The Summer I Couldn’t Sleep Yew trees branched into my veins. Needles pricked my hands my wrists— needles punctured my chest, a harbor for a man-made conduit. Nothing stemmed my desire for you. Nothing stopped the waking hours filled with longing for— I am expected to say: Life and I say: your mouth spreading mine your fingers spreading every mouth of me open the entire sleepless summer I lay...
In filmmaker Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), over the course of 76 minutes we hear acclaimed queer New York City photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) recount the contents of his previous day on 18 December 1974 to writer and personal confidant Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), leaving no detail unturned, no cultural figure (ranging from Fran Lebowitz to Susan Sontag) unmentioned. Sachs’...
When Ewa Wojciak met Bruce Kalberg, she had just received her MFA and landed a job as the art director of the recently launched LA Weekly. Kalberg was working as a temporary assistant in the accounting office. Their first lunchbreak together, Kalberg told Wojciak he wanted to show her something. He led her out of the building to his VW Bug, parked right out front on Sunset Boulevard. The car was...
Men in nice suits do not often crawl around on their hands and knees; there’s too great a risk of their shoes getting scuffed, their knees wearing through, or, God forbid, their seams splitting right along their backside. But brave men in suits defied the norms on...
Desire can make you sick, or it can make you try. Los Angeles-based artist Nancy Buchanan, working steadily since the 1970s, has consistently chosen the latter. Hair Room (1973/2025), a closet-sized chamber where strings of hair caress the top of your head as you walk...
“fullmoon” is a bit of a homecoming for Adam Alessi. The artist has been averaging around one solo show a year since his sudden art world ascent about five or six years ago, but with the last two having taken place in Italy and New York, Los Angeles has rarely seen...
There’s an easy attractiveness to Florian Krewer’s paintings that obscures the complex formations of desire within them. At times they seem stripped of everything but their earnestness, but then at others, they are scattered with bold and reckless impulses. There is...
“It Smells Like Girl,” at Jeffrey Deitch, in conjunction with Company Gallery, shares its title with a Tala Madani painting depicting a suspiciously phallic object, a lone actor against a cloudless blue sky. Stark and funny, the phallus is the main character, but its...