Flamingo’s Dream has never missed a church social, eats all the watermelon at the weekly buffet, shoving the rinds in her purse to take home to her poodle. Flamingo never goes out without makeup, “putting her face on,” hoping to catch the eye of a bad boy, a...
It’s not that difficult to be contemporary. Be it through art, or writing, or simply conversation, we’re almost always discussing what’s right in front of us. It’s another thing all together to create something which takes on an entirely new meaning decades after...
What stories do monuments tell? Is there more than one story, more than one point of view? Can monuments be moved from one location and placed in another? Confederate statues taken away from the Kentucky capital go where? How can they be recontextualized? During the...
Careening from a blotted and splattered background into what almost appeared to be real objects floating on the surface, the paintings cavort around a plethora of meanings in Max Presneill's latest body of work titled "In Case of Emergency." The overall sense is that...
The two shows currently on view at the Night Gallery – Wanda Koop’s “Heartbeat Bots” and Michelle Rawlings’ “In the Garden” – represent opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary art. The larger show, “Heartbeat Bots,” introduces us to a fantastically vibrant and...
There are many stories that we have told ourselves in order to make our world make sense. These modern myths range from Columbus’ “discovery” of this continent to the very idea of the American Dream. These stories are taught to us from birth, intrinsically attached to...
Ed Clark "Expanding The Image" marks the first time Hauser & Wirth has shown the abstract painter's work at their Los Angeles location. The exhibition consists of Clark's formative work from the 1960s and 1970s, and complements an exhibition Hauser & Wirth...
In Robb Putnam's "Unattended Creatures," sad-faced bears and rabbits, some with no faces at all, make up most the sculptural works, while another exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery, "Escape," by John Bankston, combines several different series of paintings and mixed...
We catch up with Nadezdha Tolokonnikova by phone while she’s in LA recording. “Pussy Riot is a movement and we have different creative initiatives,” she says. One of them involves the group getting more seriously into music leading to an album slated for sometime in...
Catalina Island Museum has the distinct honor of being the first Southern California museum to successfully extract me far from my quarantine pod with the promise of engaging art in situ. The irony of a relatively risky and difficult choice for my inaugural post-COVID...
Stockholm-based artist Joakim Ojanen's delightful exhibition of paintings, drawings, and ceramics at Richard Heller Gallery is aptly titled: "A Show for the Lonely Distant Baby Souls." According to the artist, it is "a celebration of the human being." He goes on to...
I’ve always had a deep love for art that dripped with symbolism. Art that encodes stories within their frame or form, all while being aesthetically appealing, draws you into a dialogue with the artist and your fellow viewer. It’s a bit like an inside joke; if you...
Near the end of his new biography of Andy Warhol, where he is discussing his legacy, Blake Gopnik mentions that there have been at least 500 books about Andy Warhol. This might logically lead one to ask: Why should there be another one? Besides the fact that this one...
You never really know which exhibition is going to make you cry. I certainly didn’t expect it to happen at Heather Day’s “Ricochet” at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery. None of the work was particularly sad and I actually had low expectations based on what I saw online. I...
In ever-mounting reports on the interlocked pandemics of COVID-19 and structural oppression, two words cyclically resound: “vulnerable” and “resist.” While the virus causes us to consider our own immune system’s vulnerability or resistance to it, it also creates or...
It is easier than it has ever been to feel distant, from one another and from the world at large. I was seeking to traverse that distance when I visited the Charlie James Gallery, and I found the path through Duke Riley’s new works in "Far Away." In Riley’s glittering...
In grad school at Cal Arts, I remember a renowned professor telling me there were certain symbols one should always avoid because they were “too loaded” oversaturated with other cultural referents to be read clearly. One of these symbols was the heart, not the...
Bright White, forever the blank page, the empty backdrop, illuminating the dreams and desires of other colors – added to, enhanced, augmented, amplified and enlarged – the beginning of everything and the end of nothing – it should be enough just to be yourself, but...
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