Ed Templeton has expressed his obsession with watching people who walk along the sidewalks and hang out at the waterfront in Huntington Beach, California. He is equally fascinated by young girls and old men, their modes of dress or undress, and the details of their...
I try to avoid reading too much into titles of paintings because they can rarely be more than the most tenuous captions for something effectively functioning in a language of its own. Occasionally a show’s title underscores a certain theme resonating through the...
Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie’s work is clearly indebted to that of his artistic forbearers. Not since Anselm Kiefer has a painter dealt so explicitly with the heavy, fraught history of 20th century Europe, and like Francis Bacon, his visages are rendered as...
Carol Es has long drawn upon two major factors in her personal history—factors that she recognizes that she shares with many others, but perhaps not in quite the same way. Strongly identifying as Jewish, Es has emphasized the cultural and historical aspects of her...
Phyllis Green’s “Walking the Walk” consists of sculptural works that also function as garments and performance props. Their use as such is documented by photographs by Ave Pildas with the artist posing and modeling each of the artworks. Toying with the idea of a high...
Harkening to the grace of bygone days when those who wished to communicate with one another would do so by putting pen to paper, East Bay-based artist Gail Tarantino’s “Hand Written” draws content from letters written by the artist to astronomers, naturalists and...
A trio of sepia-toned photographs, displayed at the entrance of the Leila Heller Gallery, documenting four naked men followed by Western soldiers in a rundown village instantly evokes the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The jarring scene—American soldiers humiliating local...
Julia von Eichel’s wall sculptures (all 2014) are oddly unsettling, with innards that seem to strain against their outer skin and an overall configuration suggesting movement or attenuated growth. It’s tempting to see naturally occurring phenomenon like spores,...
At first, Andrew Dadson’s newest exhibition at David Kordansky, “Painting (Organic),” seems to lack cohesion, with medium and mood shifting frequently. There are three very distinct types of works on display: a collection of photographs hung in a grid formation; six...
It seems every traveler, on occasion, suffers a collapse of time and space. Careening down a hotel hallway late at night, carrying a suitcase whose weight amplifies the exhaustion from hours of cramped travel, one's head begins to spin. Doors, walls, and expanses of...
Ann Chamberlin approaches painting like an alchemist approaches a vile of life-giving succor—with tremendous reverence and passion. The new paintings on view at Lora Schlesinger Gallery mine some of the same archetypal themes she has visited previously. However these...
Last week I ventured to the Cooper Design Space in Downtown LA’s fashion district to see the “15 CalArts MFA Show.” It is a large inconspicuous building surrounded by cut-rate fabric stores typically used for designer showcases—a somewhat irregular location for an art...
Washington Post In the rarefied world inhabited by performance artists, gallery owners and MFA candidates, there is something called “non-collectible art.” Making this art doesn’t produce something that someone can buy and take home, like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona...
Ochi Projects, a new gallery on Washington Boulevard. hit a home run this week with its first group show curated by Brian Wills and Lexi Brown. The horizon line has long been a symbol of infinite possibility, and all of the work in the exhibition speaks to this theme...
Michael Deyermond is an artist’s artist, making stuff that makes him happy, and us too, albeit for the fact that some of the sentiments here are darkly appealing and often self-reflexive. This is not art that begs to be loved at the expense of much needed content, but...
Bernice is premiering at the Palm Springs Shortfest next week and the eponymous documentary celebrates the spunky tenured New York art dealer, Bernice Steinbaum as a long-time pioneer of female and minority artists. I’m sitting beside Steinbaum now, taking in her “New...
The Artist as Debtor The role of educational institutions in shaping and defining artists is being questioned and critiqued by the very professors, students and alumni who make up these institutions. One of these critiques, the nationwide movement to organize and...
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