Articles

WOVEN VISIONS
Diedrick Brackens Explores Identity with Innovative Technique and Unusual Tenderness

Even with the growing inclusion of textile art in textbooks, surveys and biennials, one doesn’t normally think of weaving as a cutting-edge contemporary art medium. Diedrick Brackens is out to change that. A breakout star of the 2018 Hammer “Made in L.A.” biennial, Brackens uses his works to foreground Black and queer bodies—and the occasional catfish—through lyrical, at times haunting,...

EDGES AND PLURALITIES
Melissa Joseph Brings Craft Into the Future

by Annabel Keenan

For Melissa Joseph, all things relate to edges. Her practice exists on several of them: painting, felting, craft, utility, art … the list continues. She works in a unique dry-felting medium to create imagery based on her own photography and that of her family. While channeling “ancestral stories,” as she explains, she also addresses broader social issues, including gendered labor and identity....

NEEDLEWORK IN THE SERVICE OF SUBVERSION
"Iron Halo" by Sal Salandra

by Tucker Neel

For the past few weeks, Iron Halo, a catalog of Sal Salandra’s art, has occupied my coffee table, stopping everyone who sees it in their tracks. The cover is a detail from a work called Human Ashtray: an ultramarine background surrounds a bearded man wearing a dog collar, his head restrained by a disembodied hand. Two cigars flick ashes into his salivating mouth. But it’s not the shocking nature...

FABRICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Ahree Lee Weaves Seamlessly Between Art and Technology

by William Moreno

Multidisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Ahree Lee started her career focused on video work. In 2001, she took on her first major long-term project employing the repetitive and somewhat pedestrian habit of taking a daily selfie. The resulting images were transformed into a mesmerizing visual diary, Me, 2001, which became a prescient viral YouTube sensation. Envisioned as a lifetime effort, it...

Metro Art
THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY

by Scarlet Cheng

Visiting the three new Downtown LA Metro stations recently, I found myself intrigued with how artists commissioned by Metro Art use the transparency of glass to design artworks. The street level of the stations is enclosed by glass, both to allow natural light in and to show people outside what is inside, and vice versa. It creates a certain built-in welcome to pedestrians, both those planning...

ON TOP OF THE WORLD
Mercedes Dorame Reverses Power Structures With Spirituality

by Bianca Collins

At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all. “Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yang’aro (Looking Back),” the inaugural installation for the Getty’s Rotunda Commission series, marks the museum’s first solo...

COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
"Redaction" by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar

by Sarah Sargent

A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both Black, decided to produce a book version of the same name, published by W. W. Norton, to attain wider distribution, particularly among...

FUCKING WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Films of Martine Syms

by Cat Kron

How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017, where the then 29-year-old artist debuted her first feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice, as part of the exhibition...

MALKA GERMANIA
Yael Bartana's Jungian Journey Into the Past and Present

by Liz Goldner

In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation, while transforming that trauma into manna. Malka Germania (Queen Germania in Hebrew), created by Israeli native/Berlin resident Yael...

The Complex Stuff is the Best
Keith Haring at The Broad

by Tucker Neel

“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old son, Oscar Forbes, to get his thoughts about the exhibition. After setting up tickets for our visit, the museum’s PR team emailed...

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Reviews

Jane Dickson
at Karma

I never feel hotter or more detached (indeed, more American) than in a car, windows down in the August heat. It’s an exercise in movement, longing on an unremarkable plane of asphalt. Each lane is a pulse, where everyone seeks a false salvation. Jane Dickson’s new...

Darya Diamond
at Sebastian Gladstone

Looking at Darya Diamond’s limp latex sculpture, In Every Dream Home a Heartache (2024), I think of bruised skin, frail shoulders: a tired body collapsed on the floor — phallic, deflated, stamped with marks like a trampled body bag. Throughout “Sugartown,” intimacy...

“Scupper”
at François Ghebaly

Curated to pose as a mirror to society’s collapse, "Scupper"’s artists address a spectrum of social ills from preservatives in food to inadequate healthcare. The six-page press release does a better job than some of the works themselves at justifying their presence in...

Divya Mehra
at Night Gallery

A mechanical broom wielded by a robotic arm sweeps across the floor under the corner of a custom-made carpet shaped like India. In an adjoining room, an enormous inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man lies face-down adjacent to a neon sign which reads “DIASPORA.” A...

Raymie Iadevaia
at The Pit

Don’t let the cute animals fool you; these paintings are not so innocent. A vague sense of foreboding permeates these otherwise joyful works. In Iadevaia’s last show, climate apocalypse hovered in his portentous smokey-pink...

Gabriel Madan
at Gattopardo

Not all pop art is created equal. Gabriel Madan’s literally pops off the wall: As in, a colorful macaw plushie is affixed to one of his paintings, a heart-shaped tag reading “I’m a puppet.” I want to stick my hand up its rear and make it talk. Vulgar, yes, but...

“a field once more”
at Melrose Botanical Garden & Jane Galerie

Melrose Botanical Garden is not actually a garden, but it might as well be. Tucked between thrift shops and piercing parlors on the avenue, the narrow gallery feels like an oasis. “a field once more,” a group show drawing upon Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of...

Michael E. Smith
at Chris Sharp Gallery

Michael E. Smith’s unassuming, poetic sculptures are late capitalist Zen koans: riddles with no answer but which nevertheless spark a moment of satori. For instance, a milk carton covered in mirrors seems to suggest that we are all the lost children. But is this a...

Oscar Tuazon
at Morán Morán

Oscar Tuazon’s activist art project LAWS: Los Angeles Water School combines high concept with a rigorous materiality. Machined folds and facets shape The Evening Redness in the West (2024) a C-print printed on an aluminum sheet that mimics the way coated analog photo...

Oshay Green
at C L E A R I N G

I’m not sure I completely understand Oshay Green’s obliquely-named sculptures made of deconstructed leather couches, or how they relate to a series of embossed wooden slabs and a haunting wall work that imposes itself over the gallery like a giant spider. A legible...

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