Artillery Magazine

Tag: contemporary art

  • COLLECTORS CORNER: Danny First — (print exclusive)

    COLLECTORS CORNER: Danny First — (print exclusive)

    Tell us who you are in 50 words or less:

    I live, collect, and breathe art. For the past ten years, I’ve run the La Brea Studio Artist Residency,  The Cabin LA (according to ArtNewspaper, “Per square foot, the most influential gallery in LA”), and The Bunker LA. Two alternative exhibition spaces in LA. I also sculpt.

    What do you require from an artist you collect?

    Originality. Even if other artists heavily influence them.

    Favorite place to meet with an artist outside of their studio or your home?

    I take my visiting artists to exhibits that I think they should see & also to In & Out.

    This article is available in print and in our digital edition. To read the full article, please subscribe.

     

  • Jacqueline Humphries at Matthew Marks

    Jacqueline Humphries
    at Matthew Marks

    We recognize the legacy Jacqueline Humphries is working from the moment we set foot in Matthew Marks’ two gallery spaces; yet something throws the viewer slightly off. It’s the echt gestural vocabulary of post-World War II art, but as if viewed through a scrim or screen, which in more than one sense it actually is—a highly processed, thoroughly post-modern actuality, in which the processing itself breaks down with pigments dissolving, disappearing, reappearing through, or floating above an interwoven mesh of screens, coding, and emoticons.

    The residuum of Humphries’ gravitation towards certain well-defined styles and gestures is fairly manifest—e.g., mid-1950s Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, or color field painters like Helen Frankenthaler. But Humphries resisted the figurative direction of so many of her neo-Expressionist peers to meet the screen(ed) world of the media-saturated Pictures Generation head-on. Four decades later, her interrogation is even more foundational, almost ontological: not simply the perception, projection, or reflection—the materials of her art—but messaging, meaning, and interpretation; the ambiguity of figure and (always shifting) ground; and what one view tells us about the next.

    Screens complicate the traditional picture plane; and Humphries throws the viewer through a screen (or screens) very darkly from the onset. JH456 (all paintings 2024) floats a volcanic storm of black cinders over Still-esque pours and drips of crimson and anthracite against a fine mesh that itself shadows chalky blue ‘shadow’ pours or underpainting. And as for the pours—are they actually? Or just more stencils? The artist’s title/signature initials in the upper-left quadrant just barely gives that away. Gravity will have its way in this ambiguous domain of the pre-determined and free-floating. (Or will it? Humphries might conceivably rotate the linen panel to further confuse or ‘cross-examine’ figure or ground or both.)

    Jacqueline Humphries, JH123, 2024. Photo: Ronald Amstutz. © Jacqueline Humphries. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles.

    The largest of the paintings, JH123 (127×114 in.) gives us a waterfall of slightly pallid rainbow pours in amber yellows, pale blues, and pinks, from the center of which looms a cluster of black hulking, almost exploding fountain of pours—conceivably as stenciled as other parts of the painting. But pulling back from the painting dead center, we register horizontals parallel to the upper and lower edges; and we’re suddenly made aware of another layer of painting/stenciling that could make something else of this entirely. It’s impossible to say whether Humphries played with a Johns style array of block letters or numerals (or if such effects were stenciled on and immediately washed over); but it was hard not to be reminded of those classic fluorescent half-tone Colby Co. posters that once blanketed southern California, advertising everything from rock concerts and prizefights to business liquidations and the 2012 Hammer Museum Made In L.A. biennial. Here (as elsewhere), Humphries floats a quasi-anamorphic stencil of her initials and assigned number for the work (or series of works), as if to assert both authorship and a certain detachment from these ambiguous and slightly volatile conundrums.

    Amid these first few paintings, we start to reconsider relative definition and uncertainty as it enters into the moment of conception and execution; that everything is mediated between image and object on either side of lens and retina. That uncertainty (and some drama) is at play in “Crimson Shatter”✨, which bears some resemblance to JH456, but on a slightly larger scale (111×100 in.), magnifying its impact. Their similarity alone throws the determination of pours/drips and stencils (as well as underpainting) into question—the three larger stenciled pours of JH456 here reduced to a kind of rent in the ‘fabric’ (that ‘bleeds’ black), and even the ‘sparkle’ emojis screened mostly in black and sinking into the underlying screen mesh. Between this vivid crimson—slightly brighter than actual blood—and that coal black of JH456, it’s hard to resist a mental leap to associations with disaster. Paler, cooler underpainting, whether pink, blue or grey, only seems to magnify the violence.

    Our culture has evolved a fascination with encoding clearly shared by the artist. But Humphries also seems conscious of the dubious filtration of screens, a kind of passive suppression such media ‘shorthand’ can willfully or inadvertently promote. The pours (conceivably accompanied by other applications, whether by stencil, brush or both)—mostly in deep red—are almost entirely obliterated beneath a larger black mass in JH123✨, except for a cloudy cluster of red that drips to the edge of the panel; and suppression seems to be half the point; also fracturing.

