In ancient days of strife and warfare, a death squad of bird-women used the strategies of sound and seduction to destroy their enemies. Homer gave the Sirens a starring role in book 12 of The Odyssey, where they attempt to divert Odysseus from his returning home to...
Sometimes art looks like design, and sometimes design looks like art. It’s hard to know the difference these days as both artists and designers seemingly want to merge one with the other. Either way, the 5th edition of FOG Design + Art was the perfect hybridization....
Via her expressionistic brush, Judith Linhares teases latent absurdity and uncanniness from hackneyed pictorial genres. Female nudes, sublime landscapes, exotic animals and floral still lifes are jumbled and transposed into worlds of outré wildness. The Pasadena-born,...
Georganne Deen did not become disillusioned by recent geopolitical events—she’s been feeling that way for a long time. It’s just that her newest paintings reflect certain newly topical aspects within the widening gyre of social entropy, expressing in both style and...
On Thursday evening, when performance artist Astrid Hadad began telling a glitter-bombed, sombrero-wearing rubber chicken that everything would be okay, I remembered that there was still good in the world. The day’s news had been completely crappy, and I had ridden...
From an immersive psychedelic installation to on-trend political art, the first Saturday night gallery openings of the new year were bursting with visual and social pleasure. At Jason Vass in DTLA, artist Tony Puryear’s weekend pop-up, gankstas! Know Your...
The late Mike Kelley's "Kandors 1999-2011" at Hauser & Wirth is literally and figuratively tenebrous. Deviating from Kelley's typical folksiness, this show exudes a clinical coolness. "Kandors" was his final major series. It centers on the fictional metropolis...
Is a collage comprised of assembled painted canvases a collage, a painting, or assemblage art? Does the semantics even matter? “Jabberwocky,” Josh Jefferson’s exhibition at Zevitas Marcus, plays with these boundaries. Jefferson created the collages (the gallery has...
Robolights, the annual open house for a vast year-round, found-art installation in Palm Springs, is coming to a close. Open through January 8th nightly from 4:30-9:30 p.m., aglow with holiday lights, this surreal yet sweet art installation is rich in detail and...
A pair of concurrent shows at Craig Krull features paintings that, despite firm adherence to the tradition of pigment on canvas, appear to exist as other objects. Caroline Larsen squeezes vibrantly hued paint from pastry tubes into loopy ribbons and whimsical daubs...
Whatever one’s disposition, “ONE YEAR: The Art of Politics in Los Angeles” at Glendale’s Brand Library & Art Center provides fuel for thought and stimulus to action. Negotiating the polemics of the current political climate and the overarching sense of anxiety...
Dear Reader, The new year is a time to look forward, but in this issue we also take stock. Staff writer Ezrha Jean Black does so with her popular (and for obvious reasons, not so popular) Top Ten LA shows of 2017. Ezrha works hard to be fair-minded yet critical, with...
The experience of art in Los Angeles is always both very specific to its localized encounter and acutely conscious of its engagement with the world. As political forces outside California moved to further isolate us in 2017, that dialogue and artists’ sensitivity to...
At Kandis Williams’ studio, sparse and white with tall ceilings and drywall divisions, her studio neighbor Orion Martin and I sit and talk with her about contemporary intimacy. I am struggling as to whether I should revive a Tinder account in an act of hysteria...
In the mainstream, queerness has a way of being pushed into the shadows, forced back into the closet. It happens all around us, especially in communities of color, spaces which still oftentimes say that queerness does not belong here. It was a bit of a surprise then...
Just as there is a certain metaphysical link between acknowledging one’s existence and looking in the mirror, there exists a similar link between the acknowledgement of a culture’s experienced reality and its representation in media. When a cultural group lacks...
Years before the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA” was initiated, the Museum of Latin American Art was exploring Latin and Latino culture. Its previous 2011–12 PST, “Mex/L.A. ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930–1985,” explored the relationship between...
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