María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Behold
The J. Paul Getty Museum
February 18 - May 4, 2025


María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Behold, is a survey of works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a Cuban born and Nashville based multi-media artist whose complex works examine themes ranging from migration to motherhood. Though not widely exhibited in California, Campos-Pons has been making installations, performances and 2D-works for more than thirty years and is also a well respected professor. She has been on the visual arts faculty at Vanderbilt University since 2017 when she relocated there after teaching for twenty-five years at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Behold is a traveling exhibition organized by curators at the Getty and Brooklyn Museums. Its final stop in Los Angeles comes after its debut at the Brooklyn Museum (September 2023 - January 2024), as well as presentations at The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (February - June 2024) and the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (September 2024- January 2025).

On view are photographs, videos, paintings, sculptures and installations that interweave Campos-Pons's interests and unique ways of compositing imagery to create allegories and historical narratives that bring together important people, places and times throughout the artist's life. The multi-panel Umbilical Cord (1991) employs a long piece of wire that connects twelve individually framed sepia-toned photographs of outstretched arms and midsections of women from the artist's extended family. Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) is a mixed-media installation that reflects on garment work and laundry. Printed onto fabric and wrapped around three ironing boards are what appear to be old family photos of Cuban women. These ironing boards stand upright and are set deep in a darkened space. The floor surrounding them is covered with spot lit irons and trivets made of glass that seem to float in the darkness and become a metaphor for the boats that forcibly carried numerous Africans to the Americas. Videos are also projected onto the remaining three ironing boards; in one, Campos-Pons folds a long cloth referencing women's work. While a commentary on domestic duties by enslaved workers, Spoken Softly with Mama is also a celebration of life, like many of Campos-Pons's pieces.

Dualities are pervasive within Campos-Pons's work. She often examines the self (herself) in relation to family and heritage. In the late 1990s while a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Campos-Pons began to use the Polaroid 20 x 24 instant camera. Rather than make single images, she designed complex grids featuring numerous Polaroids resulting in larger finished pieces, but also illustrating her ability to conceptualize and produce interesting relationships across fragmented imagery— literally cutting apart and reconstituting the body. Replenishing (2001) is a seven part Polaroid, hung in an H-like configuration, that depicts the artist and her mother as separate, framed, vertical triptychs. Campos-Pons and her mother are dressed in long, formal and elegant dresses. The middle image of the portraits contain their hands each casually holding the end of a long strand of beads. In the central image of the piece, Campos-Pons focuses on where the beads are knotted together, emphasizing the mother daughter connection.

While the exhibition contains captivating examples of Campos-Pons's multi-panel drawings, videos and large-scale sculptures made from Murano glass, it is her large grids of Polaroids that stand out and speak most directly to her investigations into feminism, kinship and memory. Single photographs stand out, such as The Right Protection (1999) in which the artist is depicted with hand-drawn eyes covering her back both seeing and not seeing us simultaneously.

But, it is in the sixteen-panel work Elevata (2002), the twelve-panel photograph De Las Dos Aguas (2007) and the most impressive twenty-eight panel Polaroid Finding Balance (2015) that Campos-Pons links present to past. In Finding Balance, Campos-Pons draws from her Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian ancestry. Here she is depicted in white face wearing a black and gold robe decorated with what appears to be a monster or demon. Making up many of the 28 different framed images around her are photographs of bird cages, knotted fabrics and red rectangles shot against a mottled-blue background. Long strands of braided hair weave through the composition literally tying together different cultures and time frames.

None of Campos-Pons's complex pieces are a quick read. She questions everything and takes nothing for granted. Her process is both labor intensive and social. While formally elegant and conceptually rigorous, these works are also extremely personal. She traces ideas about home and home-land, looking at where she came from (Cuba) in relation to where she now resides (Nashville, TN), She also sees things through a feminist perspective as well as that of a displaced person. She engages with those around her and looks back to where she was born and grew up (Matanzas) as a way to connect with others who share her racial heritage, as well as those who do not. In her magnificent works, she connects. Campos-Pons uses fragments to weave together stories, histories and materials that situate herself as a solid entity in an ever changing work.

Click here for María Magdalena Campos-Pons on its own page.

Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
Sprueth Magers
February 15 - May 3, 2025


Jon Rafman

The varied and ever-mutating aspects of digital culture and technologies are at the forefront of Jon Rafman's investigations. With the recent proliferation of AI, he has become even more interested in how technology has infiltrated and influences the ways visual media is both produced and consumed. Proof of Concept is an immersive installation that "reimagines television for the AI age." While manipulated videos and large-scale fabric murals span the gallery walls and floor to fill the main exhibition space, it is the photographic images upstairs (not officially part of the show) that serve as an apt introduction to Rafman's practice.

Since 2008, Rafman has perused Google Street View looking for anomalies — things that were strange, unusual and out of place. He was interested in what narratives can be inferred, what actions actually occurred, versus what might have been a performance for Google's cameras. A sense of the surreal permeates these images — pictures taken by a machine, like a mechanical Flaneur. For example, in 828 Pavillion St, Dallas, Texas, USA, 2020 the Google cameras capture a man driving in a car extending his arm out the window to give the finger (presumably) to the Google apparatus. In another, 53128 Cl. 51, Medelllín, Antioquia, 2019, Rafman selects an image of a group of men playing cards on the hood of a truck. Devil and ghost-like figures, as well as other costumed characters pervade these views.

As computers become more active and even dominant in cultural production, Rafman has continued to mine this content. For his current installation he has figured out ways to engage with and manipulate the AI. The exhibit actually starts outside the gallery where Rafman has installed life-size vinyl decals on the buildings facade. Here, viewers see iterations of characters Rafman invented and features on his MSM (Main Stream Media) Network, including Cloudy Heart, Iron Tears, Wicked Hatchet and Flux Arcana, many of whom have backstories, albums and subcultures, as well as followings on social media and all of which are generated by AI.

The interior of the vast main space is literally covered with fabric printed with abstract patterns, interior scenes, occasional portraits, as well as different styles of graffiti. The setting resembles a college dorm room where every inch of space is covered with coveted memorabilia. In the center of this material abundance, is a couch in front of a large screen showing assorted looping videos featuring the various musical acts, advertisements and interviews that comprise his MSM (Main Stream Media) / RTM (Real Time Music) network. This main screen is augmented by numerous smaller monitors scattered throughout the installation. Rafman invites the viewer to sit (or stand) and to consume, or be consumed by the seemingly endless stream of far-out content that is reportage, as well as an ironic look at today.

While it is impossible to differentiate "real" from "fake" and the degree of manipulation in the moving images and soundtrack, the overall effect is disorienting enough to question intent, purpose, and ultimately the reason for this bombardment. But that may be the point. Rafman explores what is possible with this new technology — be it true or false — and sets the stage for viewers to contemplate the meaning of this unfiltered "reality." The take away is both absurd and extremely disturbing, depending on one's faith in AI.

Click here for Jon Rafman on its own page.

Lisa Yuskavage
David Zwirner Los Angeles
February 18 - April 12, 2025


Lisa Yuskavage

Naked women, the artist's studio, lurid colors, dynamic and thoughtful compositions: these elements are often associated with Lisa Yuskavage's paintings. Whether small or large, Yuskavage packs each work with quirky, personal narratives that intermingle the subject of artist and muse, in addition to exaggerated representations of female sexuality. The artist is present in her recent compositions, standing at an easel, sometimes wearing a white lab coat with a paintbrush in hand or seen in relation to scantily clad models who taunt or tease the viewer.

In Yuskavage's paintings, the studio becomes a stage onto which scenarios are projected. In the monumental work The Artist's Studio (2022), also reproduced on a giant billboard adjacent to the facade of the gallery, a cherub-faced half nude girl stares out of the painting. She is dressed in a revealing, tight fitting but also draped pink t-shirt that covers the upper portion of her body, yet her pubic hair. She also wears colorful striped knee high socks exposing her bare thighs. She holds a bright green painter's palette curiously suggesting she is both artist and model. Behind her is a large painting depicting a landscape filled with green hills and a few orange clouds, as well as a single female figure —a peasant from the earlier work Nel'zah's (2012)— offering a green plate. Toward the back of the studio, a woman (also the artist?) sits at a table reading a book. Miscellaneous ladders, props and unfinished paintings are scattered in the space, all with tan, light brown or gray hues, in contrast to the more finished and vivid depiction of the figure in the landscape.

From the Renaissance to modern times, numerous male painters have created self portraits at work in the studio. Included in this group are Vermeer, Velasquez, Picasso, Matisse and even the video artist Paul McCarthy. In some ways, Yuskavage follows in this tradition, inserting herself and prior artworks into her recent paintings, yet with Yuskavage there is often an ironic challenge or provocation. Painter Painting (2024) is a large-scale oil with the artist at its center, her back to the viewer. She is in the midst of creating a grayish portrait of a doll-like woman with huge breasts. The painting within the painting dwarfs the depiction of the artist whose head is in the middle of the subject's cleavage. Two sketches/studies of nudes are adhered with blue tape to the painting in progress. A small sculptural maquette for the naked woman in the painting is placed on a stool nearby. With older works surrounding her, it is as if Yuskvage is mining her past for inspiration.

The artist at work is absent in In the Company of Models (2024). While the studio setting is similar to the one in Painter Painting, Yuskavage does not appear as a painter, but rather a younger version of herself is presented as a model who emerges from a bright green wall in a like-colored dress. Though legless, her body position suggests the beginning of a formal dance. The central figure — a seductive female nude wearing nothing but beaded panties— is surrounded by stacked depictions of Yuskavage's past paintings, like the bright yellow Rorschach Blot (1995).

This exhibition, Yuskavage's first solo show in Los Angeles in 30 years, includes both large-scale and smaller paintings. Seen in relation to each other, the works have informative overlaps that illustrate her process, passions and history. This is an audacious move. Yuskavage recontextualizes old works by placing them in a studio setting — as if to say this is where I began and this is where I am now and I am happy to take you on a journey from then to now and show you what a magnificent painter I have turned out to be. Yuskavage has a unique way of celebrating both the vulnerability, as well as of the stoicism of the artist's model and a knack for portraying the complexities of the artist herself at work.

Click here for Lisa Yuskavage on its own page.

Anthony Lepore
No Condition is Permanent
Moskowitz Bayse
February 15 - March 29, 2025


Anthony Lepore

For his exhibition No Condition is Permanent, Anthony Lepore continues to explore properties intrinsic to photography— specifically the ways that the camera flattens and transforms three dimensional objects and how they then appear as two dimensional images. In his previous exhibition ime’s A Taker, Lepore created illusionistic works by combining photographs of objects shot from different vantage points and arranging them so they appeared correctly positioned within shelf-like structures that framed the images.

In his current pieces, Lapore expands on that illusion by making works that combine actual objects and photographs of them. In these he not only explores givens in photographic representation, but also looks at the relationship between textures — photographic and actual — with respect to flatness and depth. All the King's Horses, All The King's Men (all works 2025) is without a doubt a reference to the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme. Here, Lepore attaches multi-colored shards of speckled ceramics to photographs of the same ceramic surface. The glaze within the irregularly shaped fragments repeats, becoming a complex pattern across the background. From the front, the picture appears flat, but when seen from either side, the actual ceramics rise above the surface. As the eye tries to make sense of the relationships between the objects and the photograph, the work becomes even more nuanced.

In other works including Summoning Suns, Specter and One Into Another, Lepore attaches glazed stoneware to the printed image visually juxtaposing the colors and textures. For Summoning Suns, a vertical line of overlapping images of a quasi-oval shaped ceramic saucer with crackled white glaze against the orange clay was shot against a black background. It is bisected by a vertical line of the much smaller-scaled actual ceramic pieces. Similarly, in One Into Another, enlargements of white and green glazed stoneware rectangles are topped with actual ceramic fragments to line up both patterns. Within the composition of six differently sized rectangles are zig-zagging cracks that emphasize both the depth and the separation between both the individual pieces and the photographic depictions of them.

In The Way Out, Lapore fashions a life-size dysfunctional ladder from two pieces of clay. They are attached to a framed photograph of a thinner metal ladder leaning against a blank white wall. The photographed ladder casts a wavy blue shadow onto the wall. The clay ladder also casts a shadow on the photograph — but from the actual lights in the gallery — though it appears to be part of the photographic image.

Lepore delights in using photographs within photographs and creating spatial illusions through the addition of non-photographic elements. Where the object and image overlap and how they appear as one has long been his obsession and with each body of work, he succeeds in presenting more formally innovative and conceptually complex pieces.

Click here for Anthony Lepore on its own page.

Masamitsu Shigeta
Perspectives
Tyler Park Presents
February 15 - March 29, 2025


Masamitsu Shigeta

Masamitsu Shigeta is a New York based artist who turns banal and everyday surroundings into evocative paintings that inspire viewers to reflect on and take a second look at what they might otherwise pass by. For his previous exhibition at Tyler Park Presents in 2022, Shigeta created impressions of buildings and trees he happened upon while walking around New York City. In these paintings, he captured the interplay between nature and architecture, depicting trees surrounded by fences as anomalies in the urban landscape. Each painting was also framed in a way that enhanced some aspect of the image.

For Perspectives, Shigeta once again takes on the role of urban wanderer. Like Baudelaire's flaneur, Shigeta is a thoughtful and astute observer who navigates the city. Shigeta's grouping of modest sized oils includes impressions of Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Thailand, Hong Kong and Zurich. As in past exhibitions, each work is surrounded by a hand made frame that parallels an element within the scene. The painting A Snail (2024) is bordered by a light brown wooden rectangle with curved corners that wraps the canvas. This frame mirrors the rounded brown shell around a small snail depicted in the lower half of the composition. The focal point of the nighttime scene is this lone snail crawling across an empty city sidewalk illuminated by street lights and surrounded by large green trees.

A Broom Tree (2024) is a blue hued painting of the top portion of two palm trees in front of three modernist buildings with glass facades. The closer tree has five magnificent fronds branching out in all directions. The painting is bordered by the wide bottoms of four push brooms, their texture corresponding to the fronds. Palm trees also appear in three other works (all 2025) where Shigeta also focuses on their surroundings. In A Palm Tree in a Cell, the tree is seen through a chain link fence. One large section of the fence is centered in the composition through which Shigeta portrays an empty playground and further back a street lined with trees depicted as a succession of green and orange brush strokes. A similar scene appears in the larger work, Diamond (2025). Here, the chain link fence appears more as a flat black and gray cartoony illustration. It frames a receding suburban street with a cloud filled sky and greenery that recedes into the distance. This work is surrounded by a light gray enamel frame etched with a chainlink pattern.

Looking Up A Tree (2024) is a playful cityscape where Shigeta centers a single tree seen from below. The skyscrapers and sky surround the circular shape of the treetop which is accentuated by an extremely wide rounded frame wrapped in a black knit sweater. Another work where the frame stands out is Log 3 (2024). In this painting, Shigeta depicts the end of a pile of logs from a foreshortened perspective illustrating the rings in green and orange stripes. As the image recedes into the distance, the background is filled with a light yellow sky, green hued trees and a light blue-gray house. A bright orange frame in a pattern of half circles surrounds the painting, paralleling the orange of the log's rings.

While Shigeta's painting style is expressive and descriptive, his palette is realistic without being exacting. In these captivating works, it feels like he is capturing a fleeting moment and filling it with admiration, as if to say: look up, look down and see what I see. What stands out in these charming and innovative works is the way that Shigeta transforms banal aspects of the natural and urban environment. These instances are framed as unique perspectives and filled with just enough texture, color and detail to remake the ordinary into something highly significant.

Click here for Masamitsu Shigeta on its own page.

Hadi Falapishi
Edge of the World
Blum
January 18 - March 22, 2025


Hadi Falapishi

Hadi Falapishi was Born in Iran in 1978 to two photographers and later studied photography at Bard College where he received an MFA in 2013. Now residing in Brooklyn, his multi-disciplinary practice has grown beyond photography and now includes painting and ceramics. At Blum, he presents three related, but stylistically different bodies of work — globe-shaped ceramic sculptures on rectangular pedestals, childlike and cartoony images painted on cardboard, as well as hyperreal, Surrealist inspired paintings that play off iconic works by René Magritte.

On one wall in the exhibition are modest-sized, representational paintings, many of which feature the artist's head or full body inserted into appropriated commercial and art historical imagery. Professional Painter in a Calvin Klein Ad, (all works 2024) features the artist dressed in a formal black suit staring directly out of the painting. He holds a long flaming matchstick that may have been used to light the candle on the nearby mantlepiece. Like the suit, the setting is formal. Though casually posed, the artist appears out of place. For Professional Painter in a False Mirror, Falapishi fills a black dot (the center of the eye in Magritte's original) with his head. Similarly in Professional Painter and a Mysterious Horizon, as well as Professional Painter Talking to the Therapist he changes Magritte's work slightly. In Talking to the Therapist he swaps his head for one of the caged birds in the interior of the cage while in and a Mysterious Horizon, he uses his own image in place of the three men Magritte depicted. By titling these works "Professional Painter ..." he not only celebrates his dexterity as a painter but also equates his paintings with iconic Surrealist works.

In contrast to these realistic paintings, displayed on adjacent walls are funky cut outs — painted cardboard adhered to wood panel — where cartoon figures and animals frolic. As easily as he borrows from Surrealism, Falapishi also appropriates Western films like "High Noon." In his rendition of High Noon, he assembles a cast of cut out characters and locates them in a barren landscape with a flatly painted gray rock and yellow mountains in the distance. The action takes place upon a brown ground under a red sky. A cowboy stands upon the rock as if scanning the distance as a woman rests against its side petting a smiling dog. A cat peers out from the other side of the rock. In the sky are clouds, birds and an airplane, as well as an orange sun. In High Hopes, a smiling man and woman sporting cowboy hats are seated on a horse jumping over a section of fence. The sky here is pink and the ground a bright green. Again, Falapishi includes a yellow mountain and orange sun as well as blue and white clouds. The large horizontal work Smoke Break spans 88 inches. Two crudely painted characters dominate the composition. One lights the cigarette of the other in a mostly barren landscape divided in half — yellow sky and brown ground with two horses and pink mountains rising off the horizon in the distance. In the past Falapishi's characters included a range of humans, cats, dogs, horses and mice enacting themes of displacement, alienation and entrapment. The figures and animals that populate his current images appear relaxed and at ease while enjoying basking in the sun or sleeping by a campfire in a desert landscape.

Placed on pedestals in a line down the center of the gallery are Falapishi's ceramic globes all titled Edge of the World. In these pieces, he juxtaposes his cartoony figures now etched into ceramic and glazed in bright colors with quirky three dimensional sculpted figures that balance on top of the large ceramic balls. In Edge of the World #5 a man and woman are positioned head to toe encircling the center of the globe which has a brown base and a light purple sky. At the top Falapishi positions a thin, tall patterned vessel shaped like a bong. At the top of this sits a male figure holding another vessel in his arms.

Falapishi knows exactly what he is doing and by combining disparate styles and materials, he states not only am I a "professional painter," but I know how to have fun and poke fun. He combines high and low art styles making realist paintings, sophisticated ceramics and naive cut outs that tell similar stories in different ways.

Click here for Hadi Falapishi on its own page.

Jeanne Silverthorne
They Will Be Like Shadows
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
January 11 - March 22, 2025


Jeanne Silverthorne

Visiting Jeanne Silverthorne's exhibition They Will Be Like Shadows during the recent Los Angeles fires influenced the interpretation of the works. Her platinum silicone rubber and mixed media sculptures — some figurative, others referencing the body — alluded to death and destruction paralleling real time events. Seeing Banshee (Self-Portrait at 73) (2023), a life-like, off white sculpture of a woman (the artist) stretched out on the gallery floor sent shivers down my spine. Here, Silverthorne recreates her aging body, devoid of color but full of detail: untied sneakers on crossed feet, gray synthetic hair and black rimmed glasses flanking her complacent face. In Too Dumbly in My Being Pent (2023) we see the same figure, now in fragments and stuffed into a cardboard box lined with bubble wrap suggesting the sculpture will be shipped and/or stored somewhere out of sight. In keeping with Silverthorne's practice, the figure as well as the box and wrappings are all intricately fabricated casts. Silverthorne is a master with her chosen material (platinum silicone rubber) and can fabricate and transform just about anything of any size with acute veracity.

The exhibition unfolds as a narrative on life and loss and an artist's practice as it relates to the rest of the world. The pieces are fragile and sturdy simultaneously. Because Silverthorne has such a command of her materials, the works are also minimal and maximal: they feel alive though they are not "real." In the disconcerting sculpture And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began (2022), a tiny, sleeping baby wearing a knitted cap rests on a white cloud that resembles an enlarged wad of chewing gum, cake frosting or a billowing cloud, depending on one's interpretation. 

In Silverthorne's trajectory the infant grows and becomes a child. Children's sneakers appear in Crate with Sneaker, In My Mother's House and Double Sneakers ('The Three Sillies') (all 2023). In Crate with Sneaker Silverthorne completely fashions from rubber, a four-foot high wooden crate. The otherwise empty container holds one small black sneaker at its base. As the disembodied foot is its only contents, the takeaway is unsettling. The narrative progresses: the child becomes an adult. Silverthorne not only depicts herself in the aforementioned (Self-Portrait at 73), but also her mother in two other works. The evocative small-scale table-top sculptures Mom Under a Cloud II (2024) and Mom on Book (2023) are richly impactful. In Mom Under a Cloud II, Silverthorne's mother is seated on top of a pile of crates that might also suggest coffins. This exacting figure leans forward, one arm across her lap, the other below her chin as if lost in thought. Above her head, a floating cloud magically hovers.

For Mom on Book, Silverthorne's mother stands on a hardcover volume of a book of fairy tales. The closed book sits on a pedestal. It has white pages and a black cover. Its title (365 Fairy Tales) appears as raised letters on the spine. The implication in this quasi-narrative could be a mother reading from the book to her growing child before the mother is consumed by the clouds (referencing Mom Under a Cloud II).


Hanging Question Mark (2020) in many ways sums up the experience. Here, Silverthorne suspends a large, black, three dimensional rubber question mark from the ceiling so that the circular punctuation point sits on top of a tall rubber crate. The excess rubber rope loops over pipes in the ceiling and rests on the floor behind the crate. As viewers try to make sense of the various elements, the work remains ambiguous and absurd. When seen in relation to the empty quotation marks of Quotes (2021), which bracket empty space on the wall, it becomes evident that Silverthorne is playing with language and inviting viewers to think metaphorically as they interweave the various aspects of the installation.

Click here for Jeanne Silverthorne on its own page.

Brittany Mojo
Strong Spell
Craig Krull Gallery
February 1 - March 15, 2025


Brittany Mojo

Hardly a month of Los Angeles gallery viewing goes by without an exhibition featuring ceramic artworks. This includes Brittany Mojo at Craig Krull, Emily Marchand at Ochi Projects and Hadi Falapishi at Blum. Once considered a mere "craft," more and more artists are embracing clay as their preferred medium while using it to make all manner of vessels, sculptures, and even installations. Brittany Mojo who studied ceramics at California State University, Long Beach (BFA) and at UCLA (MFA 2016) has a long history working in this medium.

Stemming from the emotions surrounding the pandemic for the last several years, Mojo's works have been black and white. But color prevails in her latest exhibition Strong Spell. The new works utilize various colored clays made by mixing stain or underglaze into white substrates. The colored clay is then cut into sections or tiles and then attached to larger pots and structures to create textured and unevenly patterned surfaces as in the twelve-inch high Tile or the sixteen-inch high Quilt (both 2024).

While Mojo draws on the tradition of quilting as well as vernacular design for inspiration, her pots come from her imagination and have a child-like spontaneity that radiates the joy of their making. It is hard not to smile at For Better or worse (2024), a rounded off-white container covered with colorful hand-drawn flowers. Wandering around the installation which unfolds like a maze on the gallery floor one encounters numerous plates and vessels, many placed on bulbous wooden pedestals, as well as conch shaped and small round objects —- an egg and a tennis ball —- all crafted in porcelain and delicately painted. Big and small are presented together, often in clusters so as to suggest possible conversations between the pieces. When the colorful pot Tile nests up close to the black and white patterned Conch (2025) or when the functional Lamp (2025) is juxtaposed with the smaller vessel Orange Daisies (no date) playful relationships are formed eliciting reactive smiles

Mojo excels at rendering patterns and in black and white works like Snake Egg, Spiral Check, A Book on Pattern, Shell and Seashell, her hand painted underglazes cover the entire surface, becoming illusionistic three dimensional geometric abstractions. A wonderful collection of her deliberate but child-like handwork can be seen in a floor-based piece made up of twenty-five individual tiles where black out lines of simple shapes — like flowers and an ice cream cone are juxtaposed with Ellsworth Kelly like stripes, as well as grids of triangles and diamonds in complementary and contrasting colors.

Collectively the installation resonates as the interplay between the pieces makes them richer. There is no doubt that Mojo's process is labor intensive, yet the pieces burst forth with joy as if they spontaneously appeared positioned exactly as they should be in the gallery. A strong spell is cast when viewing the installation, a spell that helps to alleviate the sense of grief from the recent fires and the oppressive nature of world events. Mojo creates an alternate reality filled with wonderful and evocative objects that offer a sense of reprieve from the realities that surround us.

Click here for Brittany Mojo on its own page.

Doug Aitken
Psychic Debris Field
Regen Projects
January 18 - February 22, 2025


Doug Aitken

P-22 was the celebrated mountain lion who roamed the Los Angeles environs. He was featured in numerous articles beginning in 2012 until he was euthanized because of wounds and disease in 2022. The first work viewers encounter in Doug Aitken's exhibition Psychic Debris Field is the larger than life sized sculpture Spirit Animal (P-22) (2025), an homage to the deceased cat made from more than forty embedded aggregates ranging from kitty litter to all sorts of beans and seeds encapsulated in resin. This powerful beast has become, in essence, a metaphor for the landscape he inhabited.

Numerous other animals are featured in the exhibition — including stags and buffalos — impeccably crafted from man-made (reclaimed computer packing foam) as well as natural materials. Three incarnations of this bright white animal dominate one gallery: two are standing and one is seated in a resting position. Green vines dangle off the backs of two of them suggesting life and regrowth in the face of death. For [TBT - Stags] (2025) Aitken replicates two stags butting heads, their interlocking antlers illuminated by LEDs that change color in the darkened back gallery.

As usual, Aitken has fashioned a stunning, visually compelling installation that juxtaposes audio visual, sculpted and printed elements. Aitken's installations as well as individual works have a formal beauty. He intuitively weaves together a range of materials to maximize what they have to offer, be it a repurposed ice chest or a light box tondo of an abandoned car.

As an installation, Psychic Debris Field divides the galleries into two discrete environments. In the front room, Aitken presents the sculpted buffalos alongside a suite of large-scale, digitally printed wall works featuring the side of a modernist house with glass windows, the outline of a 1950s era swimming pool, and a desert landscape horizon line (both with and without horses), or an expanse of blue sky. These similar compositions contain different iterations of the same elements to become a quasi-timeline through California's history and landscape.

In the back room Aitken has constructed an immersive environment with sounds and changing lights. While the centerpiece is the life-sized sculpture of the two stags, other elements include a city bus shelter, an ice machine filled with live cacti and steel replicas of cacti set into the center of car tires filled with resin. Translucent resin pigeons rest on some of these plants, glowing different colors as LED lights within them ebb and flow. As the room shifts from deep reds to blue and purple, viewers become more tuned in to a sound collage that repeats fragments of the phrase "when I move I see things more clearly."

Throughout his remarkably eclectic career, Aitken has depicted the natural and urban landscapes as anchors for objects as well as actors. The exhibition at Regen coincides with Lightscape (2024), a multi-screen installation that debuted at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and is on view at the Marciano Art Foundation through March 15, 2025. The two installations highlight Aitken's unique explorations of light, landscape, sound, and the ever-changing environment that surrounds us.

Click here for Doug Aitken on its own page.

Ellen Picken
Waves Take Shape
Lowell Ryan Projects
January 18 - February 15, 2025


Ellen Picken

At first glance, Ellen Picken's paintings are formal studies of shapes and colors with a 1950s modernist palette. In addition to oil on clayboard, Picken adds natural materials such as ash, pine resin and iron oxide to create her lush compositions. The geometric patterns also have a spiritual feel. In numerous pieces, she places objects on the surface to create a three-dimensional veil through which the paintings formal symmetry can be seen. Additional layering is created with site specific murals-- undulating black stripes and curves painted directly on the gallery walls behind the framed works.

Picken's seductive and breathtaking paintings are intimate and carefully composed. In Johanna's cities come and gone (all works 2024), a geometric shape that resembles a modified celtic cross fills the canvas. It is formed by horizontal striations that transition from deep reds and browns at the top to lighter grays and greens at the bottom. This shape is set against a brushy black ground. In the lower right, Picken paints dark orange flames, an image of fire that carries an emotional resonance in Los Angeles now. Thirteen points for Catherine is a more celestial painting. Here, golden ovals circle around an orange starburst shape similarly set against a black background. The hovering shapes emanate from two golden arches filled with concentric circles that rise slightly off the painted surface.

Inside the Mountain and I'm in the other room are paintings with sculptural elements. Wooden slats cover the bottom portion of Inside the Mountain like saloon doors through which Picken paints concentric circles in various hues of orange, tan and brown that allude to an abstract rendition of a target or circles around a sun. For I'm in the other room, Picken covers the front of the painting with door beads that overlay a twisted abstraction in brown and white resembling a coiled snake or garden hose.

Picken's compositions and palette call to mind paintings by noted older female artists including Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Paulina Peavy and Luchita Hurtado, as well the recent works of Los Angeles based Roy Dowell. Like these artists, Picken is interested in where the spiritual and the geometric intersect. She juxtaposes organic and geometric forms and patterns in earthy colors alluding to symbolism, transcendence and perhaps the occult without being overtly preachy. While the paintings on their own hold the wall and the viewer's attention, Picken excels through the combination of painted wall and painted canvas. Here, the different styles and paint applications compete with each other and vie for attention. Picken inverts the less is more axiom suggesting that more (site specific wall paintings) creates context and provides a container through which to perceive the works.

Picken's pieces have an unsettling logic. They toy with symmetry and then throw that precision off base. They undulate, pulsate and allude to observed spaces and objects, yet they are completely imagined. Through the combination of pure geometry, scientific observation and religious symbolism, Picken has created masterful paintings that resonate on multiple levels.

Click here for Ellen Picken on its own page.

Elizabeth Tremante
Final Girls
Serious Topics
January 4 - February 8, 2025


Elizabeth Tremante

What would happen if art masterpieces came alive? If the bleeding Renaissance depiction of Christ on the cross actually spewed blood into the gallery? Elizabeth Tremante imagines these situations. Her evocative and often unsettling but still quite humorous paintings draw from art history, yet rather than reproducing iconic artworks as an homage, she alters them in subtle ways, often illustrating how the people depicted in the works might emerge from the confines of their canvas boundaries, as well as their art historical genres.

Tremante creates amusing scenarios that juxtapose museum or gallery interiors filled with historical and contemporary artworks with a range of female visitors: teens, mothers, families, as well as disabled, nude or pregnant women. In some pieces, they take on characteristics or expressions from the paintings on the walls while in others they appear to do their own thing — paint or practice yoga — completely ignoring the context and content that surrounds them.

In an online interview, Tremante discusses taking her six year old daughter to a museum only to realize they were in the midst of artworks predominantly made by men where women were represented as vulnerable, or objects of desire and violence. Often these depictions featured naked or fragmented bodies, something that was difficult for a six year old to understand. Tremante decided to reinvent this narrative in her own canvases and create scenarios where people who visit exhibition spaces play off the paintings on view.

For Trios (2024), the artworks as well as the visitors to the space are grouped in threes. Here, Tremante paints a room in a museum where both contemporary and historical works of art hang on the wall. An altered version of Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes (1965) is juxtaposed with a Renaissance style painting of three women seated at a table in front of burgundy drapery. In the foreground a pregnant woman stares at a sculpture based on the Three Graces. In another room seen through an arched doorway, a painting of the Virgin Mary with child and two angels hangs on a wall. A woman in a wheelchair studies the composition. Below the Lichtenstein, red paint drips onto the gallery wall and floor where a girl sits with a bruised knee, her blood matching the red hues of the painting. To the right, a woman contorts her body in a difficult yoga pose. Scattered around her are the contents of her purse, which includes opened red lipsticks that have traced red lines across a terrazzo patterned floor.

