Tom Knechtel is one of the top ten "best of Los Angeles" shows in 2016, selected by staff writer Ezrha Jean Black.
ON OUR COVER: Tom Knechtel
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Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday and didn’t over-eat as much as I did! I want to start the new year off with a couple of announcements.First, you may have noticed that the name of this blog has changed to Jane Chafin: Offramp. The name references the...
MAMA Gallery: Jordan Sullivan
Jordan Sullivan’s “The Divine Nothing” is clearly an indulgence in color and aesthetics, and it isn’t a bad thing. Sullivan’s work is strikingly painterly. The large format C-prints appear more like washes of watercolors than photographs, with their blissfully...
Sometime between the morning of November 9th and the current holiday season, there was an interruption in the more or less weekly postings in this space. It’s not like it’s never happened before. I do drop out of sight now and again; and there are those intervals when...
Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that...
T’was the 16th of December
T’was the 16th of December, and all over Los AngelesEvery creature was stressed, including the angels. Wrapped like burritos in coats, scarves and hats,We swarmed Barnsdall Art Park like grumpy old bats.Isolating ourselves in the auditorium, two-by-two,We awaited...
Doug Aitken – Electric Earth
Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with...
Fowler Museum: Belkis Ayón
“Nkame,” the Belkis Ayón retrospective at the Fowler Museum, comprised of 43 collography prints, is about the Abakuá, an all-male secret society in Havana, formed by a group of slaves from southern Nigeria. However, there is another layer in Ayón’s body of work.The...
MOCA takes a dump, bigly
There’s a new smell in town, and the best way to find the source is by following your nose down Grand Avenue to MOCA. Yeah, I thought it was coming from the room of stale, day-old Rothkos too, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that the odor comes from the R.M....
Dreamy Art and Ginger Cider
The crowd inside Klowden Mann in Culver City last Saturday was more intriguing than the art that brought them there. One weekend after Art Basel, three weeks until Christmas, and 10 days into December, we felt the effects of the weekend’s predicament for art openings:...
Matthew Rosenquist: Just Keep Walking
Matthew Rosenquist knows his way around the block. I mean that in every sense. He’s acutely attuned to a certain street culture and attitude in common circulation both in L.A. and elsewhere – a suburbanized (and slightly desperate) vernacular observed not only in...
Anat Ebgi: Ethan Cook
Currently on display at Culver City’s Anat Ebgi gallery are the familiar, yet intriguing color field paintings of Texas-born, New York-based mixed-media artist Ethan Cook. Taking inspiration from abstract painters such as Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin, here Cook delves...
Rashaad Newsome: Taking a Second Look
It was my third day in Miami on my second annual Art Week pilgrimage. I was in the South Tent of Pulse Art Fair with my #squad, chatting in the De Buck Gallery booth with a woman named Mavis Gragg whom I’d met the evening before. We had just listened to a gallery rep...
Maria Lassnig: A Painting Survey, 1950 – 2007
In Maria Lassnig’s career, we trace a continuously evolving negotiation between the conscious self and the alternately concrete and conceptualized other. The body of Lassnig’s work – evolving over the course of her long career from her first expressionist essays into...
Hammer Museum: Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh’s small but impactful show of new work at the Hammer Museum probes the construction of the black female subject within the historical context of the African diaspora. Her aesthetic influences are culled from traditional African and Caribbean visual art...
Keith Walsh
Artist Keith Walsh is interviewed by Mat Gleason, discussing his art, an art that stands at the crossroads of aesthetics and activism.
Art Fair
Starring: Jacqueline Novak, Max Wittert, Julio Torres, Eric Schwartau, Steven Phillips-Horst, Jacob Berezin, camera by Daniel Rampulla, sound by Spencer Plassman, edited by Steven Phillips-Horst, featuring music by Physical Therapy.Talk Hole is Steven Phillips-Horst...
R. H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30
R. H. Quaytman’s Morning: Chapter 30 has an assertive, unrelenting horizontal presence, but it really represents a kind of constellation – coextensive with the larger universe of associations that populate Quaytman’s entire body of work. That constellation may be...
