los angeles art publications
ART DAMAGED
STAYING SANE(ish) WITH DR. TRAINWRECK Essay
I am about to get married. Maybe. Probably. And as a part of this whole thing, I find myself spending hours—hours—discussing the particulars of what this marriage is going to look like. What rules are we going to have? How are we going to keep each other safe and make...
ROLL CALL
LUDOLOGY
lu·dol·o·gy /l(j)uˈdɑlədʒi/ n A field of cultural studies that examines games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures that surround them. It is also known as game studies or gaming theory. Find an artist who created a portrait of another artist in any...
KEN GONZALES-DAY Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
At Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day: Afterlife, shows new digital collages furthering his body of “nevermades;” a term coined by the artist to describe his revisionist reimaginings of Western historical moments and figures bringing into question the long...
MOUNTAIN AS METHOD A Look Inside the Mountain School of Arts, LA's Most Mysterious Art Institution
I missed the party. A party that promised nothing less than to reveal the nature of reality. I wanted to go, but the promised revelation of full reality was curtailed by immediate financial reality—I had to go to a wedding out of town the night before and couldn’t...
RECONTAMINATION
LA-based photographer Gerd Ludwig has been recording the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster for the last two decades. Here, Artillery presents a selection of Ludwig’s most recent images, focusing on the ghost town of Pripyat. The near-classically surreal...
YUVAL PUDIK at NOON Projects
Men in nice suits do not often crawl around on their hands and knees; there’s too great a risk of their shoes getting scuffed, their knees wearing through, or, God forbid, their seams splitting right along their backside. But brave men in suits defied the norms on...
NANCY BUCHANAN The Brick
Desire can make you sick, or it can make you try. Los Angeles-based artist Nancy Buchanan, working steadily since the 1970s, has consistently chosen the latter. Hair Room (1973/2025), a closet-sized chamber where strings of hair caress the top of your head as you walk...
ADAM ALESSI at Hoffman Donahue
“fullmoon” is a bit of a homecoming for Adam Alessi. The artist has been averaging around one solo show a year since his sudden art world ascent about five or six years ago, but with the last two having taken place in Italy and New York, Los Angeles has rarely seen...
FLORIAN KREWER Michael Werner
There’s an easy attractiveness to Florian Krewer’s paintings that obscures the complex formations of desire within them. At times they seem stripped of everything but their earnestness, but then at others, they are scattered with bold and reckless impulses. There is...
IT SMELLS LIKE GIRL at Jeffrey Deitch
“It Smells Like Girl,” at Jeffrey Deitch, in conjunction with Company Gallery, shares its title with a Tala Madani painting depicting a suspiciously phallic object, a lone actor against a cloudless blue sky. Stark and funny, the phallus is the main character, but its...
JASMINE JOHNSON at New Theater Hollywood
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Thus begins the most (and perhaps only) captivating scene from Jasmine Johnson’s film PCH & Heroin, which premiered recently alongside her film Tweakernam at New Theater Hollywood. The line, from...
MARINA WEINER at The Hermitage
In a backyard in Glendale, Marina Weiner’s solo exhibition, “Stripe Machine,” cleverly redefines the term “public art.” The art is not shown in public; the gallery, Hermitage Los Angeles, is a small, beautifully built shed behind a private home. Rather, Weiner’s...
AMERICAN ARTIST at California African American Museum
In a small gallery of the California African American Museum, a wooden table hosting just short of two dozen drawings and a life-size sculptural replica of a chicken coop invoke a perplexing story about institutional partnerships in the contemporary arts. In “Shaper...
ARTIST TAKEOVER: PETER TOMKA
DUELLING REVIEWS: BRUCE NAUMAN at LACMA
AMONG THE THANATOIDS
He owns a mobile home he drives from place to place, crashing where he can for as long as he can, depending on the language in the local zoning ordinances. He works remote contract data entry jobs on a laptop, always connected to free public WiFi, and accepts all...