The center panel in the frenetic triptych Short Breath Tight Chest (2023) illustrates numerous unconnected visitors to a vast museum space. Here, Tremante paints a melange of artworks ranging from classical to modern sculptures, including an abstracted Giacometti woman and Brancusi's Bird in Space. The paintings installed on the walls include a color field work (presumably by Ellsworth Kelly), as well as Renaissance and Cubist pieces. Also depicted is a painting of a crucifixion where Christ's wound spurts an arc of red blood that puddles on the floor near the Brancusi. Surprisingly, none of the museum visitors appear to be looking at the artworks but rather are otherwise engaged — one young woman with a green face stares at the ceiling. A mother cares for her crying child. Another woman reads on a bench, her shoes off, oblivious to the simply drawn naked figure on the bench beside her. To the left and right of the center panel, Tremante moves in closer. On the left a woman has set up an easel in front of Manet's Young Lady (1866) and begins to paint it. The bird in the original is positioned as if sitting in the woman's hair. A nude pregnant woman rendered in a cartoony style stands at the left edge of the work. In the right panel, two girls examine a copy of the Marjane Satrapi's book Persepolis, indifferent to the sculpted heads and painting of a naked woman behind them.

All of this is in good fun, but also purposeful and poignant. Tremante reimagines museum interiors as public space open to all audiences and activities. She indulges in depicting intimate and private moments — nose bleeds in One Day After School (2023) — as well as playful reactions to the paintings. In The Loose Tooth (2024), a young girl holds a tooth in an open hand out toward her mother. A line of blood spills out of her open mouth. The painting in the background depicts three scantily clad women looking down on the scene. In her works, Tremante explores the relationship between the people who visit the museum and the artworks installed. She infuses new perspectives, expressions and attitudes into images from art history to better connect these painted figures to the now.

Click here for Elizabeth Tremante on its own page.

John Miller
Total Presence
Various Small Fires
January 4 - February 8, 2025


John Miller

John Miller is a conceptual artist as well as a writer and theorist. He is best known for works painted in what has become his signature color: burnt sienna. There are numerous scatological references associated with his use of this color which has appeared in his works since the 1980s and has manifested itself in numerous ways.

While the pieces in the exhibition Total Presence are photographic, they are augmented by impastoed swaths of hand painted burnt sienna. The somewhat banal color photographs depict fragments of the urban landscape — places where concrete, brick walls, graffiti and signs come together. Miller creates trompe l'oeil illusions by painting shapes in random places on the photographs (inkjet prints on canvas) to cover what is below with precise rectangles in expressive shades of brown. These additions rise off the surfaces and often have drop shadows added through Photoshop to create a sense of depth. Miller's painted additions are purposely awkward, interrupting the integrity of the image below. They do not belong and do not necessarily cover anything "important," nor do they conform to the architecture in some cases. The tondo shaped painting Painted Grapes (2024) is a cropped collage of various urban wall fragments that juxtapose interior and exterior markings with a section of painted brown.

Three different series comprise Miller's exhibition. The trompe l'oeil paintings in one room are seen in relation to a 2020 video The Trip in another. Here, a 3D modeled male mannequin with tousled brown hair and a gray suit seen from just above the shoulders rotates slowly against a monochrome background that transitions from red to yellow to blue to green as the camera moves in closer to his face. Among ethereal electronic sounds, a male voice utters, "I'm spinning, I'm spinning around again" for the entire thirteen minute duration. At the very end, the sound and spinning of the figure reduces to slow motion, the face fills the frame against a blue-purple background. The screen then goes black and a text appears that states: "I'm spinning around my friend" leaving viewers somewhat perplexed by this subtle change.

The third work in the exhibition is a room-sized photographic mural, An Illusion of an Illusion (2024) that spans two walls and a corner of a square room. It combines images taken in New York and Seoul, juxtaposing fragments from two distant cities. Miller documents aspects of everyday life — receding streets with delivery trucks, doors and door handles, stickers, posters and official signage. The montage moves from close up to distance shots creating the illusion of a panorama. While life-like and to scale, the composited scenes are strangely uninhabited. The white letters of a blue window sign on a New York street proclaiming "We've moved" prompts questions about location, dislocation, gentrification and the constant movement of urban life.

Thinking about the spinning mannequin translocated from the confines of his shifting monochrome background to an urban setting, be it New York or Seoul, it is possible to imagine him (or one) ambling down city streets, regarding textured walls and marveling at strangely painted surfaces that resemble the texture and style of his hair.

Click here for John Miller on its own page.

Annie Briard
Through the Walls of Gold
Royal Projects
November 16, 2024 - February 8, 2025


Annie Briard

Annie Briard is a Vancouver based artist who explores the intersections of art and science. She examines the visual qualities of light and perception through images of the natural landscape. The works in her exhibition Through the Walls of Gold share a kinship with the California Light and Space artists and though not a sculptor per se, in this installation she enhances her photographs with transparent three-dimensional acrylic elements in a range of colors. The photographs depict desert landscapes and were taken during residencies at the High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, CA.

When thinking about desert colors, muted greens and browns against bright blue skies come to mind, as do pink and orange horizons during sunrise and sunset. In Briard's images, shot with handmade lenses, the colors are distorted. At first glance, the pictures appear to be double exposures or photoshop manipulations. In actuality, they are shot with a camera through lenses fashioned from military prisms that both fracture and reconstitute the landscape. The color-distortion is further exaggerated through the addition of plexiglas overlays that alter the hues of the image, as well as the wall behind it.

In Through Walls of Gold VIII (veils) (all works 2024), a yellow rectangular sheet of plexiglas hangs in front of a portion of the large horizontal wide-angle photographic print. Briard focuses on the close-up details of an expanse of gray rocks, but through her special lenses, the colors of the rocks range from yellow to orange to purple. Similar shifts occur in Through Walls of Gold IV (dawn) where the rocks appear as a gradient of color that moves from a brownish green to a golden yellow-orange. In this modest sized framed photograph, Briard superimposes a vertical strip of smokey acrylic over a portion of the image which adds a three-dimensional aura to the work. For Through Walls of Gold III (green land), Briard transforms a banal photograph of a desert creosote bush into something surreal. The plant grows out of the sand in the lower half of the image, extending up into the sky. Mountains fill the horizon and what might be a blue sky is now a murky yellow-green. A detail of the sand with orange shadows fills the top third, covering a portion of the sky. A fragment of an orange circle also appears in the lower left corner of the image which is bordered by a transparent orange plexiglas mat.

Light mountain (freestanding) is a human scaled triangular pyramid of orange plexiglas on a very low white triangular pedestal. It is centered in the gallery where it bisects the sight lines for viewing the large wall mounted works Through Walls of Gold IX (mirage) and Through Walls of Gold VII (light mountain) adding yet another layer of transparency and distortion. A pale blue plexiglas rectangle that overlaps the upper right portion of the photograph titled Through Walls of Gold V (knowledge) intensifies the sky and alludes to the expanse beyond the picture. Within the photograph, Briard transforms yet another innocuous green-brown desert plant into a saturated bright magenta, orange and yellow.

While it is unclear how much control Briard has over her lenses and the scale of the distortion, these dreamlike landscapes have a lushness and sensuality that is often missing from the work of her male "light and space" counterparts. The images have the aura of an acid trip and while both controlled and unexpected, they take viewers to a different realm. The pieces have a presence and a resonance that goes beyond their formal properties. Briard works with distortion and optical illusion to transform the ordinary into something unexpected.

Click here for Annie Briard on its own page.

Cynthia Daignault
The Lemon
Night Gallery
October 26, 2024 - January 18, 2025


Cynthia Daignault

In Elegy, her first exhibition at Night Gallery, Cynthia Daignault presented black and white paintings that explored environmental collapse. Each painting was the same height and installed to form a narrative across the gallery about the passage of time and the timelessness of the painted image. Rendered in black and white, the works also suggested a relationship between beauty and loss. In her second exhibition, The Lemon, she explores similar themes but from a completely different perspective.

The Lemon takes its name from Edouard Manet's painting Le Citron (1880), an ornately framed, small scale hyper-realistic painting of a lemon in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Daignault's painting reproduces Manet's work, as well as its frame, but rather than create a like sized piece, she centers her image on a much larger white canvas. This piece is exhibited alongside other impressionist paintings as both an homage and a critique of the genre and its occasional misogyny. Daignault is a facile painter who is as comfortable with realism as she is with abstraction. In this exhibition, she offers new interpretations of iconic paintings by Manet, Pissarro and Cézanne among others. In The Details (all works 2024), she selects and re-presents fragments of the originals. In the painting entitled The Book, she reproduces pages from an art history text that depicts images by Pissarro and Cézanne. The three paintings from the series Stable Diffusion, reveal two women lounging on the grass in varying degrees of detail. And for The Luncheon, she obscures Manet's masterpiece with wide, Gerhard Richter-like fields of scraped paint.

For the giant painting The Collection Daignault creates a large grid with painted reproductions in various sizes of works spanning numerous genres and timeframes. Included are iconic paintings by Guston, Mondrian, Matisse, Rothko, Warhol, O'Keeffe, Vermeer, Van Gogh and Caravaggio. They are evenly spaced and aligned as if a treasured postcard collection of favorite paintings— images that one wants to savor and remember. On an adjacent wall, Daignault installs The Details. In this ten-part work, she breaks down Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bérgere (1882) into fragments. Different aspects of the painting are presented as small rectangles, each more expressionistically rendered than Manet's original.

Throughout the history of art, artists have borrowed, copied and appropriated aspects of others' work— modifying, erasing and even reproducing pieces verbatim. This list is long and includes a variety of approaches as well as mediums ranging from photographs and paintings to sculpture. While some artists use works from the past to offer critiques or to challenge ideas of originality or to transform the male gaze, Daignault wants to connect to the past and celebrates painters she admires. She states that the exhibition is "an attempt to understand the weight of influence. Of history. Of love." For this exhibition, she studied Impressionism and the world of Manet. Rather than create new works based on her surroundings, she remade his paintings as a way to understand, not only how he applied paint to the canvas, but also his motivations and where he positioned himself in his world. How his work and his world transfer to the now is at the core of Daignault's explorations.

Click here for Cynthia Daignault on its own page.

Ayin Es
On the Mend
Compound Yucca Valley
November 16, 2024 - January 12, 2025


Ayin Es

Ayin Es is an illustrator, artist, musician and story teller who creates art to explore aspects of their personal life. The work shares their fears, triumphs and "the broken aspects of their psyche," making these personal issues public.

For the exhibition On the Mend at Compound, Es presents paintings, sculptures and works on paper that contain simply drawn characters representing the artist, as well as a dog-like animal called "Dan" that embodies the positive aspects of life. Spanning the last fifteen years, the pieces on view present "Dan" in multiple shapes, colors, sizes and activities, such as playing drums, wearing a crown and surrounded by brownies and bits of celery. "Dan" even appears as Frankendan (2010), a stuffed animal that is simultaneously comforting and out of sorts.

In the watercolor Riding A Jesus-like Fish (2023), a figure with a red line across their chest rides on a giant fish with two arms and three legs as it walks on undulating waves. Related works including the painting No Secrets on my Sleeve (2024) and the series of embroideries on muslin Many Mes and As Needed (2023-24) are more directly about healing as a transqueer artist who recently underwent "top surgery." Two uneven grids each containing 24 of these small embroideries share a wall in the back gallery. In As Needed Es depicts pill bottles with three half white, half red capsules by its side. Many Mes is a delicately sewn black line that pictures a figure with floppy ears and a red flower growing out of the top of it's head. It has wide open eyes and a straight horizontal line as a mouth that parallels a black line with red jagged stitches across it's chest. Though simple, the image expresses pain and sadness, as well as hope.

While many of the works contain Es's "alter-ego," they are for the most part self portraits that process their surgery and its aftermath. In these works, Es appears as a human animal hybrid with sad eyes and floppy black ears. In Recovery (2023), they recline on a bed, medicine bottles by their side. In Queer Mutant Cake Thing (No Arms. I'm Lazy) (2024), the figure appears more distraught with the top of their scarred torso emerging from a cake-like form with black boots. King of This and Joypack (both 2024) are rendered in a more agitated and expressionistic fashion where the scarred figure is surrounded by colorful lines that follow the contour of the head and body.

Es created a care package to accompany the exhibition with home made bandaids, a reworked can of Campbell's chicken soup and other soothing offerings. Perhaps the desired take away is expressed in the watercolor and ink on paper piece Happy Person (2023). In this small but powerful work, the floppy eared, wide eyed figure smiles. There is a flower growing from the top of its head and they hold a leash with a "real" dog under a colorful rainbow beside a garden of flowers. The healing has occurred. The red scar that appears in many of the other works is gone, paving the way for the next chapter in the artist's life.

Click here for Ayin Es on its own page.

Nancy Macko
Decompositions: Photography
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College
October 5, 2024 - January 12, 2025


Nancy Macko

During Covid, many people began strange rituals. The unknown, the isolation, the mandate to stay at home affected people in different ways. Because she could not travel, photographer Nancy Macko created her own fantasy world that to visit on a regular basis. Contained within her compost bin were a host of colors and textures, as well as the occasional maggot or other insects drawn to the decay. Using a close focus lens, Macko began to document the interplay of these elements. Rather than looking down, she shot through the plastic sides of the bin. The resulting evocative and uncanny images not only reproduce the disintegration of forms, but also record the atmospheric residue.

The theoretical references within the work stem from Michel Foucault. Whereas the art historical references range from William Henry Fox Talbot and Carleton Watkins' images of plants and vegetables to Edward Weston's seductive peppers. There are nods to Dutch Still Life painting, Surrealism, Archimboldo's personifications, as well as associations (for me) with Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), a film that graphically depicts the character's obsession with decay.

The thirty-eight color photographs are a range of sizes and orientations: some of the larger images are even placed on brightly colored free standing walls. Numerous quotes by Foucault from his seminal work The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences are also placed on these walls alongside the images to direct the way the pictures are interpreted. It is also possible to indulge in their beauty and to admire them in formal ways.

The works realistically and metaphorically explore time, transformation, loss, regeneration, fragility and the cyclical aspects of nature. The large horizontal image Asparagus Kindling (2020) hangs alone on a magenta wall. Two stalks of asparagus fall to the left and right of a vertical stem suggesting fallen trees or logs. Moldy green-blue semi-translucent leaves with different shades of black and brown surround the stalks. Within the mix are what could be onion skins, as well as a disintegrating reddish orb that supports one of the pieces of asparagus. Streaks of condensation cascade down the image to reiterate the fact that the photograph was shot through a wall of plastic.

Many of these luscious photographs are reminiscent of underwater scenes or sci-fi landscapes at once familiar and utterly foreign. For example, in the aptly titled The Light in the Creek (2020), a discarded stem with delicate green branches leans from left to right toward the center of the composition. It is superimposed over other colorful and intricately shaped plant fragments forming what could be seen as a receding horizon. In the center of Vigil (2022) is an insect — a living creature — and a reminder that death and life are intricately bound.

Macko's images are wonderfully layered and filled with light and shadow. This is evident in Lemonthyme Jungle (2021). Here, translucent branches, stems and rinds float within a light blue background to meld with one another within an ambiguous setting. In White Dragon (2022), a white cylindrical shape topped with what appears to resemble a headdress emerges from an orange blob that floats in front of pink and white debris. Macko's dragon is a wobbly creature neither menacing nor threatening as it is subsumed into a dark void.

Macko's photographs are created using a close focus lens. The images depict collapsed spaces of muted colors. These disconcerting scenes are filled with chance juxtapositions. While the integrity of the compost remains, some pictures become evocative still lives and landscapes, while in others, Macko allows for maximum abstraction.

Click here for Nancy Macko on its own page.

Julia Yerger
When Lottery
Chateau Shatto
November 9, 2024 - January 4, 2025


Julia Yerger

Julia Yerger's paintings and collages on view at Chateau Shatto meld abstraction and representation. These hybrids are layered works in which outlined shapes resembling human figures are inserted into quasi-landscapes and cityscapes. While the images evoke recognizable spaces dotted with human forms, they are in essence formal explorations that investigate mark-making, tonality and color.

In Beatles (all works 2024), a central figure painted in shades of white and outlined with dark lines is surrounded by a crowd of featureless heads sketchily filled in with a range of pastel colors and roughly drawn lines. The main figure does not have a human head. A mop-like, red-pink shape appears where the head would be. A more skeletal form with a rectangular eye-patch blasts forth to the figure's right trailing a light blue-green cloud. The yellow-green background could be a park or other natural setting. Within this ambiguous space are tool-like mechanical shapes whose purposes remain a mystery.

The Family Band similarly depicts silhouetted figures — many of whom hold instruments — assembled against a deep blue background. Yerger delineates foreground and background spaces with the band in the background and its audience occupying the foreground in the lower half of the painting. Wearing a white t-shirt, the head of one of these cartoon-like figures is a blue spiral flanked by clenched fists. The other members of the crowd are less defined. Between the "band" and its audience stands a man reading a book. He wears a reddish shirt and pants with yellow and white stripes. As in Beatles, the scene is simultaneously familiar and disconcerting, spacious and flat.

Yerger's collages combine found papers from comic books, magazines and newspapers with ink and matte medium. They are dizzying illustrations where recognizable elements intermingle with colorful geometric shapes to create visually compelling and strange narratives. Welcome to.. juxtaposes reproductions of an air-bound snow-boarder, a rock-climber and a guitar-player collaged with snippets from comics and other black and white illustrations to become a surreal figure that travels through an unknown world that spirals out toward the edges of the composition. Bits of text, as well as architectural elements allude to an inhabitable space, but never cohere.

Two women appear to embrace in the compelling painting Opposite Sister. The background is an off-white tree whose leaves and branches are drawn with different color lines. The tree is ghost-like yet present. In the lower portion of the composition, Yerger depicts two figures. The one with her back towards the viewer has purple hair and a reddish-maroon dress. The top of her head fuses with the trunk of the tree while some of its leaves mesh with her hair. The other figure is also abstracted with a pink face and no definable features, blue-green hair and wearing a green striped shirt. Yerger successfully combines different styles of painting — expressive brushstrokes, flat expanses of color and intricate lines — to capture the tender moment.

Yerger's works are not quick reads. Some of the components are unmistakable and while there might be a moment of recognition, she obscures the familiar by layering the representational aspects of the images into an abstracted ground. These dynamic pieces have their own rhythm. They are culled together from disparate assets and filled with light and shadow to become unique worlds populated by ambiguous yet stately figures who hold their ground and seem to belong.

Click here for Julia Yerger on its own page.

Ohan Breiding
Promiscuous Ghost
Ochi Projects
November 16 - December 21, 2024


Ohan Breiding

Ohan Breiding's installation, Promiscuous Ghost, is a haunting exploration of the realities of climate change. One of the focal points of the exhibition is Glacier Calving (Rhone) (all works 2024), a huge photo-mural of the Rhone Glacier located in the Swiss town of Obergoms, not far from where the artist grew up. What stands out in this quasi-life-size image is the sparseness of the ice and the detritus around what remains of thermal blankets soaking in puddles of water. People from nearby villages draped these blankets over the glacier to help insulate it from rising temperatures. When the mural is viewed in relation to a small historical black and white photograph of the same glacier from the turn of the last century (installed above the gallery door), the chilling loss of snow becomes quite obvious.

Breiding has placed two seats — fiberglass rocks with jagged edges covered by soft pads wrapped with red straps — in the center of the gallery at what would be the base of the glacier depicted in the mural. The faux rock seats face a monitor that is attached to a "weather station" (gages and a transmitter not working in the gallery, but completely functional). Looping on the screen is a thirty-two minute film: Belly of a Glacier. It begins with the birth of a cow and bubbling lava from a volcano then transitions to footage of the glacier with the harsh sound of raging water Breiding recorded on numerous trips to Switzerland. These scenes are intercut with historical and scientific footage, as well as documentation of a glacier "funeral." Through compelling and thoughtful juxtaposition, the cumulative effects of climate change on the glacier and its surroundings emerges.

A modest-sized fiberglass rock with a bronze plaque sits on the floor in the back corner of the gallery. The plaque reads: This is the first glacier to lose its status in this region. Within the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to have melted. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. It is dated September 2050, the date the glacier is expected to fully disappear. Funerals for glaciers began occurring world-wide in 2019; these are ceremonies/celebrations that help people process their grief about the demise, or impending demise of glaciers. One such event is included in the film and Breiding's tribute fits within this tradition. It is at once a warning and a call to action.

Seven hand written reproductions of the text on the backs of postcards line the wall across from the large mural. Titled Souvenirs -- the original images date from 1969 - 2007 -- these works invite the viewer to imagine what is depicted on the verso. For example, Souvenir 1 has the caption "Winding Road Leading up to the Rhone Glacier, 2007" while Souvenir 7 is captioned "Aerial view of the Rhone River, Obergoms, 1969." This postcard is one of three addressed to a recipient in the United States. It is a birthday greeting celebrating the beauty of the mountains of Switzerland... A wish you were here letter connecting people across time. While most of Breiding's pieces are objective and somewhat instructive, the Souvenirs are intimate.

Using personal and historical documents, as well as current footage of the receding Rhone Glacier, Breiding has created an installation that explores issues of climate change without being didactic or preachy. This thoughtful and poetic meditation on the beauty and power of nature and the possibilities of its impending demise is not only a call to action, but a call to take a moment to appreciate that which surrounds us before it disappears.

Click here for Ohan Breiding on its own page.

Oluwatobi Adewumi
Journeys of Belonging
Von Lintel Gallery
November 9 - December 21, 2024


Oluwatobi Adewumi

Oluwatobi Adewumi is a Nigeria born artist who now resides in McNeil, Arkansas. He immigrated to the U.S. after completing a degree in computer science in Nigeria. Though mostly self-taught as an artist, Adewumi is extremely skillful and perceptive. His representational works are beautiful and compassionate portraits of friends and acquaintances that trace their journeys, as well as the cultural struggles they faced as black immigrants. The portraits are more of an investigation into people, personalities and the stories he was told, than about a specific place or time.

In his artist's statement, Adewumi speaks of his interest in providing both the history and the present situations of the people he depicts. While the works are quasi-political and explore issues of race, they are more referential and poetic than didactic. His subjects are often people who have been marginalized and through his depictions he returns their voices. The underlying motivation in his practice is an exploration of what it means to be black — be it in Nigeria or in Arkansas. Adewumi states in a recent interview published in the Arkansas Art Scene Blog, "My art takes on reconstructing lost stories, documenting the ideals of our history. I want to challenge stereotypes and myths that have been crafted by others."

As a draftsman, Adewumi has a deft hand and his realistic drawings depict his subjects in exacting detail. In many of the portraits are in three-quarter view with their bodies turned to the side while they gaze in that direction or back toward the viewer. The portraits are a combination of charcoal, acrylic and collage on paper or canvas and though Adewumi begins with a realistic representation, he obfuscates the image through the addition of vertical stripes that create a veil through which sitter is seen. These stripes — in lighter or darker grays, as well as subtle sepias — might reference the American flag and/or prison bars.

Two related sets of works are featured in the exhibition. In the back space are the images Don't Stop the Freedom, Prejudice, Wrinkled on Purpose and After All (all works 2024). In these pieces, the "stripes" are more subtle and meld with the subject's skin. The person depicted in each portrait is shirtless (shirts are a major component in many of the other works). The only bodily adornments are placed below the ear like dangling earrings that juxtapose sales tags and political stickers with small red, white and blue American flags. Adewumi titles these pieces after the texts in the tags and stickers to direct the interpretation. For example, in Don't Stop the Freedom, a rendering of a small stop sign that states "Don't Stop" is combined with one that exclaims "Freedom of Movement." Both cover the flag. The image becomes a jarring portrait confronting both racism and patriotism.

In many of the other portraits, either on paper or canvas, Adewumi focuses on what surrounds the subject. In Crisscross, he creates a hoodie by collaging a page from a faded, red hued newspaper that prominently displays the text "Criss-Crossed" over the head and shoulders of a bearded man. He draws red and black lines within the hoodie in a plaid pattern. Charcoal silhouettes extend across the shoulder and into the face of the man. He gazes out past the edge of the composition, unaffected by the striped augmentation to his face and wardrobe. In Where it all Started, he also presents a realistic and tender rendering of his subject. Here, a black man depicted from the top of his head to just below the shoulders fills the composition. He appears pensive, his thumb resting just under his chin. His shirt is a collage of newspaper headlines where words including WARS, GRAND, WHO, FIGHTS are given prominence in combination with articles adorned by circles and hand written notes.

Half of the woman's face in The Time Will Come is covered by a striped collage of floral motifs, silhouettes and newspaper fragments. The photorealistic qualities of the face contrast with the abstraction below, turning the portrait into something more than a direct representation.

Adewumi could easily just present beautifully rendered portraits of his community that celebrate the delicate features and intense gazes of his subjects, but these works are more than that. He alters the surface of his images by imposing stripes on his subject's skin or turning their garments into collages. The newspaper imagery, as well as the patterned clothing can sign for both the sitter's thoughts or inner life, as well as the urgency of past and current events. These unique and enigmatic works blend realism and collage in an attempt to present and celebrate the inner truth of the sitters.

Click here for Oluwatobi Adewumi on its own page.

Walead Beshty
Profit & Loss
Regen Projects
November 7 - December 21, 2024


Walead Beshty

Walead Beshty's current exhibition at Regen Projects is tight, sophisticated and thoughtful. Profit & Loss is a visually and conceptually rich presentation. On view are small-scale black and white photographs, modestly-sized oil pastels and small concrete sculptures with radio antennas. It also features large-scale mixed media pieces: collages of actual newspaper pages, textual reproductions from found signs and commercially printed billboards.

Beshty is an extremely prolific artist who has created an unusually diverse body of work over the last fifteen years. His choice of media is often specific to the content of the project, be it a series of abstract and colorful photograms based on work by Moholy-Nagy, or glass and copper boxes packaged and shipped via FedEx and displayed together with the shipping containers as pedestals. Beshty often draws from art history for the conceptual and theoretical framework of his projects. Unusually, this particular exhibition also includes significant references to other artists' works. His drawings of large, chunky mangled cigarettes recall the work of Philip Guston, as well as Irving Penn. The newspapers overlaid with stenciled type share an affinity with Rirkrit Tiravanija's recent installations, in addition to carved paper text pieces by Mark Bradford. The draped billboards recall both the Zipper works by Karen Carson and some of Robert Morris' felt sculptures.

That being said, Beshty's art is not derivative and his exhibition, while perhaps paying homage to the works of others, is a thoughtful investigation of value, exchange and the ways we communicate. On the front desk sits Smart Object (Radio): 2035 Achilles Drive, Los Angeles, California (all works 2024), a table top sculpture combining a piece of found concrete with a radio antenna. A selection of these dysfunctional devices — antennae combined with concrete, brick, mortar or ceramic tiles — are also presented in a side room. At once familiar and other-worldly, these humorous sculptures might be futuristic or relics from a sci-fi inspired past. They are placed on white pedestals and share the space with a series of framed works on newspaper juxtaposed with drawn text from "bandit signs."

Bandit signs are small advertisements hung without approval. Beshty began collecting them in 2007 during the global financial crisis and in this series of works, he uses oil pastels to stencil the crude and cryptic verbiage from the signs over actual pages from newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. IMMIGRATION Services 323.582.9871 2407 Randolph st., HP [The New York Times, Sunday 16 April 2017; Los Angeles, California] is a spread from the front and back pages of the New York Times from April 16, 2017. In it, Beshty juxtaposes the word IMMIGRATION with headlines that announce atrocities and a full page advertisement for Starbucks' cold brew. Here, world events and consumer culture are presented alongside the needs of immigrants. Other works from this series include WE BUY HOUSES 626-765-5726 [The New York Times, Friday 14 April 2017; Los Angeles, California] where the phrase WE BUY HOUSES covers the front and back pages of the New York Times from April 14, 2017 and CREDIT REPAIR (323) 535.7289 [The New York Times, Wednesday 15 November 2017; Los Angeles, California]. Again, Beshty calls attention to the discrepancies between advertising, news and the services aimed at the urban poor.

While the smaller works that use text from bandit signs invite viewers in to read and look closely, the larger mixed media pieces are more aggressive and bombastic. In these, Beshty combines multiple newspaper pages so they create a backdrop spanning over ten feet across. On this layer, he collages found signage (like those seen on or attached to telephone poles with contact information tabs), as well as laser prints of explosions and miscellaneous paper fragments above and below words appropriated from the bandit signs. In Bandit Sign Painting [DIVORCE & CUSTODY 909-485-9282 (Los Angeles Times, Sunday 23 June 2024; Los Angeles, California)], the words DIVORCE & CUSTODY and a phone number are painted in black oil paint and oil pastel, dominating the composition.

The Bandit Sign Paintings are presented in conjunction with a series of large-scale works titled What Goes Around Comes Around. For these pieces, Beshty enlarges and then cuts words from bandit signs out of found vinyl printed billboards. He layers them with expanses of canvas, glassine and paper that give the pieces a structural support for the cut letters to hang and drape over. Across the center of What Goes Around Comes Around [DIVORCE & CUSTODY 909-485-9282], individual letters have been excised from the layers of material and these fragments cascade toward the floor, exposing the supports for the construction and the wall behind it. These works are minimal and maximal, obtuse and straightforward, abstract and representational simultaneously.

In the outer hallway, Beshty includes a series of small, framed black and white photographs of RV's lined up on the street near his studio. Surrounded by detritus these images of Rv's are presented adjacent to pieces where Beshty has cut and collaged U.S. currency in various denominations with added gold leaf to emphasize the geometric shapes. There is a lot to take in as well as take away in Beshty's challenging installation. To ponder the terms "Profit" and "Loss" and think about commodities, advertising, homelessness, newspapers, and modes of communication or exchange all within a commercial art gallery where the works themselves are also for sale creates an obvious paradox. For better or for worse, Beshty is complicit. He engages in the system he critiques and while the works do not cry out BUY ME, they illustrate the complexities in "the construction of value and the meaning of worth."

Click here for Walead Beshty on its own page.

Rachael Browning
This Way Up
Moskowitz Bayse
October 26 - December 14, 2024


Rachael Browning

For her third solo exhibition at Moskowitz Bayse, Rachael Browning continues to explore photographic truths and ambiguities. In This Way Up, she presents photographs and drawings that inform as well as obfuscate. Her 2022 show Pushing Rope investigated entropy through the addition of supports to anchor objects in nooks where windows used to be. Minor Adjustments was a body of work from 2020 where she intervened in the natural landscape. Using rope, turn buckles, straps and miscellaneous hardware in primary colors, Browing made slight adjustments to trees, rocks, flowers and expanses of ground in an attempt to make them level.

The works in This Way Up continue these somewhat absurd investigations. There is a bit of play, as well as a question of which came first when regarding the photographs and the works on paper. The archival pigment print #120 06 (all works 2024) is a photograph of a rectangular piece of light blue green foam on top of thinner pink foam that has been wrapped around masonite. Held together by a piece of thin and maybe stretchy pinkish-red rope or string, the entire bundle is set on a black ground. An image of the same sized and title in graphite, colored pencil and pastel on paper reinterprets the photograph by transforming it into lines and textures that, not replicating the photograph exactly, act as a graphical representation that reduces the shapes to flattened areas but other in ways becomes a more complex rendering.

Comparing the drawn and photographic versions of #126 03 also reveals thoughtful variations. In the photograph, Browning positions a folded rectangular black packing blanket against a square black background. On top of the blanket is a rolled cylinder of the same material, about the same length and around one third the width. Sandwiched perpendicularly between these two objects is a thin rectangle of industrial black non-slip flooring with protruding ovals. The entire "sculpture" is held together at the bottom of the composition with a light gray cord. In the drawing, Browning carefully reproduces the zigzag pattern of the blanket as white lines against a black pastel ground. The ovals are precisely drawn into a darker black section. The quasi-abstract rendering retains the photographs three-dimensionality, yet it is obviously flat.