    A 3-D printed panel in white enamel on PLA (a kind of biomass plastic), Untitled (2025) recapitulates (at about 10 percent scale) the screen/pour/drip imprint of JH123✨, with the clear difference that the sparkle emoji screen printing—deeply embedded, though almost ghosted (grey)—in the painting, scarcely appears in the panel. It made for a coolly analytic bridge between the slightly violent chromatic drama that seemed to scream off several of the linen panels preceding it, and the latent violence that wafted off of Humphries’ series of aquatint etchings of Paul Schrader’s scenographic outlines (all handwritten by the director in blue and red ink on yellow legal pads)—clearly an hommage to the director/writer. (Humphries is an admirer of the filmmaker—apparently not just for his films, but also his insight into classic noir cinema.) Mishima and the iconic Raging Bull to one side, the range of Schrader’s film work is riveting. 

    Jacqueline Humphries, Untitled, 2025. Photo: Ronald Amstutz. © Jacqueline Humphries. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles.

    After the drama in the main gallery, the works in the galleries facing Santa Monica Boulevard seemed almost coolly elegiac. An all-over stenciling of large green dots that seemed to uncannily cluster like grapes over dripping black puddles and pours in a smaller Untitled were a nod to Roy Lichtenstein’s Benday dots and his own comic-book graphic send-ups of AbEx heroic gestural brushstrokes—these, including equally organic-looking splotchy white overpainted drops in the upper section, decidedly less heroic and almost deliberately pathetic.

    One of the most striking paintings in the entire show) was a second JH123✨, in which the sparkle stenciling takes on an exceptionally ironic cast. That suppressed sparkle quietly underscores Humphries’ re-cast definition of the work—articulating form and processing into a far more complex statement. The tumbleweed mass of black pigment of the first painting is rotated slightly off center here, with new bits of underpainting and drips or ‘spray’ exposed (although the lower edge is strikingly similar). Beyond rotating the stencil(s), additional screens, stencils or under- or overpainting shadow the upper-left portion of the off-center mass, almost bleaching away its right section—placing this ‘absent’ mass at its rose-pink scrimmed center. 

    This latest body of Humphries’ work comes at the viewer with an almost existential directness and estrangement. Without sinking into the quicksand of over-interpretation, disaster seems to float towards us amid these ambiguous archipelagoes of form and re-cast, re-framed, re-screened gesture. But the work also moves the viewer towards a reconsideration of the ‘ground’—or the void beyond the ground. Humphries meets her viewer in a familiarly skeptical terrain, where fear or dread are less significant than the disintegrated actuality—the flip side of the ‘sparkle’, if you will, which is an infinitely twilit absence.

    Jacqueline Humphries
    Matthew Marks
    1062 N. Orange Grove
    Los Angeles, CA 90046
    February 20 – April 5, 2025

  • Ramsey Alderson at Tiffany's

    Ramsey Alderson
    at Tiffany’s

    It’s a matter of complete coincidence that Ramsey Alderson’s show “d’Or” at Tiffany’s—an East Hollywood artist-run garage space programmed by Adam Verdugo—coincides with the 17th anniversary of the notorious Emos vs. Punks Fight held in Mexico City’s Glorieta de Los Insurgentes in early March of 2008. The famed altercation, which saw young Punks and even younger Emos collide in a pedestrian-only roundabout of downtown Mexico City, was the flashpoint after weeks of anti-emo violence across the Mexican republic fueled by newly emergent online avenues. Animosity built up towards the effeminately fashioned emosexuales (the unambiguously homophobic name the Punks came up with for the Emos, one phoneme away from the Spanish pronunciation of homosexual) until hundreds of youths from both sides clashed in the glorieta.

    The figures in Aldseron’s paintings, while not too different in their fashion from the Emos in grainy archival flip phone videos of the fights, belong to a faction unknown. They are not the collective alternative, but the lone actors. Whatever terminology may apply, they are undeniably legitimate emosexuales, presented here in intimate moments immune from ridicule or categorization. Bath For Our Foredaddies (2025), the central painting of the show, depicts two spikey haired boys interlocked in a bath, gazing at the viewer, toasting dainty goblets. There is something totally inverted about the bathers. Their interests lie beyond being public agitators, their provocations exist only for each other. Their demonstration is leisurely, and it’s a private demonstration. A worthwhile question is raised: Are they really like that for the attention?

    Ramsey Alderson,
    “d’Or,” exhibition view, 2025. Photo: Lizzie Klein.
    Courtesy of Tiffany’s.

    In the three other works, Alderson’s nonchalant yet assertive style occasionally exceeds the modest sizes of the panels the figures find themselves in. The boys are also tightly cropped, unaware of the confines of their own frames. Substantial areas of the panels are covered in single tones of lusterless acrylic, and one figure is rendered only through thin overlays of ink and charcoal at varying opacities over a golden ground This is complemented by areas of special sensitivity, like the blue hair that is more robin’s egg than Manic Panic in Mmm (2024), or the white outlined pants and sleeves on a pensive train rider in d’Or (2024). The idler and the traveler both bask in their own limp wristed flamboyance, while still maintaining the same lack of concern for the viewer as the bathers.

