A black rain cloud hangs at the doorstep of Shulamit Nazarian’s compelling group show, "Broken Language." The rain cloud—No Pressure (2016) by Wendy White—is a flat, aluminum-composite cartoon of a cloud that hovers at waist-height from the ceiling by nylon rope and...
Saturday afternoon provided a steady viewing of the last glimpses of “Irrational Exhibits 10th Anniversary: Mapping the Divide” curated by Deborah Oliver, with a closing performance by LA-based artist, Lara Salmon, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in...
Kerry James Marshall’s current retrospective at MoCA is less a ‘Pick-of-the-Week’ than a Must of the Year. Regardless of the particulars of each individual’s experience, it is a show that compels serious reevaluation of the historical canon of Western painting (and...
Young Caesar is born of a certain moment – a definably Californian, forward- and global-looking moment. In Lou Harrison’s music and the awkwardly framed conceits of its libretto by Robert Gordon, there is yearning, rather than the ‘ambition’ we might associate with...
In his latest video installation “Weed Killer” (2017), Patrick Staff approaches the topic of identity by juxtaposing the cancer patient’s experience with that of the transgender person’s and examining the ravaging effects that pharmaceuticals can have upon the...
Mar is sitting in his Marina Del Rey studio, wearing a pair of ripped, paint-splattered jeans. Behind him is the largest piece featured in his upcoming solo exhibition at Art Angels: a 6x6-foot color-wheel whirlpool. Mar points directly across from him to a painting...
Artist Masami Teraoka said, “Let’s make art!” and they did. Pure art rumbles, bubbles and springs forth, like the eruption of a magnificent geyser. As the plume spray drifts and evaporates in the wind, the beauty of the gesture is the impermanent purpose. A...
Periodically, we hear complaints (or alternatively, sighs of gratitude) from one quarter or another that painting is dead; or sometimes more specifically, that abstract painting is dead. At this point it’s far more likely the planet will die before abstract painting....
The hot Santa Ana winds whipped around our bare legs as we searched for The Lodge on Western Ave Saturday evening. Inside, a zillion children were engaged in hide-and-seek and overall hyperactivity, while the adults, mid-career artists, mingled in summer dresses,...
Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington's complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments...
Two major Hamptons fine art fairs are not returning in 2017: Art Hamptons and Art Southampton. Organizers of both suspended events attributed the cancellations to market conditions and buyer fatigue. Rick Friedman, the founder of Hamptons Expo Group, put on the...
My art-sister-in-arms and I headed out to Craft and Folk Art Museum Saturday evening to take in their survey show of Betye Saar’s washboard assemblages. Spanning the course of 20 years, from 1997 to present, this specific exhibition references the domestic, spiritual...
Mercifully averted, the television writers’ strike was urgent news in Los Angeles, where total triviality-immersion is our raison d’être, and its media coverage was breathless. This would have wryly charmed Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. His 1985...
There’s an enormous tension between the two shows currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museum; yet each resonates all the more powerfully for the juxtaposition. While Material As Metaphor is emphatically abstract, and Keepin’ It Clean explicitly grounded in...
We see the future differently in recent years, as the future presses relentlessly into the present – way beyond ‘future-shock,’ as termed by the futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, into a kind of ‘present shock.’ This manifests in any number of ways, including the way...
There was a cool sense of relief walking into David Kordansky's gallery and seeing that the great turn out for Mai-Thu Perret’s "Féminaire" and Lesley Vance's "12 Paintings" was still abuzz. With much to take in, simply retaining all the beauty of each individual...
From the moment the stage lights go up for The Monster Builder, the audience is caught in a whirlwind of over-the-top sophisticated banter, much of it addressing architecture. The first scene reveals an ultra modern glass house with inhabitants, Gregor, the...
Jessie Homer French's paintings nullify categories like sophistication and naiveté; embodying aspects of both, they fit into neither. As implied by the show's title, "Food Chain," harsh realities figure prominently in French's depictions of subjects that include...
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