Browning's constructions are funky arrangements of banal industrial materials that investigate shape, texture and form. When photographed, attention is paid to light and shadow. Seen in relation to their drawn counterparts, the photographs become more nuanced as the eye, as well as the mind goes back and forth between the two versions, comparing and contrasting the compositions, materials, textures and inclusivity of the transformation. Throughout the eight pairs (which are purposely not hung side by side), there is never an exact one to one relationship, but rather associations that suggest interpretation. In #124 03 for example, a taught spring extends between two eyebolts that are attached to a concave shaped piece of oriented strand board (a type of engineered wood similar to plywood). For the drawing, Browning inverts the image so the wood becomes a black shape centered on tan-toned hand-marbled paper. It is criss-crossed by multiple perspective lines extending out from the edges of each object.

The exhibition text (press release) is a long list of opposites that might be used to interpret and understand the works— light & dark, negative & positive, cause & effect, reveal & conceal. Rather than explain what and why, Browning wants her viewers to look, to compare and contrast, and to marvel at the nuances that can be extracted through the combination of simple forms and materials.

Click here for Rachael Browning on its own page.

Evan Whale
The End of Sunset
Tyler Park Presents
November 2 - December 14, 2024


Evan Whale

Cities change. The old is replaced by the new, for better or for worse. Gentrification is rampant in Los Angeles today. Developers are turning vacant lots into luxury high rises citywide — tearing down what was quaint, unique and historic — and forever changing the aura of neighborhoods and the fabric of the city.

Evan Whale is an artist who resides just west of downtown Los Angeles in a neighborhood that has been referred to as "The Forgotten Edge." The location is where Echo Park, Angelino Heights, Chinatown and Downtown collide. He has been documenting, as well as lamenting the ways this neighborhood has changed for several years. Through a series of mixed-media and photographic works, he attempts to make sense of and in some ways preserve what is being lost. In his exhibition The End of Sunset, he combines photographs and artifacts juxtaposing these fragments to form mementos that address collective memory.

Dramatically illustrating the absurdity of the changes to the area, Whale presents two customized viewmasters. One reproduces black and white images taken by Ed Ruscha at the address 1185 W. Sunset Boulevard from 1973-2007; the other illuminates an Aragon Properties LTD rendering for a proposed mixed use high rise that would include 327 apartments in addition to commercial spaces. Past and future collide in this intimate display.

While at first glance, Whale's photographs appear to be of banal subjects — tires, signs, abandoned chairs — the way they are altered is what makes his work unique. For example, The End of Sunset (Tired, B & F Auto Repair) (all works 2024) is a manipulated photograph of a pile of discarded tires. Whale applies chemicals (the work is called a Chemigram), as well as oil pastel to the image, in addition to carving into its surface. This imbues the image with a glittery blue and pink aura. The End of Sunset (Reliable Rearrangement) is a photograph of a sign for a building supply store. Whale documented the sign just before it was demolished and collected the shattered fragments which he later collaged to some of the works in the exhibition. In the image, the still vital sign (now sparkling with its chemical appliqué) is borded by a cloudless blue sky and a palm tee — both quintessential in Los Angeles. On top of the print Whale has carefully collaged shards of irregularly shaped black plastic that could be fragments from the lettering of the sign. These puzzle pieces move the image from documentation towards abstraction.

In The End of Sunset (B&F Auto Repair, Friends Car Wash, Campos Auto Sales, O&J Auto Repair, Best Way Car Wash, Sempe Auto Repair, Reliable Sash & Door, Atlantic Richfield), Whale places two bright yellow rectangular pieces of acrylic where garage doors might have been located. The title traces the different venues that once were situated at the address 1185 Sunset (the same address that Ruscha documented). The photograph features the now vacant dilapidated building augmented with yellow rectangles that overlay the image. Whale's use of color is reminiscent of an Ellsworth Kelly painting as he pays particular attention to the relationship between his added yellow parts against the cyan graffiti on the buildings facade as well as the blue sky, green trees and red trim.

The standout in the exhibition is The End of Sunset (Mixed-Use). In this imposing vertical composition, Whale brings together a color photograph and a piece of acrylic laser cut in the form of a chain-link fence. The photograph depicts a dysfunctional shopping cart with broken wheels sitting next to a chain-link fence. The distorted color in the image comes from Whale's choice to use outdated film. Here, a faded acidic green ground transitions into burnt orange before fading into a light magenta sky. On top of this image sits a large piece of acrylic UV printed with three palm trees against a bright blue sky. The trunks of the palms extend from the metal supports of the abandoned shopping cart. In this piece, Whale combines the utopic ideal of a sunny paradise with the dystopic reality of homelessness in Los Angeles.

In prior bodies of work, Whale also juxtaposed architectural and natural elements, more obviously manipulating the photographic surface with hand-painted additions. For the works in The End of Sunset, the handwork pretty much disappears in favor of chemical highlights that transform the original images into something otherworldly and surreal. Through the blurring of fact and fiction, the project aims to call attention to that which would be forgotten in the ever changing landscape of Los Angeles.

Click here for Evan Whale on its own page.

William Leavitt
Gothic Electronica
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
October 27 - December 3, 2024


William Leavitt

Tracing the trajectory of William Leavitt's work from his early photographs and installations to later paintings, the theatrics of his sensibilities emerge. Beginning with the multi-panel photographs on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art (a companion exhibition is also being presented at Sebastian Gladstone Gallery) The Consequences Can Be Real (1975) and Are You Sure She Said That? Yes, Absolutely, (1977), these are pieces that contain disjointed fragments, filled with props and actors, that imply but never fully disclose a narrative. The sequence of five color photographs that make up The Consequences Can Be Real (moving from left to right) depict silhouetted trees against the night sky that block the view of a house, followed by a close up portrait of a young woman in profile shot against a black background. The next image is an antique garden sundial also photographed at night. From there the sequence transitions to a fragment of an orange-red stage curtain and ends with a photograph of a painting that depicts a violent bolt of lightning glowing against the night sky. This work directly relates to Gothic Curtain (1970) a site-specific installation with curtains and the sounds of a thunderstorm that is installed in the slightly darkened back room.

Leavitt's paintings most definitely speak to the now. Many depict sci-fi robots, though not generated AI. He states, "Recently I’ve done portraits of cyborgs who could operate in a more theatrical realm, perhaps as characters in a sci-fi movie. My work is about things of the world as props for narratives, sequences of objects, places, persons, their combinations evoking random choice, or a mood, a kind of blank absurdity, or the suggestion of a story." Circuit Torso 12, Circuit Torso 21, and Circuit Torso 14 ("all circuits are busy now"), (all 2023) are anonymous silhouettes filled with exacting and detailed paintings of enlarged circuit boards set against blank linen grounds. These mechanical people exude personality, yet remain functionless. In Male Robot (2018), Leavitt depicts a gray silhouetted figure encircled by concentric rings of white that encase loose, random scribbles. The figure stands upon rocks in front of stone ruins.

Fragmented walls and ruins also appear in other paintings. Wall 9 (2012), juxtaposes atoms, and sections of a brick wall hovering in space above a dark planet glowing with spots of light. Roller, Reflection, Fieldstone (2020) is a painting of an interior and exterior space simultaneously. On the left side of the painting, a winding rollercoaster cascades through a desert landscape, its metal supports segue into wall struts of a stone interior. The interior is divided in two — the upper and lower sections are mirror images of each other. Within the space, Leavitt paints five figures, from the shoulders up, as if gathered around a table, their lower bodies strangely invisible. The witty and surreal image is an iconic example of Leavitt's compositing.

The installation at Sebastian Gladstone also includes photographs, paintings and a large-scale sculptural work that contains elements found in the two-dimensional pieces. Attached to a circular rig suspended from the ceiling is a classical column, a red curtain, a tree trunk and a stone pillar — props with myriad meanings and associations. The curtains, walls and natural elements (cacti, trees, grass, etc) within the images are realized full-size in the installation. Leavitt surrounds his figures with architectural fragments to ground them, yet also to fantasize about the narrative possibilities that connect figures to spaces. Leavitt is a conceptualist who draws from his environs and reinterprets that reality to transform it into a noir, surreal yet strangely welcoming place.

Click here for William Leavitt on its own page.

Florian Krewer
Strike the Dust
Michael Werner Gallery
September 14 - November 16, 2024


Florian Krewer

Florian Krewer is a German born, New York based painter who documents aspects of his life and the world around him, transforming these observations and reveries onto large colorful canvases. Krewer also makes photographs (and drawings) and these are often the jumping off point for the paintings. Though not on view, many of his photographs are included in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition and provide context to the more abstract paintings. For example, the 92 x 80 inch oil on linen, Time is Now (all works 2024) depicts a man with tattooed arms (the artist) giving another man a haircut. While Krewer changed elements from the photograph to create the painting replacing the background — a generic wall and door with a colorful pastel abstraction — the basic composition remains the same. Though larger than life, Krewer's gigantic painting retains the moment of intimacy between these two men that was casually snapped by the camera.

Similarly, the painting New Orleans is based on a photograph of a Mardi Gras parade. In the image, a man wearing golden pants walks along a crowded sidewalk. His face is covered by a frowning clown mask while he also holds a smiling version in front of that. In the painting, Krewer simplifies the scene, transporting the mask-wearing figure to a beach along a shoreline. A silhouetted cityscape can be seen in the distance, nested between an impastoed blue sky and thickly-painted, purple-hued water. Krewer blurs the details present in the photograph and turns the image into a simplified and more abstract scene. The double mask references the push-pull between the comic and the tragic — a well known reference originating in Greek Theater.

A photograph of a swimmer awkwardly jumping into a pool is the point of departure for the huge, colorful painting Into the Sun. Here, Krewer recreates and personalizes the myth of Icarus. In his version, the swimmer — with a blob of fiery orange hair — catapults in mid-air. He is depicted cascading toward swirling green and blue undulations within a swimming pool and is positioned in front of a golden burst of light against an ambiguous and quasi-threatening black background.

Up and Down depicts a winter night. In this evocative painting, simple illustrations of birds painted in bright reds, greens and blues surround a barren tree in a snow-filled landscape. In the distance are four other tree trunks that parallel the facade of a building with numerous illuminated windows. Entering the composition from the left midpoint is the back of the head and right arm of an anonymous figure wearing a blue "hoodie." His outstretched hand gestures toward a small magenta bird as if to offer food or perhaps, even a resting place. The image is tender and sympathetic, despite the coolness of the environment.

Like so many of Krewer's paintings, these scenes depict intimate moments. While his expressionistic paintings often feature isolated or small groups of figures, many also contain animals that may be substitutes for people. Twinz is a painting with a bright red-orange background and a deep red-gray foreground. A fence separates two animals — a menacing black jaguar and a sympathetic white dog. The dog is behind the fence and has an expression of innocence. The jaguar stares at the viewer ready to pounce.

Dichotomies — sweetness and angst, good and evil, urban and pastoral pervade Krewer's paintings. Krewer uses exaggerated and saturated colors to create images that are realistic dreamscapes that veer toward the surreal. In these works, he asks the viewer to be a voyeur while simultaneously identifying with the figures depicted. While they are for the most part personal narratives, these powerful images contain recognizable themes that resonate universally while simultaneously engaging with the formal language of painting.

Click here for Florian Krewer on its own page.

Christopher Page
Picturesque
Baert Gallery
September 21 - November 2, 2024


Christopher Page

Christopher Page is British artist whose paintings at first glance appear to be framed geometric abstractions — paper with subtle washes and gradients of color — surrounded by contrasting colored mat board and wooden frames. What is odd about these images is the shadows that fall across their surfaces suggesting particular times of day. In the center of November, Evening (all works 2024), a 66 7/8 inch square oil painting shows a red-orange square that appears to be a piece of paper with torn edges. Similar in feeling to a monochromatic Mark Rothko, this piece is depicted as a traditionally framed artwork bordered by dark and light blue mats and surrounded by a beveled wooden frame. Yet, something is off. Shadows cut across the image, but there is no window or light source in the gallery that would cause this to occur. As the viewer adjusts his or her position, the shadow remains in place: it is in fact, painted. Glancing at the image from the side reveals that it is flat and that the uneven edges, the mat board and frame, as well as the shadows have been impeccably rendered in tromp l'oeil style.

Picturesque, the title of the exhibition, not only references that which is visually attractive, but is also an aesthetic ideal introduced in the 18th century where the landscape was depicted as sublime. While Page's works are paintings of non objective paintings, in essence, they only become landscapes through the introduction of shadows that beautifully interrupt the compositions. This is what gives the works their edge and intrigue. Page reiterates these references through his titles which refer to seasons and times of day. Dawn, for example is a painting of a piece of paper with red and green horizontal bands of washy color that allude to a sky at dawn. It is placed on a deep blue backing and surrounded by a thick light blue mat board with a believably painted beveled edge. Two painted concentric wooden rectangles (with exacting grain) frame the entire artwork. Again, Page confounds expectations as this is a painting of a painting and not a three-dimensional artwork as it appears. A shadow, as if the work was hung on a wall opposite a window, criss-crosses the canvas.

Trompe l'oeil paintings are often realistic depictions of illusionistic spaces — spaces that exist only on the picture plane with skewed perspectives or foreshortened architecture. Many artists have experimented with trompe l'oeil throughout art history to create confused architectural spaces. The painter who shares an obvious kinship with Page is René Magritte, specifically because of his interest in fusing paintings of paintings and their surroundings. In his 1933 painting The Human Condition, Magritte places a canvas in front of a window, depicting a painting of the view outside that perfectly melds with what would appear outside the window. The work purposely confuses what is "real" and what is a representation. Another work from 1935 similarly places a painting of the ocean on an easel in front of a window overlooking that same scene.

Page shares Magritte's sense of play and because he is such a skillful renderer, he can convincingly create these illusions. The works are about looking and seeing. They pose the questions: What is an abstraction? What is a landscape? And can a painting be both simultaneously? The anomaly in the exhibition is a work titled The Outside. Here, Page presents a human scaled, arched window that frames a fiery orange background. Again, the painting is flat, yet appears to be an "actual" window containing twelve panes. It is partly opened, yet the perspective and the mechanisms of its interlocking parts are not in synch. This makes it an impossible object that still somehow coalesces in the mind's eye.

Page creates complex puzzles that cannot always be solved. His highly detailed paintings present something that at first glance appears to be simple — framed fields of color washes — but upon closer examination, his works are much more than meets the eye.

Click here for Christopher Page on its own page.

Nathan Gluck
Unlocking The Mind: Nathan Gluck's Early Surrealist Collages
Luis de Jesus Gallery
September 14 - October 26, 2024


Nathan Gluck

Nathan Gluck (1918-2008) was an artist, designer, illustrator and art director. He also happened to be Andy Warhol's studio assistant from the early 1950s through the mid 1960s. He was intimately involved in art and literary circles, meeting artists, architects and designers including Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp and Philip Johnson — and these associations filtered into his own production. Though early on in his multifaceted career he was not primarily not known for his artworks, he was widely exhibited later in life.

Gluck amassed a vast body of work, (making collages for over 70 years) and on view at Luis de Jesus Gallery are a selection borrowed from his estate and created in the 1930s and 1940s. These elegant, small scale works were influenced by Surrealism and share a kinship with other artists making collages at this time including Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Hanna Hoch, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. The exhibit also includes vitrines with books, documents and ephemera that showcase many of these influences.

It is wonderful to see cut and paste collages in the digital age where one becomes acutely aware of the hand work involved in the montaging, as well as the old-fashioned source materials. And Gluck's pieces demand close scrutiny. The earliest work in the exhibit Untitled (9-26-1939), includes an actual photogram that Gluck created while attending Pratt Institute in 1938. The collage juxtaposes a photogram of silhouetted leaves and shells that allude to undersea worlds with black and white cut outs from old book pages and features a mermaid, the sun, a rose and a crescent moon with a detailed face.

Gluck created a suite of collages based on Paul Klee’s 1929 book, La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman) where he removed womans' heads from found images while replacing them with various utilitarian objects. In The Pet Bird (1941), a Victorian era woman with a pocket watch as a face leans forward to gaze at a small bird that has been freed from a nearby cage. Other collages from 1941 in the exhibition include The Invalid, In The Paris Observatory, Passaic Falls at Valley Forge and Military Maneuvers in a Georgia Swamp. These works incorporate fragments from magazines montaged with engraved book pages and though black and white, they still reflect the different colors and tones of reproductions and printed papers of the time.

The background image for In The Paris Observatory features a man looking up through a gigantic telescope toward the stars and beyond. In the foreground, Gluck collages a disproportionately smaller man stretched out on a recliner who also gazes up toward the sky. In the center of the image is a young man with wings who holds a framed image of a man's head. Two other portraits of women appear in the scene, but they are looking out at the viewer rather than at the sky or the men.

Many of Gluck's collages are extremely detailed and contain complex, albeit obtuse narratives that can be pieced together, or not depending on the viewer's motivation to appreciate the works visually —or conceptually— as both options are possible. Some of the later works dating from 1942 and 1943 are more colorful and de Chirico-esque. In Untitled (12-29-1943), an illustration of a dapper woman wearing a plaid coat holds what appears to be a giant pocket watch. The painted foreground depicts a brown road surrounded by abstract buildings and smoke stacks that recede toward a white railing behind which Gluck has collaged more imagery of smokestacks below a light blue sky. Untitled (12-30-1943) has a similar composition. Here, a black and white line drawing of a woman holding up a child dominates the bottom quarter of the small collage. Her feet are strangely submerged in a green curvilinear shape that signs for grass or a small pond. Behind her is a train (also a black and white illustration) that passes along the diagonal in front of a light pink building with gray windows. Hovering in the painted gray-blue sky is a painted yellow balloon whose exact size is hard to determine.

It is a delight to enter into Gluck's imagination and begin to decipher the Surreal narratives he has created. Collage is a medium that has allowed for fun and experimentation throughout the years and it is wonderful to go back in time, reflect on what was happening in the world then and try to understand what Gluck was thinking and feeling when he created these obtuse yet satisfying works.

Click here for Nathan Gluck on its own page.

Jane Dickson
Are We There Yet?
Karma Los Angeles
September 19 - November 2, 2024


Jane Dickson

Astroturf? Astroturf is synthetic grass made of vinyl and nylon used as a playing surface in sports. It is strong, rough, textured and durable. Why would an artist use it as a surface to paint on? Jane Dickson, who is well known for her paintings of Times Square and her explorations of "the psychogeography of American culture" began painting on non traditional materials in the 1980s — vinyl, sandpaper and then astroturf — to give her surfaces a gritty, textured and impressionistic aura. This was well suited to the depiction of illuminated neon signs and nighttime rendezvous'.

At Karma, a selection of older (as well as larger, more recent) landscape paintings are on view. Encircling the south gallery are fifteen small-scale framed oil on linen landscapes, all titled Road Trip and dated between 1999 and 2001. In each of these works painted from her original photographs, Dickson captures the open road as seen from behind the wheel.

The exhibition title Are We There Yet? references the desire to get to one's destination and suggests the experience of driving there is just a means to an end. Dickson transforms moments from these journeys into paint in a quasi-realistic manner. In Road Trip 8 (2000), a light blue rectangle representing the sky sits above three triangular shapes, two are brownish green and depict the color of the grasslands along the road. The third triangle delineates grayish brown pavement dotted with yellow stripes that vanishes into the distance. Some of the pictures are urban — containing overpasses and signs, while others capture distant hills and winding freeways. In many, including Road Trip 10 (2000), the illuminated taillights of cars ahead document the flow (or standstill) of traffic. What stands out when seeing the paintings together is the presence and position of the horizon line which physically and metaphorically divides the paintings by emphasizing the contrast between the natural and the built environment. Often sketchily painted, these works serve as impressions and reminders of Dickson's road trips and the wonders of travel. Although the original photographs were taken in the 1990s and the paintings created long after the photographs were shot, the images still resonate today as reminders of what has and has not changed specifically with respect to traveling along California's roadways.

In the north gallery are more recent larger works painted on Dickson's chosen ground — astroturf. In a conversation with this writer, Dickson spoke about the process of painting on this surface, how astroturf has changed and the different ways she has learned to apply the paint (first oil now acrylic) to maximize the contrast between light and dark and to allow the textured surface to assert its own presence both formally and conceptually.

Dickson's large paintings are most impressive, atmospheric and luscious. Though they depict scenes from the past culled from her own photographic archive, they most definitely represent the now. It is difficult to look at Out of Here North 3 (2013) and not be reminded of the devastation of the recent fires in the Los Angeles area. In this painting, a glowing orange sunset dominates the composition. In the foreground, cars with red taillights recede down a highway toward towering power lines suspended across transmission towers, a dark silhouette against the vibrant sky. Out of Here Red Taillights Snow (2002-2013) is a dizzying and dazzling composition. A deep blue ground (the night sky) is covered with swirling red and white brush strokes — like enlarged pointillist marks — filling the frame with illuminated snowflakes refracting the red taillights. This burst of color dominates the viewer's field of vision causing a sense of vertigo. That the ground is astroturf exaggerates the blur. Dickson's mastery of this generic industrial material allows her to transform the ordinary into something sublime.

In more recent paintings including El Niño Monte Vista 4, Smog Check, and North State Rainy Parking Lot (2024), Dickson continues to mine old photographs. These haunting large-scale paintings entangle the viewer into a dialectic between reality and representation. It is hard not to look at the blowing palm trees in both Smog Check and El Niño Monte Vista 4 and think about the dangers of climate change or the fact that too much rain leads to floods as suggested in her eerie depiction North State Rainy Parking Lot.

In these paintings, Dickson focuses on the climate of Los Angeles. Although she begins with photographs shot years ago, her depictions of blowing palm trees, fire filled skies, vintage cars and receding roadways capture today's landscape. Dickson's use of astroturf in the larger works calls attention to what is unsettling and unfamiliar but as the anomaly of astroturf disappears, viewers are left with expansive, moody and disquieting paintings that speak to the ever changing now.

Click here for Jane Dickson on its own page.

Julie Weist
Private Eye
Moskowitz Bayse
September 14 - October 19, 2024


Julie Weist

In 1969, Vito Acconci created Following Piece where he followed random strangers as they traversed New York City. He concluded this surveillance when the person entered a building. Photographs, maps and notes make up this multi-panel conceptual artwork. In 1980, Sophie Calle created The Detective, a photographic piece where she hired a detective to follow her. In another work, Suite Vénitienne (1983), she was the follower rather than the followed. Suite Vénitienne chronicled the surveillance of Henri B. as he wandered the streets of Venice and as a book, as well as an installation, it was made up of both texts, maps and photographs documenting the process of trailing and spying on someone.

Julie Weist's Private Eye follows in this tradition. This conceptual artwork documents Weist's stint as a private detective in New York beginning in 2022. The exhibition includes photographs and documents (a version of her actual state license to be a private investigator (PI)), as well as documentation of her (mostly online) investigations. Weist decided to be a PI as part of a public art project and went through a laborious application process and was approved, much to her surprise. The PI license gives one access to searchable databases that contain information on private citizens. Weist's investigations centered on cars and she searched the database for various types of license plates. While she purportedly followed the rules surrounding searches as a PI, her pursuits were somewhat out of the ordinary. 

An example is the display of a framed facsimile of her PI license located near the entry of the exhibition. The title of the work — All persons to whom such license certificates have been issued shall be responsible for the safekeeping of the same, and shall not lend, enable, let or allow any other person to have, hold, use or display such certificate; and any person so parting with such a license certificate or displaying the same without authority shall be guilty of a misdemeanor — calls into question the legality of exhibiting — and perhaps even selling — this document as a work of art.

In OUTATIME from the DRNsights Database (2024), Weist creates digital collages that juxtapose surveillance photographs that hone in on car license plates with satellite images of the cars supposed locations. "OUTATIME" is a reference to the film Back to the Future and many fans have souvenir plates with this phrase. Weist searched for this in the database and displays the photographs that showcased positive results. The framed archival pigment print juxtaposes printed snapshots taken by surveillance cameras that Weist found in the database with aerial views of neighborhoods from locations all over the U.S. Each car picture is centered in a view of the neighborhood be it an urban or suburban setting. More than thirteen pairings are collaged together within this large print. Weist was quite specific when searching the database. In addition to OUTATIME, she also looked at license plates that read  honk, found and artwork. The associated photographs are also printed out with mapped locations and incorporated into digital collages.

In some ways, Weist's pieces, especially those in her Vehicle Sightings Series can be seen as performances. When Weist discovered that tow trucks eager to repossess cars hunt for them like live prey, she staged quasi-performances by parking her car near repo yards hoping that webcams would photograph her car and feed it into the database. To make it more "fun" she'd "dress up" her Subaru covering with flowers and in one instance a tutu. In Watching the Watcher she entered the plates of the repo tow trucks she saw going after cars slated to be repossessed and in turn presented these often out of focus and cropped photographs in grids of nine pictures representing the repossession in action.

Weist also includes three beautiful and abstract handmade paper pieces. These works are compiled from shredded documents. One mandate of being a PI is to shred evidence. People with Traffic Citations in My Town: Guilty & Dismissed (Wildcard Search for Self) (2024), contains fragments from random traffic citations, again culled from the PI database, that meld with raw and colorful paper fibers. That Weist implicates or surveils herself in a number of the works comes as no surprise. In Self Portrait from the Vehicle Sightings Series and Self Portrait as Investigator and Investigated (both 2023), she collages images depicting the license plate of her green Subaru with "Non-Public Data Access Forms" and other hand written records to comment on issues of privacy and vulnerability. 

In this intriguing and complex body of work, Weist investigates archives using data — images and texts — as raw materials for creative explorations. Artists have a long tradition of mining archives (Lyle Ashton Harris, Leslie Hewitt, Fiona Tan, Adam Pendleton and Theaster Gates to mention just a few) but Weist's pursuit is a bit different in that she actually became a Private Investigator to gain access to information not available to the general public. In doing so, she opens a "can of worms" about surveillance, ethics and vulnerability stating, "I think that the vulnerability really comes from not knowing that these systems are operating." 

The work in Private Eye exposes what goes on behind the scenes and can be interpreted as a warning sign — like the panopticon that Michel Foucault writes about so elegantly in Discipline & Punish —  that everyone is being watched. Big data is the new omnipresent eye.

Click here for Julie Weist on its own page.

Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography
Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography
The Getty
August 20 - November 24, 2024


Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography

According to Wikipedia, "holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later reconstructed. It is best known as a method of generating three-dimensional images, and has a wide range of other uses, including data storage, microscopy, and interferometry." That holography has not been embraced by artists like many other new technologies should come as no surprise: it is cumbersome to both create and to view. Creating holograms necessitates lasers and mirrors and specifically placed objects in a controlled setting. Unlike a traditional photograph, once the image is captured it is not simply framed and hung on the wall but displayed with mirrors and lasers in dimly lit galleries.

Since the late 1960s, a number of artists across the globe (including Bruce Nauman and Salvador Dali) have experimented with holography. For whatever reasons, it became more of a display spectacle than a viable art form. A hologram appeared on the cover of National Geographic Magazine in 1984, 1985 and 1988. Around that time, holograms also began to appear on credit cards.

But it was not until the C-Project (which ran from 1994-1998 and was overseen by Ron Mallroy and Matthew Schreiber), that other artists began to experiment with the process. On view at the Getty Museum, Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography is presented under the umbrella of PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Many of the holograms in the exhibition and in the Getty's collection were donated by Guy and Nora Barron, the collectors who funded the original C-Project ("C" being the speed of light). Although 20 artists participated, just six are included in the Getty exhibition which features ideas for holograms as well as fully developed works by artists as diverse as John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Ann McCoy, Ed Ruscha and Dorothea Rockburne. The exhibit also includes two other artists currently working with holography: Deana Lawson and Matthew Schreiber.

Schreiber is both an artist and technician, having studied holography and then worked with the C-Project artists to develop their ideas and bring their projects to fruition. Schreiber's own works are traditional holograms made with laser light that "reflects, diffracts, and interferes with subject matter." On view are pieces from his "Bowie Series" started just after the musician's death. These feature silhouetted hands against brightly colored interference patterns. His interests in the supernatural and illusion and how these ideas could be illustrated through holography led Schreiber to create a series of works about Lilydale, New York, a large spiritual community. These images emphasize the "otherness" of the medium.

When viewing holograms, once the "wow" factor has worn off and the vagaries of how to position oneself to view the entirety of the image are understood, holograms can be appreciated and critiqued as viable works of art. In some ways, experiencing a hologram falls somewhere between watching a video and looking at a lenticular photograph. The pieces are static and dynamic at the same time. They encapsulate three-dimensions and appear to move, yet it is the viewer's movement in relation to the picture that "completes" the image.

The exhibition includes projects by a number of well known artists. Chuck Close's holograms are close-up self portraits. Rather than flatten his features into a two-dimensional plane, these show three-dimensions. When a viewer moves from side to side, Close's gaze appears to follow and track the viewer. Louise Bourgeois' holograms are small and delicate. They are dream-like and eerie, functioning like miniature, surreal stage-sets filled by objects with psychological resonance (including disembodied figures, chairs and beds). These scenarios are enmeshed in a pink-red glow, reminiscent of the color found in a traditional darkroom. Ed Ruscha is represented by a suite of holograms titled The End. These works reference early cinema and reproduce the flicker between frames and after the credits would roll. In some ways, they are like mini-movies as moving from side to side causes the picture to oscillate.

Deana Lawson began integrating holographic images into her photographs in 2020 while working with Matthew Schreiber. She was intrigued by "the multiple perspectives holograms provide when viewed from different angles in addition to the references to spiritual and mythical realms." In Black Gold (2021), she juxtaposes past and present. The present is a candid image of an African American man holding numerous gold chains. He is standing next to a black brick wall alongside a table filled with miscellaneous objects — perfume, a box with a microphone, etc. The holographic image is located as an insert behind the main figure at the back of the scene and appears as a backlit orange-green gradient. It features a different Black man in a lush garden holding a garden rake over one shoulder. While the date of this image within is unspecified, it appears to be historical and creates a relationship between then and now.

Since this is the first time The Getty is exhibiting its holographic holdings, Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography is a must see. It is well contextualized as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide. The takeaway is that holograms are a magical blend of art and science, yet as artworks, they do not always transcend their technical complexities. The works on view remain enigmas, albeit beautiful, complex and compelling, but more challenging than satisfying as works of art.

Click here for Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography on its own page.

Chris McCaw
Marking Time
Marshall Gallery
September 7 - November 2, 2024


Chris McCaw

Chris McCaw is a San Francisco based photographer who examines the movement of the sun across the sky. Another California photographer, Richard Misrach made large scale color photographs using long exposures to capture the night sky while exploring the desert landscape. Rather than celebrate color and the arc of the stars, McCaw's photographs trace the movement of the sun. They are for the most part, black and white and intimate in scale compared to Misrach's project. McCaw's unique process results in solarized images as vintage photographic paper is exposed inside his cameras.

To create his images, McCaw attaches high intensity lenses to home-made cameras large enough to accommodate pieces of photographic paper. The suns trajectory over many hours is captured by the lens and even burns a hole (like a magnifying glass) in the paper. Solarization also often takes place: this is the reversal of tones on the negative acting paper. The exposures range from a few hours to a whole day and result in unique images that juxtapose the movement of the sun in relation to the motionless horizon and surrounding landscape which is usually dark and mysterious.

At Marshall Gallery, a selection of both black and white as well as color photographs are on view that have been created over the last ten years. Sunburned GSP #1103 (Salton Sea) (2024) is a three panel work. Each vertical section is dominated by a large portion of gray-toned, empty sky above the hazy sea. Moving from left to right across the three panels is an aggressive burn that starts high in the left panel and ends just above the shimmering horizon. This burn line (an actual hole in the paper) represents the movement of the sun across the landscape, a trajectory recorded over a number of hours.

For his Heliograph series (2016) McCaw created multiple exposures, tracking the sun at different times of the day, or in different locations, resulting in intersecting burn lines in the sky. These photographs are abstractions like Heliograph #101 (Mojave / Strait of Juan de Fuca) (2016) where two bright lines form a large "x" over the dark print that depicts the horizon and distant hills in shadow.