    Even so, their stage is set. The garage door at Tiffany’s is open when the show is. During evening viewing hours, each wall is paired with its own spotlight, which project three eerie focal triangles against the lacquer-red Alderson and Verdugo elected to paint the interior walls. On the opening night the floors still smelled of the dark brown stain used to turn the plywood viewing platform into something more seductive. These gestures read as carefully conceived abutted against the implied indifference of the femme boys in the paintings. The impression of the garage is not unlike a craftily and economically furnished dingbat apartment outfitted with odd color belonging to an aging dandy. Or maybe it’s just a weird mismatched midwestern finished basement. In any case, Tiffany’s seems to recognize these paintings’ place—somewhere within an indulgent tableau of desire and indifference.

    Ramsey Alderson: d’Or
    Tiffany’s
    861 N. Alexandria Ave.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90029
    February 8 – March 22, 2025

  • Gregg Bordowitz at The Brick

    Gregg Bordowitz
    at The Brick

    I left Gregg Bordowitz’s recently-closed exhibition at The Brick, “This is Not a Love Song,” thinking the same thing as upon leaving The Brutalist: “I didn’t know it was going to be so Jewish.” In both, the artist’s Jewish identity weaves through a deep consideration of form as such. I might even cheekily add that in both cases, the interest in form manifests in concrete specifically. The Brutalist’s eponymous brutalist, László Tóth, uses concrete to maybe (?) represent the suffocating brutality of Auschwitz. Bordowitz, on the other hand, has a longstanding interest in concrete poetry. This is not a review of The Brutalist but one further comparison is perhaps warranted. The film’s climax centers on the completion of Tóth’s brutalist church/community center and the antagonist presumably committing suicide somewhere inside, turning the monumental structure into a tomb as well. In an epilogue, Tóth’s niece describes the building as a redemptive allegory of Auschwitz. In other words, the film culminates in a tomb for a body that is never shown and a story of redemption for the most indescribable of sins. A rather Christian Judaism, all told.

    I bring this up only to contrast it with the approach to Judaism taken by Bordowitz, one more active and paradoxically, more architectural. Bordowitz’s Judaism is not so much represented as it is embodied—a structure for living. The exhibition is anchored by a freestanding wall positioned diagonally in the center of the gallery. Bordowitz’s poem, Bougainvillea Calliope, is affixed directly to both sides of the wall. It is governed by Bordowitz’s self-imposed rule that each line be exactly ten syllables. Lines such as “LASAGNA HOLIDAY IMMIGRATION/ HOSTILITY RECIPE LEGACY” are illustrative of the poem’s taut blend of the nonsensical, political, and personal. The poem’s balance of formal rigidity and quasi-abstract meaning is paralleled in the print series, entitled Tetragrammaton, hung on the wall, which occasionally obscure sections of the poem. Though they are all abstract, the series depicts the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew theonym for the name of God. Here too, the formal constraints of language overflow with an irrepressible passion.

    Gregg Bordowitz, “This is Not a Love Song,” exhibition view, 2025 at The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz. Courtesy of The Brick.

    As an academic, AIDS activist, poet, and politically-inclined video artist, language has always been central to Bordowitz’s practice. Here though, the written word functions as a sort of necessary boundary line. The rules it establishes for sensemaking serve to delineate what exceeds it, what cannot be accounted for. In this way, it is not simply an inert representation but a site of energetic activity. Another piece, Continuous Red Line, made of a red strip of tape, running inches off the floor along the gallery’s perimeter operates similarly, linking each element of the exhibition into a whole. The artworks are thus in conversation with one another though this does not require that they find any resolution. The line is perhaps the ur-form of art, representing form as such and the fundamental building block of artmaking. Both the scrawled lines of quasi-legible Hebrew on each print and Continuous Red Line are thus testaments to the line’s dual functions as a form and a process, an idea echoed in the exhibition’s accompanying booklet. There, Bordowitz writes that “form is both a process and a state.”

    This is echoed in the exhibition’s curation itself. Placing the wall in the gallery’s center animates the typical flatness of text and prints. Additionally, the wall’s placement forces viewers to ritually circumambulate the work. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heshel, who Bordowitz quotes in the booklet, famously said that Judaism does not build cathedrals in space but in time, through the affirmation of ritual. In other words, form emerges out of communal repetition. This idea is closely related to a central tenet of Bordowitz’s political belief, cultivated through years of AIDS activism with ACT-UP, that the personal is political. Both theories conceptualize the individual’s actions as a fractal piece of a much broader community movement. Both ideas suggest that meaning is found in action itself, not finality. At a moment when Jewish identity is in danger of being essentialized (or concretized) into a hard nationalism, Bordowitz’s work suggests a softer Judaism, one that cannot crack as a result.

    Gregg Bordowitz: This is Not a Love Song
    The Brick
    518 N. Western Ave.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90004
    February 2 – March 22, 2025

  • David Hammons at Hauser & Wirth

    David Hammons
    at Hauser & Wirth

    I went in blind to David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue (on view for the first time since its 2002 debut)—both literally and figuratively. When I pushed back the heavy curtain shrouding the gallery, darkness swallowed me. I couldn’t pull out my phone to navigate by its glow, nor could I use it to look up additional context for the exhibition—prior to entering, I had been asked to stow it in an automatically locking pouch. My only option was to switch on the miniature flashlight I had been provided and cast its blue beam before me in search of the show. Little did I know it had already begun.

