At first glance the array of objects in Kristen Morgin’s evocative installation “Messages to My Twenty Year Old Self” appear to be those found in a rummage sale: old books and toys, record albums and empty tuna cans, comic books and musical instruments. What is most...
Shana Lutker’s exhibition of new work at Susanne Vielmetter is best understood in the context of her wider oeuvre, which of late has been singularly concerned with the 1920s Surrealists. Each of Lutker’s “chapters” juxtaposes her spare, minimal and conceptual visual...
It’s been said that the first half of the 20th century was Picasso’s and the second half, Duchamp’s. The transition from modernist painting to today’s mixed-media conceptualism is in large part due to a 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show...
Cultural anthropologists have traditionally brought assumptions of Eurocentric superiority to their studies of “primitive” societies, using language and presentations that cast the subjects in a dismissive light. Turning the tables on this practice, Michael Arcega,...
For more than 10 years, starting in 1998, Zoe Leonard photographed the ravages of urban life. From New York to Eastern Europe, Africa, Cuba and Mexico, she found shuttered storefronts and fallen marquees, makeshift signs and dated logos, obsolete computers and manual...
Space and architecture constitute, for Gaston Bachelard in his book, The Poetics of Space, a site for our memories, which become real and find a location through the geography of constructed space. These locations, which function as markers on the road of our...
The first encounter with the most strikingly original art (not unlike the most speculative scientific thinking) is always a bit strange – possibly configured, oriented or abstracted in a way toward which our minds and senses can only gradually accustom themselves. We...
Comic-book artists are sometimes dismissed as just that—common “drawers” as it were rather than fine artists. This recent retrospective of Jack Kirby’s graphic work currently on view at Cal State Northridge’s Mike Curb Gallery sets the record straight and proves that...
I’ve been trying to discourage art, cultural, political, fashion and retail organizations of every size from exhibiting, performing, organizing, opening, demonstrating or launching anything during the summer before Labor Day, and especially August. But I suppose it’s...
I’d taken a photographer friend to The Getty to look at the Light, Paper, Process show curated by Virginia Heckert – a must for any photographer and, for that matter, for anyone interested in process-oriented form and media (which includes myself, in recent months)....
Noah Purifoy made it his life long duty to seek art everywhere in everything, and to do so with tremendous poise and discernment. The retrospective Junk Dada on view at LACMA is breathtakingly inventive and, if nothing else, speaks to the unending seductiveness of the...
When I enter the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive for the first time, I know that I have not viewed art in any space like it before. The venue bridges the gap between gallery space and archive —the exhibit’s content is displayed among boxes of materials, shelves of...
Deedee Cheriel’s work feels akin to falling headlong into a rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream while drinking a pint of Buffalo Trace Bourbon on a hot New York summer night in Chelsea. Her mostly small paintings of animals reenacting human activities...
In 2013 artist Doug Aitken realized an extraordinarily ambitious art project, "Station to Station," a kind of continuous art performance on wheels. This one rolled coast to coast, populated with creative folk who got on and off, making music, making art, making...
Popular music is increasingly a topic of exhibition in the museum and gallery world but I’ve found its presentation can be either overwhelming or underwhelming. After all, how can the curator condense an experience so visceral like performance—an act itself at once...
Drawing a fine line between voyeurism and vigilance, Indian artist Abir Karmakar’s second solo exhibition "Uncanny Space” at Aicon Gallery continues with his preoccupation of seducing viewers to become surreptitious onlookers of his painted private spaces. Yet at the...
Jeffrey Vallance’s séance/performance, Ghost Writers – a collaboration with the self-titled psychic astrologer, Joseph Ross, held in conjunction with Vallance’s show at CB1 Gallery, The Medium Is the Message – was ostensibly intended to draw out the spirits (and...
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