Poly-optic 042, (2015) is a unique paper negative filled with a grid of thirty-five circles. In actuality, the photograph documents sunrise to sunset, tracking the sun as it moves across the sky — a dark dot surrounded by white as the image is a negative. McCaw also experiments with color and in Instant #46 and Instant #40 (both 2023), the sky is a surreal deep red and the arc of the sun transitions from white to blue to yellow in each of eight different images. In Instant #46, it appears as if it were a UFO, or other some other celestial anomaly.

Inverse (2024) is a series where McCaw presents negative and positive exposures within the same image. For example, in Inverse #98 (Nevada) he captures the interior of a barn. The image is divided in half. On the left is a positive depiction of the dark-toned interior walls of the barn. Seen through an open doorway, the landscape is a gradient that goes from light to dark. The right side of the image is a continuation of the shot in negative where the walls of the barn are a ghostly white and the landscape through the door is an eery dark. Seen together the differences are exaggerated and what lies in shadow in the positive is highlighted in the negative, making for a breath-taking and intriguing picture.

McCaw's work is simultaneously scientific, technical and aesthetically complex. Once the process is understood, the works are not diminished. Rather, they become more intriguing. They resonate technically and conceptually, especially through references beyond the photographic. Seen in relation to minimalism or even abstract expressionism, they take the photographic into new dimensions.

Click here for Chris McCaw on its own page.

Dinh Q. Lê
Survey 1998 - 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
August 27 - October 11, 2024


Dinh Q. Lê

The Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê tragically passed away from a stroke in April 2024 at the age of 56 in Ho Chi Minh City. He was best known for his woven photographs that juxtaposed historical, pop culture and contemporary imagery about the Viet Nam War. In these complex and visually compelling mixed media works, he explored subjects ranging from memory and myth to personal and cultural identities. Incorporating the tradition of grass-weaving, a skill he learned as a child from an aunt in Viet Nam (his family left in 1978), he combined stills from Hollywood films about Viet Nam with journalistic images. Although he continually shifted and delved deeper into different aspects of the past, both real and imagined, how the war, the county and its people were remembered and represented in the West continued to be a motivating factor in his work.

Spanning his career, the exhibition begins with an early non-woven work Headless Buddha (1998), an image of a headless buddha, shot on location in a majestic temple. This backlit light box image is juxtaposed with a disembodied cement Buddha's head resting on a pedestal, staring at its headless representation.

While this work is the anomaly, it sets the stage for Lê's explorations into the relationship between relics, ruins and memory. Bookending the survey is Cambodia-Reamker #36 (2023), a large woven photograph that is 86 inches wide. Here, Lê fuses images from the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Sanskrit Ramayana, an epic poem about the balance between good and evil, with portraits of prisoners from the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. Lê traveled to Cambodia and photographed the murals at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. In this series, he weaves his imagery of these colorful and delicate murals with close cropped black and white reproductions that focus on the faces of the young condemned prisoners.

In works such as Dismantling Icons (2003) or Untitled 3 (2004), Lê takes brightly colored stills from Hollywood films about the Viet Nam War such as "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now" and "Born on the Fourth of July" and combines them with black and white images documenting the war by photojournalists. In many of these compositions, patterns appear within the weaving that become a third layer adding both formal and content. In this case, Lê works with his own photographs as well as appropriating from various sources. The pieces often combine black and white historical images with more intensely colored film stills or images culled from consumer and popular culture.

In Double Distorted Portraits (2017), large eyes come in and out of focus as the viewer moves between black and white images of two child prisoners and a fiery red-orange background that surrounds them. Similarly, in Night Vision (2008), the eye and the mind transition from foreground to background images while oscillating between hues of green, black and white that reveal a hovering helicopter, soldiers, and victims of war. Again, Lê brings together past and present while alluding to the (sadly) unavoidable and (seemingly) ever-present conditions of war.

Integral to his process is the study of history and culture. He purposely uses fragments and representations from different sources and is aware that his reconstructions only offer an incomplete "whole." Lê's works were not only about the conflict in Viet Nam; he also brought imagery from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into his later compositions. Through appropriation — of a craft (weaving) and imagery — Lê developed a unique process that allowed the fragmentation and the reconstruction of different genres and eras to rewrite history and show the discrepancies between fantasy, memory and reality.

We can never know where Lê’s abbreviated body of work may have gone from here. Even so, this survey exhibition is more than just a celebration of his creativity. It features aspects of his work which makes a strong case that it will remain influential and significant as time goes on.

Click here for Dinh Q. Lê on its own page.

Various Artists
Lost & Found
E2 Art Space
September 7 - December, 2024


Los and Found

Lost & Found is an exhibition of found photographs, otherwise known as vernacular photography. These unattributed images were taken between 1920 and 1960 and represent different aspects of American life. The original photographs as well as newly printed enlargements fill the large gallery space offering a bit of mystery to accompany a trip down memory lane. Exactly whose "memories" and what "lane" can only be inferred as the subjects as well as the photographers (of mixed races and ages) are not unidentified.

These photographs belong to a private collector who has amassed over 7000 images that were found on Ebay, at swap meets, in auctions, as well as purchased from dealers who specialize in vernacular imagery. In the gallery, the color and black and white photographs are varying sizes and hung salon style, often grouped thematically. They range from pictures taken in photo booths to formal studio portraits, mugshots from the SF Police Department, and a number of anomalies and misprints, random people —couples and children— posing, smiling and enjoying the day.

What is interesting about the exhibition is both the familiarity of the images and how different they are from today's snapshots despite being created in a different era. Though ubiquitous in pre-digital times, photographs were taken with a camera (not a phone). The film needed to be processed so seeing the image was not immediate. Receiving and viewing a package of images from a photo lab or local drug store was a special occasion, as was going to a studio for a portrait or posing in an instant photo booth. Photographs were thrilling.

What makes an image special? Significant? Memorable? The original purpose of an anonymous photograph is unknown— was it a keep sake documenting a special event or person? How precise is the composition, the color, the styling? Does it matter? Some of the vernacular photographs chosen for this exhibition depict cliche moments, while others capture an obtuse or off kilter scene. For example, one color picture features a bowling club. Five women stand behind a table with their bowling balls in front of them. Wearing blue or white short sleeve button down shirts with quintessential 1950s glasses and haircuts, they smile at the photographer. Another image presents a happy couple, perhaps captured before a dance or prom. The boy wears a white suit jacket with a red rose pinned to the lapel. The girl wears a frilly blue and white dress and holds a corsage of pink and white flowers. The background is a living room where the couple is surrounded by a television, framed photographs, a lamp and the corner of a couch.

Sepia toned images originally from a photo booth are presented actual size and dramatically enlarged to fill a wall painted a deep blue. It is interesting to think about the poses and expressions as well as the wear and tear on the images over the years, particularly when compared to the numerous selfies posted on social media. How was posing back then different than it is now? What was the purpose of having a photograph taken? How were they shared and disseminated? That so many of these images are now collectables — available for purchase at swap meets, etc. — makes one wonder about the longevity of the billions of photographs posted online everyday? What will happen to them in the future? Will they be collected and savored?

Some of the most interesting pictures in the exhibition are easy to miss. These are small snapshots where heads are cut off or bodies are silhouetted in unusual ways. For example, a diagonal line of light cuts across the composition in a photograph of a man in a bright white shirt holding his cue stick readying his a shot at a poolt able. This image is presented in a small grid juxtaposed with other curious anomalies. While many of these "found" images could have been shot by "real" photographers, as they have striking compositions or capture alluring expressions, the fact that they are not is what makes them and the exhibition significant.

What might have been lost, has now been found and given new life — viewers can project their own stories and compare their memories to these images and think about what photography was in the past in relation to today.

Click here for Lost & Found on its own page.

Various Artists
Foreigners Everywhere
Venice Biennale 2024
April 20 - November 24, 2024


Foreigners Everywhere

The joy of visiting Venice during the Biennale is twofold: the city and all its treasures as well as the insertion of contemporary art in venues that are off the beaten path.

The more days in Venice the better, as it is not really possible to see the Biennale in its entirety— both official and collateral events and exhibitions— in just a couple of days.

Planning a route across the island takes one on a journey, literally seeing "Foreigners Everywhere" as Venice is overpopulated in the Spring and Summer months with both Biennale viewers and regular tourists. This years theme focuses on ideas around displacement and includes many more women and artists of color than in years past, as well as curated selections featuring artists who are under-recognized and who have not been invited to participate in the past.



Highlights of collateral events viewed around the Dorsodoro include an animated panoramic video installation by Josefa Ntjam. Installed in a blue triangle shaped pavilion in the courtyard of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, swell of spaec(i)es features sea creatures meeting the apocalypse. Also of note was an installation by one of the most celebrated and internationally recognized Indian artists of the 20th century M.F. Husain (1915-2011). The Rooted Nomad included his paintings, as well as a video installation that filled the space with dynamic and ever-changing colorful floral arrangements and animated figures. Other big name shows that were not to be missed were Pierre Huyghe at the Pinault Collection, Jean Cocteau at Peggy Guggenheim and Jim Dine at Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu. Another installation that resonated was Dare To Dream from Ukraine. Here, the Puerto Rican artists Allora & Calzadilla presented a new iteration of their piece Graft where flower petals were strewn across the floor beneath delicate and evocative hand-painted figurative murals by Kateryna Lysovenko.

Moving across the Grand Canal to the Castello began with visits to the Querini Stampalia and the Museo di Palazzo Grimani. The Querini Stampalia is an amazing space combining contemporary architectural works within a sixteenth-century palace. It hosts contemporary exhibitions that often play off the rooms and furnishings. To coincide with the 2024 Biennale, on view were installations by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and works by Yoo Youngkuk.

In addition to having a room filled with classical sculptures and one of the most magnificently detailed ceilings anywhere in Venice, the Museo di Palazzo Grimani also hosts contemporary exhibitions. On view for the Biennale was an exhibition of abstract paintings by the Texas based artist Rick Lowe, as well as a video installation and associated sculptural props by Wael Shawky (whose work was also on display in the Egyptian Pavilion at the Giardini).



The Arsenale was next on the agenda.



First impressions are meaningful so the artist/artwork chosen for the entry room of the Arsenale is significant. For 2024, it was filled with a criss-cross of fabric tie downs or security straps by the Mataaho Collective (New Zealand). They created a shimmering pattern and grid-like structure across the walls and ceiling. Further into the space, the Disobedience Archive organized a display of videos — more than one could ever see in a single sitting — installed on monitors within the curved walls of a semi-circular space. A full day or more would be required to watch these films and videos, so rather than catching glimpses here and there, many people walked right by.

Some highlights and memorable works seen on the long trek through the Arsenale include:

Kiuanji Kia Henda is an artist from Angola who presented three different closely connected works made over a span of seven years. These include a grid of nine color photographs of facades seen through the different geometries of white protective railings, as well as a sculpture comprised of the actual metalwork.

Dalton Paula (Brazil) exhibited paintings that celebrated historical figures of African descent involved with anti-slavery movements in Brazil. The beautiful combination of under and overpainting emphasized the span of time from past to present.

Bouchra Khalili is a French Moroccan artist now residing in Vienna. In The Mapping Journey Project, she presents a series of projected videos that trace the stories of those who were forced to travel illegally due to political and economic circumstances. The imagery consists of fingers tracing routes on a map while the narration recounts the different journeys through North Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.



In contrast to the more didactic multiple screens in the The Mapping Journey Project, Ana Segovia's (Mexico City) single channel video filmed in bright pink hues features two Charros (Mexican cowboys). The work is meant to undermine traditional male-centric attitudes and spaces.

Toward the back of the Arsenale's long first section are large-scale site-specific colorful painted murals by the Aravani Art Project, a collective based in Bangalore, India that celebrate life choices trans people should have but are often denied.

Numerous special and country pavilions are also housed within the Arsenale grounds.

Brazil's Beatriz Milhazes created new pieces for the Applied Arts Pavilion and also exhibited vitrines filled with traditional woven textiles from different cultures that inspired her. In the Mexican Pavilion, Erick Meyenberg presented the installation As we marched away, we were always coming back featuring a long table set for a grandiose meal accompanied by projections of a family gathering in the countryside. The work elegantly explores issues of displacement and ideas related to losing one's ancestral homeland. Other memorable installations include Luciana Lamothe's Hope the Doors Collapse (Argentina), Robert Zhao Renhui's, Seeing Forest (Singapore) and Matthew Attard's, I will Follow The Ship (Malta), an installation that intertwined drawing and digital technologies to explore the legacy and symbolism of maritime graffiti. Usually, the pavilion for Italy is a large (regional) group exhibition, but this year it features To Hear an installation by Massimo Bartolini that fills several spaces with intriguing sculptures that comprise a range of visual and acoustic experiences.



Outside the actual buildings one happens upon large sculptures by Los Angeles based Lauren Halsey, as well as neon works suspended above and reflecting in the water by the docks at the back of the Arsenale by Claire Fontaine with the slogan "Foreigners Everywhere" in many different languages. This installation seemed like an afterthought and not a very imaginative use of this unique location. The small bunkers at the very back of the Arsenale grounds should always be visited as here one finds dark dilapidated spaces filled with mixed media sculptures or projected videos.

On the way to the Giardini, one cannot ignore a collateral exhibition by the magnificent William Kentridge at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot was a site specific installation of projections, drawings and ephemera. Here, Kentridge sequentially presented nine videos on two different sized screens in the otherwise small and very cluttered space. These videos depicted his interactions with props and himself and explored themes of the studio, politics, isolation, memory and self-portraiture. To view all nine episodes would take more than four hours— hard to do with limited days in Venice.



Not far away from the Arsenale Institute is the Giardini where over 30 countries are represented in national pavilions, each with its own unique architecture. Some highlights include Archie Moore whose installation kith and kin won the Golden Lion Award for the Australia Pavilion. Moore covered the black walls with a map of relations drawn in white chalk bubbles. Jeffrey Gibson represented the United States with a colorful mixed media installation titled the space in which to place me. Yuko Mohri's installation of wired fruits was a crowd pleaser in the Japanese Pavilion, as was the video by Wael Shawky representing Egypt. This was a historical rendition of Egypt's seminal Urabi revolution (1879-1882) against imperial rule using both actors and puppets. John Akomfrah's ambitious installation Listening All Night to the Rain in the Great Britain Pavilion was an investigation presented on numerous video screens of issues of contemporary life, such as memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change. The work in the lower level was organized into cantos (song like movements) that beautifully juxtaposed images from art history and nature with an evocative undulating soundtrack.



At the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani on San Polo, there was an exhibition So As Not To Lose The Thread of works by Karine N'guyen Vann Tham and Parul Thacker who were inspired by the ornate textiles and wall tapestries that make up the permanent collection and made pieces that played off what they saw in situ. Nearby was the transformed Prada Foundation housing an ambitious and over-the-top installation by Swiss provocateur Christoph Buchel. For Monte di Pietà, Buchel filled the building — including exhibition galleries, hallways and in between spaces of the foundation — with "junk." Be it found objects merchandise purchased from pawn shops or valuable collectables, Buchel's installation looks at the nuances of commerce and exchange.

In a space that was once a hospital was the exhibition Nebula commissioned by the Fondazione In Between Art Film. This is the second Biennale that this disused space has been transformed into an exhibition hall for video installations. Here one finds a provocative video by Giorgio Andreotta Calo that follows a sheep through the former hospital, as well as a haunting video of a life-sized puppet hanging from a noose by Diego Marcon.

The Julie Mehretu exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi was a delight and a perfect place to end the day. It unexpectedly combined her work with seven artist friends often using different media to create intriguing relationships and conversations that carried into the night.



The last day in Venice took us to the famed Venetian Opera House La Fenice. Nearby was Victoria Miro Gallery with an exhibit by Sarah Sze and next door at Ateneo Veneto (the oldest cultural institute still operative in Venice housed in a sixteenth-century building: the Scuola dei Picai) was an exhibition by Walton Ford. His installation of paintings were on view with the added benefit of a Tintoretto.

A surprise was Andrzej Wroblewski (1927-1957) at Procuratie Vecchie presented by the Starak Family Foundation. These works on paper and paintings depicted occupied Poland during World War II.

The installation Above Zobeide by Wong Weng Cheong from Macao, China was inspired by the fictional city of Zobeide in Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities. In this installation, Cheong juxtaposes a recreation of the fictional city with a hall of video monitors with delayed footage of viewers traveling through the space.

Last stop was an exhibition of works by Willem DeKooning curated by Gary Garrels at the Gallerie Accademia. All that was left to see were the numerous treasures housed in the museum.





Click here for Various Artists on its own page.

Kyungmi Shin
Origin Stories
Craft Contemporary
May 26 - September 8, 2024


Kyungmi Shin

In Kyungmi Shin’s exhibition, “Origin Stories,” the Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist explores past and present through a thoughtful intermingling of ceramics, sculpture and painted photographs. Her complex works investigate both female and Asian identity and ancestry through art historical representations while also referencing contemporary culture. She mines personal photographic archives, enlarging photographic snapshots and then tracing aspects of them with gold and silver painted lines. She also explores traditional Asian patterning, often presenting her original ceramic objects in combination with authentic traditional pieces. The confusion between the two kinds of objects questions the notions of contemporary and traditional.

The exhibition brings together multiple aspects of Shin’s practice so as to weave a trajectory through her expansive range of pursuits. “Shaman tiger takes a walk outside” (2024) is placed in the center of the gallery to receive prime attention. In it Shin dramatically exercises her ability to combine multiple forms and materials. The image is that of a tiger, but seen differently from all sides. While first and foremost a 3-dimensional object, it also doubles as functional furniture. Its shelves, for this installation, house numerous pieces of chinoiserie.

Dichotomies and instances of simultaneity prevail throughout. In her painted photographs, Shin often begins with family photographs or images from art history, as in “and the sweet upside-down cake (Lunch on the grass)” and “Three Magi” (both 2022). In “and the sweet upside-down cake (Lunch on the grass),” she superimposes an image of adolescents picnicking with Asian-style foods atop Manet's painting “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe,” drawing visual comparisons as well as contrasts. Similarly, “Three Magi” is overlaid with a photograph of a woman and her child (another image from the artist’s family archives) that echoes the depiction of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus in the original painting by Andrea Mantegna. “Riding on that Carriage” (2020) pays homage to Shin's father, who is depicted as an old man seated on a couch surrounded by decorative imagery culled from myriad sources.

What is unique about Shin's work is the way it weaves together multiple narratives across cultures and generations. Within the installation, these large-scale painted photographs as well as the ceramic objects are presented on walls that range from dark brown, to deep red, and a light blue-gray — colors that come from, as well as enhance the imagery.

Shin’s hand-crafted ceramics are often presented in conjunction with the photographs. Here, Shin includes arrangements of both found and created ceramic objects. They are placed on shelves and laid out on antique wooden stands. The standout “Tentative Baroque” (2020) is an intricate porcelain sculpture of a lower leg and foot inscribed with painted blue vines. These vines also extend as ceramic tendrils from the top of the leg. The object rests on an antique wooden end table and is located in front of a wall painted a dark reddish-brown.

Filling a wall in the side gallery is a black and white photographic mural that replicates “The Audience of the Emperor” from the series “The Story of the Emperor of China” (1700-1710), a tapestry by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer and Guy-Louis Vernansal that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Atop this mural and on an opposite wall painted a deep red, Shin presents hard-paste porcelain ovals from her “Journey to the East” and “Blue and white Christian Narrative” series (both 2019). In these pieces, she fuses traditional Asian patterns with more illustrative renditions of historical symbols drawn from religious iconography.

Shin endeavors to explore different representations of Asian identity using both personal and historical viewpoints. She is interested in the complicated relationship between East and West. Her works are impeccably crafted, formally sophisticated and conceptually rigorous. Through subtle layering with a range of mediums, she imparts visual pleasure. She also takes us on a journey back and forth in time, pointing out issues of displacement, injustice, and cultural appropriation as well as adaptation. She is using these distinct histories and media in similar ways, bringing them together to create an original aesthetic hybrid.

Click here for Kyungmi Shin on its own page.

Mickalene Thomas
All About Love
The Broad
May 25 - September 29, 2024


Mickalene Thomas

The entrance to Mickalene Thomas' exhibition All About Love replicates the facade of her childhood home in Camden, New Jersey complete with fake brick siding and windows lit from within. This exterior is also partially covered by a banner stating "I Was Born To Do Great Things." The first room in this ambitious survey exhibition is the 2014 work I Was Born To Do Great Things which is comprised of living-room recreations that contain wood paneled walls, vintage furniture and records (including one 'playing' on a turntable), as well as enlarge family photographs, in addition to one of Thomas’ signature painted figures. Domestic interiors appear in many of Thomas’ photographs and seeing one reconstructed contextualizes these works. Many of Thomas' projects celebrate and pay homage to the women who influenced her— beginning with her mother and including the writer bell hooks and the photographer Carrie Mae Weems. Throughout her career, Thomas has focused on the depiction of the female black body, embracing self-empowerment and joy. These women are often larger than life, dressed in bold patterned fabrics, surrounded by glitter and unafraid to reveal their sexuality.

In addition to numerous remarkable individual works, what stands out in this exhibition is the emphasis on installation— as different series are displayed on colored walls or juxtaposed with large-scale photographic murals. Many of Thomas' early works were black and white photographs of female subjects in domestic interiors surrounded by patterned wallpaper and fabric coverings. She also created small scale collages where she juxtaposed cutouts from style and fashion magazines (like the iconic Jet Magazine) often adding glitter and rhinestones to the compositions. It is interesting to see the ways these early images are transformed into the more recent larger, mixed media works. For example, the 2010 Type-C print Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les trois femmes noires doubles in size to become the 96 x 120 inch, rhinestone and acrylic paint mounted on wood panel work Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les trois femmes noires d'aprés Picasso (2022).

Rather than the individual pieces, it is the ambiance created within the galleries and the conversation between works and series over time and through differing media that gives the exhibition its power. Centered in one "room" are an arrangement of chairs and ottomans, covered with mismatched bright African patterned fabrics. These are placed in the center of the large gallery on a section of concrete floor that has been covered with square carpet samples and assorted parquet floor tiles. A few plants, as well as piles of books make this an inviting space to sit, relax, converse and regard the works on the walls. Here, Thomas installs Ms. Celie's Blues (2016), a multi panel photographic and mirrored work inspired by the characters in The Color Purple. Spanning another wall is the 8 channel split screen video Angelitos Negros (2016)— a collage of women's faces from close up set to Eartha Kitt's 1953 song. Opposite the video is a salon style arrangement of Thomas' early photographs in varying sizes.

In another room, pixelated fragments extracted from the works fill the gallery walls from floor to ceiling, in addition to images of empty closets and abstract patterns and painted gestures. Over this bombastic collage hang works from a series of paintings where Thomas appropriated pin-ups from Jet Magazine, including January 1976 (2019), Jet Calendar 1977 (2022) and February 1976 (2022). The room also includes a tightly packed floor display of plastic potted plants upon a mirrored surface. The relationship between these works and their surroundings is uncertain: perhaps Thomas is drawing parallels between the Jet Magazine women and artificial nature.

A series of large-scale more abstract and fragmented collages with glitter fill light and dark pink walls to create another room that glows with a saturated and overtly female aura. Another intriguing piece is the multi-media video Me as Muse (2016), where Thomas fragments her nude body across twelve separate monitors accompanied by an audio recording spoken by Eartha Kitt and historical references to odalisques in art and the fetishization of the black female body.

Thomas often creates exhibitions combining individual works and installations that bombard viewers. The exhibition at the Broad traces highlights of her career while presenting a range of works in specific and varied contexts. The gist of the show and the motivations behind her creative pursuits attempt to shed light on the representation of Black women throughout art history (as well as their absence) and to celebrate their bodies as glittering wonders with a strong presence that cannot go unnoticed.

Click here for Mickalene Thomas on its own page.

Karl Haendel, David Sipress, Taylor Marie Prendergast
Dogs & Dads
Diane Rosenstein Fine Art
July 13 - August 24, 2024


Dogs & Dads

How to cope with the dog days of summer, when it is hot, humid and uncomfortable? A good way to beat the heat is to visit the exhibition Dogs & Dads which features drawings by Karl Haendel and David Sipress, as well as paintings and drawings by Taylor Marie Prendergast. This show explores dogs and dads, often with humorous and ironic overtones. Dogs are considered man's best friend, but what of dads?

Sipress is a cartoonist best known for insightful and cutting cartoons that have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker. In ogs & Dads he is represented by numerous small scale pen and ink drawings, as well as two larger site specific wall drawings that explore the relationships between parents and children, as well as between different canines. Why So Downward Facing Dog? (2014) depicts two dogs at a bar, one looking down into its drink. In one of the scaled up works, an almost life-size dog owner points his finger at a small cowering mutt. The text bubble above the figure states, "Bad drawing." It is an apt entry point to the exhibition.

The images are installed to create conversations between the artists and to suggest relationships. For example, a cartoon by Sipress of an elderly man looking in a bathroom mirror as his wife stands by the door is captioned, "Omigod! It's my Father." This is presented between Karl Haendel's Angry Dog 8 (2023) and Taylor Marie Prendergast's Earthly Stray (2024), both close-ups of dog's heads where the focus is their open mouths baring sharp white teeth.

Prendergast explores the image of the dog as a symbol— her drawings and paintings are compassionate and sympathetic, yet also wary. The huge oil on canvas, All That's Left (2024) is threatening. Here, the larger than life-size head of a dog fills the composition, aggressive and raw. In Until Evening (2024), a dog sits patiently waiting to devour a small rodent trapped under its paw, whereas in Night Watch (2024), a pair of muzzled dogs resemble stoic protectors.

Karl Haendel is represented by a range of works, some overly cute — like the pencil drawing I didn't ask to be born and I don't want to die (2024) — and others disturbingly truthful, as in the projected video Questions for my Father (2011) made with Petter Ringbom, or Prozac Drawing #3 (Fuck You Dad) (2004). Haendel's works often feel like punctuation or bridges between Prendergast and Sipress, especially because of the way the show is installed with works hung at varied heights, some even touching the floor. The combative looking dog in Angry Dog 9 (2024) appears ready to pounce or to eat a small cartoon by Sipress positioned to its right. Two Sipress cartoons are positioned above Haendel's drawing Pup and Flowers 4 (2022) of a fully rendered animal sniffing a simple line drawing of flowers in a vase.

The twelve minute work, Questions for My Father depicts sixteen men in close up looking directly at the camera asking questions about fathers that were never voiced. Whether fact or fiction, this film brings to light some things sons might have wanted to know about their fathers but were probably not comfortable asking. The intimacy within the film is echoed in the works on the walls as the exhibition equates dogs and dads — best summarized in a promotional cartoon on the gallery website featuring two dogs conversing about the exhibition. One states, "The artists are using the dogs to talk about their dads, issues of paternity, patriarchy, anger, violence, emotional distance." The other replies, "So we're metaphors."

Haendel's drawing, I Can Smell My Own Fear (2024) is a rendering of the artist's arm and hand holding a Charles Barsotti cartoon up to the clouds. The image within the image shows a bearded psychiatrist taking notes as a Snoopy-like dog lies on the couch. The caption reads "I Can Smell My Own Fear." Like most of the works in the exhibition, it explores what it means to be alive.

Haendel, Prendergast and Sipress are using animals as metaphors and in these works, they reference emotions and cycles in life— be they fear, fatherhood, parenting, aggression, unconditional love, affection, pain, aging, life or death.

Click here for Karl Haendel, David Sipress, Taylor Marie Prendergast on its own page.

Erika Vogt
Image Blockers
Overduin & Co.
June 29 - August 10, 2024


Erika Vogt

The first things viewers see upon entry to the gallery in Erika Vogt's exhibition Image Blockers could be interpreted as abstractions — large green and orange rectangles covered with with six black acrylic shapes. These are Vogt's Newspaper Drawings and they are comprised of fifteen front sections of the New York Times whose dates span the last few years. Newspaper Drawing: Lemons and Newspaper Drawing: Stars (all works 2024) are push-pinned on a large wall of the otherwise empty space. Each front page has been painted either green (Lemons) or orange (Stars), while the rest of the pages are untouched. The papers are casually secured to the wall so many of them droop to reveal the content inside. Pieces of black acrylic almost as large as a single newspaper page in the shape of a lemon or starburst cover parts of the headline pages. Though partially obscured, it is impossible not to scrutinize the words and images and reflect on the news of the days represented in relation to the present.

In another gallery are two loosely assembled wall sculptures. Image Blocker 5 and Image Blocker 6 are crafted from acrylic, linen, paper and thread and occupy either side of a passageway to the last room of the exhibition. Based on the shapes of ancient Cycladic terra cotta vessels, these soft flattened forms retain some three-dimensionality. Because they share the space with a projected video, they are not lit so their presence is ambiguous. On the opposite wall is a large video projection titled Book XII (Channel 1). This five minute loop with sound explores time. The central image is a large analogue wall clock set to 12:00. Although the second hand moves backwards, the time hardly changes. Digital clocks appear and disappear from the frame. Dressed in a lab coat, a woman (the artist) reads from a newspaper. Layered as if a filmic collage are sequences of the woman spinning the starburst shape from the newspaper drawings and holding up different objects toward the camera, further fragmenting the image. The video flip-flops from positive to negative in concert with a pulsating soundtrack that feels more like noise than any distinguishable sound.

Vogt's other videos also unabashedly indulge in the use of digital effects and the layering of imagery — be they newspapers, actual spirals or lemons (relating to the Newspaper Drawings or Image Blocker sculptures), or an image of the spinning globe. Lemon & Egg is presented on a small screen and is the most abstract of Vogt's video works. Here, a small lemon floats up and down in the frame that is otherwise filled by an organic spiral and a blown up EKG line originally made of thread. This imagery is often juxtaposed with the silhouette of an egg. Although obtuse, this digital video does connect to the static works on view.

Thinking about the title of the exhibition — Image Blockers — and the purposeful layering within the works, it seems as though Vogt is relating past and present, drawing from popular as well as art historical contexts (for example Hollis Frampton's 1969 film Lemon) calling attention to the ever changing world as well as its sameness — the repetition of words, of pictures of warring nations — and asking viewers to notice the spaces in between.

Click here for Erika Vogt on its own page.

Kenny Scharf
Go Wild
Honor Fraser
June 29 - August 24, 2024


Kenny Scharf

More often than not, it seems that Kenny Scharf "goes wild," filling gallery and museum spaces from floor to ceiling with paintings, sculptures, site specific murals, sound, plants and even discarded toys. He has enjoyed overwhelming viewers throughout his long career by creating rooms with no resting place for the eye. His immersive installation Go Wild at Honor Fraser Gallery delights and surprises as his latest iteration of an over-the-top presentation. Because this gallery has multiple rooms, it gives Scharf the opportunity to present both discrete objects and his iconic installations.

To discuss the relative calm (before the (visual) storm), it makes sense to mention a suite of recent tondo paintings installed in one of the main gallery spaces. These are large, colorful circles filled with air-brushed squiggles and cartoony sci-fi faces that have wide-eyes and protruding noses — examples of Sharf's celebrated cast of characters. For the tondo Loopy (2024), he intersperses purple and pink faces with undulating and swirling lines against a blue-yellow spray-painted and mottled background. Placed in different locations within the tondo 3Amigos (2023), are three smiling cartoony faces each with bulging black and yellow eyes and wide smiles positioned amidst a galaxy of linear stars and spirals. Spanning a single wall, each of the five large tondos displays an array of overlapping and abstracted whimsical faces.

No Kenny Scharf exhibition is complete without Flinstones-esque characters and painted utilitarian objects. Here, he presents both painted cars and surfboards. Over many years, Scharf has decorated vehicles for numerous Los Angeles drivers as part of his KARBOMBZ! series: a few of these are shown as photographic documentation, surrounded by several painted surfboards. Always full of surprises, Scharf includes new works that reference the Los Angeles landscape and its environs — brightly painted and somewhat anthropomorphic oil rigs, in addition to works depicting colorful cell phone towers — places where Scarf can apply his pop sensibilities to transform structures and locations into something unexpected.

