It’s worth considering why it’s so easy to caricature Donald Trump. He looks strange—with his fake tan, anus-like pout, signature comb-over—topped with a bright red, race-baiting ball cap. Like any President-to-be, he’s the focus of boundless criticism and ridicule, yet pundits and partisans have marveled at his ability to refract most critiques in a way that makes him even more omnipresent and...
Mel Chin’s latest public art project in Los Angeles, The Tie that Binds: MIRROR of the FUTURE, was initiated last summer during CURRENT: LA Water, the city’s inaugural month-long Public Art Biennial presenting temporary large-scale artworks sited along the LA River and in other water-adjacent locations. The biennial came and went via a whirlwind of press events during one of the hottest summers...
Marc Horowitz has shifted in the past few years from his early work, bridging performance, social practice, entertainment and social media, into the more traditional practices of painting and sculpture. “Interior, Day (A Door Opens),” his show at Depart Foundation last year, demonstrated publicly for the first time the extent of that shift. Two recent solo shows of his painting and sculpture—the...
If you are familiar with Laurie Fendrich’s work, you know that the artist is a New York–based painter of vibrant geometric abstractions that strike a precarious balance between order and subterfuge. And you may have heard about her 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. But do you know that she is also a writer and teacher who embraces English novelist Jane Austen as a...
How do we put this? A Guy’s gotta paint! And the Guy who’s gotta paint has clearly gotta be obsessed about it! And maybe a few other things besides painting… like SEX! I mean a Guy’s gotta be inspired to paint! And then he’s gotta get through the stuff that fuels, fires, or contrarily, blocks that inspiration, those obsessions. Like—could he get a drink or something? No—something more...
Suggesting both the afternoon desert sunlight just before it fades into dusk and the night black sky that makes Joshua Tree National Park such a stellar stargazing site, these images are as fragile and tough as the Joshua tree itself. In “Embracing the Incarnate,”...
Mining tensions between the hyper-feminine and the fragile masculine, Troy Montes Michie continues his interventionist textile and collage practice with a body of work centered on the reappropriation of the Chicano countercultural figure La Pachuca. Dishwater Holds No...
It’s all I can think about. It’s all I can think about. It’s all I… Since the news broke revealing the Supreme Court’s green light to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it’s all I can think about. It is tremendously difficult to avoid feeling the progress forged by decades of...
Highly prescient, somehow whimsical, Sandow Birk’s exhibition “Los Angeles and Her Surroundings” explores what can only be described as late-stage capitalism in Southern California. In 40 drawings that have whiffs of nostalgia, environmental and architectural...
Monica Wyatt’s “c u r i o u s e r - Assemblage Creations from Wonderland” is a magical mystery tour of immersive experience. Wyatt offers work that is, at turns, whimsical, wild, and ephemeral. Created of repurposed materials, her detailed, intricate work floats and...