DIGITAL EDITION
Current Issue
September/October 2023
Table of Contents
CODE ORANGE September-October 2023 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner Seth Kaufman and our finalists, Kaufman's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the September/October2023 online edition Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for...
Metro Art THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY
Visiting the three new Downtown LA Metro stations recently, I found myself intrigued with how artists commissioned by Metro Art use the transparency of glass to design artworks. The street level of the stations is enclosed by glass, both to allow natural light in and...
From the Editor September/October 2023; Volume 18, issue 1
Dear Reader, Seventeen years—that’s a long time. Most relationships don’t last that long. That number has now outlived all my other jobs; I’m referring to my relationship with Artillery. I started this magazine with my late husband in 2006, who warned me: Once you...
ON TOP OF THE WORLD Mercedes Dorame Reverses Power Structures With Spirituality
At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all. “Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre...
COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT "Redaction" by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar
A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both...
FUCKING WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Films of Martine Syms
How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017,...
CLIMATE CONSCIOUS Artists Advocate for Carbon Reductions
Art sector efforts to decarbonize have been highly visible over the past three years as galleries and artists have publicly pledged concerted action to reduce exhibition-related emissions: Nonprofit advocacy groups like Gallery Climate Coalition, Art + Climate Action...
MALKA GERMANIA Yael Bartana's Jungian Journey Into the Past and Present
In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation,...
The Complex Stuff is the Best Keith Haring at The Broad
“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old...
BUNKER VISION The Power of Lust
If you are addressing power dynamics in your art, a good place to set scenarios in is a military context. There is a built-in component of control in every aspect of martial discipline. What one wears, eats and how one’s time is spent, is all carefully prescribed from...
ART BRIEF Supreme Court Levels The Playing Field For Artists
The 2022–23 term has been a disaster for the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. disgraced himself by spurning demands from Congress and the public that the Court adopt a code of ethics similar to the one covering all other federal jurists. If such...
THE DIGITAL Dream Big: Remember Where You Came From
Memory is a funny thing. Do you remember skinning your knee when you were a kid, or do you just look down at the scar and think of the stories you’ve heard? As you drive down the first street you lived on, do you remember the market on the corner where you would get...
PEER REVIEW Fin Simonetti on Ambera Wellmann
A stone sculptor and stained-glass artist (among many other things), Fin Simonetti approaches demanding classical mediums with cultural critique and tender ambiguity. The New York–based Canadian artist has become known for her stone carvings of canine body parts—such...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Coachella and New York
Melrose Hill or Bust We now have critical culture-mass in the area of Western Avenue between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard: half a dozen galleries have settled in, to be joined by LAXART any time now (the latter was supposed to have opened last year). This area...
ASK BABS The Name Game
Dear Babs, I’m a mid-career painter who’s carved out a decent professional career. I’m not famous, and frankly, I don’t want to be. My problem is that I have a unique name I thought would never be confused with another artist. Recently another, young painter with my...
POEMS "Cowsong" and "Yellow Touchings"
Cowsong Guide me into the depths, where the lack of oxygen intercepts the thing no human accepts. Yet here I am, alive: a joke the wind might contrive. Underneath the beat of your blood, feet in the stars, face in the mud. I can hear your brains beat and your heart...
COMICS The Seven Deadly Ads
“Solid Projections” Larder
Diving into the past to ground contemporary viewers in the ever-advancing here and now, the four artists in “Solid Projections” present a grouping of dubious memory objects—newly-minted souvenirs of moments alluded to rather than experienced. Beth Collar, Coleman...
Molly Segal Track 16 Gallery
Like many other pictorial artists, Molly Segal is a storyteller. Her preferred medium is watercolor applied in various degrees of thickness to a special plastic-coated paper that is less absorbent than conventional papers, but also more easily re-worked. The titles of...
Mònica Subidé Nino Mier Gallery
New portraits and still lifes by Mònica Subidé channel the aesthetic of circa-1906 Paris and Barcelona with such organic authenticity that they could credibly pass for recently discovered works by an unknown genius of that era’s avant-garde—yet they are imbued with an...
Will Thornton Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles
There are dark recesses of art that draw us into something we may think we want no part of: images that weave the repulsive into skeins of elegance that we do not fully understand because the understanding resides only within the artist, if anywhere. The effect is...
Brian Cooper Rory Devine Fine Art
Transforming the gallery into a performance space for his installation “Things Thinking,” Brian Cooper constructs an environment for contemplating the ideas of cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, whose theories posit that our perceptions of the world are mental...
Faith Ringgold Jeffrey Deitch
Maya Angelou’s words You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise speak to Faith Ringgold’s origins—as a college student in the 1940s, she was told by her professor that she...
Joni Sternbach Von Lintel Gallery
In much of her work, New York–based photographer Joni Sternbach experiments with historical photographic processes, specifically tintypes, direct positive images created on thin pieces of metal. Tintypes were popular in late-19th-century photography studios since the...
Maria A. Guzmán Capron Shulamit Nazarian
“Pura Mentira,” the title of Oakland-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s exhibition, is a statement on people’s propensity for multiplicity. Using textiles as her medium, Capron merges the figures in her pieces together, their bodies often winding together to create...
Linda Arreola Avenue 50 Studio
Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, Linda Arreola’s “Abstract Wanderings From the LA Borderlands: 2020–2023” comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings, some in multi-panel formats with varying scales, can scarcely be contained...