Few grasp the power of language to be visually enthralling while expanding our consciousnesses as well as Lindsay August-Salazar, whose solo show at Lowell Ryan Projects, “There’s No Place Like No Place” brings these questions to the forefront. Employing vibrant color...
Pick of the Week: Lindsay August-Salazar
Brave New World: Handel’s Alcina The English Concert & soloists, conducted by Harry Bicket — Los Angeles Opera, November 2, 2021
“Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,...” William Shakespeare, The Tempest Scarcely into the second act of Alcina—the third of Handel’s operas based on material from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso...
OUTSIDE LA: Jennifer Bartlett Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Various sizes of square panels mostly covered with dots with groups of parallel lines and occasional fields of paint line the gallery walls of Locks Gallery in Jennifer Bartlett's installation "Recitative"—its title derived from a rhythmic free form vocal style of...
THE TRUTH ABOUT MINIMALISM A Conversation with William Minor
“No one achieves frivolity straight off. It is a privilege and an art; it is the pursuit of the superficial by those who, having discerned the impossibility of any certitude, have conceived a disgust for such things; it is the escape far from one abyss or another...
Remarks on Color: Timid White and Bruised Sand: A Conversation Remarks on Color
Considering the world today, it’s no wonder you’ve begun to peel, to pull away from your respective homes, to hide from the tremors, quakes and quick-sands of the living world. We are all guilty of something. We have all fallen under at some time or other, curling in...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Leigh Salgado Launch Gallery
“As the World Turns” is an apt title for Leigh Salgado’s fourth solo exhibition at Launch Gallery. Many of the graceful works are circular, globe-like. A lush world of beauty that also evokes ideas of the circular nature of life: our annual passage around the sun, and...
Pick of the Week: Unseen Picasso Norton Simon Museum
My first review for Artillery Magazine – almost two years ago now – was for my favorite museum in southern California, The Norton Simon. I recently went back and reread that article, and I found that my own writing was, to be kind, academic. Dry as a bone, really....
From the Editor November-December, 2021; Volume 16, issue 2
Dear Reader, I had the unexpected pleasure of spending four hours at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum with my 93-year-old mother-in-law recently. Not that visiting the Fogg is unusual—we’ve done it for years, practically every summer. But this time we spent four hours...
Bennett Roberts It’s About Time
Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it...
June Edmonds Freedom in Abstraction
The post-pandemic era can offer rewarding challenges, as I found out when engaging in my first Zoom interview. I spoke with painter and educator June Edmonds on the occasion of her current 40-year retrospective at the Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, and a...
Constance Mallinson Talking Trash: Figuratively and Abstractly
Constance Mallinson’s career has spanned the many vicissitudes of the art world, from Minimalism to Pattern and Decoration, through to postmodern conceptual strategies. More recently, she has created a form of realistic painting that draws from Modernist Abstraction...
Ilona Szwarc Reclaiming the History of Breasts
Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest show, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, introduces sculpture alongside her photography, documenting herself casting a model’s torso in silicone and plaster. Other recent LA exhibitions...
Trulee Hall Femininity in Phantasmagoria
On a blessedly moderate summer Sunday, I am driving over to Trulee Hall’s studio in the industrial backside of LA to participate in the filming of her newest project, Ladies’ Lair Lake, by getting nude and air-brushed green from head to toe. This project will be the...
Shoptalk: LA Art News New Director at MOCA, Academy Museum reopens, and more.
MOCA Madness Good news, the art world is revving up! We have art fairs taking place In Real Life, galleries setting regular opening hours and museums flinging open their doors. Of course, we’re not completely out of the COVID woods—many venues require proof of vax...
More Fireworks for MOCA Art Brief
One of the most memorable events at MOCA occurred when Chinese-American artist Cai Guo-Qiang exploded gunpowder from an exterior wall of the Geffen Contemporary just after sunset, setting off blinding and spectacular explosions before a huge crowd unprepared for such...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Artist Ewedrt Hilgemann’s Sculpture Implosion Event, Royale Projects, Los Angeles, 2017
Before Bechdel Bunker Vision
If you are interviewing somebody who gets interviewed a lot, and they compliment you on the quality of your questions, you are probably doing something right. This happened on multiple occasions to Delphine Seyrig during her 1981 documentary Be Pretty and Shut Up!...
ASK BABS FRIEND’S ART SUCKS
Dear Babs, My longtime friend recently started painting and selling his art online. We live in different cities, and it’s been hard to meet because of the pandemic, but he’s having me over soon, and I know he’s going to want my thoughts about his art. The problem is I...
