As of late, queer art exhibitions have been popping up all over America. One such art show is “How Do I Look?: Shifting Representations in Queer Identifications,” which is on display at the Da Vinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia. In this review, I will surface the artwork that I think fall short of reckoning with queer(-ness-), and I will discuss works that can be folded into a productive...
Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. —Donald Judd, Specific Objects 1965 When Donald Judd spoke of work that is a hybrid of painting and sculpture, one of the artists he was undoubtedly referring to was Frank Stella, who went on to forge a career based on this premise. For Stella, the sculptural quality of most of his paintings,...
Los Angeles performance artist Molly Jo Shea knows that you’ve got some genuine feelings, you’re just scared to reveal them. If you attend one of her shows, maybe you should be afraid. Shea operates as a doula of the emotions and she will barf blood or take a tough unripe tomato to the kisser to make sure that you give birth to as many of your passions as possible. A striking, brown-eyed...
An austere flat horizon is blanketed by intensely blue sky and bracketed by the remnants of an orange window frame, its rectilinear quiet slyly evoking Rothko. Gauzy clouds, piled atop a low mountain, are seen Magritte-like, through a thick wooden square—maybe a window frame or a picture frame. A diptych—or, rather, a window bisected by a thin mullion—opens to a desert landscape punctuated by...
“My name is called Disturbance,” as Mick Jagger sang in "Street Fighting Man," and as 2016 careened into 2017, many of us wondered where exactly we stood with respect to what beckoned immediately across the horizon and came to grips with an unsettling notion that we might have no real understanding of what constituted that specific place. Our own physical actuality had made its own irrevocable...
Colorful, peculiar and static, Arlene Shechet’s freestanding sculptures possess an animation. They cant and list in space, tilting precariously as if ready to tumble. On a plinth or platform, they are eccentrically placed, rarely centered. The spatial lilting is seen...
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May in a beguiling, gestural and chromatically complicated suite of blossom paintings by E.J. Hill. They were undertaken during a recent residency that coincided with the interruption of life as we knew it, shaped by both the...
The artist Bradford Salamon embraces his entire life in his artwork, from his childhood and teenage years—watching cartoons and films, surfing in SoCal, playing in bands, and engaging with friends—to the present. These experiences and influences are recollected and...
There was an almost respirational pacing to this show—taken from a slightly more expansive exhibition of the Montana-based artist’s work at the Missoula Art Museum—between variously light or darkness-drenched works on canvas (and/or panel) and the chromatically...
Ever had your memory moonwalk? Such a notion is possible after experiencing Without Your Interpretation, the Ulysses Jenkins multiverse at the Hammer Museum, a retrospective comprised primarily of video and performance art covering five decades. Putting soul in...