    Several other patrons, also wielding flashlights, materialized as I stumbled ahead. Had they come in from a separate entrance? Not quite—the gallery, it seemed, comprised several vast rooms, each one with sky-high ceilings. There were no signs or markers to direct us toward any predetermined path. We simply had to let the silence move us.

    The Oxford New World Dictionary defines a concerto as “a musical composition for a solo instrument or instruments accompanied by an orchestra, especially one conceived on a relatively large scale.” The sole sounds in this concerto were hushed voices and the echo of footsteps against concrete. Yet the definition does offer a framework for interpretation: the solo instruments were the blue lights; the orchestra was the black background they played against.

    The very presence of darkness suggests some hidden objects or entities; to obscure means to make dim as well as to conceal. It makes sense that I should instinctually anticipate some surprise. The next room, I was always sure, would contain a potential discovery: maybe a miniature in a far-off corner, or a stories-tall installation that would justify the exhibition’s scale. For a moment, my party believed we had found a sculpture, about the size and shape of a person; it turned out to be a living, breathing security guard, sentenced to standing still amidst our shuffling.

    When you stare at nothing for long enough, everything becomes something. Soon, I was shifting my focus from the open space to its container. Minor irregularities on the walls held the significance of hieroglyphs. Electrical boxes could have contained clues. A floor-to-ceiling garage door proved particularly awe-inspiring: after beholding so much blankness, the textural interruption felt, well, orchestrated. I craned my neck, looking for cracks where the white light of the clouded March sky might have seeped in. I found none.

    A full sweep of the premises revealed no secret totem. Making my meditative rounds, I felt a flicker of disappointment that my search should turn up dry—but had it really? Perhaps the perpetual craving for some tangible, cathartic conclusion is part of what Hammons set out to interrogate. In the tradition of John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), the absence of a spectacle can be a spectacle in and of itself. If a tree falls in the forest, does it really make a noise? If no blue lights bounce off the gallery floors, does the concerto play on?

    It is tempting to view the show, all-consuming as it is, as its own entity apart from the world, but one experiences it anew when taking into account the artist’s prior interrogations into race and Blackness. Hammons is known for using color to reframe the viewer’s understanding of familiar images: his painting How Ya Like Me Now (1988) depicted Jesse Jackson with white skin and blond hair, while Untitled (African American Flag) (1990) presented an American flag in the red, green, and black of the Pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914. Additionally, Hammons has used negative space in sculptural installations to great effect: In the Hood (1993), which appeared on the cover of Claudia Rankine’s poetry collection Citizen (2014) in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, consists of the hood from a hoodie nailed to a wall, the wearer absent or invisible. Considering all this, the piece reflects upon what it means to “see color”—not just an encounter with blackness, but an encounter with Blackness.

    Much critical praise for Concerto in Black and Blue concludes by celebrating its collaborative nature: the intersection of flashlight beams becomes a gesture of intimacy or interrogation between strangers as their identities are subsumed by shadow in service of the art they’re unwittingly creating. Yet I’m more drawn to the work as a conscious collaboration with darkness. By restricting the sense by which we most typically experience art, Hammons forces us to look at what we can’t, or won’t, see. 

    David Hammons: Concerto in Black and Blue
    Hauser & Wirth
    901 E. 3rd St.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90013
    February 18 – May 25, 2025

  • XIAO HE at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

    XIAO HE
    at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

    There is something a little chipper about the art world right now that belies the national mood. Palettes tend toward cheery hues and uncomplicated content. Not that there’s anything wrong with upbeat paintings, it just seems like there are other types of content worth exploring that the market discourages. We all enjoy a hint or more of darkness, whether it’s horror movies, Goth music, or what have you. It’s just a harder sell when the commodity in question is going to hang in your living room.

    In this regard, Xiao He’s “A Whole Night” is somewhat refreshing, not that these would not look great in your house (it’s just a matter of which house, perhaps—say, do you own candelabras?) These paintings have an air of melancholy, mystery, and darkness which draws you in without answering all of your questions. Their bleak charm recalls nineteenth-century painting. My all-time favorite alcoholic short king, Toulouse-Lautrec, comes to mind. Another interesting symmetry, Toulouse-Lautrec’s immersive slice-of-life barroom scenes anticipate film, and some of He’s paintings are painted from film stills.

    Take Le Consentement (2024), for instance; it depicts a faceless female figure—suggesting disassociation or a loss of identity—against a murky background. The source for the still is the 2023 French film Le Consentement, co-written by Vanessa Springora, about the sexual abuse she experienced beginning at age fourteen from author Gabriel Matzneff (then 49). Matzneff wrote openly about raping young boys and girls and was defended by the French literary establishment. Yikes! All of this is horrifying, and the painting is a dark reminder of how it is nothing new for the cultural establishment—even ostensibly liberal institutions (ahem, Democrats…)—to condone unspeakable evils. The most enlightened among us might not want this on our walls even if the daily news cycle reminds us of this dynamic constantly.

    Xiao He, Le Consentement, 2024.

    Like many of these paintings, this one is an interpretation of a film still and retains a cinematic quality—not just in terms of horizontal composition but in how it hints at narrative and atmosphere. They suggest a moody background score, a sonic accompaniment which might be austere chamber music or a Chopin nocturne—not what one usually intuits from contemporary paintings, which tend to convey more pleasant lifestyle content: flowers, succulents, anodyne portraiture, and middle-class interiors come to mind, for instance.