The highlight of the exhibition is the site specific immersive installation, Go Wild. Here, Scharf has covered the space with a backdrop filled with rainbow-colored drips over which he has painted larger than life size flowers and tree-like characters that emerge from between the vertical lines of the murals to create a circus-like atmosphere. Scattered on the floor are numerous giant clay pots holding live trees and decorated with exaggerated and oversized cartoony facial features looking out in multiple directions. Appearing in random locations, dilapidated chairs and couches covered with spray-painted marks offer a place to sit, relax and take in the chaos that surrounds.

In a previous exhibition, Scharf installed a huge entanglement of discarded ridable toys in all shapes, sizes and colors that cascaded down from the roof and over the facade. In his current show, smaller toys dangle in clusters from the ceiling and are placed so that they form a train along the perimeter of the walls — in essence creating a fun house environment. This immersive and dizzying installation elicits smiles while simultaneously confounding expectations. With so much "bad news" happening across the globe, Scharf offers a place dedicated to "fun" — where there is a bit of everything for everyone.

Click here for Kenny Scharf on its own page.

Ed Ruscha
Now Then
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
April 7 - October 6, 2024


Ed Ruscha

In 1956, Ed Ruscha left Oklahoma City to study commercial art in Los Angeles and immediately developed an affinity with the city. Los Angeles then, as it is now, was filled with signage and advertisements. It also has awe inspiring skies, palm trees and iconic architecture and the young Ruscha's drawings and paintings soon filled with these images. In Los Angeles today, people speak of Ed Ruscha moments like palm trees silhouetted against gradient backgrounds. It is unexpected and ironically humorous that moments or things that exist in "real life" are referred to as being like Ed Ruscha paintings.

Ed Ruscha / Now Then is a retrospective exhibition that showcases his work from 1958 - 2022. It was first presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from September 10, 2023 - January 13, 2024 and is now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Included are photographs, paintings, works on paper and ephemera that highlight Ruscha's career and illustrate his unique way of seeing and presenting the world. In many ways Ruscha's work and this exhibition is about perspective: the different angles and points of view that one can frame what is in front of them and present that information. What is present? What is left out? How do things change over time? Are they read from front to back or back to front? These questions have long been a concern for Ruscha, as well as a point of departure.

Small renderings of The 20th Century Fox are presented from multiple vantage points as are larger paintings of Standard gas stations. Likewise, Spread (1972), can be read from two sides. Spread is a large work on paper that is suspended from the ceiling so it becomes sculptural. Here, Ruscha rubbed chewing tobacco onto the front and back of the paper to spell the word right reading as well as backwards. This is just one example of Ruscha's conceptual wit and interest in perspective, perception, language and how images of words can be read. Canvases filled with language appear throughout the exhibition. These pieces are created using a range of colors and typefaces that direct the reading of words such as BOSS, OOF, WON'T, SMASH, NOISE, QUIT, SPREAD and FAITH. Ruscha has depicted stains as well as objects floating in space. He has a deft hand and can render abstractly or in exacting detail with equal dexterity.

The pick-up truck rig used to photograph every building on the Sunset Strip is documented in the exhibition and presented alongside the accordion folding book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Ruscha's other photographic projects include Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) and Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). These now iconic books and images have influenced generations and have spawned numerous homages. The exhibition includes the infamous Chocolate Room (1970/2023) which was first produced in Venice, Italy and is recreated for each subsequent presentation. For the work, Ruscha screen printed sheets of paper with Nestle chocolate and wall papered an entire room to create a visual as well as olfactory blast.

Among the later works are black and white word paintings like The End (1991), paintings of Los Angeles intersections that juxtapose the names of the streets amidst a sandy concrete texture like Beverly at Western, Normandie and Vermont (1999). Also on view is Inch, Mile (2016) a painting of different wood grains and surfaces inscribed with the words "inch" and "mile" in comparative scales. Uncharacteristically and somewhat of a surprise is the more representational trash heap depicted in Psycho Spaghetti Western #7 (2010-11).

Lesser known works are interspersed with well known images like the 1965-68 painting Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire and numerous depictions of the iconic Hollywood sign painted in block letters and presented on canvases that are different shapes, sizes and colors. The take away from the exhibit is an impression of Los Angeles as a city of signs. Ruscha's city is an expansive space and though devoid of actual people, his image of Los Angeles is filled with an active and long-lasting human presence.

Click here for Ed Ruscha on its own page.

Richard Misrach
Dancing With Nature
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
June 22 - August 3, 3024


Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach has had a long career as a photographer. He has documented the American west, the detritus of Hurricane Katrina, the devastation from the Berkeley fires as well as artifacts left by migrants along the U.S. Mexico border. The color photographs that make up his Desert Cantos series (begun in 1979) are poetic meditations on expansive spaces and the night sky. He is interested in natural beauty as well as human interventions in the landscape, often combining both in single images. Actual humans occasionally appear, as in his On the Beach series from the early 2000s. The tiny swimmers in these pictures are often surrounded by vast expanses of ocean that become patterns and colorful abstractions dotted with anonymous figures — an uncanny juxtaposition.

Though at first wedded to traditional approaches to photography, Misrach has migrated to and embraced digital technologies and now uses software like Photoshop and non-darkroom printing to make his recent digital works. In December 2022, Misrach and thirteen dancers from the Alonzo King LINES Ballet company traveled to Hawaii where they spent five days improvising along the oceanside cliffs. The images were used by the company for a 2023 performance and now appear in the exhibition Dancing With Nature. The large-scale color photographs are presented both as positive and negative images.

The negatives are unsettling and mysterious. As positives, they are breathtakingly spectacular. The images celebrate the fluid and graceful movements of the dancers in contrast to the jagged volcanic rocks. They are positioned against light blue skies that meet deep blue-green seas. As the dancers improvised, Misrach captured instants that ebbed and flowed in relation to the environment. These moments appear other worldly and spiritual as the dancers' arms and legs point up and down, directing the viewer's eyes around the composition.

In Adji and Shuaib (Cellphone #1), On the Cliffs, Spitting Cave (all works 2022), two dancers appear quasi-silhouetted on a plateau above the ocean. A break in the clouds above allows the sun to peak through and illuminate a spot of ocean at the horizon line, just below the dancer's extended hand. Maddie and Adji, On the Cliffs, Spitting Cave #1 similarly captures their bird-like gestures — a spreading of the arms as if wings and a desire for freedom expressed by the dancers.

When presented as negatives, everything changes. The figures and their shadows become light and ghost-like, the landscape unrecognizable. Misrach indulges in these differences and even exhibits the same image in both formats. Shadow Ballet #8 and Shadow Ballet #8 reverse depict a line of dancers from above holding hands along the waters edge. Their elongated shadows hug the footprint laden sand which extends above them. The water parallels the underside of the human chain. Not only does Misrach present this image in reverse, it also hangs inverted from how it was shot to create an even greater disorientation.

In a brochure that accompanies the exhibition, Misrach speaks about the beauty of the human form in play with the environment. Despite global warming, or the state of the world, or the war in Ukraine, Misrach sees this body of work as hopeful and a celebration of beauty and positivity. Though much of his work has been political and "heavy," here the lightness of the body in relation to the cliffs and the sea is seen as liberating.

Click here for Richard Misrach on its own page.

Rebecca Campbell
Young Americans
L.A. Louver
May 29 - July 20, 2024


Rebecca Campbell

A grid of fifteen portraits of teenage boys and girls painted in a multitude of styles fills the far wall of the gallery. Are these the 'young americans' of the exhibits title? Young Americans was also the title of the 1975 album by the late David Bowie and was seen as his breakthrough in the United States: it also contained the hit song "Fame". Thinking about Bowie and rock and roll and youth culture then —in comparison to now— it is possible to conclude that as different as things are in 2024, innocence is innocence, vulnerability is vulnerability, strength is strength and the young eventually grow old.

Two large paintings set the stage. Greenhouse and California Love (both 2023) are exteriors. In California Love, Campbell portrays a fruit tree surrounded by flowers. Behind a wooden fence are palm trees. In the foreground, colorful plants appear to dance in the magical light. This is the California dream. Although the painting is devoid of people, the human presence abounds — as gardener and appreciator of California's unique light. Greenhouse celebrates Campbell's excellence as a painter and as an observer of domestic life. Here she presents the family home — a green house with a balcony that is surrounded by plants and trees. A mix of styles inhabits the surface ranging from highly detailed renderings to blurred abstraction in addition to thick applications of paint. With Campbell, every stroke, gesture, area of color and expression is deliberate and purposeful. In Greenhouse, she allows three isolated figures— a painter on the balcony, a silhouette in an upper window and a shoeless youth seated on a wall at the edge of the homes back stairs to exist in their own worlds, connected and disconnected simultaneously.

This is evident in the eighty-inch square painting In Utero (2023) where a boy sits cross-legged on the floor. He has long hair and is wearing a t-shirt from "In Utero," the band Nirvana's 1993 album. He has dark red sneakers with white stripes and laces that formally relate to a red locker located behind him, as well as to the red edges of the paintings hanging on the wall in the room (that resembles Campbell's studio) behind him. His gaze is pensive, his face a melange of colored brush strokes with shadows and highlights that reinforce a dynamic, rather than static being.

Hollywood is a sign (2023) is a similarly evocative painting that features two young boys peacefully floating in a deep blue swimming pool. In the background is a reproduction of the iconic Hollywood sign set against distant hills. As the rectangular pool recedes, the incongruities of the scene and the location take shape. The boys are in a pool in the desert. Why is the Hollywood sign there too? The boy in the foreground rests his chin on the pools deck, his head leaning on his shoulder, his face partially in shade. He seems complacent and relaxed. Behind him, magically floating or perhaps just sitting in the shallow end is another boy in a lotus pose. They seem connected, yet alone with their thoughts.

In the diptych Wolf Moon (2024), Campbell extrapolates. A youth wanders through a stream at night. A full moon behind him illuminates the transparent fabric that envelopes him. Is he a dancer? A mysterious arm emerges from the drapery behind the main figure. Is it real? A dream? Spiritual? The beautifully painted image represents the freedom to express, to be whomever one wants to be dancing in the shimmering night.

In Between (2024) is a painting of two girls. One present and looking forward, one seen from behind and looking back at a distant city. Both are clad in an ornate red dresses that dissolve into dripping paint toward the bottom edge of the canvas. They sit above a freeway in what appears to be a cave or a bunker with an uneven hole in the cinder-block wall behind them. There is an aura of sadness and longing, though their gazes never meet. The focus is the space between— a silent freeway and an urban silhouette.

In Campbell's work dreams come to life. There is loss and celebration, desire and hope. Many of these subjects are Campbell's own children and their friends, so she can be simultaneously objective and subjective in their depictions. She extrapolates from her own life to create paintings that communicate more universally about what it means to be young in an ever changing world.

Click here for Rebecca Campbell on its own page.

Shawn Huckins
Zippers Short and Skinny
Richard Heller Gallery
June 15 - July 13, 2024


Shawn Huckins

Shawn Huckins is an exacting artist whose works often begin with recreations of American masters that he paints with uncanny skill and detail. His works are a lot more than faithful reproductions however. With each series he injects surprise, be it overlaid text or emojis within the painting, or the addition of actual woven fabrics. In an early series from 2011 he juxtaposed historical works with the now familiar shorthand of text messages. The title Zippers Short and Skinny — his current exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery — is a play on words found when re-reading “Leave Any Information At The Signal. Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages,” a book on Ed Ruscha. Huckins states, "The original phrase in the book was ‘Zippers Long and Skinny’, but since my show is about masculinity, I changed it to ‘Zippers Short and Skinny.’  It’s basically an innuendo for small male genitalia." In these pieces he "explores the complex phenomenon of masculinity within the societal landscape."

In some ways, Huckins' pieces also share a kinship with Vanessa Prager's recent portraits as her thickly impastoed paintings also reference historical works. Prager replaces the sitter's facial features with bouquets of flowers to create an unsettling yet evocative mass. While Prager's works are a feminist critique, Huckins is interested in an abject depiction of masculinity. The first works viewers encounter are paintings of seated male figures partially obscured by drapery. Portrait in Pink Satin Fabric (Joseph Sherburne after Copley), 2024 transforms John Singleton Copely's realistic portrait of Joseph Sherburne, a wealthy Boston merchant, by covering the face and half of the subject's body with soft pink fabric that whimsically flows down from the top of the painting. Huckins retains the deep blue patterned fabric behind the figure, as well as the floral decorations on his brown-robe and the frilly white cuffs that surround his hands. Portrait in Green Satin Fabric (Nicholas Boylston after Copley), 2024 similarly focuses on the depiction of green satin fabric that Huckins introduces into the scene.

The draw however is Richard Heber (after Copley), 2024. Huckins recreates the upper portion of John Copely's painting of Richard Heber painted in 1782 that pictures the nine-year-old boy casually leaning against a tree. In Huckins' version, the bottom of the painting has been replaced by tufts of colorful yarn that form a rug descending from the boy's chest and cascading onto the gallery floor. The Brown Boy (Thomas Lister after Reynolds), 2024 also begins with the recreation of a historic portrait— Joshua Reynolds' 1764 depiction of the young Thomas Lister, who later became the 1st Baron Ribblesdale. Again, Huckins presents a fragment of the painting, this time installed off kilter and resting on the floor where it connects to an array of colorful yarns that spill out like a shag carpet. Huckins brings out the colors in the sky, flowers and myriad hues of green, transforming them into an uneven grid. In these pieces, Huckins plays with ideas of masculine and feminine, as well as craft and fine art, to invite a dialogue that challenges traditional notions of male bravado.

Various Fabrics: Portrait of Thomas Abthorpe Cooper (after Harding), 2023 is an earlier work from Huckins' Dirty Laundry series. In this painting, he wraps the entire head, obscuring the face from Chester Harding's c.1822 portrait of Thomas Abthorpe Cooper with a turban of colorful and patterned fabrics. In describing these works he states, "We use cloth to conceal, but also to express, selectively, based on how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Of course, we don’t express all facets of our identity, some things we hold near out of habit, nature, or fear of ridicule. We all have dirty laundry, literally and figuratively. "Dirty laundry", the phrase, is defined as personal, or private affairs that one does not want made public as they would cause distress and embarrassment. "Dirty Laundry", the series, employs contemporary fabrics painted over traditional American portraiture to explore questions surrounding what, how much, and how well we share and hide."

These altered portraits, fragmented images of young aristocrats and effeminate hands emerging from silky fabrics challenge traditional notions of masculinity. Huckins presents images from the past in a new light and suggests that male bravado as depicted by American Masters was shielded the sitter's true identities.

Click here for Shawn Huckins on its own page.

Sidney B. Felsen
First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.
Getty Research Center
February 20 - July 7, 2024


Sidney B. Felsen

Gemini G.E.L. is a Los Angeles based print shop founded by Stanley Grinstein and Sidney Felsen that opened in the 1960's. Best friends and fraternity brothers at USC, they were also art collectors who wanted to work with artists and establish friendships. They joined forces with lithographer Ken Tyler and opened what was to become one of the most respected printmaking studios in the world. Over many decades, Felsen photographed the studio and the artists at work. It is his images and insightful documentation of the art that was created and the people involved at Gemini that is the focus of this evocative and historically significant exhibition.

Felsen's archive of more than 70,000 photographs are contained in the Getty Research Institute's collection and through the discerning eye of curator Naoko Takahatake, viewers can travel through time looking at images of a range of artists at work. While the list of artists includes those still working as well as some who have passed on — ranging from Claes Oldenburg to Richard Serra, Roy Lichtenstein, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Murray, David Hockney, Ann Hamilton, Julie Mehretu, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Tacita Dean and Analia Saban — what becomes apparent is how much they enjoyed what they were doing.

While questions about whether Sidney B. Felsen was or even wanted to be an artist surface, that is hardly the point. What Felsen did was create a visual history of a certain place as it grew and evolved over time. While there are numerous images of artists in the process of creation, there are also pictures of parties, adventures and just plain fun. The images are intimate as Felsen had the trust of these people. He was not an outsider looking in, but a friend and a peer of those he photographed. Gemini became an extended family.

Across the walls are not only images Felsen made documenting the artists and their printing processes, but also photographs of him with his family, as well as of the Los Angeles environment that he shared with east coast artists to entice them to come to L.A. Annotated calendars with notes and pictures illustrating the goings-on both at Gemini and in the city itself are personal and informational details that expand and inform the intimacy of the exhibition.

Noting the recent passing of Richard Serra, the exhibition becomes a trip down memory lane where viewers can smile knowingly at pictures of John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly and Elizabeth Murray and wonder what they'd be creating now, as well as delight in Gemini's embrace of younger artists working today like Julie Mehretu, Tacita Dean and Analia Saban.

The exhibition is not a history of the prints made at Gemini (nor does it claim to be), but rather is a celebration of the community Felsen and his pals created: one that continues to evolve and inspire to this day.

Click here for Sidney B. Felsen on its own page.

Jim Isermann
Wrapture
Pacific Design Center Gallery
May 2 - June 29, 2024


Jim Isermann

Primary colors and simple geometric shapes in different configurations can create complex patterns and dizzying experiences as exemplified by Wrapture a spectacular installation by Jim Isermann at the Pacific Design Center Gallery. Isermann has been creating and exhibiting colorful, hard-edge geometric works on paper and canvas for years. He also uses vinyl to create shapes that can be tiled to span large walls and become installations. When the paintings and vinyl decals come together, the whole becomes much greater than the parts, especially when the walls and the architecture of the space are integral aspects of the installations. Isermann's work has connections to Op Art as he is interested in the optical effects between forms and colors, however it goes beyond the formal to resonate on multiple levels. He brings together exacting precision and mathematical computation, craft, decoration, pattern, geometry and color theory to look at the relationship between high and low, intermixed with Queer identity and camp aesthetics.

It is difficult to separate the individual works from the installation here as the intricacies within the paintings extend to the array of patterns that serve as wall paper or backdrops. The entry wall of the exhibition is covered with orange decals consisting of four sections of a pill / jelly bean shape contained within a square. When tiled together, the oblong ovals join to create complex patterns across the wall. On the opposite side of this wall, an identical graphic — blue rather than orange — has been installed. Two variations of the painting Untitled (8,4,2) (2019) hang on the wall to initiate a give and take, back and forth dialogue between the paintings and their relationship to the pattern behind them. This "conversation" continues as viewers proceed up the stairs into the vast main space where they are bombarded with more wall decals and paintings.

Isermann covers one wall in metallic silver— these stickers/decals have excised circles and ovals that reveal the wall behind them. On top of this reflective surface are red, white and blue paintings: Untitled (hole painting)(1187) and Untitled (hole painting)(1587) both 1987. In Untitled (hole painting)(1187), Isermann builds a pattern around an empty square at the center of the work. Concentric squares in red, white and blue rotate a few degrees as they get larger and larger to form the rest of the painting. At first glance, Untitled (hole painting)(1587) appears to be identical, but in this piece Isermann alternates squares and circles without any rotation.

Each wall is covered with a different configuration of vinyl stickers that range from criss-crossing light blue and orange diagonal stripes to more complicated patterns of wider and thicker lines in different arrangements and colors. These vinyl backgrounds become infinitely repeating patterns composited together from multiple square or rectangle sections. From a distance the compositing is seamless, but up-close the individual segments can be discerned. Installed over these complex patterns are paintings created between 1986 and 2019.

The paintings contrast, as well as complement what hangs behind them and the juxtaposition often creates a kaleidoscopic effect in one's visual field. Isermann understands the complexity of color relationships and geometry and is deliberate with the oscillations and rotations of shapes within each painting. His surfaces are smooth and the edges between colors exact. What at first glance appears obvious and simple— squares within squares alternating yellow, orange, red and blue— as in Untitled (yellow 116, orange 1505, red 179, blue 2925), 2009 is in fact a mathematical sequence of colors and shapes that both curves and recedes into the distance. Untitled (0386), 1986 is a hexagon-shaped canvas with six triangular sections over which Isermann has outlined abstract petal shapes that are red or yellow depending on where they intersect with the two-toned blue background. But dissecting the geometry of Isermann's paintings is not the point. The point is to appreciate them for their formal beauty and enjoy the way they play off one another while marveling at their complexity and intricacy.

Click here for Jim Isermann on its own page.

Tony Cragg
Marian Goodman Gallery
April 26 - June 29, 2024


Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg is a British born, German based sculptor who was best known in the 1970s and 1980s for floor and wall based sculptures made from found objects. These were often plastic parts or toys organized and assembled by size and color across walls into human shapes or recognizable objects. In the 1990s, Cragg began to move away from works made from found materials and started to create more monumental sculptures that had dominant presences in space. These pieces were less conceptual and more about investigations into the physical properties of their materials.

On view at Marian Goodman Gallery are awe-inspiring free-standing sculptures created between 2018 and 2024. These are displayed as "families" within the gallery, allowing viewers to compare and contrast the physical properties of various substances and structures. Cragg has the uncanny ability to transform as well as personify bronze, steel, wood or stone into light, airy, organic shapes that appear to dance on their pedestals despite their weightiness.

The exhibition opens with the wooden sculpture In No Time (2018). This abstract form filled with intricate folds and layers of wood feels both human and other worldly. While the work wants to be appreciated from afar, it simultaneously demands close scrutiny as the smooth surface has been carved, molded and manipulated. Cragg's wooden sculptures are made by gluing together many pieces of cut plywood that are then ground down to form a smooth surface.

Multiple sculptures are titled Masks. The two dated 2021 are made out of Guatemalan green stone while the work dated 2023 uses bog oak wood. All three feel like compressed layers or odd shaped disks that have been fused together to resemble geographical strata. All of Cragg's works have dimensionality as they are created through an assemblage of two-dimensional forms. Somehow the lines and the individual shapes are retained while the sculptures blossom into space. They twist and whirl in unpredictable ways. The veins of the green stone and the dark wood give the works depth and texture. They do take on human characteristics and become unsightly masks without identifiable features.

Works entitled Incident (2023) are also exhibited together. These stainless or Corten steel pieces are looser and strangely expressive. Rather than being dense "blobs" for example, the stainless sculpture Incident (2023) is alien-like and hyper reflective. The curvilinear forms have mirrored surfaces and rise from the floor or from low pedestals like elongated and distorted human skeletons.

Vessel (2023) is a bronze sculpture filled with horns and holes. It resembles entangled and enlarged branches with softened thorns that surround shallow nests or hollows that penetrate the stoic form. Hedge and Stand (both 2023) are rusted Corten steel structures. Hedge is floor based and spreads out like a surreal hedge made of interlocking and overlapping organic forms, while Stand has the properties of a distorted silhouette neither male nor female, yet human-like nonetheless.

It is interesting to contemplate the trajectory of Cragg's sculptures and the relationship between small-scale, fragmented throw-away plastic shapes and the monumental presence of these later works. It is almost as if he has scaled up and refined the fragile aspects of the found objects, now transforming them into solid, robust forms made from materials most often used in contemporary and traditional sculpture. While the new works still explore the relationships between the parts and the whole, they are more concerned with materials and their formal properties and the complex methodologies needed to create them, than in any commentary or critique of the environment from which these materials come.

Click here for Tony Cragg on its own page.

Karla Diaz
Wait 'til Your Mother Gets Home
18th Street Arts Center
February 17 - June 22, 2024


Karla Diaz

Karla Diaz has been drawing since she was a child. The title of her current exhibition Wait 'til Your Mother Gets Home is something her aunt would say to her when she would draw on the walls of the family home. Consisting of 37 paintings and works on paper, that when seen together become a personal narrative about the many facets of Mexican American identity. Diaz combines figuration and abstraction to explore and revisit her memories of growing up in Los Angeles. In these compelling works, many of which have the feel of posters from the 1960s, Diaz places flatly rendered portraits and figures into abstracted landscapes and cityscapes. The pieces reference Mexican, as well as Mexican American traditions, in addition to depicting intimate moments with family and friends. The watercolor and ink on paper pieces are illustrative and rendered in vivid colors, whereas many of the paintings have more muted tones giving them a soft, dream-like quality.

On the buildings exterior walls outside the gallery are five colorful large-scale banners: each one a self portrait. One depicts Diaz as Frida Kahlo surrounded by a halo of red roses, whereas in another, Diaz wears a bright blue eye patch. In Self Portrait with Raised Fist she holds an image of a male revolutionary in front of her face. He has a raised fist and is wearing dark sun glasses. Self Portrait with Nopales Ears is more playful. Here, Diaz depicts herself with bunny ears shaped like green cacti.

Moving from exterior to interior, the works become smaller yet have similar impact. Installed in a line along the gallery walls, the images begin to tell a story that weaves through Diaz's life and relationships to familiar locations, be it the 99 cent store, a swap meet, a park or subway interior, or significant moments like when family members crossed the border. In one of the smaller spaces, Diaz presents an installation that pays tribute to the civil rights activist Rubén Salazar who was murdered August 29, 1970 on the day of the National Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War. Diaz not only paints a watercolor of the Silver Dollar bar, the location of his murder, (The Silver Dollar, 2021) but also includes a separate painting of his bloodied body (Rubén Salazar, 2023).

Diaz's style is quirky and illustrative. Her backgrounds are patch-work splotches or loose gradients of bright color — pinks, oranges, greens and yellows — that serve as the ground for her portraits and other scenarios. The figurative and narrative elements often merge with the background shapes and palette to create a layered effect that is more formal than content driven. Diaz's drawn lines emerge from these color fields to depict people and places with admiration, wit and intensity. For example, in Dona Juana (from the Swap Meet series (2023)), Diaz portrays a woman in front of a stall holding a shoe in one hand and a cell phone with a portrait of a child in the other. Her bright pink shirt is decorated with back to back exotic women with piled black hair, long eye lashes and extended tongues. Dona Juana stares at the viewer and smiles.

No Te Metas Con Mi Cucu (Don’t mess with my ass) (2022)) is an image of protest. Assembled together are portraits of women holding pro-choice signs in front of a court house juxtaposed with a colorful rendition of an older man wearing a suit and pink tie seated in a chair resembling the famous image of Huey Newton. While Diaz allows the forms and figures to overlap, the focus of the image remains intact. Although That Fire (2021) is acrylic on canvas rather than watercolor on paper, the intensity of the moment is deftly portrayed. Diaz tenderly captures the agony and dismay on a woman's face while flames engulf the building behind her. While The Fire is an image of pain and suffering, My Sleeping Beauty (2021) is an image filled with love, as different colored flowers surround a woman, perhaps helping to induce a dream state.

Diaz's seductive images tell personal, as well as universal stories. They are humble without being didactic, colorful and to the point. The pieces are about domesticity, as well as urban life while exploring how the two are interwined. As a Mexican American, Diaz draws from her heritage but also from the world that surrounds her. Her pieces fuse fact and fiction, dreams and reality to create narratives about her experiences growing up and living in Los Angeles.

Click here for Karla Diaz on its own page.

MSCHF
Art 2
Perrotin
April 6 - June 1, 2024


MSCHF

Quotation. Appropriation. Art about art. Using the works of others as a point of departure is hardly new. Throughout art history, artists have borrowed from, modified, erased and even copied pieces verbatim as homages or critiques. The list is long and includes a wide range of approaches. For example, Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman re-staged famous paintings as photographs, while Rachel Lachowicz, Deborah Kass and Elaine Reicheck have replicated works by their more famous male counterparts, often infusing them with a feminist agenda. The Brooklyn, NY collective MSCHF is a somewhat new addition to this diverse group of artists and while their work is as much about consumerism and consumer culture as it is about art, they play around the idea of readymades.

Coincidently, at the same time MSCHF is exhibiting works at Perrotin, pieces by Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery. Throughout her long career, Sturtevant produced copies of works by well known artists to challenge ideas of originality and in the current exhibition, there are exacting recreations of famous works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jasper Johns and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, as well as The Dark Threat of Absence (2002) where Sturtevant reproduced the jarring video by Paul McCarthy.

MSCHF's approach is more sardonic and tongue-and-cheek as they toy with art history and high and low cultures. While many of their projects are also commodities available at their online store, they are quite serious about their gallery presentations. This installation includes 249 reproductions of Pablo Picasso's tiny carved wooden sculpture, Le Poisson presented as a large grid on the wall like a choreographed school of fish. Titled Possible Real Copy Of Poisson By Pablo Picasso (all works 2024) this piece does contain one Picasso original. In another series based on the book Animorphs, MSCHF creates oil paintings where a classical sculpture transitions to a contemporary work as illustrated in JaguarKourosDavidCowBoyMan. Against a blurred landscape, the painting shows various Kouros sculptures that morph into Michelangelo's David and finally into Takashi Murakami's My lonesome cowboy. A similar transition occurs in Murakillendorf's Venus. Outlined in yellow, the painted reproductions morph from the Venus of Willendorf to Murakami's large busted sculpture Hiropon.

In the Botched Masters series, MSCHF starts with found 17th and 18th century religious paintings. They recklessly paint over these (possibly) valuable oils, obscuring faces and turning figures like Mary and Jesus into cartoon blobs, in essence destroying the original while creating new value. In AirBnB (Botched L'Adoration des Bergers), they cancel out the haloed Mary and replace her with an incongruous representation. Similarly, in Flower Boy (Botched Portrait de jeune garçon à la guirlande de fleurs), they obscure an 18th Century depiction of a young boy with a crudely painted and modernized rendition. These works are horrifying and humorous simultaneously.

Another art about art reference is Touch Me Sculpture One More Time, a large free standing sculpture in which bronze bodies in the style of Michelangelo and Bernini are entangled together on top of a pentagonal shaped white pedestal with an illuminated LED display with an ambiguous numerical readout. Bullets Fired Into A Wall By A US Veteran recalls Chris Burden's Shoot, and Met's Sink Of Theseus calls to mind both Duchamp's Urinal and Maurizio Cattelan's gold-plated toilet America, (2016) installed in a restroom at the Guggenheim Museum and later stolen from the Blenheim Palace and reportedly melted down.

Scattered throughout the exhibit are colorful Bootlegs, cartoony sculptures based on the boots worn by Astro Boy (a 1960s Japanese cartoon). Like disembodied figures situated randomly across the gallery, these over-sized resin boots sprout ungainly hairy legs. MSCHF's works are all about camp. They are ironic and seductive while in the know about contemporary art and popular culture. They also strive to challenge accepted norms about the art marketplace and conventions of art connoisseurship and consumption. The exhibition asks viewers to think about craft and digital culture, as well as expanded boundaries of what is accepted or acceptable for artists and for galleries.

Click here for MSCHF on its own page.

Kristen Morgin
My Love Must Be a Kind of Blind Love
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
April 27 - June 1, 2024


Kristen Morgin

Los Angeles based Kristen Morgin is best known for her delicate sculptures. More often than not, these works are crafted from painted unfired clay and are to scale tromp l'oeil renditions of books, album covers, games, toys and other child-like objects that are weathered and worn. No sculptures are on display in My Love Must Be a Kind of Blind Love. Instead, she presents large-scale detailed drawings for the first time These mixed-media pieces read as quirky assemblages of two-dimensional materials from a melange of subjects that are brought together to create fascinating narratives.

[Vibes Playing Softly...] (2024) is a large, horizontal, graphite and pencil work on paper filled with a detailed depiction of a giant bowhead whale that spans the composition. Centered on its back is a cartoon princess sleeping comfortably in the crook of the whale's spine. The giant crustation appears to be suspended by ropes carried by tiny flying birds towards the top of the image. At the bottom are a gathering of small silhouetted figures watching the scene unfold. A snake swims alongside the whale as they traverse a patchwork of taped together graphite textures. All of this "action" takes place atop graphite renderings of large film sprockets.

Different species of whales appear in two other images. In the sepia-toned The Puppet and The Whale or So Far Away, (2022) Morgin juxtaposes a spotted orca gracefully swimming in a darkened celestial space (it could be sky or sea) with two floating balloons, trying to get free of the chains that surround its fins. What appears to be a thin horizontal shelf crosses the top of the image on which rests a non functional puppet that could be a sleeping Pinocchio. In What the Whale Dreamt (2024) Morgin combines two different types of paper that are combined with ragged masking tape. The top drawing depicts a pencil sketch of a sperm whale on which rests a sleeping Snoopy drawn is a contrasting style.On another sheet of paper, hanging from strings attached to the whale's body, is an beautifully drawn abstract mandala/flower that transforms from a realistic representation to a grid of back and white pixels.Mo

rgin purposely collages elements and renders aspects of the works in different styles to give the works a patch-work effect. Through the combination of graphite drawings with masking tape and collage, the pieces feel as through there were rescued, magically reconnected and brought back to life. Similar to her quasi-broken ceramics, Morgin salvages forgotten moments and objects from the past to presenting them as cherished entities.

