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...
When I was just out of school and began my first regular daily commute of the Southern California freeways, I remember stealing glances to either side of the road. I caught brief glimpses of the fleeting vistas, noting how with every quarter mile, my vantage point...
A special place exists within those fleeting moments transitioning from slumber into an awakened state. In those few seconds when dreamscape combines with reality, both a mild confusion and an eerie comfort sets in. Our mind sifts, sorts and makes sense of what is...
Americans who know Cuba only through movies (God-father 2, Before Night Falls) and familiarity with a few star Cuban artists (Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta) are guilty of the oxymoron of mainland insularity, a product of Cold War tensions that arose in 1959 with the...
Throughout our evolution we’ve been afraid of the dark. As creatures primarily endowed with encephalic gifts, we aren’t well-equipped to vie with nocturnal animals, full of tooth and claw and with more finely attuned senses. They make quick work of us when we don’t...
James Welling’s “Flowers” (2004–11) suggest backlit tree branches in bloom against a blank sky. A pure white light appears to pass through these elegant arrangements of shadowy stem, leaf and petal shapes, and in the process is refracted, as if by a prism, into...
As the George Clooney character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? comically declared, “We in a tight spot!” With 7 billion people competing for ever-scarcer natural resources in an environment beset by weather changes, Homo sapiens is headed for challenges, and not of the...
I often feel the need to escape the insincerity of Los Angeles for the non-ironic nature of the desert. Hollywood’s slapstick tradition seems to have similar desires. A rock, maybe a bit browner than his companions, sits at the bottom of a boulder-pile. We watch the...
Kim Stringfellow’s photographs of derelict cabins that sit within the high-desert landscape of the Mojave provide a necessarily familiar entry point into “Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape.” This, the artist’s most...
It’s been a productive year for Farrah Karapetian, a participant in “The Black Mirror” group show at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery, L.A. Louver’s 2013 “Rogue Wave” survey, and the 2013 California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. She has also been...
Fragmented and contorted bodies in motion span the gallery as if onstage in Bettina Hubby’s exhibition “Pretty Limber.” Large-scale figures made of vinyl decals float across the space, wrapping around corners and emerging from the floor. Composited from numerous...
Shot from behind a glass partition, a girl with long blond hair sits alone at the edge of an empty pool. Her back is to the camera; her legs create ripples in the blue water. Where the pool ends, a golf course begins. The setting is obviously one of wealth. This color...
At first glance Charles Fréger’s “Wilder Mann”—an exhibition filled with photographs of furry giants and frolicking monsters—may seem inconsequential. Yes, the work is fluffy and intentionally entertaining on the surface, but it goes much deeper. After one fully...
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Samuel Bayer’s series of photographic “Triptychs,” recently on view at ACE Gallery Beverly Hills, is the complexity of the meditation on desire and representation that they can engender in a [male] viewer. These 16 12-foot...
Catherine Opie enunciates the intentions and ideas behind her current body of 2012-2013 works with the first two images the viewer encounters—one a portrait, the other an abstracted landscape that could loosely be described as meditative. Lawrence (the conceptual...
Kelly Barrie’s hybrid process at first seems antithetical to photography and its ability to stop time, yet it is through his improvisations—like the nimbleness required by a skater or graffiti writer—that his work ingeniously engages a series of paradoxes. Rather than...
Since its invention, the camera has often acted as an intruder, an interloper or an uninvited guest. Walker Evans photographed subway riders from a camera hidden in his coat. His black-and-white images depict men and women gazing at the camera while immersed in their...
Michael Light has been shooting photographs of the western U.S. landscape for over 20 years. They are generally taken from a small light airplane that he flies himself, and explore the majesty of these vast and variegated lands, creating dense patterns akin to...
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