    He’s approach to each work is driven by concerns of narrative and content rather than just the formal trajectory of her painting practice. This stands in stark contrast to a lot of art in which the same subjects or abstract motifs are recapitulated ad nauseam. The result is a refreshing variety of subjects and a series of distinct paintings, each of which feels like a fresh, independent attempt at making art. Her painterly chops are confident but worn lightly. She is not, thankfully, trying to impress anyone. Moonlight (2024), for instance, depicts a crescent moon above scraggly tree limbs. The modulation of dark skies between two hues, a dark Phthalo blue and a deep purple-ish crimson, conveys, as much as it depicts, the moodiness of a night sky.

    An earlier work, Sunbathing (2024), is stylistically an outlier. The surrealistic distortions of a fleshy abstract female figure recall Maria Lassnig. This work is fairly frontal, filled with surface effects, flat space, and fleshtones which connote the feeling of flesh as much as its appearance. The cadmium orange nipple evokes corporeality and sensory stimulation more than it resembles an areola. In The Bride (2024), a hulking orange mass with brown hair draped over it feels like being too drunk and hunched over a bar table. The space is more recessive and representational than Sunbathing, but the sense of form capturing internal experience rather than modeling appearances is similar. On the other hand, Yi Yi (2025), a painting of a dark figure against doodly pink abstract clouds, feels like a cartoon version of what she achieves elsewhere with more specificity.

    Xiao He, “A Whole Night,” installation view, 2025. Photo: ofstudio. Courtesy of Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.

    The titular work, A Whole Night (2025), depicts a city street at night and feels cinematic because this type of image is more familiar in film. In this case, it was inspired by a shot from Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit (1982).  The bright highlights, in broad light brushy marks, could be a cheap painterly trick—as in a kitsch print of Times Square at night—but the light touch conveys care and hesitancy. It captures the dinginess of late-night streets and dismal outdoor illuminations rather than turning it into a glinting spectacle.

    Like the aforementioned Toulouse-Lautrec, the unfussy attention to painterly effects extends into the backgrounds. These can be as captivating as the foreground with a sensitivity of touch and slight coloristic modulations—like the warm brown submerged in tenebrous blacks in The Spectator, depicting a single flower. These moments, to extend the cinematic analogy, can feel like a supporting actor stealing the show.

    Xiao He: A Whole Night
    Reisig and Taylor Contemporary
    4478 W. Adams Blvd.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90016
    March 8 – April 12, 2025

  • CONVERSION at Cheremoya

    CONVERSION
    at Cheremoya

    The title of the two-person show at Cheremoya, “Conversion,” has a twofold implication: religious and material transformation. Calla Donofrio’s desaturated paintings depict acts of (sometimes sexual) violence that have been censored by parts of the image being blacked out or disrupted by a black cross. Shiny and diligently uniform, the paintings have a materiality to them that meets the sepia-toned flatness in a way that feels unreal, like a digitally rendered dream. In An Eye for an Eye, anonymous hands grip a central figure, covering his mouth and threatening him with a knife. Each limb is indistinguishable and possesses an unnerving level of smoothness, save for the over-articulated veins and cartilage sprouting from the hands. We see the central figure on the verge of getting his eyes gouged out, the sight blocked by a small black cross. 

    At the center of the room, Kento Saisho’s small, blackened sculptures sit on a table covered in sheet metal. Made from steel and enamel and mostly in vessel form, these structures are spiky and menacing despite their fragile, burned appearance. Striking and strange, they ask to be intimately examined. Upon peering into the vessel’s opening, you see that tiny metal spikes dot the insides, like an inverted porcupine. Saisho’s sculptures have undergone a transmutative process. Many of his works include “crucible” in the title, connecting the form to the mode of making and creating a self-reproducing system. Flame also appears in Donofrio’s painting Trinity, where it is siloed in a cinematically cropped box, merely taunting instead of scorching. 

    In contrast to Donofrio’s paintings, Saisho’s sculptures have a real, or simply less literal, sense of movement between danger and frailty, the material and the spiritual. Where Donofrio’s paintings are purgatorial, Saisho’s vessels offer a sorely needed rebirth. The ricochet that occurs between the two artists’ works is initially buoyant—each lends the other a distinct layer—but it peters out eventually. The potential for a mutual material becoming is left unfulfilled. 

    Conversion: Calla Donofrio and Kento Saisho
    Cheremoya
    2700 W. Ave. 34
    Los Angeles, CA 90065
    On view through May 10, 2025

  • ROBERT RUSSELL at Anat Ebgi

    ROBERT RUSSELL
    at Anat Ebgi

    In Robert Russell’s solo show “Stateless Objects,” lush paintings of solitary vessels and kitchenware float like apparitions on the walls of Anat Ebgi. A mix of Judaica—challah platters, kiddush cups, and the like—alongside porcelain teacups produced in pre-Holocaust Germany, these “stateless objects” belonged to people of the North African, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian Jewish diaspora.

    Russell’s paintings are cold; the monotone backgrounds against which the objects sit range from cool grays and blues to blacks. Save for the occasional floral-printed teacup, the objects themselves are sapped of any warmth. Though the work appears highly glossy and dimensional from afar, up close, we are denied the pleasure of sheen or dramatic painterly flourishes. What was thought to be tactile is flattened and mattified.

