Desert X, we love the name of this art biennial out in the Coachella Valley—“X” as the unknown, the sexy, the je-ne-sais-quoi factor. There is something mysterious and alluring about the desert, with its sere, sparse, wide-open expanses and its promise of possibilities. This one also conveniently offers some amenities, like posh hotels and spas, good restaurants, and hip rock concerts. The...
Jami Porter Lara stumbled upon both the subject and the medium of her current exhibition “Border Crossing” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., while walking in the arroyos along the U.S./Mexico border in Arizona four years ago. Little did the New Mexico artist know then that she would end up showing this evocative work near the White House, where the sitting...
Most customers at Trader Joe’s have food on their minds. Not Ann Weber. While others grab favorite items off the shelves, the intrepid artist heads for the dumpsters. Perpetually on the lookout for cardboard boxes to transform into sculpture, she has an eye for colorful labels, crisp black letters and remnants of shipping tape, but she isn’t opposed to plain brown. “I love making beauty from...
This Spring, for the first time in the US, spectators can engage directly with the art and performance of the Berlin-based collective Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel) in City as Stage, a multidisciplinary work in two parts: 100% City, an immersive video installation housed at the MCASB, and Home Visit USA, a series of interactive performances hosted at...
Maybe every gesture that you make can birth a fresh way of living. Perhaps by merely looking over your shoulder, or touching the ground, you can create a brand new philosophy or a radical break with reality. So argued the dancers in the Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Getty Museum last Friday, on March 10. The nine performers assembled in the Getty’s Tram Arrival Plaza at 2 pm, all dressed in...
At the ICA Los Angeles, curators Marcelle Joseph and Legacy Russell have assembled 25 artists whose practices engage with the construction of identity and the self as subject –or, as Judith Butler puts it, The Condition of Being Addressable. This international and...
Kristopher Raos’ "No Escaping the Housework" is an eye-popping splash of vibrant color. His bold works are highly refined pop art which depict the packaging for a variety of different cleaning products. Technically untitled, each piece indicates a “product” name and...
A grotesque feeling of excitement and misery shivers through me whenever I encounter Mika Rottenberg’s work. Her stories of monstrous mechanisms of hypercapitalism are infused with a queasy comedy that reminds me of Julia Kristeva’s “laughter of the apocalypse”...
A pair of exhibitions each in their own manner engage with formula and intuition. In Portraits: Invented Subjects and Divergent Styles, 90 works (all acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 inches, 2015-22) by Nathan Redwood form a tight procession flanking the walls in grids and...
Lethal Amounts in Downtown LA is well known in the underground scene for being a venue which supports alternative music and outsider artists. This unconventional venue is the locale for Emma Ruth Rundle’s first solo show entitled Dowsing Voice. Rundle is originally...