In 2013 artist Doug Aitken realized an extraordinarily ambitious art project, "Station to Station," a kind of continuous art performance on wheels. This one rolled coast to coast, populated with creative folk who got on and off, making music, making art, making...
Popular music is increasingly a topic of exhibition in the museum and gallery world but I’ve found its presentation can be either overwhelming or underwhelming. After all, how can the curator condense an experience so visceral like performance—an act itself at once...
Drawing a fine line between voyeurism and vigilance, Indian artist Abir Karmakar’s second solo exhibition "Uncanny Space” at Aicon Gallery continues with his preoccupation of seducing viewers to become surreptitious onlookers of his painted private spaces. Yet at the...
Jeffrey Vallance’s séance/performance, Ghost Writers – a collaboration with the self-titled psychic astrologer, Joseph Ross, held in conjunction with Vallance’s show at CB1 Gallery, The Medium Is the Message – was ostensibly intended to draw out the spirits (and...
Gertrude Stein once famously wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” and Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, whose exhibition "Wonder Pop," consisting of Disney characters and well-known Pop cultural figures drawn in bright colors and recast with gay themes, might respond...
Entering Joseph Holtzman’s recent Hammer Project feels akin to entering a child’s sacred imaginative landscape, one where all the imaginary friends can not only be seen, but also deeply witnessed on a visceral level. Not all these friends are indeed friendly and some,...
There are times when an art movement quietly documents the heart and soul of the much louder story of history that surrounds it. In 1966, LSD was legal. It was available to a large group of first adopters who found the drug to be “very sensational.”In 1967, LSD was...
Katherine Bernhardt’s quirky public mural is currently covering the exterior walls of Venus Over Los Angeles gallery in the Arts District of Downtown LA just in time for the mid-summer heat wave.Giant free-floating cigarettes, slices of watermelon, cantaloupe, papaya,...
"The Slick & The Sticky," a group show co-curated by Vanessa Place, insists adamantly on its own dystopian themes, wherein the works in the exhibition deliberately obfuscate their own suggested meaning. Working off the premise that all language is inherently...
The only quibble I might have with the Getty's excellent show, "Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography," would be that its title is too literal-minded. A show as exciting as this one is might have had a more adventurous title – say, "Back to the Future," or...
Straddling a fine line somewhere between sincere participation and ironic appropriation, Petra Cortright’s multimedia cyberspace art endlessly reflects and redoubles the medium from which it borrows. The Internet is Cortright’s vehicle and content, framed by...
It’s time for a little retrospect here at AWOL – as in looking back in an attempt to take in the whole of something. An impossible task – but you have to start somewhere. It’s also about taking the proper measure of something or someone you thought you knew –...
There are few sights more ridiculous than a grown man wearing a pair of shorts. Back in my day, grown men simply did not venture outside clad in shorts. Anyone choosing to appear in public in such outlandish garb would be laughed off the streets. Scorn would...
Not that this hasn’t been done before, the theme of “flatness” explored again and again in all its variations, but in its most recent incarnation at David Kordansky Gallery, artists like Tauba Auerbach transform the static spatial plane that is “flatness” into a...
Last Sunday, instead of curling up to watch an episode of Orange is the New Black and calling it a night, I headed to Venice Beach where art collectors Mike and Diane Silver had opened their gorgeous canal-front home for “Nude Survey Two,” where the established Plein...
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, now includes 30-plus national pavilion spaces in the Giardini area, a mindboggling abundance of ancillary exhibitions (including especially the group show in the warehouse-like Arsenale), as well as a plethora of performance art,...
How often have you found yourself saying, “I would bring my business here, if only they had more generic, mall-safe, focus-group chosen art on the walls?” Surrounded by more museums, galleries, and out-of-work MFAs than in any other city, these SoCal establishments...
Mark Bradford’s first solo exhibition "Scorched Earth" at the Hammer Museum is a stunner and not in the typical ways one might expect. These paintings, engendered equally by the 1992 LA uprisings as well as the AIDS epidemic, constitute a visceral visual experience...
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