    The work, particularly those pieces with black backgrounds, gestures toward the Dutch masters’ tulip paintings. Notably, in both black-backgrounded paintings, the frigidly white porcelain ware, adorned with decorative flowers or foliage, comes from Germany and thus contains a looming implication of Holocaust displacement. Russell gives the memento mori of Dutch tulip paintings a new tone. They serve as a reminder of the losses of the Holocaust, but also present an optimism. Unlike the flowers in a floral still life, these decorative flowers do not wilt and die, but are preserved on static porcelain, sustaining an eternal life.

    “Stateless Objects” provides limited conclusions, opting to avoid context, historical or religious. The one instance of shepherding appears in the press release’s claims that the mere act of depiction is “a form of restoration” and “repatriation.” The care taken to paint these objects faithfully is in and of itself a devotional and religious act, a form of honoring ancestral lineage and histories. I don’t quite buy the “restoration” or “repatriation” claims, but I think Russell engages in remembering. And like memory, history is presented through fog (much like the hazy blank backgrounds of these paintings), which can’t offer precision but can offer a freer associative space.

    Robert Russell: Stateless Objects
    Anat Ebgi
    6150 Wilshire Blvd.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90048
    On view through May 10, 2025

  • ALEXANDRA GRANT at Alloy Project Space, Curated by John Wolf

    ALEXANDRA GRANT
    at Alloy Project Space, Curated by John Wolf

    Situating her work at the juncture of word and image—an intermedial locus where, in her case, verbal content is at once borne and engulfed by complex painterly structures —Alexandra Grant has, in fact, had to struggle to achieve a coherent balance between her twinned disciplines. The struggle was real and has proven successful. “Ceremony,” Grant’s latest solo show, brings together a hefty selection of recent large abstractions with a smaller roster of less recent canvases. There is an intricate and muscular, yet expansive interplay of diverse, even contrasting formal elements that figures in both groups. But where the dispersion of forms in the earlier work seems stiff and overthought, every recent painting moves gracefully and powerfully in its own choreographed dynamic. Even their color regains a lusciousness that the earlier pieces bury. 

    The works in both groups build themselves around Grant’s mantra, “I was born to love, not to hate,” declared by the heroine in Jean Anouilh’s play (based on Sophocles’ original) Antigone. Formal tricks—highlighting, mirroring, dripping—visited on the phrase buzz about the earlier paintings, consuming and often compromising vital compositional maneuvers. In the most recent tableaus, however, it’s the language that dissolves into the picture, without loss of meaning or presence. The language in the paintings is harder to read, and stronger for it. Even the problematic earlier works, however, prove joyous and ominous, given that the tenet they declare is one that humans, not least the artist herself, have truly lived and sacrificed for.   

    Alexandra Grant: Ceremony
    Alloy Project Space, Curated by John Wolf
    525 S. Santa Fe Ave.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90013
    On view through April 15th, 2025

     

  • YORGOS LANTHIMOS at Webber Gallery

    YORGOS LANTHIMOS
    at Webber Gallery

    The images in Yorgos Lanthimos’ first photography exhibition were captured while the filmmaker was shooting Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Poor Things (2023), but you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at them. Except for the actress Hunter Schafer in one stark portrait, all of his subjects remain anonymous. Synecdoche abounds, fitting for a director whose plots, on paper, read like the premises for riddles (most often delivered eloquently). A pair of high heels stands on a sidewalk—is their owner coming or going? Faces are always turned away, suggesting an even more riveting world beyond the viewer’s perception. The everyday marvel of seeing the unseen emerges as a theme; one particularly arresting photograph calls attention to a depression on a leather couch cushion whose crinkles appear almost perverse, left by some visiting phantom. (This is one of very few color photos; after viewers lose themselves in black and white, the couch’s brown hue itself registers as supernatural.) The show is worth perusing, even if you haven’t watched his films—perhaps especially if you haven’t watched them, so that the invisible might come more clearly into focus. 

    Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs
    MACK and Webber
    939 S. Santa Fe Ave.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90021
    On view through June 21st, 2025

  • TERESA MURTA at Nicodim

    TERESA MURTA
    at Nicodim

     

    Teresa Murta’s hallucinatory fever dream of gestural abstraction is full of organic lines and undulating forms that made me feel like I was finding images in clouds that would begin to take a familiar form before disintegrating before my eyes. Is that a bouquet of Black penises? Do I see a duck? Is that a reclining figure?

    To be held (2024) evokes the alienation of a Bacon painting with fleshy viscera, nearly congealing into a coherent figure against a blue background. Murta’s forms straddle the fence between figurative and abstract, keeping viewers guessing. This is the part of the show that I find most successful. Murta nails the spirit of abstraction, leaving space for the viewers’ contemplation without being shackled to recognizable representations.

