We all wonder about the secret life of quiet people—surely, there’s turbulence churning beneath placid surfaces. In the fascinating new documentary Finding Vivian Maier, we follow John Maloof, a self-styled photo historian and first-time filmmaker, on his journey to...
I don’t remember when I first ran across Ad Reinhardt’s dazzling, sarcastic collage comics—probably in the ’80s (around the same time I stumbled upon his brilliant “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else” screeds, but before I saw his equally but oppositely...
The photographs at the Annenberg Space for Photography of National Geographic magazine are cinema-size, faces larger than life, their suffering and innocence unbearable but attached to your memory forever. There are also animals filled with destroyed beauty and a...
It is often the case that an artist who creates a lifetime of strong work will be known for a single piece. One of the shorthand images that denote surrealism is a fur teacup. More people know this image than the name of the artist who made it (Meret Oppenheim). In...
Taryn Simon, widely considered today’s premier conceptual photographer, is essentially an investigative taxonomist. She rose to fame with her series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” (2007), in which she secured access to normally closed-off sites like...
At first glance Dustin Yellin’s sculptures seem to be all about process and accumulation. They are a technical feat created by fusing layers of collaged and painted quarter-inch glass sheets into blocks that weigh thousands of pounds. These three-dimensional works can...
Few artists can walk the fine stylistic line between illustration and painting, but Leonardo Cuervo’s work succeeds. Walking into “IN FABULA,” one experiences adoration and fear: perfect women, shining bugs, all seemingly imbued with an internal turmoil. The works...
It’s been said all literature is comprised of two stories: man goes on a journey; stranger comes to town. In her two-channel video, Sympathy for the Devil (2011), Claudia Joskowicz examines these alternate sides of the same coin, exploring the exile of two...
Even more than, say, Richard Tuttle, to whom he might (uneasily) be compared—B. Wurtz tests a viewer’s relationship to objects and construction of their meaning, significance, even utility. This encompasses relations among objects, and by extension, our relationship...
California artist Alyson Souza creates paintings and sculptures that draw parallels between man-made relics—vintage electrical equipment, say, or battered geographer’s tools—and nature forms of similar shape, texture, or function. An immense head of cabbage opens to...
Always following his impulses, Timothy Washington is an artist’s artist, and in the Southern California African-American artist’s community is one of the last remaining practitioners from South Central LA’s Golden Age of Assemblage (late 1960s to mid-’70s). Washington...
Environmental undertones, bright poppy color and a sense of collaboration create a striking combination for Devon Tsuno’s exhibition “Watershed,” which is split into two distinct sections. Tsuno is native to LA and an educator enamored with the Los Angeles River...
The guise of the paint-slinging hero never quite fit William T. Wiley, whose early folksy, Western-styled brand of funk art, fueled by Abstract Expressionist and conceptual underpinnings, atrocious puns and general anarchy, was christened “Dude Ranch Dada” by Hilton...
It is rare to see an artist make a shift in their work as dramatic as the one Michelle Segre made between her shows at Derek Eller in 2008 and 2011. Within a few short years, she went from making fastidious, slightly-surreal beeswax and papier mâché sculptures to...
Who knew? Who knew that Andy Warhol would become an angel, full of love and the love of God and the beauty that surrounds him in the heavens above? Last night, at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, artist Jeffrey Vallance conducted a séance with psychic medium...
Julia Daultat China Art ObjectsJulia Dault’s recent exhibition “Rhythm Nation,” at China Art Objects feels like a trip down memory lane, or more specifically, a journey back through 1980’s color field abstraction where artists like Jack Whitten and David Reed were...
What makes a fair work? (Of any kind, really: a question out of Merchant Capitalism 101—or even Trade 101.) The merchants and the goods are key—by far the most important factor. But we’re not just talking about a marketplace, retail street or mall design – an...
After ten years, the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s Incognito benefit has become a fixture on the L.A. art world calendar; and although I don’t necessarily make it every year (the never-ending battle of time and distances, to say nothing of travel contingencies), I’m...
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