Just across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati is The Carnegie, a former library in Covington, Kentucky constructed in 1904 one of over 2,500 worldwide funded by Andrew Carnegie. Now a theater and exhibition space, the center serves the local and surrounding...
OUTSIDE LA: THESE THINGS ARE CONNECTED
GALLERY ROUNDS: Caleb Stein ROSEGALLERY
And we’re back… back to communing for art’s sake. If you’re looking for something intimate and off the trodden path, there’s Caleb Stein’s exhibition "Down by the Hudson." It’s a focused collection of subdued, low-contrast, black-and-white photographs featuring water...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Paul Mpagi Sepuya Vielmetter Los Angeles
Just as Diego Velázquez’s "Las Meninas" (1656) troubled differentiations between life and painting, Paul Mpagi Sepuya confuses the boundaries that separate life and photography, questioning what is intended to be seen and concealed. In his recent exhibition at...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Information Booth Worker with Red Nails, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, 2022
GALLERY ROUNDS: Lev Rukhin East 26 Projects
Russian exile Lev Rukhin creates grand works of realism tinged with just enough peculiarity to suggest doubt. They are dreamlike—much of the imagery is suspended in a nimbus—and implies both memory and trickery. This device is quite intentional; the exhibition is...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Robert G. Achtel Marshall Gallery
The City of Namara is a fictitious place created by Robert G. Achtel. In the photographs that define this curious and digitally fabricated location, Achtel presents Namara as a place devoid of people and filled with modernist architecture. Each building is shot...
Book Review: A Measured Coolness Building + Becoming by Amir Zaki
Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the...
BOOKS: Forbidden Photos George Platt Lynes' Daring Eye
In 1981 a new photography monograph appeared that seemed like an artifact from a parallel universe. The cover was a studio shot of a nurse flanked by two nude men. Many of the photos in the book depicted nude men in potentially gay scenarios. It had only become legal...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Fashion at Frieze Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, 2022
SIGHTS UNSCENE Superbowl Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary; “Das Zimmer” (The Room) in Pipilotti Rist Exhibition, Los Angeles, 2022
GALLERY ROUNDS: Gianna Vargas TAG Gallery
Gianna Vargas’ latest body of work “Dessicate,” comprises photos taken throughout December of 2021 during the middle of the pandemic. The work stems from Vargas’ trip to Utah where she took images of the forest amid winter decay. I made my way toward the intimate back...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Deinstalling artist Ning-Hsin Hu’s "Pressure Test" at Torrance Art Museum’s NOMAD show, Torrance, CA, 2021
Pick of the Week: Wolfgang Tillmans Regen Projects
In our post-truth age, where it’s easy to assume any image has been digitally manipulated, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ stands out from the pack for his striking candidness. In his eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, the German artist presents a diverse array...
Ilona Szwarc Reclaiming the History of Breasts
Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest show, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, introduces sculpture alongside her photography, documenting herself casting a model’s torso in silicone and plaster. Other recent LA exhibitions...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Artist Ewedrt Hilgemann’s Sculpture Implosion Event, Royale Projects, Los Angeles, 2017
GALLERY ROUNDS: LACMA Review of Vera Lutter and "Acting Out"
For a museum that has torn down all of the buildings on its original campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been putting up some pretty interesting exhibitions in one of only two exhibition spaces that are left. The two photography exhibitions I’m thinking...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Birth of a Foothill Fire, San Gabriel Valley, CA, 2019
Remarks on Color: Lachrymose Lemon August's Hue
Lachrymose Lemon cannot stop weeping. She sobs uncontrollably at everything all the time: the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, softball games, dinosaur conventions, the day her favorite chicken finally laid an egg. From the moment the sun rises to the last...