    Teresa Murta: To Meet on the Riverbend
    Nicodim
    1700 S. Santa Fe Ave., #431
    Los Angeles, CA 90021
    On view through April 19, 2025

  • DL ALVAREZ at Guerrero Gallery

    DL ALVAREZ
    at Guerrero Gallery

     

    Those of us who have dreamed—which I pray is everyone reading this—know how it goes: A cacophony of vignettes rattle through your unconscious, some a single flash, some endless, though in reality, they’re all only a few seconds in duration. No matter their absurdity, what we see in our dreams is largely what we’ve seen in real life, consciously or subconsciously registered, though often distorted or removed from context. Mirroring our convoluted dreams is DL Alvarez’s “Dormmagory,” a collection of graphite and colored pencil drawings that, viewed together, resemble the flickering montage of a dream state.

    Simultaneously bulbous and cavernous, the pustule-covered face of the figure in Witch (2025) is a fitting beginning to the beautifully twisted ride Alvarez takes us on. It’s disarming, yet magnetic, and oddly reminiscent of Giueseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits where his subjects’ faces were formed from ripe flora and produce. While Arcimboldo’s were a play on “you are what you eat” and a splendorous nod to consumption, Alvarez’s is a little more “19th-century woman plagued by consumption.”

    The two men leaning over an acoustic guitar in Lesson (2025) could seem like a jarring juxtaposition against Witch, with their 70s shags and ever-so-slightly touching hands—truthfully, it’s romantic. But the dissonance between the two pieces is what makes the show work. The exhibition is a shuffle of the insidious and the blissful, the subdued and the loud. Some pieces are close-ups that hint at more, some are purposefully distorted, and some are as clear as a photograph. Walking through is a waking dream, bits of which I’m sure will reappear in your sleep at night.

    DL Alvarez: Dormmagory
    Guerrero Gallery
    3407 Verdugo Rd.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90065
    On view through April 12, 2025

  • JOE SOLA at La Loma Projects

    JOE SOLA
    at La Loma Projects

     

    It seems heaven is butter scented. Or at least La Loma Projects is butter scented. And who knew the Pearly Gates were actually in Highland Park? Walking through those gallery doors, you’re hit with a bright light that really does feel like a scene out of a movie where the character dies, only to be welcomed in the blazing light and mist of a divine eternity by Saint Peter or, in this case, Joe Sola. The unnatural glow of the gallery can be attributed to the thousands of packing peanuts (2,500 cubic ft., to be exact) piled throughout. Their creamy sheen reflects the fluorescent lights overhead, casting a luminescence that shrouds the exhibition space. To get close to the works, you must wade through the mounds of peanuts—which, being biodegradable, cause that buttery scent. It’s a multisensorial experience completely in line with Sola’s multi-disciplinary practice.

    The show itself is a fittingly eclectic collection. There are serene paintings done in broad, watery strokes, featuring a curly-haired lamb, a DJ hunched over their deck, and a flock of sheep; a simple triptych line drawing of a man whose oversized mustache keeps rearranging itself; and a tiny sculpture made of broken bits of wood of a stick figure officer writing up a ticket for a box. Each work, regardless of medium, uses a pared-down color palette of neutrals, though the paintings incorporate bits of muted pastel tones that add to the soft haze of the gallery.

    The officer—namesake of the exhibition, “Officer McGinty writes a ticker and other works”—appeared in the videos Sola posted on Instagram teasing the show, videos that blended animation with Reel-style documentation of what Sola is wearing or doing. The show and its social media prelude are an excitingly tactile trip into what is clearly an ambitious mind. You could (and should) sit in the buttery bliss for a while and take in the variety. Maybe bury yourself a bit too, which, by the press photos, it seems Sola himself did.

    Joe Sola: “Officer McGinty writes a ticket and other works”
    La Loma Projects
    6516 N. Figueroa St. A,
    Los Angeles, CA 90042
    On view through April 12, 2025

  • KYLE DUNN at Vielmetter

    KYLE DUNN
    at Vielmetter

     

    Kyle Dunn celebrates the languid vibe of siesta culture through figurative and still-life pieces. The works on view use acrylic to replicate the luminosity of the Old Masters’ oils, giving Vermeer illuminated by the harsh New York summer sun.

    Siesta (2024) depicts two naked, reclining Asian men napping beside an unfinished plate of cut cantaloupe. More details emerge upon further observation: a burning newspaper and a tiny dog that peers down from the top of the stairs. Flames reappear in Still Life With Garlic and Money (2024), cutting through the stillness and serenity with tension, foreboding, and even a sense of danger.

    I loved so much about this show: the sexualized Asian male body (something severely underrepresented in society at large), Dunn’s mastery at painting every surface, and the details hidden in reflections and shadows. If you look hard enough, you can find that little devil.

  • Desert X

    Desert X

     

    Since 2017, I have been among the 1.7 million people who have participated in the art biennial-cum-treasure hunt to seek out large-scale, site-specific contemporary art installations scattered throughout the Coachella Valley desert, the land of the haves and have-nots. Not in a white cube, locked away in a walled institution, or behind a paywall, Desert X is a great equalizer, breaking down the walls of the institution and sharing the cultural wealth of art and the wild west with any who wish to seek it out.