Her stream of consciousness works delight in random associations and strange juxtapositions that criss-cross genres and time. The "cutesie" aspects of the pieces are purposeful like in the tiny drawing I can Feel It In My Bones (2020) where Morgin illustrates a valentine holding skeleton. Vanishing Wild Things (2020) pays homage to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Here, a range of completed and outlined animals from the book share the space with trees and Nintendo-looking pixelated figures. Whimsy and magic are all pervasive in Morgin's works on paper. The drawings are delightful, unpredictable and imaginative. She seamlessly re-purposes and re-configures appropriated and invented imagery to make thoughtful mixed-media works that are infused with complex narratives and skillful reproductions.

In the back gallery is an exhibition of works on paper by Tom Knechtel that perfectly complements Morgin's drawings. Both artists imagine the ways animals and humans can interact and how what animals communicate when they take on human characteristics. It is a pleasure to see works by both these accomplished artists on view at the same time.

Click here for Kristen Morgin on its own page.

Daniel Gordon
Orange Sunrise with Flowers, Fruit, and Vessels
Nazarian / Curcio
April 20 - May 25, 2024


Daniel Gordon

Daniel Gordon is one of a number of contemporary artists who work within the parameters of "Constructed Photography." In addition to Gordon, some artists/photographers who work this way are Matt Lipps, Chris Engman and Thomas Demand. Constructed photographs are images created in the studio and shot from a particular vantage point. They use carefully created objects set on table tops, or made to scale so they cohere within the image to form a believable, though hand-crafted scene. Gordon has created unsettling Cubist-like portraits as well as still-lives that are assembled from different pieces of cut paper as tableaus and then photographed. In the exhibition titled Orange Sunrise with Flowers, Fruit, and Vessels, he presents both large-scale, colorful still lives as well as paper sculptures in the form of ceramic vases. The vases are a recent addition to his oeuvre and elucidate the complex process he goes through to construct his photographic works.

Presented in a line on white pedestals, Gordon's vases and vessels recall museum displays of traditional and classical pottery, however, his renditions are invented and entirely modern. These sculptures are made from carefully assembling cut-out shapes from inkjet enlargements to become three-dimensional collages. Checkered Vessel in Green (all works 2024) stands twenty-inches high and can be seen from all sides. It alternates rows of what originally would have been different colors of green ceramics divided by black lines of grout. Pitcher with Shapes is a white pitcher decorated with an array of geometric shapes all cut from enlargements and reassembled.

The sculptures on display are similar to objects reproduced in Gordon's photographs. Still Life With Figs and Oranges is a large image (74 inches high). Here, Gordon creates a table top display consisting of numerous vases and fruits organized on a table and shelf. Though the image is flat, the setting has dimensionality. On a purple shelf trimmed in bright green are both figs and oranges as well as two vases filled with plants that cast a shadow on the back wall of the scene. In the foreground is a rounded table on which sits random figs, figs in a bowl, a smaller vase without flowers and two oranges. What is fascinating about the image is that it is entirely constructed out of paper and each object is made by assembling photographic fragments. In this image, Gordon is attuned to color opposites as the orange vase casts a blue-purple shadow that has a red-orange outline giving the entire composition a Matisse-like aura.

Oranges with a Blue Crown of Thorns is a smaller composition that also plays with the relationships between flat background colors and assembled objects. Four different sized and shaped oranges, a vase with blue flowers, a smaller empty vase as well as a pitcher rest on a red shelf trimmed in cyan. Below the shelf is an orange plane — either the wall behind or the shelfs edge— and behind the still-life are colorful silhouettes that follow the contours of the vase and pitcher against an orange background framed with cyan. Aloe With Onions and Zucchini is also a collection of vases and vegetables, this time on top of a bright yellow table trimmed with green. Here, Gordon arranges onions and a zucchini in relation to two vases, one empty, the other containing an aloe plant. Again, these objects cast shadows onto the background, this time presented as a white void outlined in black.

Once one has a clear understanding of Gordon's labor-intensive process and the mental activity of de- and re-constructing are completed, the works can then be appreciated for their formal beauty, inventive color and curious scale-shifts. In the end, Gordon's still lives are not about perception, nor the illusionistic properties of photography, but rather they are abstract still-lives that are concerned with design, color and form. He delights in the activity of transforming a photograph of an object into a sculpture and then back into a flat image as he explores the relationship between the real and its reproduction.

Click here for Daniel Gordon on its own page.

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy
January - May 12, 2024


lunaluna

In Hamburg, Germany from June 4 - August 31, 1987, Luna Luna opened to the public. Conceived by Austrian artist André Heller, it was an open air museum billed as the "world's first art amusement park." Heller invited over thirty artists from numerous countries to participate including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Josef Beuys, Salvador Dali, Sonia Delaunay, Monika GilSing, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Rebecca Horn, Roy Lichtenstein and Kenny Scharf. After the exhibit closed in 1987, it was scheduled for display in the United States but, the story goes, Heller had disagreements with the handling of Luna Luna's American launch. This provoked years of litigation and landed the artworks (packed into 44 shipping containers) somewhere in the middle of Texas where they remained for many years.

Quoting from a Yahoo!Finance article by Suzi Coen (December 4, 2023) "an estimated 250,000 people visited the fairground in 1987. André Heller had hoped Luna Luna would then tour the world, but his plans fell apart. Three years later he agreed to sell the whole project to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, who had hoped to show it in San Diego. Because of complications, the plans were never executed and Luna Luna was moved to rural Texas in 2007, where it was left untouched for another 15 years. The creative director Michael Goldberg first discovered Luna Luna in 2019 and became obsessed with the project during the Covid pandemic. He then pitched the idea to Drake and his team. The crated artworks were purchased site unseen by Drake and his company DreamCrew and shipped to Los Angeles in 2022."

A downtown warehouse was secured, the crates unpacked and examined, walls built and painted so that the artworks that comprised the original Luna Luna could be seen once again. In early 2024 Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasyopened with great public acclaim in Los Angeles where it is scheduled to be on view through Spring 2024.

The difference between the original and the current iterations is experiential. In Germany, the display was outside. The rides functioned. The space was active. The atmosphere was like a party or a carnival. Here, in Los Angeles the project has been "museified." It feels more like documentation — objects and displays that can be viewed passively rather than actively — and in this sense, it disappoints. After being directed to the appropriate parking area, viewers enter a vast, darkened warehouse space. Once inside, they are given a map and told that there are numerous guides to answer questions about the exhibition. One can wander at leisure through two connected spaces while reading about the original display of the works, but able to see them only as static objects in this contrived setting. While each artist created a unique and meaningful piece for the 1987 showcase, they don't resonate in the same way today as they probably did then. Why is the dominant question. Is it because many of the artist have passed away — Beuys, Haring, Basquiat, Litchenstein, etc.— and we are now seeing their pieces in relation to their life spans and trying to contextualize them within their career trajectory?

What stands out? In 2024, immersive installations, technology driven works and digital displays are a given. While Salvador Dali's Dalidom one of the few structures that can be entered in the current iteration, is a geodesic dome and mirror chamber — for today's audiences, it is a selfie opportunity reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama's nfinity Rooms. Keith Haring's work was the subject of a recent retrospective at the Broad Museum (Keith Haring: Art is For Everybody May 27 - October 8, 2023) and although the murals and painted carousel he created for Luna Luna are fantastic representations of his iconic mark-making, todays audience is quite familiar with his work. The same can be said for Jean-Michel Basquiat whose quirky paintings and drawings were also recently on display in Los Angeles (Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, March 31 - October 15, 2023). In retrospect his Painted Ferris Wheel is quintessential Basquiat.

Missing from the experience are the crowds, the cheers and the sounds— as music was also an important component of many of the artworks. In Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, lights occasionally dim and then shine on the different pieces to shift audiences' attention through the space. Kenny Scharf created cartoony creatures that are presented here as stand-alone sculptures. Because the ceiling of the indoor space was too low to place other figures on top of a swinging chair ride with as they were originally, they sit forlorned nearby.

As conceived of and first presented in Germany, Luna Luna was a participatory spectacle. In Los Angeles, Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is a historic display with a few enterable installations, but for the most part functions as roped off exhibits along with plenty of documentation. To augment and highlight the original presentation, there are displays of artifacts, walls of photographs, as well as historical timelines to contextualize the artists and their works. Is Luna Luna fun? For sure. Educational? Of course. Innovative? At the time, yes. Worth the trip? Sure, because it gives Los Angeles audiences a chance to experience the artworks created for the 1987 event and to view long forgotten works, some of which are seminal pieces in these artist's careers. But also no, because it is expensive and ultimately a bit of a disappointment due to the hands off nature when compared to its 100% hands on original presentation.

Resurrecting Luna Luna was clearly a costly endeavor and while the installation feels like it could be in a museum, it came about through private funding and is costly to visit. To de-crate, restore, transport and then re-install the artworks took time and a huge team. It was an admirable effort and the organizers should be applauded. Is it an exceptional art experience? No, but as journey back in time and as a way to view what occurred in a specific place at a specific moment, it is worth a visit, despite the cost.

Click here for Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy on its own page.

Pat Steir
Painted Rain
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood
February 28 - May 4, 2024


Pat Steir

The point of departure for Pat Steir's exhibition Painted Rain at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and the color of the sky and sea, in contrast to the muted tones of New York. This aura permeates her current paintings and coincidently, the pieces (as they are filled with drips) also evoke the recent weather — the violent storms and torrential rains that have pounded the region this season.

Steir has been painting since the 1970s and throughout her five-decade career she has been celebrated for her large scale abstractions presented both as canvases and as site-specific wall drawings. Her works are often created by pouring and dripping buckets of paint from the top of a tall ladder. This allows gravity to dictate the flow of the colors. She began making drip paintings that resembled waterfalls in the 1980s— powerful and evocative pieces that relied both on chance (as drips and pours cannot be completely controlled) as well as Steir's innate sense of color. To create the paintings on view, she begins by covering the canvas with a solid color ground that still emits a glow through the work, although just the base layer. She next applies a grid of chalk lines that become a geometric framework or structure that contrasts the more fluid chaotic forms of the drips which are poured on top.

The background in All the Colors (all works 2022-23) is reminiscent of a twilight sky just before night that still retains an azure essence. The painting is divided in quarters by two white chalk lines that meet in the center of the canvas. Placed just above this intersection are six horizontal brush strokes that occupy the center and take command of the work. Orange, deep red, green, yellow red and light blue stand as elements of color in an otherwise barren ground. In Thin Air, she covers a cobalt background with textured layers that are a lighter tone of blue. Wide horizontal bands of red, white and yellow are painted just above the center and allowed to drip and meld together as they cascade down the length of the canvas toward the floor.

While the majority of the paintings explore the relationship between striations of color against a range of blue backgrounds, in Green on Top Steir covers a dark rust ground with overlapping stripes that drip down to become veins of intermingling green, orange and dark red. In Some Blues, the white chalk lines divide a deep red background into a grid of rectangles. Toward the center of the work, Steir paints thirteen separate horizontal lines that transition from light to dark blue to create the illusion of a gradient. In this piece, the lines do not drip or fuse together. Steir explores the tensions between texture and color here, as well as playful foreground and background relationships.

Steir's new works are a celebration of color— specifically the color blue. It is somewhat ironic to learn that eight years ago she was diagnosed with color blindness and learned she cannot see that hue. That being said, Steir still mixes her paints to maximize the subtle differences in this color and through an exploration of both gesture and chance has created a powerful and emotionally complex body of work. Her pieces are simultaneously a formal examination of the properties of color and paint, as well as an experiment in controlled chaos. These large scale paintings take their inspiration not only from color but also from nature (the flow of rivers or rain) and the fluids that run through the human body.

Click here for Pat Steir on its own page.

Clayton Schiff
Routing
Harkawik
March 1 - April 13, 2024

Paco Pomet
Last Adventures in High Res
Richard Heller Gallery
March 30 - May 4, 2024


Clayton Schiff and Paco Pomet

There is a strange affinity between the paintings of Clayton Schiff (at Harkawik Los Angeles) and Paco Pomet (at Richard Heller Gallery). Perhaps what ties them together is the unsettling humor in their debased presentations of human beings who are "off" in uncanny ways. Both also use quirky, limited color palettes.

For his exhibition Routing, Schiff presents medium sized oils on canvas in which isolated human-animal hybrids travel through urban and natural landscapes. The green figure in Enroute (2023) wears a pink tracksuit and seems fixed on getting to his destination as he (it?) approaches a labyrinth of criss-crossing pathways that intertwine as they recede into the distance. In Summer Screed (2023), Schiff presents a male figure (with a dog-like head surrounded by flies) wearing shorts, a tank top and sandals while sauntering through a quasi-desert— a space filled with dead birds, spilled liquids and dropped food items. Various tufts of green plant matter dot the acidy yellow-green ground.

While Enroute and Summer Screed are exteriors, paintings like Babble, Cleanup and Over There take place inside. A creature dressed in a blue robe with a long snout and a horse-like tail vacuums an unpopulated dimly lit hallway that curves off into the distance in Cleanup, while in Over There, a naked, pinkish green, short-tailed creature sits perched on a stool in the corner of a room and stares out an open window. Binoculars in hand, (he/it) gazes at dirt pathways lining the rolling hills alongside a distant shore. What he sees, or what he is looking for or at remains a mystery, as does the uncertainty of why.

Schiff's locations emit an aura of emptiness while his figures show an indifference to their situations. Within each scenario, Schiff hints at a need for connection that never seems to materialize — each character remains trapped or isolated within the confines of these barren invented places.

A sense of unease and disquiet also envelops Paco Pomet's paintings. His single hued mostly-monochromatic works (in tones of sepia, blue and gray) have a timeless quality and appear to be sourced from appropriated photographs from another era. These muted and carefully painted scenes are juxtaposed with jarring full-color cartoon characters or gestures that disrupt the tenor of the images while moving them from the believable and real to the "surreal."

In The Audition (all works 2024), a suited man sits at a piano with his arms poised above the keys, but instead of hands, Pomet paints a twisting coil of fat orange "spaghetti" extends from his wrists and globs all over the keys and up onto the piano like paint oozing out a tube. Three elongated beads of white cartoony sweat outlined in black float some distance from the man's head against the sepia toned background. Embedding offers a similar sense of "what is going on?" Set in what appears to be a 1950s or 1960s styled room, in this painting, a woman pulls a Murphy bed down from the wall. Caught between the wall and the mattress is a very surprised cartoony depiction of a distraught man.

There is an unsettling disconnect between the sketchy and impastoed brush strokes that define the woman and her surrounding verses the more illustrative style of the cartoon. While Poment's monochromatic palette recalls works by Mark Tansey, the seriousness of his compositions is thrown off base by the addition of unexpected elements be it alien light sources, cartoon characters or emojis. These humorous and witty works delight in rendering the "real" as "surreal." Pomet, like Clayton Schiff defamiliarize — they both create works that render the ordinary strange and in doing so change the way everyday scenarios and human interactions are perceived.

Click here for Clayton Schiff and Paco Pomet on its own page.

Allen Ruppersberg
25 Ways to Start Over
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
March 16 - April 20, 2024


Allen Ruppersberg

The works of Allen Ruppersberg can be applauded for their wit, intelligence and humor. Each project is conceptually savvy and visually engaging. In his latest exhibit titled 25 Ways to Start Over, Ruppersberg does not disappoint. The works are based on a set of questions or premises that engage with the concept of "starting over." Among the 25 ways of starting over prescribed within the pieces are the directives to: Change your name, Begin at the beginning, Do a self-portrait, Embrace nostalgia, as well as Count backwards from 100. Each suggestion becomes not only the title of the individual artwork but also appears as texts within.

Ruppersberg is an avid collector, reader and writer. Some of the works in this exhibition draw from his stockpile of "pulp fiction" books written by authors using pseudonyms. Others take their point of departure from Life: a User's Manual, Georges Perec's 1978 novel where the main character makes and later dissolves images fashioned into jigsaw puzzles. In the three large works inspired by Perec, Ruppersberg presents a large digital print mounted to plywood that features a combination of disparate ephemera: snapshots, drawings, posters, book and album covers and the typewritten title 25 Ways to Start Over, and a subtitle: for example, #20 Do a self-portrait (tic-tac-toe). For this piece, he combines nine appropriated images— old photographs, reproductions of statues, spin art, etc.— and overlays them with crudely drawn X's and O's so they become the background of a tic-tac-toe game.

Ruppersberg removes large shapes from each printed image — a figure, a head, a leg, as well as text bubbles like those found in comics — that become voids in the composition. The cut-out elements are hung on the wall or placed on the floor. While it is possible to realign the missing elements to complete the image, Ruppersberg is more interested in drawing attention to the absence than in the possibility of recombination. 25 Ways to Start Over (#13 Count Backwards from 100 (99, 98, 97, etc)) is a similar work that hangs alone in the back room. It is a large two-panel digital print filled with numbered fragments (from 99 to 1) taken from reproductions of works of art. Myriad associations and references are inferred but through Ruppersberg's deliberate ambiguity, his intentions are never revealed.

The standout in the exhibition is 25 Ways to Start Over (#14 Embrace Nostalgia. Get Out the Old VHS Tapes). Here, Ruppersberg has covered a wall from floor to ceiling with a mural collage of flattened old VHS tape boxes presented as an overlapping cacophony. This site specific piece complements four works all titled 25 Ways to Start Over (#3 Change Your Name) where Ruppersberg combines various pulp fiction novels by writers using pseudonyms (pierced with holes as they have been screened onto pegboard) with "real" books, drawings, album covers and miscellaneous found objects. On a nearby table is The Pseudonym Library of Allen Ruppersberg, a book that reproduces a number of the covers that appear in the works, in addition to providing biographical information on the "real" identity of the authors. It also includes an introduction by Al Reed (Ruppersberg's own pseudonym).

Vernacular as well as pop culture, as well as its nostalgic allure have always attracted Ruppersberg: be it trashy book covers and their titles, or outdated VHS tapes. In this presentation, he curates an ironic trip down memory lane, whimsically and thoughtfully connecting past and present. As in his other works, he considers them in relation to our current moment and weaves a narrative that juxtaposes these objects from the past with contemporary times and in this particular series, he contemplates the absurdity of starting over.

Click here for Allen Ruppersberg on its own page.

Ville Kansanen
Future Primitive
Marshall Gallery
March 2 - April 20, 2024


Ville Kansanen

Ville Kansanen is a Finnish multidisciplinary artist based in California whose works use digital photography to examine "transcendent aspects of the natural environment." He ventures into the desert — an ever changing expanse of barren land — equipped with camera and props and assembles sculptures that he documents over time. While there is a rich history of artists who work in and with the natural landscape including Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, as well as photographers who are interested in perception and representation who have documented interventions created to be viewed from specific vantage points like John Pfahl (1939-2020) and the contemporary Los Angeles based artist Chris Engman, Kansanen's interventions collapse time and space.

For Future Primitive, he has created works in situ at Coyote Dry Lake Bed near Barstow, California represented as digital photographs made by compositing layers of images taken over time. This allows the final photograph to not only align with distant mountains, the sun or the moon, but also to be both sharp and out of focus through shallow depth of field. For Landstones #1 (2024), he brings various materials including painted wood, fabric, earth and limestone to the gallery to create a site-specific sculpture similar to what he might construct in the desert. Here, medium size stones are bundled together and suspended within a wooden framework in front of a wall whose top half is painted black and whose bottom half is covered with brown desert mud. The suspended stones are likewise half black and half brown and when viewed from a certain vantage point, the rocks perfectly align to create a horizontal line that cuts across the wall. Having an actual sculpture in the gallery helps viewers understand Kansanen's process which is otherwise presented in the photographs.

Kansanen is drawn to the solitude, light and timelessness of the desert landscape. He is interest in creating sculptures and performances that he documents as they evolve and then presented as single images. In many of the works, the compositions emphasize the horizon line which is often bisected by wooden armatures holding suspended objects. For example, in Landstones #2 (2020), Kansanen inserts a vertical pole in the crackled ground that holds a cluster of rocks in position just at the horizon line, resembling the illusion in the gallery. The rock held in place in Mountain/Rock #1 (2018) rests above the dip in a mountain, perfectly placed so that it hovers just above the valley and surrounded by blue sky.

Kansanen also tracks the way the desert changes from day to night. He records the movement of the sun and the shadows it creates, as well as the differing shapes of the moon. In doing so, he thinks about the relationship between land and sky as well as light and dark. In Annular Eclipse Tracker Triptych (2023), Kansanen photographs from multiple angles a large circle inscribed in the sand that parallels the shape of the eclipse. In the left panel, the moon is a horizontal crescent and the parallel painted mark in the sand is a white semi-circle. In the center image, the white (painted) circle is complete to match the glowing halo where the moon now blocks the sun. In the third piece, the glowing moon is an upside down crescent and the mark in the sand appears at the bottom of the image as a deep brown line indicating his alteration of the landscape.

While Kansanen's images are formal studies that rely on perceptual acuity, they are also concerned with supernaturalism and the spiritual aura elicited by the desert. An image like Sky/Sun 06 (2016) is playful as it appears as if Kansanen is pulling clouds down from the sky, while photographs including Land/Earth #5 (2017) and Land/Earth #8 (2018) are eerily haunting as Kansanen evokes portrays of the supernatural. Having spent a lot of time in the desert, Kansanen has a reverence for nature and is respectful and cognizant of its vastness and unpredictability. His process begin with observation. He then creates interventions that are photographed in varying stages. The final images are about perception and reveal the how these interventions reflect both the magic and power of the desert. They celebrate the light and space in the desert, as well as the passage of time.

Click here for Ville Kansanen on its own page.

David Byrd
Nothing to Say
Matthew Brown Gallery
February 22 - March 30, 2024


David Byrd

David Byrd (1926-2013) was an artist living in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City who worked as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the Montrose, New York veterans affairs hospital from 1958-1988. Before that, he studied at the Ozenfant School of Art (NY, NY), but did not pursue a career in the arts upon graduation. Rather, he worked odd jobs in New York City and then in 1958 moved near Montrose, NY to work at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. At work, he began to observe the patients' daily rituals and routines, often making sketches during work hours. In essence, the patients became his muses.

During his retirement years, Byrd focused solely on his art and made drawings and paintings documenting his environs: both people and the landscape, as well as created works from his memories of working on the psych ward. In the final decade of this life, he began to chronicle his time at the Veterans Center, gathering drawings and textual fragments that described his experiences there and compiling them into a 218 page book. Many of these pages are on view in the exhibition.

Though not really recognized for his artworks during his lifetime, Byrd did have one solo exhibition in 2013 just before his death. In recent years, his work has found an audience and has been more widely exhibited and collected. Byrd painted because he wanted and he needed to. He regarded it as a meditative process and as a means toward self improvement. He states, "I tried to paint because I had the remote idea that it might serve me in my behavior to others." Looking at the works through the lens of need and self improvement, as well as direct observations of the sufferings of others, the images collectively not only document a specific era and place, but also the effect this work had on Byrd's psyche. His realistic scenarios were created with sketchy outlines and a soft palette consisting mostly of earth tones. They are compassionate and thoughtful, while also describing the horrors and suffering he witnessed.

This large exhibition — his debut in Los Angeles — is comprised of twenty-one paintings, eleven framed drawings from Byrd's sketchbook, as well as thirty pages from his handmade manuscript documenting his time at Montrose. The paintings are culled from different series and feature quirky landscapes and images representing his family, as well as patients at the hospital. In each, Byrd articulates a range of emotions, be they pain or pleasure. For example, in the oil on canvas Hell of an Evening (1992), three people are seated at a table in the center of a brown hued "room" that is otherwise mostly empty. A large woman has her back to us, another raises her fist in a fit of anger. On the left, a half naked man sleeps on a small bench. Two other male figures appear to be washing dishes at a sink located at the back of the room. An elongated figure in a blue coat or robe approaches a doorway on the right.

Feelings of distress and isolation are also captured in Patient Pondering (1995). Byrd depicts a receding interior space — a hallway or cell with a single light source. Five men are illuminated by this window. Closest to it, a man in brown pants and shirt with a green hat gazes into the distance, a patch of sun filling his chest. Behind him and further back in the room are the other men — two on the floor, one creeping against a wall and the last in blue silhouette toward the back. Each figure appears lost in their own thoughts, neither aware of nor engaged with each other. Other "hospital" paintings include Alcove (n.d.), Man With Mirror (1999) and Agonized (1970) where a man extends his body, splayed across a wooden chair, filling the composition like a hovering ghost with a clown- like, exagerated expression of agony emblazoned on his face.

Paintings like People at the Bar (P53), (1960), Pool Players (n.d.) and Sparring Partners (1954) fall more into the Social Realist tradition. Here, Byrd depicts the outside world, be it people playing pool, enjoying drinks at a fancy bar or gathering at a boxing match, capturing the everyday in a way reminiscent of Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn or Jacob Lawrence: stylized and illustrative simultaneously. As a painter, Byrd has a light touch. The works have a sketchy, drawn quality. His palette is sombre and his application of oils is subtle and washy rather than thick impasto.

In addition to these tender and captivating paintings, there are eleven framed, untitled pencil on paper drawings from Byrd's sketchbooks depicting interior and exterior scenes, as well as studies that juxtapose random fragments like in Sketchbook 5, p. 13, (n.d.) where he combines a woman in a swimsuit carrying an umbrella, a woman brushing her teeth, work boots and a man dressed in winter garb. His drawing style is both descriptive and expressive at once.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the display of pages (spread out in vitrines) from Montrose VA 1958-1988, a self made book that Byrd worked on from 1999-2013. Here, he recorded his impressions and memories of working at Veterans Center, taping his small sketches to pieces of construction paper and compiling them into a 218 page artist book/diary. In pencil and all caps, the texts describe Byrd's observations in the hospital. He recorded in depth the interactions between patients and staff, as well as the ways he saw the patients relating to the physical space. Many of the drawings in the book were later recreated as paintings and it is interesting to compare the original sketches with them.

Byrd had a facile hand and was able to capture intense and often outrageous incidents with compassion and tenderness. One page from the book depicts and describes showering. It is a colored pencil sketch of two naked men against the wall in a room presumably showering, joined by a third that is more monster than human. The text reads: "Asked what does the picture represent, I can't say for sure. An old man with water feeling good on old bones, a middle person I thought would make the picture better, and a soaped up third character that is momentarily unrecognizable."

Byrd's images of the Veterans Center call to mind the works of Henry Darger and Martin Ramirez, both prolific "outsider" artists. While Byrd had artistic training, his works mine similar content — the goings on in the minds of those experiencing psychotic episodes and the places designed to keep them safe. The witty, psychological, and compassionate body of work he left for others to ponder resonates long after viewing.

Click here for David Byrd on its own page.

Amir Zaki
Nothing to Say
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
February 24 - March 30, 2024


Amir Zaki

Amir Zaki is a Southern California based artist who uses digital photography to scrutinize the natural as well as the built landscape to make pictures in the documentary tradition that transform what actually exists "in the world." He begins by capturing his surroundings with a camera (sometimes also using a GigaPan, a device for stitching many digital images together into one). Using other digital tools, he transforms these images into something other than reality. At first glance, Zaki's photographic images often appear "normal", but upon closer examination something is off — added, subtracted or perhaps both — causing pause and reflection between what is pictured and what is expected. In his series On Being Here, (2022), Zaki architecturally skewed the perspective of piers. For Empty Vessels, (2019) his subject was skateparks where he manipulated the forms to emphasize their bunker like architecture and in Getting Lost, (2018) he illuminated and photographed trees at night, capturing them so they seemed to be in conversation with each other.

In his exhibit Nothing to Say, he presents two new series: Signs and Trees. The photographs in Signs feature outdoor commercial signage devoid of text, presented as architectural monumental structures that jut into the sky. The images that comprise Trees similarly tower into the sky against a variety of cloud filled backgrounds. Looking closely reveals isolated birds nested within the leaves or perched atop the branches.

Taking the title of the show literally — and Zaki's titles do direct the reading of his works — the signage without words does have "nothing to say." Beautician (all works 2023) is an altered Norms Restaurant sign where Zaki has digitally removed the letters— N, O, R, M, S— and replaced each of the original five white shapes that supported the letters with light hues ranging from yellow, cyan and magenta to a soft black. The newly colored and empty sign appears sculptural against the sombre yellow-gray sky (the way Los Angeles skies often appear at dawn or dusk). In the lower left hand corner, an airplane appears as a tiny spec flying out of the frame.

The Designer references a Modernist era, Art Deco style sign. Shot from below and looking up at an angle rather than straight on, the photograph features a white pole that rises from the bottom of the image. The pole is bisected by three ovals with orange fronts, above which is a large rectangular box filled with a delicate pattern of small orange dots to the left and empty space to the right where letters would have been. In The Painter, a rusted pole supports six rounded rectangles that at one time advertised a restaurant or business but in Zaki's rendering, the letters are gone and each rectangle has been filled in with a single color: red, green, light orange, cyan, off white and purple, becoming a geometric abstraction against a pale blue sky.

Zaki never depicts the ground or base of the sign, but rather presents them as flattened shapes against the sky. Once the words are removed, Zaki either fills the empty space — inside the signs structure— with sky or opaque colors. Although these signs no longer advertise places or things, they do communicate and engage not only with Zaki's past works, but with the history of art, as well as with the shrinking boundaries between photography and digital technologies.

In addition to the signs, Zaki also displays a series of photographs called Trees. The Trees are named after family members and could perhaps be thought of as portraits or tributes to those close to him. Like the signs, they are shot from below, have no anchors (ground or trunks) and enter from the bottom of the frame where they intersect with an image of the sky. In Dori, Zaki presents a tree with brown, rust and green colored leaves and peeling bark against a light blue sky filled with billowing pink-orange clouds. Sitting on a small branch on the left side of the picture is a solitary bird. Similarly in Mateo, Zaki includes a bird resting on a thin branch at the top of the tree. While it is hard to identify the species, perhaps it is the birds rather than the trees that Zaki is pairing with family members. Nevertheless, though these image are silent, it is possible to imagine the birds singing— perhaps even to the ones that populate the other pictures. Were the birds actually in the trees when Zaki shot the pictures? Probably not, but their presence gives the photographs a surreal aura. While a photograph cannot replicate a birds song, Zaki's juxtapositions, be it birds and trees or wordless signs still communicate. As the tree photographs represent an extended family, and the birds a focal point of each image, it appears that they and Zaki have "something," rather than "nothing" to say.

Zaki is a master at compositing— adding as well as erasing aspects of images he shoots— transforming the observable into something hyperreal, imagined and fantastical. Throughout disparate series, he has converted the natural world as well as the built environment into images and scenes that depict impossible, but believable places. He consistently transforms that which is objective into something subjective, beautiful and unexpected and this is what sets his work apart.

Click here for Amir Zaki on its own page.

Rachel Lachowicz
The Gravity of Color
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
February 3 - March 29, 2024


Rachel Lachowicz

Throughout her thirty-year career, Rachel Lachowicz has been celebrated for her inventive experimentation with non-traditional materials. In the 1990s, she began to use cosmetics— specifically eyeshadow and lipstick— to remake Minimalist forms created by iconic male artists such as Carl Andre or Donald Judd. Using a seductive combination of wax and red lipstick, her sculptures "feminized" these hard-edged works. Lachowicz also appropriated sculptures by Kurt Schwitters and imagery by Chuck Close and Andy Warhol, recreating likenesses of their pieces with grids of eye shadow containers. She also crafted geometric abstractions and pieces that recalled the works of California Light and Space artists with subtle colors of pressed eye shadow.

