DIGITAL EDITION
Current Issue
March/April 2023
Table of Contents
From the Editor March-April 2023; Volume 17, issue 4
Dear Reader, As long as there are people, there will be portraits. Face it—no pun intended—people are attracted to people. We like to look at ourselves; we like to people-watch; we gaze into our lover’s eyes. Our faces are unique and fascinating: they are who we are....
CODE ORANGE March-April 2023 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner, Tim Sassoon, and our finalists, Sasson's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the March/April 2023 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for...
All That Glitters The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta
One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of myself at the age of five or so, composed by my father. Along with my siblings’ pictures and beyond the sentimentality, these portraits have become distinctive family emblems and historical markers, wrought at a time of...
Uncut and From the Heart Henry Taylor Ditches One Tool for Another
Amid an ocean of color-mad paintings in Henry Taylor’s three-decade retrospective at MOCA is a colorless painted object: a black typewriter case overlaid with text of thick white coarse brushstrokes: I TRY To be Write aint TRY’n to be WHITE Simple rhythmic text...
Brilliant Veils Amir H. Fallah Creates Vibrant Artworks That Question Cultural Boundaries
Entering a room of portraits by Amir H. Fallah, the first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t see their faces: the figures are cloaked. In one, the subject sits draped in a richly patterned blue-and-purple shawl, cradling what looks like a gilded African head in its...
On the Nose Helen Chung Talks Anatomy
The afternoon we agree to meet for a quick Q&A over drinks, Helen Chung arrives at the restaurant slightly late (though not much later than me)—fittingly enough, from a commissioned portrait sitting. Engaged by the process, conversation and the resulting portrait...
Frames Within Frames The Photography of Grant Mudford
Grant Mudford is a photographer with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1944, he studied architecture at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Since the 1980s he has functioned as a...
Spiritual Healing Luis Sahagun's Cathartic Family Portraits
As a practitioner of curanderismo, an ancient Meso-American system of folk medicine, Mexican-born, Chicago-based Luis Sahagun regularly performs limpias, traditional cleansing or “soul-retrieving” rituals. As an artist, he has applied this practice to the creation of...
Africa Around Town “Adornment | Artifact,” Curated by jill moniz
The Getty Villa’s exhibition, “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” offers a stunning display of jewelry and items of personal adornment excavated from burials of royalty and aristocratic individuals from a region that spans what is today southern Egypt and northern...
DECODER That Thing-centric Love
I hope you’ve had this problem: You like some art somewhere but you hate the social machinery around it. You know something is good, but the discourse, the nepotism, the snobs, the takes, the informative six-page features, the art history teachers, the leachers, the...
ART BRIEF Is England Losing Its Marbles?
Great Britain is in serious decline. The City has lost its position as Europe’s indispensable financial center, the UK economy is in recession and its vaunted National Health Service is in shambles. The Tories have ruled Britannia for 12 straight years, much of it in...
THE DIGITAL Consumer vs. Appreciator
With the current exponential rise in digital, AI-generated art and blockchain verifiable provenance, has the need for showing an original piece of art lost allure? Akin to a natural history museum showing a dinosaur skeleton that is 99% reproduction and 1% actual...
BUNKER VISION That'll Do, Pig
Between 1971 and 1983 Los Angeles hosted an annual film festival called Filmex. The people behind it went on to found the American Cinematheque. In 1975 they received a submission from Belgium that caused the judges to cringe so hard that they planned to reject it....
OFF THE WALL Just Want to See His Face
In early 1972, the Rolling Stones headed out on tour after the No. 1 worldwide release of their 12th album, Exile on Main Street. Also known as the “Stones Touring Party,” the raucous, star-studded and drug-fueled tour featured 48 shows in the US and Canada. The...
ASK BABS Sans Human Touch
Dear Babs, I have been following a lot of the conversations about AI-generated art and I’m concerned that it’s going to be bad for artists. I’m worried it’s going to steal from existing artwork the algorithm vacuums up and make it so people don’t value the skill it...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
SHOPTALK: LA Art News
Arrival: Santa Monica Airport, FRIEZE LA Is there such a thing as too much art? My eyeballs think so, as they began to glaze over Saturday afternoon while browsing the art fare at the Felix art fair at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was Day Four of my marathon. In February...
BOOK REVIEW: Two Artists’ Books on Dystopia
The Earth is parched, its water impure. The air is poisonous, awash with industrial effluvia and alive with toxic organisms. Our culture has been radically and relentlessly artificialized, while we are regimented, consumerized, alienated and terrorized. Fortunately,...
POEMS "Vincent's Blackberries" and "Belated Start, Premature Conclusion"
Vincent's Blackberries Buying blackberries, you held out on me in Hollywood Erewhon. Tonight is Friday, Christmas lives on and on. Vincent was out in Aries eyes and feeling good, wanting to meet people: other people who buy blackberries I was by myself in mascara and...
COMICS
Jim Shaw Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
Jim Shaw’s work has always moved, both performatively and analytically, between the quotidian space of individual consciousness, and collective and cultural spaces both conscious and unconscious. Since he began using film studio and theater backdrops as readymade...
Hugo Crosthwaite Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants...
Elizabeth Malaska Wilding Cran Gallery
Transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings which operate like a story or a fairytale—a mythology of metamorphic processes that disrupt, shape-shift, alter and expand concepts of the self—employing a kind of magical thinking oriented around...
Friedrich Kunath Blum & Poe
It is not unusual for an exhibition of Friedrich Kunath’s paintings to be accompanied by something outrageous and unexpected. In both 2012 and 2017 he carpeted gallery floors, transforming them into soft, colorful fields dotted with sculptures, couches, socks, giant...
Lorraine Heitzman, Monica Wyatt, Raghubir Kintisch Launch Gallery
Using a swirl of varied mediums, “Re•Iterate” is a fiery, highly textural exhibition curated by Lorraine Heitzman and featuring works by Heitzman, Raghubir Kintisch and Monica Wyatt. The viewer’s eye darts between textures, colors and patterns, finding a focus both in...
Wardell Milan Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
A meandering sun-bleached trek forms the exterior presence of Wardell Milan’s exhibition adjacent to the recently completed art museum at the oldest of the seven Claremont Colleges—an academic plantation that sprawls over 500 acres and eagerly sends clever children...
Luis C. Garza Riverside Art Museum
Luis Garza was a dedicated artist and visionary who helped advance Chicano culture and activism in the 1960s and 70s through his compassionate photos. Born in 1943 in the South Bronx, he moved to Los Angeles in 1965, searching for a lifestyle more amenable to his...
Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen Geary Contemporary, Millerton, New York
At Geary Contemporary, an exhibition pairing Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen, shows how nuanced, elegant and powerful the two-person format can be. At first glance, Jensen and Gill’s work have seemingly little in common. Jensen’s Warms (2021) sculptures are visually...