    Nestled into the perimeter of the iconic wind farms in Desert Hot Springs, Jose Dávila has installed 12 massive blocks of white marble from a Mexican quarry. Harnessing the illusion of exhilarating precarity, he balances pairs of them upon one another, creating towers and cantilevers of brilliant stone that absorb and bounce the desert sunlight, jutting into your field of vision from every perspective. The monumental presence of these unmissable forms of extracted land provokes a consideration of the counterbalanced emptiness that must exist elsewhere, mirroring the heavy weight of the lived reality of so many immigrant communities in the area but not from the area. The act of being together is beautiful, bold, and somber to behold all at once

    In Palm Springs, Ronald Rael’s Adobe Oasis imagines a future where robotics and ancient adobe architecture can effectively answer the housing crisis. His open-air, maze-like structure—meant to evoke the texture of the city’s eponymous palm tree trunks—demonstrates the possibilities of a modern adobe tradition 3D printed in locally sourced and sustainable Corona Clay. I wasn’t delighted by its aesthetic—its walls looked to me more like excrement squeezed through a large icing pipe—but the imaginative underpinnings of the alternative future it proposes won me over. As they say, the future is now. The work provokes critical consideration as entire cities devastated by natural disasters are rethinking how to rebuild in a climate crisis. Rael’s installation reminds us that adobe architecture has stood the test of time and offers a glimmer of hope.

    Desert X 2025 installation view of Alison Saar, Soul Service Station. Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of Desert X.

    I was soothed and amused by the imagined architecture of Alison Saar’s Soul Service Station, a gas station for collective healing. Like a friend who acknowledges our troubles and reminds us that we are stronger than any moment of seeming defeat, all who encounter it are invited to refill our troubled, deflated souls with optimistic energy. Its attendant, Ruby, is fashioned in Saar’s signature figurative style, carved from sturdy wood and covered in an armor of salvaged ceiling tin. I felt her protective energy washing over me as words of encouragement by poet Harryette Mullen poured out of the gas pump’s two conch shell-shaped nozzles. The experience felt like a warm hug, gently asking me to slow down and absorb the multitudes of Saar’s layered assemblage sculpture, radiating with the inherent magic of reclaimed materials that carry their own histories of resilience.

    Agnes Denes’ The Living Pyramid at the historic Sunnylands Center & Gardens is a durational work covered with flora planted last November. The multi-story living sculpture, a brilliant white stepped pyramid garden bed, is a commanding centerpiece of the already impressively manicured gardens. When I visited it during the press preview in early March, set against the distant snow-covered mountaintops, the sculpture was covered in plants boasting the vibrant greens, pinks, yellows, and oranges of early spring. But everyone who visits will have a different experience as the plants continue to bloom over the course of the installation. When the snow inevitably melts, and the pyramid is in full bloom, the relationship to its site will change, and the aesthetic harmony I experienced will be replaced by the juxtaposition of a fragile garden thriving in the heart of the desert.

    Desert X 2025 installation view of Agnes Denes The Living Pyramid at Sunnylands Center & Gardens. Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of Desert X.

    The impact of Saudi artist Muhannad Shono’s immersive installation What Remains, more so than any other project this year, doesn’t translate to 2D. Images of the work meant to pique my interest enough to pull me out into the middle of Thousand Palms seemed to promise little more than large trash bags blowing in the wind, and the artwork’s highfalutin didactic promising “a state of tremor,” had me rolling my eyes. But my experience of this anti-monument demanded quiet contemplation as I stood observing a field of —yes, rolls of trash bag-like material painted and covered in sand—malleable forms taking on the undulations and palette of the barren landscape. With only the sounds of its fabric scratching against dry desert brush in the wind breaking the silence, it felt eerily like I was at the end of the world, in a future when the last of us who had survived in tents were no longer around to maintain any semblance of home. Is this what is destined to become of us? Is this a fixed destiny, or something that can be interrupted? Is there justice and beauty in ruin? I reluctantly left after 30 minutes of observing the work as it transformed with every breeze, moving through it in quiet contemplation as my perspective of the landscape and possible answers to my existential questions changed with every step.

    In today’s world of rapidly accumulating crises, I suppose it’s no surprise these installations captured my heart with their abstracted pedagogies of hope, a welcome reward for finding where X marked the spot.

    Desert X 2025
    Coachella Valley, California
    On view through May 11, 2025

  • HAILEY HEATON at Authorized Dealer

    HAILEY HEATON
    at Authorized Dealer

     

    Sontag famously wrote about the photograph as a means of securing ownership over an ethereal past. Her words come to mind as one moves through Hailey Heaton’s “Hissyfit,” which reckons with the erosion of memory (and therefore history) through dementia. (The artist’s late grandmother was afflicted, inspiring this exhibition and an accompanying photo book from Friend Editions.) Rather than trying to stage representational tableaus of the illness, Heaton offers snapshots of mundane moments that appear both incidental and immortal, making both people and the natural world her subjects. A young woman faces away from the camera, anonymous and yet distinguishable by a sliver of pink panty, making manifest the intimacy of the candid. Foliage under sunlight seems fragile simply by virtue of its aliveness. In addition to showcasing her own striking prints, Heaton cleverly uses the physical space of the gallery to examine how we turn memories tangible on an everyday basis: family keepsakes (newspaper clippings, drivers’ licenses) are laid out on a table, evoking a scrapbook; tiny portraits sit framed on a shelf, the way one might encounter them in a relative’s home. 

    Hailey Heaton: Hissyfit
    Authorized Dealer
    1741 Silver Lake Blvd.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90026
    On view through April 6, 2025