In her current exhibition The Gravity of Color, she presents a series of colorful geometric wall-based works. What stands out in these pieces is their imprecision and melding of hard and soft edges. Each work is comprised of small pressed-eyeshadow tins in large grids where each rectangular element is a two- or multi-toned section that creates the overall pattern when combined. Seen close-up and individually, each "container" is a tiny abstraction. Works like Deep Weave, Radiofrequency and Ocularity (all works 2024) pay homage to artists like Josef Albers and Victor Vasarely, whereas the yellow and white Pistil Stamen references the pollen producing parts of plants. The anomaly is the more diagrammatic It From Bit. In this work, Lachowicz combines different pastel colored diagrams of seemingly impossible three-dimensional shapes on a white ground. The title It From Bit comes from physics and "symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has... an immaterial source and explanation," according to Physicist John Wheeler.

While Lachowicz's latest eyeshadow pieces conceptually draw from scientific theory and optics in an attempt to "make sense of the systems and laws that define our existence," they are first and foremost formally elegant and visually dynamic works that demand attention and close examination. While still drawing from art history, there is real visual pleasure in looking at the disparate pieces contained within Radiofrequency or comparing and contrasting the color circles and backgrounds in Ocularity.

Two large sculptures occupy a back gallery: Packets of Light (Yellow Field) and Granularity of Space. In these more confrontational and flashy works, Lachowicz has welded together hundreds of eyeshadow tin plate pans (powder coated yellow triangles in Packets of Light and bright-blue circles in Granularity of Space.) Again, Lachowicz draws from past artistic movements — in this case the "Fetish Finish" group prominent in southern California in the 1960s that included artists like John McCracken, Larry Bell and Ron Davis. Their abstract, non-objective works often had a glossy, slick machined surface. Where Lachowicz's Cell Interlocking Construction from 2010 re-interpreted Schwitters' The Merzbau with plexiglas boxes filled with pigment, these new works have no specific art-historical referents and emanate more from her imagination. That being said, both pieces have wave-like auras and allude to the climate and surf culture in Southern California.

Hardcore, Core and Legal Whip are monochromatic wall works made from a combination of lipstick and oil paint applied to the surface as thick gestural marks to create an impasto effect with the appearance and consistency of cake frosting. Once again, Lachowicz combines her materials in surprising and new ways to create the unexpected. While many of Lachowicz's earlier works had clear art historical referents and could be easily placed in a canon of feminist critique of the male-dominated art world, these new works are more nuanced and personal, while being inspired by more existential and scientific ideas.

Click here for Rachel Lachowicz on its own page.

Lucia Engstrom
Lovers & Dreamers
Von Lintel Gallery
February 3 - March 23, 2024


Lucia Engstrom

Lucia Engstrom's enigmatic works combine textiles and photography. By adding patches of thread she changes the overall tenor of the landscapes depicted in her images. Engstrom's use of embroidery differs from other artists like Maurizio Anzeri, Julie Cockburn, Flore Gardner or Diane Meyer who stitch on top of small-scale photographs essentially drawing over what is below and turning the surface into pixels or embellishing the image with decoration. Engstrom's amalgamation of different types of hand dyed threads (colored by the artist to match elements within the photographs) have more in common with works by artists such as Channing Hansen who collects and dyes raw fleece, spins it into yarn and assembles this material into complex knitted forms recalling open weave abstract paintings.

In older series like Diffused Landscapes (2013-2018) before Engstrom added embroidery to her pictures, she explored the relationship between water and sky to present the natural landscape as over-saturated and abstracted blurs hovering above and below the horizon line. To create the images in her Lovers & Dreamers series, she uses a needle and organic threads like silk, mohair and wool, piercing the printed cotton rag paper to augment specific areas of the photographs with sewn textures that give the images a sculptural quality.

In a work like Baltic Blue (all works 2023), tufts of blue and green threads of varying thickness emerge out of the landscape at the horizon line. The base image is an extremely blurred yet brightly colored landscape filled with a gradient of blue— the sky and sea— that surrounds a fuzzy line of green-brown hills. The embroidered shape covers the center of the composition to become something at once derived from the image in terms of color, yet completely alien from it in material and texture. This constantly moves the eye from seeing the contrasting forms and textures apart from one another to integrating them.

In Blue Storm, wave-like shapes of yarn cover an image of cascading waves as they hit the shore. The deep blue sky is filled with ominous clouds suggesting an approaching storm. The sewn shapes dance in the foreground (and into the white border of the paper) as if a close-up of the turbulent sea. Mirage is more subtle. Here, Engstrom depicts a group of small tree-filled islets surrounded by water and sky. Like in the other images, Engstrom portrays the landscape as a poetic expanse of either bombastic or subtle colors. White threads appear like soft mustaches or wispy clouds disrupting the calm sea as they hover above the surface of the print and move beyond the borders of the image. Some of the plant life in the lower portion of the photograph has also been stitched over, adding texture and dimensionality.

Home: Blue/Yellow is more reminiscent of Engstrom's previous work. It pictures a brightly lit and out of focus wooded area filled with blue and green trees that are backed by soft yellow leaves and patches of white sky. This over-saturated image is bracketed by clusters of embroidery that approximate the colors and shapes of the landscape. These interventions extend beyond the edges of the printed image into the white border area and break down the confines of the rectangle, frequently spilling the relief of the embroidery off of the flat image and into the viewers’ space.

Echo (Burnt Orange) has the most aggressive application of stitching. Atop a sharply focused black and white seascape split in half — sky at the top and water at the bottom — is a bulging shape made from a melange of orange, yellow, mauve, gray and purple threads. Like the shape in Baltic Blue, Engstrom spins the overlay emerging out of the photographic image from her imagination. It may begin within the confines of the photograph, but the completed image transforms it to a dramatic (as is the case in “Echo (Burnt Orange”) or more subtle result. The tensions between what is first photographed and subsequently added, as well as the relationship between the flat printed surface and the imprecise or gestural dimensional stitching, is what gives these works their intrigue and appeal.

Click here for Lucia Engstrom on its own page.

Jose Dávila
Photographic Memory
Sean Kelly
January 20 - March 9, 2024


Jose Dávila

Jose Dávila is a multidisciplinary artist based in Mexico whose conceptual practice spans numerous media. While he creates paintings, works on paper and sculpture, as well as public art, he is best known for borrowing (or appropriating) from other artists. He has replicated Donald Judd's Minimalist forms using cardboard or shipping containers and in his "cut-out" series, he removes the key element from reproductions of iconic architecture, popular culture and arts such as Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso and Richard Prince.

Dávila began his cut-outs in 2008 and in this ongoing series, removes artworks or architecture from an image to leave a white void, often in the center. Although many artists have worked with erasure and absence from Gordon Matta Clark to Robert Rauschenberg and John Baldessari, Dávila's technique was inspired by the Mexican folk-art tradition of papel picado or "Cut-Paper," which he applies to contemporary art to explore the power of negative space.

For the exhibition Photographic Memory, Dávila appropriates specific images from Richard Prince's "Cowboy Series" that were displayed for the first time at the Los Angeles Museum of Art in 2018. To create his "Cowboy Series," Prince rephotographed and cropped expansive color image of Western landscapes filled with cowboys riding horses, many of which were used in the all pervasive Marlboro cigarette advertising campaign. Prince presented these appropriated pictures as his own artwork— a strategy that was prevalent in conceptual based art from the 1980s and 1990s. In Dávila's reworkings, he not only scales up Prince's originals, but also carefully removes the horses and riders to leave a negative space in the two-dimensional plane of the print. This void becomes the focal point of the new image.

In 2008, Dávila created "Buildings You Must See Before You Die," a series of fifty photographs where he removed the central subject from images of architectural landmarks around the world and presented them in a large grid. With the buildings removed, the focus of the images became the surroundings as well as the space around them. He has also cut away important elements in paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Pablo Picasso. In Untitled (Femme d'Alger) (2016), a series of photographic works that included thirteen variations, Dávila sequentially removed different aspects of Lichtenstein's work until all that was left was its linear structure.

There is something kitschy, ironic and fun in many of Dávila's cut-outs. For example, it is hard not to smile when looking at the image of a woman staring up at a huge phallic shaped void from Dávila's multi-panel piece a chronological history of sculpture (2013), or marvel at the blank spiral void in a reproduction of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

What stands out in Photographic Memory is the conversation about the history of appropriation with Prince as the master appropriator, for better or for worse. The works pay homage to a strategy of art making while also positing that these new creations are uniquely his own. Each Untitled (Cowboy) (all works 2023) in Photographic Memory is a large-scale archival pigment print, either a single image or a diptych based on Prince's originals where Prince removed pages and spreads from magazines keeping the torn edges and Scotch taped centers. Because Dávila's images are reproductions of reproductions, they have a prominent dot-screen. Dávila simply cuts away (though not conceptually simply) the cowboys to leave the landscapes that surround them. This cut-out space casts shadows on the wall seen through the clear frame. The missing image is filled by the surface of the wall and a new dialogue ensues. Devoid of context, the Untitled (Cowboy) images feel incomplete. However, when seen and contemplated in relation to the history of appropriation and Dávila's own body of cut-outs, they further the endless cycle of reproduction and continue the art about art conversation.

Click here for Jose Dávila on its own page.

Catherine Opie
Harmony is Fraught
Regen Projects
January 11 - March 3, 2024


Catherine Opie

In Harmony is Fraught, Catherine Opie displays photographic images shot over the entire span of her career. She has been photographing domestic spaces, friends and family, the urban landscape, acts of protest, as well as the gay community since the late 1980s and in this expansive exhibition of more than sixty images that have never been publicly displayed, the specificity of her points of view becomes even more evident.

The exhibition opens with a wall of small, square, framed black and white photographs, some from the mid 1990s, others like the portrait of Stanya and Harry is from 2005. In these intense images Opie captures not only the love amongst the individuals depicted but their openness and trust of her, the image maker, exposing their vulnerabilities and personalities. In these photographs the setting was controlled as most were shot in a studio against a neutral white / gray backdrop.

Both color and black and white images are on view and while they are not arranged chronologically, the installation is grouped somewhat thematically with occasional one-offs or anomalies that reference both well known series such as 105 Freeway (1994) a large-scale black and white print of the empty 105 freeway which was constructed in 1993 and more singular images like 6th Street Bridge Construction (2022), a color photograph documenting the bridge under development.

A few photographs resonate personally — Tony Greene's Studio, September 12, 1990 — a picture of postcards and image fragments on the wall of her friend and late artist Tony Greene's studio around the time he passed away from AIDS, as well as beautiful early portraits shot in the late 1980s and early 1990s of Richard Hawkins, Judy Bamber, Bill Jones, John Greyson and Matias Viegener, artist friends and CalArts professors.

Opie's sensitivity to her subjects dominates in these intimate portraits and while she is better known for her documentation of figures in the S&M scene, gay bars and queer domestic spaces, it is the less bombastic, more subtle images of those close to her that resonate and illustrate a broad sense of community. The exhibition does include numerous nudes — some like Gay Pride Day or Yes Ma'am are overtly sexual, while others like Pam shaving (all 1990) depict a private moment now made public.

The never before seen video Making of Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) is a thirty-one minute documentation of the making of one of Opie's most iconic images — a color photograph of the artist, shot from behind against an ornately patterned deep green fabric that depicts her back which has been incised with a crude, childlike drawing of two women holding hands under a cloud and next to a simple house. The image is "quintessential" Opie — rough and tender simultaneously. The hard to watch footage documents the process of slicing her back with a scalpel, wiping off her blood and washing her back with antiseptic— refusing to mask the pain while acknowledging the pleasure of the process.

Opie is unabashed about her personal life and these images reveal conflicts as well as triumphs. Throughout her thirty-year career she has faithfully documented a wide variety of subjects — from intimate moments with her son or lovers to incidents of street violence, urban construction as well as destruction and the joy of letting go and dancing in a club. To her credit, she has refused to be pigeonholed as a certain type of photographer and this has allowed her the freedom to traverse the world photographing that which appears before her. This heartfelt exhibition attests to her commitment to show the world as she sees it and how it is.

Click here for Catherine Opie on its own page.

Nathan Vincent
Teach a man to ...
Walter Maciel Gallery
January 6 - March 2, 2024


Nathan Vincent

Two installations featuring crocheted or knitted sculptures by Nathan Vincent are on view at Walter Maciel Gallery: Locker Room (2011) and Let's Play War (2015). In Locker Room, Vincent replicates a life-size typical male gym changing room equipped with two rows of lockers and benches surrounded at either end of the back room by three urinals and three showers, all to scale and tenderly crocheted, giving the hard-edged objects a feminine aura. Interested in contradicting stereotypical gender associations, Vincent offers an altered sense of masculinity— one that is softer and gentler than the norm. Though no longer functional, the objects are placed amidst institutional blue/green walls to further the illusion of a realistic space. The piece is simultaneously beautiful and unsettling.

Despite his mother's reluctance to teach him this craft, Vincent's interest in needlework began when he was young. In college, he began embroidering his painted canvases and eventually transitioned out of painting to fully embrace yarn as a medium for art making. For the larger works, he crochets around armatures or begins with foam and builds on that.

In conjunction with Locker Room (which went on view in November, 2023) are miscellaneous "soft" yarn-objects in the front room, as well as evocative pieces collectively titled Let's Play War, originally commissioned by the Bellevue Arts Museum (WA), where it was shown in 2015. Here, Vincent presents figurative sculptures covered in green or tan yarn based on the iconic small-scale children's plastic toy soldiers. Approximately enlarged to the height of ten-year-olds, these figurines are positioned in acts of play (or war) acting out all too familiar scenarios. Some climb the walls, others recoil from attack. Meticulously crafted, Vincent faithfully replicates the subtle details of the readily available plastic soldiers using yarn.

Continuing the theme of war are other objects scattered throughout the space — Don't Make Me Count to Three! (2015) is comprised of piles of crocheted sticks of dynamite with a detonator, Joystick (2011), as well as Threat II pink, grey, teal (2017), a soft pink and teal hand-grenade innocently placed on a small shelf that calls out: Touch-me, pick me up, see if I am no longer a danger.

The works on view pose questions: What is a weapon? What connotes power? (How) can weapons and symbols of power become inert? Vincent is interested in merging masculine and feminine tropes to challenge accepted norms using what is often considered a "woman's" craft to make his artworks. The soft-sculptures on view are impactful as well as cuddly. It is ironic to think of hugging a crocheted soldier or hand grenade as one might a teddy bear and Vincent's works allow for that dichotomy and intrigue. While the pieces from 2011 and 2015 still resonate (almost ten years after their creation), there remains a curiosity about Vincent's current projects and where he has gone from these powerful and thought-provoking pieces.

Click here for Nathan Vincent on its own page.

Krista Svalbonas
What Remains
Marshall Gallery
January 20 - February 24, 2023


Krista Svalbonas

Recent photographs from Krista Svalbonas' Displacement series are on view in an exhibition titled What Remains. These laser cut pigment prints fuse black and white photographs of facades of buildings shot during her travels to Lithuania, Latvia and Germany (the birthplaces and early residences of her parents) with appropriated texts culled from personal letters from other displaced residents. Similarly, in her What Remains series more post-industrial buildings are juxtaposed with decorative patterns that fill the space around the structures.

As a child of immigrants, Svalbonas "was always interested in ideas of home and dislocation." Researching, retracing and imagining her parent's origins amidst the turbulent political climate imposed upon them and their subsequent journey away from their homeland led her to Displaced Person Camps in Germany where refugees fleeing the Baltic States spent the years after WWII awaiting permission to emigrate to the United States. Through rigorous archival research, Svalbonas located numerous camps and traveled to Germany to document those that remain. Today, the buildings give little indication of their prior use or those who once inhabited them.

In her Displacement series, Svalbonas describes the dwellings as "impersonal structures appropriated from other civilian and military uses." Photographed in situ they are printed in desaturated tonalities where the architecture fills most of the frame. Within the computer, Svalbonas collages these images with texts from letters she discovered that were pleas for asylum sent by refugees to governments in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. These words are typeset in dense overlapping rows that span the entire surface of the images and cover the buildings. The digital collages are printed and then fed into a laser cutter that etches the spaces between the letters to create an intricate, lace-like texture where the sky and foreground surrounding the buildings dissolve into a pattern of barely legible words.

Lauingen (2022) depicts a building in the town which is located in the district of Dillingen in Bavaria, Germany. The three-floor structure appears to be a traditional European residence with numerous windows, nicely landscaped and inviting. This contemporary image offers little about the buildings past. To provide context and content, Svalbonas overlays the photograph with a dense texture of words to create an evocative and unsettling juxtaposition. Because the condensed, overlapping type fuses with and disappears into the building, it is not possible to read the letter in its entirety, though the salutation "To Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt" is visible in the upper left corner of the image. Another plea appearing in the image Geisligen (2022) begins, "We Baltic Women in exile..." This text accompanies an image of a friendly treelined street with a variety of homes. The photograph representing Hamburg is a multi story apartment building apparently undergoing renovations as scaffolding is situated against the facade. The text reads: "June 1947... To the [...] board of Human Rights ..." Although only fragments of the letter are clear, the content and urgency is evident in contrast to the calm and well composed architectural photographs.

With these delicate and mesmerizing works, Svalbonas investigates notions of memory as well as displacement as an attempt to retain and preserve a certain history before it disappears. In a recent interview, she stated "Each of these layered pieces becomes a puzzle I am struggling to complete before the history is lost forever, a composite of my own experience and the fading memories of my parents and their generation. My goal is to give voice to this near forgotten history that also speaks to the impact of contemporary forced migrations."

In addition to her Displacement photographs, Svalbonas also presents a number of works titled What Remains (2021-2022). These images juxtapose black and white photographs of imposing Soviet architecture from the Baltic regions with complex and delicate textile patterns from traditional Baltic designs. There is a sharp contrast between the concrete, industrial architecture and the geometric cut-outs culled from folk-art patterns, which were often used for mittens, scarves and table cloths as well as curtains. The voids in the prints that were removed by the laser cutter show a slightly burnt golden residue that references the past. According to Svalbonas, this work "examines the ways in which people are shaped by their environment, and how they can rebel against it to preserve their identity and culture."

These images couple objective photography (like the Bechers) with archival research that stems from personal stories. Seen together the photographs from both the Displacement and What Remains series speak to both the present and past. The works intelligently and gracefully integrate ideas of home and dislocation with architecture and design.

Click here for Krista Svalbonas on its own page.

Katrien De Blauwer, Ken Graves, and Kensuke Koike
Fragmented Lucidity: The Art of Collage and Photomontage
Rose Gallery
December 9, 2023 - February 17, 2024


Fragmented Lucidity: Katrien De Blauwer (l), Kensuke Koike (c), Ken Graves (r)

Defined as a technique of assemblage to create a new whole, collage most often refers to visual works. It has a rich political, as well as aesthetic history. When the term collage or photomontage is mentioned, numerous historical artists and movements come to mind: Hanna Hoch (Dada), John Heartfield (German political montage), Picasso, Braque (Cubism) and El Lissitzky (Constructivism). Fragmented Lucidity: The Art of Collage and Photomontage at Rose Gallery features work by Katrien De Blauwer, Ken Graves and Kensuke Koike, three contemporary artists who excel in the making of collages in unique and unexpected ways.

Self described as a "photographer without a camera," Katrien De Blauwer is a Belguim based artist who creates small-scale collages that feel as if they come from another time. She often juxtaposes a few fragments culled from old magazines and newspapers. These are casually cut, though not with straight lines, and often contain large areas of a single color. In Forces 4 (2022), for example, a clipping that features the top of the head of a woman with brown hair, shot against a deep orange ground is placed below a black and white photograph of rolling waves in a turbulent sea. The top of the collage is a rough edge of cardboard or backing that suggests a mountainous shoreline. Many of De Blauwer's collages feature images of women, in some instances clothed, in others nude but never overtly sexual. Rather, she uses the human body as a compositional device similarly to the way she incorporates objects, as well as large areas of color. Each fragment is a formal, design element that may also trigger memories through juxtaposition. Single Cuts 133 (2018) is a collage made up of three photographic sections bordered by light backing paper. In this image, De Blauwer crops a black and white magazine or book photograph of a woman wearing sunglasses whose arm rises up toward the top of her head to block the sun. She cuts and rearranges it so the upper torso is positioned above the top of her head. Her face is missing entirely from the collage.

The cutting and repositioning of body parts and faces is also a methodology for the Japanese artist Kensuke Koike. Koike often begins with found vintage photographs like old studio portraits or antique cartes de visites and carefully removes aspects of the scene or the people depicted within the image and replaces the extracted elements with different parts taken from the same original. Say Cheese (2020) is a photograph of man and woman about to embrace: their lips approach one another's. Koike has removed a rectangular section of the image around the mouths of both the man and woman, switching their lips. The result is unsettling and absurd. In Traveler (2020), Koike cuts away the outlines of two overlapping squares that intersect the face and shoulders of a seated man from a vintage sepia toned portrait. He turns each square 90 degrees (one clockwise, the other counter clockwise) before re-inserting them to transform a banal portrait into an abstraction. The splitting of a head or full body in half or thirds, or the displacement of certain facial features are alterations that Koike employs in many of his collages. It is hard to believe that such seemingly simple maneuvers would so significantly alter the tenor of the image but they do so in striking ways. His surrealist images have lasting power.

Ken Graves' witty and often ironic collages draw from a variety of source material ranging from found photographs to magazine images. Through inventive compilation and juxtaposition, each work becomes a self contained narrative that offers new interpretations of pop culture. The collages on view were created between 1976 and 2015. The earliest image — Putting Them Out of Their Misery (1976) is a small black and white work, just over 3.5 x 4 inches depicting a range of mangled hard-back chairs suspended from the ceiling of a well lit living room. In the foreground, a man sprays one of the chairs from a can, suggesting that either the spraying or hanging will put the chair "out of its misery." The Home Movies (1986) is a color collage of elderly, people in fancy dress who are intently watching a movie being shown in their home. The screen is placed on a woven rug and takes up the lower half of the composition. Facing the viewer, the back-side of the screen transparently shows a heavily tattooed man from behind. Squash (2011) is a surreal montage in which a seated man wearing a suit appears to be steering a large orange squash from which golden drapery tumbles. Graves' collages allow for playful free association where the viewer can invent whatever narrative they choose from disparate elements. While collage has come in and out of vogue over the years, these three artists illustrate the various ways it continues to resonate and remains a go-to-medium.

Click here for Fragmented Lucidity on its own page.

Hector Dionicio Mendoza
Buscando Futuro / Searching for a Future
Luis de Jesus Los Angeles
January 13 - February 17, 2024


Hector Dionicio Mendoza

In Buscando Futuro / Searching for a Future, Hector Dionicio Mendoza presents mixed media floor and wall-based sculptures. The overarching theme of migration and the various ways both people and animals move from place to place is both subtly and overtly communicated. Through the individual works, the installation itself becomes a journey of discovery, place and sense of self as articulated through the sensual assembling of unusual yet commonplace materials.

It is impossible not to be immediately drawn to Leaning, Holding, Pushing (2020-2023) a gigantic figure and its shadow sculpted from among other materials, tree bark, wood and cardboard. The oversized man leans against a gallery wall, his arms extended to support his body in a position of submission that resembles someone being arrested. To the right and slightly below the sculpted figure is his flattened silhouette painted with stenciled abstract lines and floral shapes that is flush with the wall. The three-dimensional body was created by assembling numerous pieces of bark and cardboard and appears surreal and mechanical, alien and definitely not human, yet sympathetic rather than threatening.

Many of the works derive from Mendoza's experiences of the border between the United States and Mexico, as well as and the politics and narratives intertwined with borders and border crossing. This is most evident in Familia Universal / Universal Family, (2021) a spray paint on wood panel wall work that depicts five abstracted figural silhouettes presenting people of different ages and genders on the move. The leader is a woman, followed by a man with a baseball hat facing backwards who is supporting a one legged man also wearing a baseball hat. Last in the sequence is a pregnant woman holding hands with a young girl who carries a backpack. The work references the generic immigrant crossing highway signs, yet is much more nuanced and evocative.

While sculptures alluding to individuals with their implied stories dominate the exhibition, Mendoza also includes numerous images of animals such as Perros Callejeros / Street Dogs, (2024) and Beast of burden, jackass / Pinche burro, asno, (2023-2024). Beast of burden, jackass / Pinche burro, asno, features an incredibly heavy load piled high on an almost life-size silhouette of a donkey. Towering up the wall, it is an obvious burden to an animal whose lower legs and feet have been transformed into human body parts. Mendoza seamlessly juxtaposes two- and three-dimensional aspects to give the flattened animal both physical and psychological depth.

A more whimsical piece — When I dream, I fly / En mis sueños, yo vuelo, (2023-2024) is situated in the center of the gallery. Here, a figure wearing a ratty olive green "hoodie" arches back on a home-made skateboard with bright blue wheels. The feet-less rider's legs are attached to the skateboard and he has long blue feathers instead of hands. In addition, feathers also hang below his outstretched arms. His face is comprised of mirrors and glass and is nested inside the tightly drawn hood. The sculpture references "dreamers": those undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and whose immigration status remains in limbo.

In his pieces, Mendoza incorporates found materials, as well as his own concoction of "ethnic bread" — a melange derived from his study of global flatbreads that he molds into different shapes and body parts. While the finished sculptures have an ad hoc look, they are also precisely crafted to carefully integrate abstract and representational elements. The works in the exhibition allude to unbalance and uncertainty. While hopeful and majestic, Mendoza has created a suite of sculptures that suggest stories about hopes and dreams and loss and the myriad issues facing migrants and refugees in all parts of the world.

Click here for Hector Dionicio Mendoza on its own page.

Sarah Conaway
Interior Castle
The Box
December 2, 2023 - February 3, 2024


Sarah Conaway

Sarah Conaway presents ten digitized Super 8 mm films in the large darkened space of The Box, as well as a series of twenty film-stills installed in a separate room at the back of the gallery. Derived from the moving images, the stills encapsulate an instant from the larger whole. The films are all screened at the same scale from projectors meticulously installed on white pedestals. Each is a fragmentary meditation no longer than four minutes with varying still life, exterior or interior shots that are dream-like and fleeting. The series is named after the spiritual treatise Interior Castle from 1577 by Teresa of Avila (a Carmelite nun and prominent Spanish mystic, also known as Saint Teresa) which describes the "contemplative life" as a castle with seven chambers. Conaway's films are reflective and carefully observed simple moments presented as studies of color, light and shadow.

When thinking about the relationship between the still and moving images, without careful scrutiny it is hard to discern which still came from which film, though that is hardly the point. Titled like the films by number (Still Life No. 1 to Still Life No. 20) the sequence of small scale (11.25 x 13.25) grainy images depict the environs that surround Conaway's apartment. These include concrete stairs, palm trees silhouetted against the sky, drapery folds, shadows of plants on a wall and the sidewalk, in addition to dried flowers in a vase and other more abstracted interior and exterior scenes. Because the pictures are enlarged from the tiny Super 8 footage they have a shallow depth of field and a softness that harkens back to experimental film from a pre-digital era. Still Life No. 17 depicts a light sepia/orange hued image of a vase with dried flowers and its shadow. Along with numerous other shots of flowers in interiors, these images recall Andre Kertesz's photograph Mondrian's Studio (1926), as well as the aura of Maya Deren's classic film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).

The journey through the ten films moves between interior and exterior spaces while focusing on plants, architectural details, shadows and drapery. None of the completed short films are single takes, but rather slow fades that jump between subtle observations. Interior Castle I (all works 2023) is grainy and black and white. It begins with silhouetted palm trees blowing in the wind against a gray sky, then shifts to close-ups of light coral on a dark ground followed by leaves and flowers in a vase. The film segues to curtains and the light seen through them followed by details of cracked paint on walls. It then returns to silhouetted flowers in vases and their shadows moving ever so slightly on the walls before moving outside where the footage traces the shadow of a wrought-iron fence on a sidewalk before concluding with blurry shots what appears to be crumpled paper.

While each short sequence is unique, the imagery within them is strikingly familiar as Conaway repeatedly films the objects that surround her. The differences are what drive the content as she shifts her view from down to up to out while taking advantage of the ways lenses flatten space and capture shadows. The movements within each scene are subtle for the most part: a slow pan where the focus changes or a jump from close to far as seen in Interior Castle II where Conaway's camera fluctuates between a distant and closer view of drapery gathered on the floor, or hovers over a white ribbon on a dark ground. The colors are often washed out and faded hues or sepia tones except when Conaway shoots footage of garden plants. Bright green objects and deep pink backgrounds appear in Interior Castle X giving pause as if referencing a moment from a different dream.

Each projection appears like a moving painting on the gallery wall. There is no overt narrative, but rather the films and accompanying stills allude to emotions and feelings while delighting in the way the mind can drift in numerous directions when triggered by familiar, yet somewhat abstracted imagery. The works are about time, space and nature through the qualities of light that fall upon interior and exterior spaces. Returning to Teresa of Avila's book and the notion of "mansions of the mind," Conaway's films construct a journey that reveals the power and beauty in the everyday.

Click here for Sarah Conaway on its own page.

Paul Pfeiffer
Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom
Museum of Contemporary Art
November 12, 2023 - June 16, 2024


Paul Pfeiffer

Paul Pfeiffer began exhibiting his mixed media works in the mid 1990s and was immediately applauded for using a technical innovation in a conceptually significant manner — digitally erasing aspects of stock sports photographs and video clips using programs like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. In John 3:16 (2000) he cropped and composited 5000 frames culled from National Basketball Association games, carefully manipulating the footage so that the basketball remained centered in the frame while the background and players' hands were in constant motion swirling around it. Rather than project this two-minute video loop or present it on a large screen, Pfeiffer displayed it on a small monitor that extended out from the wall on a long metal armature so it appeared to be floating in space like the basketball. This iconic work is among the thirty pieces that comprises Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, his first museum survey.

Titled after Cecil B. DeMille’s opening remarks introducing The Ten Commandments, the show spans the expansive MOCA Geffen warehouse space which has been divided into separate rooms to house the individual works. The exhibition design was done in collaboration with the New York City based architecture firm Büro Korak Duman and facilitates thematic rather than chronological pathways through Pfeiffer's works. Throughout his various still and moving pieces, Pfeiffer investigates ideas relating to "spectacle" — in both sports and entertainment — and draws from abundant found footage and photographs to create his idiosyncratic and compelling works. When Pfeiffer started, the culture of appropriation was still in vogue and he found innovative ways to critique and comment on popular culture. Much of Pfeiffer's work involves the process of recreation — be it filling in erased elements from the original source material or by hiring foley artists to mimic the shouts and gestures of stadium crowds.

The title of the exhibition is also the title of a 2000 video diptych presented on small monitors where Cecil B. DeMille is caught in a loop walking in and out of the draped curtains at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood to deliver a speech, but never quite reaching the stage. Endless loops are prevalent and can be seen in works including Caryatid (2003), Live Evil (2003) and The Long Count (2000-2001), a trilogy of short video works that manipulate Muhammad Ali's most famous boxing matches so that the fighters appear to be ghostly images in an otherwise empty ring. While many of Pfeiffer's videos are exhibited on small monitors, he also creates room-sized installations.

For the MOCA presentation, these include The Saints (2007) and Vitruvian Figure (2008). The Saints was commissioned by Artangel and first presented in London in 2007. It is a recreation of an iconic football (soccer) match at Wembley Stadium in 1966 where England beat West Germany and won its only World Cup title. Upon entering a large, empty, bright space with seventeen wall mounted speakers emitting the sound of a roaring crowd, one is struck by the contrast between the minimal installation and the maximal sound. Inset into a wall toward the far end of the space is a tiny monitor positioned in the center of a large wall on which a version of the game appears. In this iteration of the footage, Pfeiffer has removed all but one of the players. He is alone running back and forth across the empty field as the disembodied sound of the spectators fills the room and surrounds the audience. On the other side of the wall, Pfeiffer projects two videos side by side. On the right is the original footage from the game and on the left, a taped re-staging of the sound by 1000 Filipinos voicing the cries and cheers in sync with the action.

Like The Saints, Vitruvian Figure is also a re-creation but this time, rather than work with the footage of an event, Pfeiffer built a room-sized replica of the proposed 2000 Sydney Olympic Stadium (that seats 80,000 people). His version is scaled up to accommodate one million people. He states, "It's a sculpture based on the stadium form, which I think of as one of the oldest architectural types in the Western building tradition. For me it’s a way to think about mass viewership through the ages, from Classical Greek Antiquity to the present and into the future. I also think of the stadium as a reflection of the larger social environment. All the conditions that shape the viewing experience of spectators in a stadium are equally active in the daily lives of people outside the stadium." To access the work, viewers ascend via a ramp and a stairway and look down on the simulated seats and tiny green playing field, made with the help of artisans in the Philippines. Pfeiffer is Filipino-American and although he is mostly based in New York, he has taught and lived in the Philippines on numerous occasions and has repeatedly worked with Filipino laborers and students on his projects.

