Artillery Magazine

Tag: Stacie Vos

  • Tony Cokes at Hannah Hoffman

    Tony Cokes
    at Hannah Hoffman

    To get to Tony Cokes’ “All About Evil” at Hannah Hoffman, a show displaying 12 selected works from a period of nearly two decades (2006-2022), one must pass a sidewalk sign for the neighboring jewelry boutique Spinelli Kilcollin. Cokes’ HD videos feature large white Sans Serif text against bright, embarrassingly and overwhelmingly American colors: red, white, and blue. Performing a patriotic zeal gone awry, the works pull the viewer in multiple directions at once: Device 1, a window flat screen, faces into the private, gated, courtyard, (where one must be buzzed in to view the work); Device 2, a wall-mounted flat screen, features two headsets for a pair of viewers to place over their ears, while a different song plays aloud from Device 3, an LED screen placed to the right of the small gallery space. The conditions surrounding this viewing experience are at odds with the overtly political content of Cokes’ work, which uses, for instance, the Sesame Street theme song alongside text on the response to coronavirus and the larger failures of the American political and educational systems. Stark text both confronts and entertains the viewer, who is offered a chance to sit on one of three large foam square blocks in the center of the gallery. Cokes’ provocative work reproduces a space not unlike an electronics superstore. The show offers neither space for immersion in a single work nor a path to political resistance. Instead, its success lies in the suggestion that rebellion itself has become a commodity, presented on multiple flashing screens with two soundtracks playing at once. The viewer is divided from themself, much like the user of an iPhone or Instagram.

  • SELINE BURN at Baert Gallery

    SELINE BURN
    at Baert Gallery

    “Kairos” by Seline Burn at Baert Gallery features 10 large oil paintings on canvas and linen, all completed this year. Blues, yellows, and greens render female figures across landscapes and interior settings that blur the boundaries between inner and outer, self and other, human and avian, dream state and waking life. In North Star, a reclining woman’s breath takes the shape of a bird; in Ariadne’s Thread (2025), three nude women with feathered skin walk across a log bridge, connected by a rope suspended in their hands. In the smaller room of the two-room gallery, two complementary paintings would seem to drive us out of the mythical dreamscape into the reality of nature, with its consuming people and animals (a cat traps a bird, a large pretzel bears bite marks). My favorite piece in this show is Intertwined, which depicts two women, or two images of the same woman, lying beside one another, separated by a striped straw hat and by the fact that one wears a striped blue shirt while the other rests bare-chested. Lying in mirrored poses, their identical brown hair flows into one another as if shared strands. There is a decided absence of male figures in these paintings, unless Gargoyles and knives suffice.

    Seline Burn: Kairos
    Baert Gallery
    1923 S. Santa Fe Ave.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90021
    On view through June 7, 2025

  • FIRST ALIENATION at Timeshare

    FIRST ALIENATION
    at Timeshare

    In “First Alienation,” printed matter and machine vision come together in a clearly human context at Timeshare, a co-curated gallery run by six artists in Lincoln Heights. The earliest work included in the show is Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 16mm film, Swamp. Looping every 6 minutes on a large black TV displaying a prominent “TRINITRON” logo, the film follows the views and voices of a couple tramping through reeds in the swamplands of New Jersey. The blurred, swaying reeds give way to the next piece in the show, Kelley O’Leary’s Mars Door, a 22 by 30 screen print on newsprint mounted on wood board that features a “door” that seems to have been constructed by humans on Mars but is instead an idea we project upon an early image of a space carved out by winds. Opposite O’Leary’s work are seven small pieces by Chase Barnes, each of them a “debezeled BNRV300 e-paper display,” or an image quickly captured on a deconstructed reading tablet during the process of content loading. The images include a blazing boardroom table, a stone tower window, empty shelves, and “Richard’s model of the F-14 Tomcat.” At the center of these digitally produced works is Anthony Discenza’s Burn Rate, the only paper in sight, which, upon closer viewing, is in fact a suite of 72 synthetic images printed on Fuji glass paper. This show sits beautifully in a space that also houses Ricoh machines, placing their service manuals alongside gallery catalogs and artist books on the permanent bookshelves at the corner of the gallery, where press releases in Esperanto feature four different cover images, one for each artist featured in this exhibition. The viewer senses in the show the fleeting, iterative nature of both language and image, especially in the face of technological and environmental ruptures over time. A press release in English may have helped to re-establish the solid ground offered by the sculptural elements of the show, from the television to the mound of photographs that can be touched and rearranged. The show is far less alienated than it proposes to be, and this is a relief.

    First Alienation
    Timeshare
    3526 N. Broadway
    Los Angeles, CA 90031
    On view through April 26, 2025

  • Sawako Goda at Nonaka-Hill

    Sawako Goda
    at Nonaka-Hill

    This exhibition features paintings, sketches, and ephemera from the estate of Sawako Goda (1940-2016). Goda’s oil paintings immerse the viewer into a strange urban sea in which the body merges with gems the size of appendages. Goda’s “story of the eye” shifted when she encountered the Eye of the Horus, an Egyptian symbol in which the eye is made of six parts, each corresponding to the anatomic location of a particular human sensorium. Moving between New York City, Tokyo, and Cairo, Goda refigured the Hollywood femme fatale and “vamp” as new creatures under or alongside glass: these women appear to be blissfully alone and entranced, completely unaware of the viewer. Rodney Nonaka-Hill first discovered Goda through her poster art from the 60s and 70s; this show beautifully showcases both the ephemeral and the monumental aspects of Goda’s corpus.

  • Valerie Keane at Gaylord Fine Arts

    Valerie Keane
    at Gaylord Fine Arts

    Valerie Keane’s works on paper are constructed with devotion, resulting in miniature worlds that reflect the viewer back unto herself. These are “flat” images in comparison to Keane’s other work, and yet a close look into the frame reveals parts that appear as though they could move, or are moving, as light rolls across beautiful strips of metalized film and tiny hand-cut strands of metal bend themselves toward the rice paper base. Resistant to photographic capture, endlessly demanding of the eye, each piece requires attention to details that differ by the minute. Imagine the medieval astrolabe, the spherical navigational device described in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, alongside the tiny zipper-like ladders and beautifully subdivided spheres of Keane’s translucent sculptures framed in aluminum: she compresses time, light, and space on the Gaylord’s fourteenth floor.