“Home exterior decorating tips: What to do with excess plastic toy trash!”
GUEST LECTURE
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artform
SIGHTS UNSCENE
Cardboard Abstractions
Most customers at Trader Joe’s have food on their minds. Not Ann Weber. While others grab favorite items off the shelves, the intrepid artist heads for the dumpsters. Perpetually on the lookout for cardboard boxes to transform into sculpture, she has an eye for...
DEAD OR ALIVE: William Hogarth
RECONNOITER
In the 1980s, Pam and Steve Nagler founded the performance ensemble Shrimps, which toured nationally and performed locally at venues like LACE. Over the years Shrimps’ iterations included Martin Kersels, Weba Garretson and Ryan Hill. The couple recently retired from...
DREAMLAND: A Frank Romero Retro
Chicano art is at once a unified cultural expression and an ever-changing record of social and geographic situation. But regional inflections invariably emerge—and, certainly in the case of Chicano art in Los Angeles, regional inflection has profoundly impacted...
Amir Zaki
Amir Zaki’s lushly photographed black-and-white landscapes introduce tension between formalist notions of timeless beauty and suspicions of digital photography’s reliability—or lack thereof. These photos of California’s coast, drawn from a series aptly named “Rocks,”...
Andy Moses
The origins of Color Field—one of the more intriguing forms of contemporary abstract painting—seem to lie in 19th-century Romanticism, particularly in a few radically reductive watercolors by J.M.W. Turner. In 2015, when some of these were exhibited at the Getty...
EJ Hill
Emblazoned in cursive neon light, the affirming phrase “we deserve to see ourselves elevated, as well as grounded” guides EJ Hill’s installation of objects and paintings, which structurally suggests both sublime ascension and children’s playgrounds. The locations of...
ARNE QUINZE
Arne Quinze’s jubilantly comely show, “Jungle Cities,” propounds fundamental questions about the problematic relationship between culture and nature. These questions align with the artist’s generally stated ambitions; however, the most urgent of them are posed...
Masculine-Feminine
Given the current political climate, one in which President Donald Trump in February withdrew Federal guidelines allowing transgender students to use restrooms matching their chosen gender, “Masculine-Feminine” offers a timely and relevant examination of gender...
Thomson & Craighead
Wake Me Up When It’s Over is a compelling and timely installation featuring selected works from 1998–2016 by the London-based duo Thomson & Craighead. Jon Thomson and Allison Craighead, who have been working together since the mid 1990s, utilize data, information...
Peter Zaleski
Long dedicated to an elegant abstraction reliant on repeated forms and broken, almost prismatic, visual fields, all rendered in limpid colors, Peter Zaleski has recently sought to brace that graceful approach with a greater stringency—limiting the recurring figures,...
Othello/Kleberg
“Knock-Kneed and Bow-Legged,” on view at Oakland’s Johansson Projects, stakes out territory in a harsh but brilliant realm where contradiction is the order of the day, and logical assumptions must be checked at the door. The works of painter Matt Kleberg imply a...
Dharma Karma from Zurich to LA
Setting afoot into an office space building was the last place I expected to be on a Friday evening. As I approached Karma International’s gallery in Beverly Hills, it smelled like a good time (if you catch my 420 drift) and I felt like a hot mess as I had no idea...
Bruce Yonemoto – The Imaginary Line Around the Earth
It is possibly the singular image of our time: the ‘walking’ glacier – or in this particular instance, the glacier that both ‘walks’ or extends forward towards the edge of a continent, yet has also begun what may eventually be a dramatic recession. It manages to both...
These Days: Afraid of Modern Living
The unassuming These Days gallery, which lies on the second floor off an alleyway in downtown LA, currently houses an impressive installation titled, “Afraid of Modern Living: World Imitation & Monitor 1977–1982.” The show features a display of zines, paintings,...
Downtown Art Walk
Feeling apprehensive as I walked to the nearest Red Line stop to catch a train downtown; I believe that the last time I tried doing the Downtown Art Walk was about seven years ago. Since then it had morphed from being an intimate, thoughtful event attracting people...
