Art
Austin Irving at Wilding Cran
It seems every traveler, on occasion, suffers a collapse of time and space. Careening down a hotel hallway late at night, carrying a suitcase whose weight amplifies the exhaustion from hours of cramped travel, one's head begins to spin. Doors, walls, and expanses of...
Ann Chamberlin
Ann Chamberlin approaches painting like an alchemist approaches a vile of life-giving succor—with tremendous reverence and passion. The new paintings on view at Lora Schlesinger Gallery mine some of the same archetypal themes she has visited previously. However these...
The Graduates
Last week I ventured to the Cooper Design Space in Downtown LA’s fashion district to see the “15 CalArts MFA Show.” It is a large inconspicuous building surrounded by cut-rate fabric stores typically used for designer showcases—a somewhat irregular location for an art...
Former MIT lecturer who robbed a bank in the name of art pleads guilty to burglary
Washington Post In the rarefied world inhabited by performance artists, gallery owners and MFA candidates, there is something called “non-collectible art.” Making this art doesn’t produce something that someone can buy and take home, like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona...
Up to and Including the Horizon
Ochi Projects, a new gallery on Washington Boulevard. hit a home run this week with its first group show curated by Brian Wills and Lexi Brown. The horizon line has long been a symbol of infinite possibility, and all of the work in the exhibition speaks to this theme...
Michael Deyermond
Michael Deyermond is an artist’s artist, making stuff that makes him happy, and us too, albeit for the fact that some of the sentiments here are darkly appealing and often self-reflexive. This is not art that begs to be loved at the expense of much needed content, but...
The Lives of Bernice
Bernice is premiering at the Palm Springs Shortfest next week and the eponymous documentary celebrates the spunky tenured New York art dealer, Bernice Steinbaum as a long-time pioneer of female and minority artists. I’m sitting beside Steinbaum now, taking in her “New...
Dismantling Art School
The Artist as Debtor The role of educational institutions in shaping and defining artists is being questioned and critiqued by the very professors, students and alumni who make up these institutions. One of these critiques, the nationwide movement to organize and...
Hugo Crosthwaite
Hugo Crosthwaite’s newest exhibition is powerful and evocative, but more importantly, perhaps, it speaks to our human frailties, specifically, the ways in which we process grief and hope. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s poem Hymn and the recent abduction and murder of...
Genocide Centennial
Today is the last day to witness iwitness—a large scale public art installation made up of asymmetrical cubic photographs on display in downtown LA's Grand Park by artists Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian. It immediately recalls graffiti artist JR’s black-and-white...
Refresh the screen: Anthony Caro at the Gagosian Gallery
File this under ‘better too late than never’ (i.e., of a piece with the story of my life). You have only two days to see this show; but if you’re in the Beverly Hills vicinity, I encourage you to run to it. This is a fabulous, albeit extremely compact, show in the...
Travis Collinson
Travis Collinson continues his investigation into his signature style of spare and oblique personas in his second exhibition at Maloney Fine Art. Utilizing a sparseness of space, form and gesture simultaneously, Collinson manages to compress, through this highly...
A Few Good Reasons to Drop Out of Art School
The New Yorker Nestled among the exhibition reviews and auction reports in contemporary-art journalism last week were scattered items about the Roski School of Art and Design, at the University of Southern California. On Friday, the first-year students in the school’s...
COLA Award Recipients
Every year the Dept of Cultural Affairs grants awards to Los Angeles based artists whose work reflects the ideologies and concerns of its residents. This year’s exhibition is particularly provocative with artists like Jeff Colson, Miyoshi Barosh and Alexandra...
Straight From Cuba
“Straight from Cuba” at Lois Lambert Gallery, is an unexpectedly compelling exhibition. To subsist as a contemporary artist in present-day Cuba is no small feat. With little to no resources at their disposal in the way of art materials and economic support, and...
Toxic Sublime
The philosophy of the sublime was first manifested in art through 19th century Romantic painters’ vast and awe-inspiring landscapes that emphasized mankind’s diminutiveness in the face of God’s treacherously beautiful creation. It was updated in the mid-20th century...
Best in Show: Frieze Fair
For this year’s Frieze Art Fair at Randall’s Island in New York City, I tried to avoid the usual fair fatigue one can experience at a show of this magnitude and went on a scavenger hunt for the best painting I could find. Location was sometimes important, as...