Although Pfeiffer makes contemporary works using a range of analog and digital mediums, his practice is rooted in history as well as his cultural heritage. He often draws from art historical, biblical and religious references, infusing the pieces with a timeless aura linking past to present. This well deserved survey introduces audiences to a range of his exceptional, thought provoking and challenging works and allows them to wander freely through the many different aspects of his ouevre.

Click here for Paul Pfeiffer on its own page.

Louise Lawler
Going Through The Motions
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
November 10, 2023 - February 10, 2024


Louise Lawler

Louise Lawler has been making photographic works that focus on the presentation and collection of fine art since the early 1980s. Her work is conceptually based and she is associated with the "Pictures Generation" — artists known for appropriation including Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine. Through photographing the artworks of others for most of her career, Lawler has examined various notions of "in-situ." Early on, her images were straight forward black and white photographs that documented artworks in museums, auction houses and collector's homes. Over time, the images became larger, full color and eventually she began to use digital tools to manipulate the pictures so they could span huge walls. Lawler's intention was to create social commentaries that focused on juxtapositions that she framed. She has always been interested in context and the relationships between the items on display, as well as the infrastructure and the curatorial practices of the institutions or individuals exhibiting them.

Going Through The Motions begins outside the gallery with a quasi-generic sign placed among the buildings landscaping that reads "Louise Lawler / False Compensation / This Weekend." The meaning of these signs is obtuse until one sees the exhibition inside, which includes photographic pieces from Lawler's swiped, adjusted to fit, and traced series. To create the images that encompass her swiped series, Lawler physically moved the camera during long exposures resulting in a partial blur. The blur is unsettling and disorientating, especially when the image depicts known artworks such as 1944-N No.2 and One: Number 31, 1950 (swiped) (all works 2022/2023) which features a double exposure of the Jackson Pollock painting One: Number 31 hanging on a wall adjacent to a semi-transparent and faded depiction of Clifford Still's 1944-N No.2, both on display at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). Similarly, The Palace at 4 a.m. (swiped) is a dark, blurry and shadowy photograph of a fragment of Alberto Giacometti's iconic sculpture also installed at MoMA. In Lawler's image, the bird-like creature appears in motion as if taking flight. Lawler does not limit her explorations to MoMA as Edison Price and Breuer (swiped) is an out of focus image looking up at the numerous lights in the ceiling of the former Whitney Museum (now referred to as the Breuer building), another enigmatic double take.

Covering several of the huge gallery walls are pieces from Lawler's adjusted to fit series. For these works, Lawler instructs each exhibitor to digitally manipulate and scale the original images to match the width and height of a given wall. Often distorted beyond recognition, works including Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Abraham (swiped) (adjusted to fit) and It Spins (adjusted to fit) are printed on adhesive material and fused with the given walls. Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Abraham are both works by Barnett Newman in the collection of MoMA as is Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel which Lawler photographed closely cropped from above.

Two small, black and white photographs in the corridor leading to the upstairs gallery are significant, though easily missed. Position (verb) and Position (noun), originally shot in 1982, are photographs of an interior space with a lamp, two arm chairs and an early mixed media work by Eva Hesse. In the upstairs gallery, Lawler again presents large-scale images adhered to the walls. These black and white works are tracings of Lawler's photographs done in collaboration with the children's book illustrator Jon Buller. The relationship between Lawler's original photographs and the tracings becomes evident when regarding Position (noun)(traced), 1982/2020/2023 because viewers can compare and contrast the original photograph with its tracing.

Why reduce a photograph to a line drawing? What does a trace reveal or leave out? Why turn something seemingly objective into something subjective and gestural? Each of the tracings is derived from one of Lawler's photographs and simplifies the spaces and images contained within them into lines. It is possible to identify some of the artworks — like one of Damien Hirst's severed animals in Dots and Slices (traced), 2006/2013 or Jeff Koon's balloon dog in Egg and Gun (traced), 2008/2016 as well as Felix Gonzalez-Torres light bulbs in Bulbs (traced), 2005/2006/2019 — and imagine the original photographs. The fact that these works exist as digital files and can be scaled to any dimension is in keeping with the practices of numerous conceptual artists whose works were presented as instructions. Congruent with Lawler's ideas with respect to re-presenting and reframing, twelve of her tracing images can be downloaded from MoMA's website for children to color.

Although Lawler's photographic practice appears straightforward — she photographs artworks on display — it is always changing as she continually devises new ways to frame and re-frame her subjects. She has recently also embraced digital technologies to allow for further experimentation. Lawler questions authorship and "swipes" images from others. Although the works are not "false compensation" as the signage outside the gallery proclaims, they knowingly and slyly take and re-present the works of others to become evocative and telling documents of collections and exhibitions.

Click here for Louise Lawler on its own page.

Jónsi
Vox
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
November 11, 2023 - February 3, 2024


Jónsi

Though best known as the lead vocalist for the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, artist/musician Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson (Jónsi) is also an accomplished visual artist. For Vox he presents three pieces in which he combines speakers, LEDs and sounds in different ways. Although each work occupies its own space, they are interrelated, investigating not only how sound can envelope a space, but also its visual qualities. While sound on its own is not visual per se,  its method of display (as arrays or canopies of speakers) can be. Both Var (safespace) and Silent sigh (dark) (all works 2023) share affinities with the work of Alan Rath (1959-2020) whose sculptures often combined numerous speakers that undulated like animated entities pulsating up and down and emitting softs sounds according to Rath's computer algorithms.

Like Rath and the San Francisco based artist Jim Campbell (known for his LED installations), Jónsi's works rely on sophisticated electronics and programming. Var (the Icelandic word for shelter) hangs overhead and consists of hundreds of small speakers wired together to form a canopy or tent-like enclosure. According to Jónsi, it is supposed to evoke a "safe space" filled with calming sounds (a six minute loop) and the scent of cis-3-hexenol (one of the components in freshly cut grass). Yet while the suspended canopy offers "refuge" in some ways, its wing-like shape also calls to mind the body of a flying bat from afar.

Silent sigh (dark) is a free standing sculpture that fills a small, dimly illuminated space. The work is arranged in an array like a mechanical snowflake where the larger speakers are in the center and the smaller ones extend out toward the edges. Jónsi uses computers (nested in the base of the sculpture) to control direct currents that change the physical state of the different speakers. This causes them to ripple and emit breath-like sounds alluding to the idea that they could be "alive."

Filling the darkened main gallery space is the eight-channel sound and LED installation Vox. With a duration of twenty-five minutes, Vox visualizes the human voice. It intertwines Jónsi's own voice with those generated by an AI to create an eerie and ambiguous audio environment that syncs with choreographed bursts and flashes of light on approximately two-foot high LED screens encircling but not filling the four walls of the gallery. While it is difficult to make out actual words or sentences, the work evokes a sense of awe and mystery with the sound becoming visually palpable. Viewers enter the space through a curtain and as their eyes adjust to the darkness they might notice a single bench that appears to be floating in the middle of the space like a horizontal version of the monolith from 2001, its black surface reflecting aspects of the pulsating light. This bench beckons. It is an indicator that to experience the piece in full, one might want to sit. As the tonalities begin to ebb and flow the LEDs follow suit to become a visual and aural soundscape that is both soothing and other worldly simultaneously.

Jónsi's sound-works are subtle and not meant to overpower the space or the viewer. Though electronically created, they reference the subtleties of the natural as well as the built world. The pieces are seductive, contemplative and inviting. As a musician, Jónsi has performed in different arenas, as well as worked with visual artists such as Doug Aitken and Olafur Eliasson, so he is familiar with the power of immersing audiences within seemingly empty spaces. Once filled with both frenetic and soothing sounds, these spaces can become a visual field for the imagination.


Click here for Jónsi on its own page.

Ava McDonough
All I hear Is the Symphony
Lowell Ryan Projects
November 18, 2023 - January 20, 2024


Ava McDonough

Ava McDonough is a young, self-taught, Los Angeles based artist whose solo debut at Lowell Ryan Projects is a mixed media installation titled All I hear Is the Symphony. The mostly black and white works are intricately constructed collages on panel made by assembling hundreds or thousands of hand-printed images. Obsessive collaging of this nature made easier by digital technologies, but McDonough's works are hand-made and in some ways recall assemblages by Elliott Hundley, as well as drawings and paintings by outsider artists like Howard Finster and Adolf Wölfli, in addition to the all-over mark-making of iconic artists including Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring and more recently, Trenton Doyle Hancock.

To create her dense and idiosyncratic compositions, McDonough begins by carving her drawings into linoleum blocks which are then inked and printed over and over again. She allows the saturation of ink to diminish over successive iterations resulting in different tonalities (shifts from deep black to light gray) in the small prints. Each block is printed multiple times and the imagery is often repeated across the many panels on display.

McDonough's doodle-like markings range from people to objects, to occasional words. Some of the imagery is generic —a shopping cart or scissors— while other drawings feel more personal. From afar, the works appear to be abstractions consisting of undulating shapes that range from light gray to deep black. The collaged elements within the large triptych, I, As a Sky-painting Journeyman (all works 2023) appear skeletal as if enlarged x-rays of the human body, yet upon close examination the overall shapes and structure dissolves into a montage of small-scale glyphs or pictographs that can be thought of as McDonough's alphabet. As the eye traverses the work, it may rest upon white silhouetted figures that morph into animals as well as utilitarian objects while the mind tries to create a narrative across the many tiny images.

Feral Ecstasy consists of overlapping curvilinear forms that suggest intersecting bodies. Looking at the individual fragments, one finds an array of nude figures, a teddy bear, a boxer, a box of Marlboro cigarettes, a toaster, the hare-rabbit illusion, a sign that states "hell" and another that reads "one way do not enter." How these elements "jive" is dependent on the viewer and their interpretation of the accumulation of line drawings. While McDonough might suggest a way of reading the works through her titles, they remain open ended.

Smaller works including the 7 x 5 inch My Beloved Vegetables! and CARNIVORES are easier to decipher. For example, in My Beloved Vegetables! there are myriad pills and pill bottles, a razor blade as well as a hunched over seated figure suggesting pain and despair, while in CARNIVORES McDonough presents a melange of human and animal forms. It is necessary to spend time with the images to discern McDonough's intentions and the works darker meanings, however it is also possible to enjoy the pieces on the surface and celebrate McDonough's labor intensive process and densely populated and evocative compositions.

Click here for Ava McDonough on its own page.

Todd Gray
Rome Work
Vielmetter Los Angeles
November 18, 2023 - January 13, 2024


Todd Gray

Los Angeles based photographer Todd Gray was a 2022-2023 Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and his exhibition is comprised of work made during that residency. Rome Work features images of iconic architecture, statues and churches in Rome combined with images from previous bodies of work, some shot in Ghana, others a selection of self-portraits, many of which depict the artist's head covered with swaths of white shaving cream. Gray is a master of juxtaposition and has devised a way to creatively layer his images, encasing each element in its own (glassless) and often oval frame so the finished works have dimensionality. 

This is most evident in the large-scale floor-based group of images, Rome Work (San Giovanni in Laterano, Goree Island, Senegal:Palace of Fontainebleau, Salaga), (all works 2023). Here, Gray combines a photograph of the facade of San Giovanni in Laterano, the oldest public church in Rome, with a contemporary image of people at the shore on Goree Island in Senegal (known for its role in the 15th-19th century Atlantic slave trade). Both these photographs are partially obscured by a large oval picture frame filled with a dark silhouette of the artist shot from behind. These three images comprise one side of the work and they lean against a smaller set of photographs like an ad hoc sandwich board. On the verso, Gray presents an oval-shaped reproduction of a religious painting depicting God and angels from the Palace of Fontainebleau in Paris, as if suspended in front of a tree surrounded by bricks in a square in Salaga, Ghana. Leaning against the tree is a mangled sign that reads "Welcome to Salaga Slave Market," which was the largest slave market where people were bought, sold, or traded for cattle in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Gray layers people and places to create a trajectory through cultures and histories that, to quote Gray, "explore[s] the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections which link Western hegemony with West Africa." In these works, he alludes to racism and oppression across space and time. While his works are formally elegant and conceptually astute, they are also quite personal as he delves into his own image archives — Gray worked as a commercial photographer early in his career and was even Michael Jackson's official photographer in the early 1980s. On Pointe (Grotesques) includes a cropped image of Michael Jackson's feet dancing on stage, his shoes on pointe, partially covered by a photograph of Gray's head and face grotesquely slathered with white shaving cream so his head resembles that of an animal. Both these framed images sit atop a photograph of an ornately painted church ceiling filled with monsters and animals.


Rome Work (Niobe and her Chirren) is a long horizontal photograph that spans nine feet across. The base images are two closely cropped color photographs of sculptures of Niobe and her children which are on display in the gardens at the Villa Medici in Rome. In Gray's collage, he overlays a tondo shaped self portrait in silhouette that mirrors the gestures of some of the sculptured figures. In Triple Play, he also connects past and present by inserting three gold framed, oval photographs of his shaving cream covered face held aloft by various attendent putti on a wall with gold trimmed architectural details— as if to say I belong here, too.

In his Rome series, Gray beautifully brings together photographs of the "Eternal" city that speak to darker times, wealth and poverty, construction and destruction. While Rome is a city full of ruins, Gray injects new life into his depictions. His images are an attempt to weave a path through different periods in history as a way to suggest that the evils of the past connect to the present. His evocative and thoughtful juxtapositions combine art, architecture with personal imagery to create new Black narratives that expose and explore legacies of colonialism in Africa and beyond.

Click here for Todd Gray on its own page.

Stephen Neidich
Lost Mix Tapes
Wilding Cran Gallery
November 4, 2023 - January 6, 2024


Stephen Neidich

For his past exhibitions at Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles based sculptor Stephen Neidich has created kinetic works. In 2019, he activated the gallery space by installing more than two-dozen metal chains that dangled from ceiling to floor, clicking and clanging in discordant harmony as they were dragged over a pile of concrete fragments placed in a circle on the floor below. For his 2021 exhibition, sensors triggered subtle movements of hand-crafted Venetian blinds augmented with LED lights to create an ever changing array of color and movement within the room. His current exhibition, Lost Mix Tapes is quiet. None of the wall-based sculptures move, yet they still command the space as strange objects infused with wit and intelligence. Spanning the walls are dysfunctional rusted steel Venetian blinds that exude character and personality. Who would have thought a Venetian blind could wink?

All The Answers Are In That Book (all works 2023) is a wall-based sculpture consisting of thirteen horizontal rusted steel strips tethered together like blinds with nylon cord and secured to the wall by metal brackets. The piece appears to be stuck in a partially open position and has seen better days, as many of the slats sag and sway between their supports. Two of the slats are bent and may imply an eye or mouth shaped portal. All The Answers Are In That Book could conceivably be functional, while many of the other pieces are purposely exaggerated. Oh, Is It Your First Time? is extremely long (28 feet) and spreads out from the top of a wall more than half-way across the gallery floor. While its rusted surfaces allude to the tones and textures of abstract expressionist painting, its material and form recall minimalist sculptures like those of Richard Serra and Carl Andre.

In We're Taking 3 Cars and Not No, Neidich twists the bottom half of the sculptures steel slats so they echo the shape of oversized intersecting folded paper hand fans. Almost everyone has encountered Venetian blinds that misbehave and Neidich exaggerates these occasions— like when one side rises but not the other (How Quickly You Forget). I Can Tell You But I Can't Explain It feels more like an unsafe floating broken foot bridge with its supports completely out of whack.

Neidich's works are serious and humorous simultaneously. His titles, including the title of the exhibition, Lost Mix Tapes are ambiguous and seemingly unrelated to the sculptures. Mixtapes are a thing of the past, while Venetian blinds are still in use as everyday items. By casting them in steel, Neidich negates their vulnerability, but solidifies their dysfunction. In doing so, there is a human quality to the work, as well as a sense of familiarity, perhaps like those Lost Mix Tapes, something still yearned for and forever embedded in memory.

Click here for Stephen Neidich on its own page.

Lia Halloran
Warped Side
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
November 4 - December 22, 2023


Lia Halloran

Warped Side is an exhibition of selected images from the newly released publication The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel and Gravitational Waves, a collaboration between the visual artist Lia Halloran and the Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne. The book is the culmination of more than ten years of friendship and working together resulting in 500 plus drawings and discussions to "mobilize science, art and poetry to explore aspects of the universe that many people are curious about: black holes, wormholes and other strange phenomena." The images on view (mostly blue ink on drafting film) depict swirling vortexes and even imagined voyages through black holes as experienced by Halloran's wife who is pictured in many of these evocative representations of the world beyond and the surprising forces of nature.

In her site specific installations as well as smaller scaled works, Halloran has experimented with a wide range of media (drawings, paintings, photographic cyanotypes) to create works that explore relationships between the body and various scientific principles. These include investigations of scientific classification systems as well as our solar system. Her works are seductive and extremely impactful when seen from afar and upon closer examination, the nuances of her chosen subject matter become evident.

In this exhibition, many of the smaller works are hung on a single wall that has been painted a deep blue and extend across it in a sequence that becomes a long, flattened rhombus. As viewers move from left to right, from single, to double or triple hung images, they can piece together an implied narrative about a journey, perhaps from Earth to unknown worlds. Halloran uses different hues and opacities of the color cyan to paint concentric circles and intersecting lines that become planets, starbursts, vortexes, funnels and black holes. Some of these works on paper, including WS115, WS116, WS117 and WS118 (2016), depict a long-haired female figure engaging with, emerging from, or spinning around vortexes and orbs that could be the Earth or another planet.

Seen outside the context of the book, these celestial drawings are devoid of text and visually they suggest the vastness of space and the beauty of the unknown. Whether imagined or illustrated, scientific principles or telescopic observations, each drawing informs the group but also functions on its own as a unique work. WS473 (2023), one of the few to include red, features two intersecting blue globes. At the point of their intersection, thin, curvilinear red lines flow out in all directions toward the edge of the paper, while blue lines appear to emanate from the top and bottom of the combined shape. Another piece, WS320 (2021) also includes both red and blue spiraling lines that form an electrified circle that surrounds an awkwardly shaped blue sphere.

In larger works the gestural lines and individual brushstrokes dance in more open spaces, appearing less confined and free flowing. In WS602 The Wormhole (2023), two tornado shaped vortexes are tethered together even though they move in opposite directions. In the more amorphous WS603 Chaotic Singularity (2023), an organic shape akin to flowing water or flames of varying opacities of blue descends from a rectangular support.

Halloran's lines fill empty white spaces and allude to masses that exist beyond our solar system. The works are graceful and allusive and though grounded in scientific principals, they also engage with the language of abstraction.

Click here for Lia Halloran on its own page.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
No More Reality (For PP)
1301 PE
September 16 - December 16, 2023


Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work has employed unusual and diverse mediums: cooking, staged readings and platforms for socializing. The forms and formats of his installations and presentations are participatory and unconventional, often involving the sharing of meals. That is not to say that Tiravanija does not also make objects and drawings that can hang on a wall or fill a conventional gallery space. In 2020, he covered the walls of The Drawing Center in New York with over 200 demonstration drawings — black and white works on paper derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune. World events and the propagation of news has long been an interest of his and for this installation, No More Reality (For PP), he covers the gallery walls with pages of daily American newspapers (collected in 2020).

The phrase "No More Reality" was used in a series of film and photographic works by Philippe Parreno in 1991-1993 and Tiravanija pays homage to Parreno by enlarging the words and painting them in black capital letters over the grid of newspaper pages. For this evocative and timely presentation, individual spreads from newspapers across the United States are mounted on linen and hung in four rows (from the ceiling almost to the floor) on the walls of the lower gallery. While it is possible to see the content of the newspaper through the washy paint, the installation is not about what can be read versus what is obscured but rather about the way "reality" is presented. With thousands of headlines and images to view, the varying agendas and perspectives of different regions becomes clear. In August 2020, Covid was raging, fires were burning, Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, there were explosions in Beirut, religious clashes in India and myriad other local and international events that were reported by the various newspapers.

Because the phrase "No More Reality" takes up a lot of space, the individual words occupy different rooms: "NO" fills a corner and a grid of 40 pages. "REALITY" covers four different walls. Seeing through these giant letters prompts one to turn the phrase from statement to question and back again.

Upstairs, Tiravanija presents framed spreads (front and back page) of a selection of newspapers — The Keene Sentinel, The News Sun, The Sun Chronicle, Starkville Daily News, The Herald Republican — from mid-August 2020 and covers them with a smaller painted version of the same phrase. In these works, "No More Reality" is flush left and a rendered in a washy red, allowing what is printed below to remain visible. The headlines of the day, including "Woman' Suffrage Celebrated," "Voting Rites," "10th Annual Dog Paddle Calls for Sponsors," are interspersed with news about Covid 19, weather and sports to create a snapshot of the times and the priorities of these different locales. How these come together to depict the larger whole is what Tiravanija is ultimately interested in. Like in his previous projects, he mines popular culture and world events to create what becomes and archive of images and content that explores disparate presentations of truth.

Click here for Rirkrit Tiravanija on its own page.

Joe Rudko
Double Take
Von Lintel Gallery
October 21 - December 2, 2023


Joe Rudko

As in his previous exhibitions, Seattle based artist Joe Rudko begins with other people's discarded snapshots. He cuts them apart, organizes them by color and subject, then reassembles them into geometric patterns to make his complex compositions. For Double Take, he uses both the front and backside of the photographs so his montages intersperse color fragments with white from the back of the images (including bits of text and hand writing). There is also a type of mirroring or doubling in many of the works which are presented as diptychs. For example, in Emerald Double (all works 2023), two intricate compositions of small rectangles, what is a "picture" on one side of the diptych is white on the other. Like in all of Rudko's works, it is impossible to "reassemble" the originals as each piece is comprised of many photographs. In Emerald Double, the fragments are suggestive and harken back to the source, in this case landscape and garden imagery in hues of yellow and green.

Sample is the most complex work in the exhibition. In this piece, Rudko divides the composition into eight sections, each one a combination of white and one color culled from the source photographs. Blue for oceans and skies, tan for sand and interior walls, green for grass, trees and gardens, red for flowers and miscellaneous lights. From afar, the pieces appear as abstractions that reference patterns of patchwork quilts. Yet upon close examination, the nuances of the fragments become apparent giving viewers the opportunity to construct their own narratives through the compositions.

In 9-patch, the photos' alternating fronts and backs are organized by color and informed by the snippets of texts that move across the images, indicating places and dates as handwritten artifacts suggestive of another time. Ripple combines rectangles of bright color— cropped sections of the originals— with printed simple black lines that often framed old family photographs. Rudko uses these as horizontal and vertical bands to frame the abstract elements.

Rudko's images command attention and draw viewers in. While at first glance they are somewhat ambiguous — are they abstract or representational? Upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that they are both. The pieces are labor intensive and specific— every fragment plays a role in the overall design and leads the viewer's eyes through a rainbow of colors and imagery. The works are tinged with nostalgia, especially in the digital age, as they are reminders of those boxes of images stored in drawers or basements. For those who grew up with snapshots — faded images that were processed at photo labs and drug stores on different types and textures of paper— these works have a particular resonance.

Click here for Joe Rudko on its own page.

Christopher Badger
Ideas Without Edges
SMC Barrett Gallery
August 25 - December 2, 2023


Christopher Badger

Christopher Badger is a Santa Monica College professor who teaches classes in design, digital media and coding. For his exhibition Ideas Without Edges, he presents artworks that stem from assignments he has given to his students. On view are his responses to prompts such as "Chemical Painting," "Computational Choreography," "Psychological Color Theory," "Sculpture as a Model of Physical Phenomena," and "Mathematical Composition of the Picture Plane." These prompts are weighty, philosophical and scientific. Badger thinks beyond the obvious and rather than use code to create screen based works that illustrate these ideas, as well as the process of their making —complicated algorithms— he uses code to create physical objects.

While one of the first works viewers see when entering the large gallery space is mathematical —a set of spiral bound notebooks placed vertically between two red book ends on a wooden table— it is presented in a traditional analogue format. Badger fills fourteen-volumes with the 24,862,048 digits that make up the largest known prime number. For this work, What is a Number? Badger invites viewers to take the time to look through the printed pages and to think about how expansive that number actually is. This work is both literal and conceptual and sets the tone for the entire exhibition — an installation that draws from ideas in art, mathematics and science.

Incremental Information is placed on the walls adjacent to What is a Number? It is a suite of five digital prints that document the gradual pixelation and disintegration of a black and white photograph of light on water. The five pictures sequentially represent higher and higher levels of magnification so the image eventually breaks down to become an abstract pattern of black and white squares. For those who are not used to thinking about the relationship between images and pixels, the sequence is revelatory.

The works become increasingly complex and complicated as Badger delves into systems that repeat to produce shapes and marks that are combined in different ways. For example, Interference Field is a large wall work consisting of Iron blue pigment, gesso and joint compound on plywood that is a physical manifestation of custom software that models interference patterns of ripples and waves on water. The interference algorithm was fed into a laser engraver which was instructed to remove layers of pigment off the gessoed ground leaving a pattern of deep blue marks that spiral out from the center to create what appears to be a vortex that is atmospheric and suggests a celestial expanse.

The largest and most colorful work is the multi-panel piece Vanishing Points. This work investigates a formal system —specifically Wang Tiles— and presents eleven squares —each made up of four isosceles triangles of any of four different colors— in a line to explore the infinite tiling of a plane. This particular presentation concludes that the sequence is aperiodic (irregular) rather than periodic. While the intentions are to illustrate computational systems, the resulting color choice and sequence has artistic precedents that can be found in works by Sol LeWitt and Ellsworth Kelly. Badger's pieces (though not interactive) are also reminiscent of the code-based sculptures by Daniel Rozin, a professor of digital media at NYU.

Many of Badger's works are derived from "instructions" that are based on code and then translated by machines that make analogue outputs from these digital files. For example, wood works like Interference Field are created by sending the software to a CNC milling machine. Visually, what stands out in the works is the relationship between chaos and control and how programmed algorithms can create the unexpected. It makes sense here to revisit the artworks of Sol LeWitt who created explicit directions for the making of his wall drawings where length, color and direction of lines were written out to be followed (with freedom for interpretation) by the person installing the piece on site. While theoretically the works could be the same each time they're exhibited, in practice, they never are. Similarly, what is striking in Badger's explorations is the way software which is specific and objective can be output to create vastly different results.

Click here for Christopher Badger on its own page.

Terri Friedman
tomorrow is just a thought
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
September 23 - November 22, 2023


Terri Friedman

tomorrow is just a thought is a wonderful exhibition of woven tapestries by the El Cerrito, California based artist Terri Friedman. Friedman has been creating her "yarn paintings" — applying formal principals of color, shape and texture to her compositions as if they were traditional "paintings"— for a number of years and in her stunning installation at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, she showcases both abstractions and a new series of woven "portraits" each titled after a different feeling or emotion. The works "respond to internal and external uncertainty" and present positive possibilities through the use of bright color, unusual materials and open ended non-objective abstraction. Her palette and compositions pay homage to Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Sonia Delaunay, but also share similarities with the knitted works of Channing Hansen. While some of the pieces contain words, they are meant to be suggestive rather than didactic. Friedman also cites interests in neuroplasticity, the capacity humans have to reshape their brain toward a more optimistic outlook as one of the motivating forces behind her endeavors. Even the title, tomorrow is just a thought can be seen in a positive, rather than negative light.

Refresh (2022) is a large tapestry of undulating shapes, colors and textures that resemble a mountain landscape/seascape dotted with droplets that dangle above zig-zagging and cross-hatched lines. Areas filled with green, pink and purple weaves overlap below dark-thread spelling out the word "refresh." What can go right (2023) is a five panel tapestry filled with floral imagery that shares a kinship with children's renderings of gardens. Trees and flowers populate the mostly yellow hued background that is filled with different colored yarns forming swirls, circles and triangles as they recede into a distant landscape. Nested within eye-shaped ovals at the top of the abstract tapestry Sometimes OK is good enough (2022) are the letters "O" and "K," giving the image an aura of positivity. Though busy and frenetic, the soft colors and suggestion of facial features offer a sense of calm and encouragement.

While the front gallery is filled with Friedman's larger pieces, seven smaller works are presented in the back space. Faces depicting "elevated states of emotion" fill these tapestries. Though brightly colored, they are messy, somewhat confrontational and a bit disconcerting. A deep purple background surrounds the lighter purple and green face of a man with black hair, magenta eyes and an open mouth in Whoa (2023). The mouth outlined in yellow thread is actually a hole in the weave. To the right of the mouth is a stained glass inset in the shape of a tear that echoes golden tears that fall from the figure's eyes. Homesick (2023) exudes sadness. Here, Friedman weaves the head of a girl with black hair — a curl on one side and four different length dreadlocks on the other side of her face. Her open mouth is filled with gritted teeth. She has one open blue eye with dark purple eyelids. A weave of dark red and yellow threads, the other eye is vacant, held open by a vertical piece of stained glass that creates a void. The figure in Atonal (2023) spews multi-colored threads from their mouth that dangle at the right edge of the composition, whereas the two heads in Ditto (2023) are mirror images of each other. The space between their multi-colored and thickly textured faces is an abstract gradient filled with orange, pink and yellow.

Though at first glance, Friedman's tapestries appear unwieldy, they are thought out compositions that are calming for her to fashion. This tension between the process of making and viewing give the works a commanding presence. They are colorful, gestural, soft, tactile, beautiful and disturbing simultaneously. They catch your eye and hold your gaze, engaging with the language of painting and textiles on complex and multiple levels.

Click here for Terri Friedman on its own page.

Dike Blair
Karma Los Angeles
September 16 - November 4, 2023


Dike Blair

Dike Blair is a New York based artist, writer and curator. He is often associated with the "Pictures Generation" and known for his sculptural assemblages, as well as his realistic paintings. While his sculptures are conceptual and minimal, his small-scale gouache (at first) and now oil paintings are more painterly and representational.

In these works, he captures everyday moments. They derive from both analogue and digital photographs he has taken over several decades and gathered into an archive. What is a moment? How moments mark or trigger memories is the subject of his ongoing investigations. When going through an archive of photographic images, Blair must decide which he will translate into paintings and the motivations for these choices also filter into the exhibition. Many of the images are banal locations or non-spectacular, people-less scenes that are casually framed, though not without compositional and formal considerations. Light also plays an important role in the pictures. While they could be divided into categories— food and drink, walls or corners, what is seen through a window, illuminated roads at night— Blair sequences the images on the wall to suggest narratives. The twenty paintings on view range in size from 6 x 8 inches to 28 x 21 inches. All are untitled and were painted between 2020 and 2023. These oil on aluminum works are both vertical and horizontal and many have the casualness and the format of cell phone photographs. His choice of surface and paint application adds to their intriguing flat character.

The paintings that focus on corners of elevator interiors or bathroom doors have a peculiar draw. These include an image whose focal point is a partially rusted "slide bolt door lock" that joins together off white and industrial green surfaces— perhaps the inside of a bathroom stall. In an Untitled painting dated 2023, Blair renders the jarringly bright mustardy-yellow wall inside an elevator, as well as its reflection in the adjacent steel panels. The composition focuses on a corner and divides the image into two parallelograms and a triangle (the floor). In a similar painting from 2020, Blair paints another elevator interior. Here, the walls are wood grain and off white and include a silver handrail. A small triangle at the bottom of the painting highlights a blue and white checkered floor that could be carpet.

Commonplace spaces and everyday objects trigger something for Blair— enough to first photograph and then to select particular images from his archive to reproduce as paintings. The resulting images are formal explorations of contrast, color and texture while simultaneously referencing nondescript places that could be anywhere. Blair's interiors also capture a certain kind of artificial light. His exteriors and paintings looking through windows present the colors and glows found in nature. One painting depicts blurred pink flowers and green grass as seen through closed textured glass window louvers. Blair juxtaposes the brightness of the outside with a portion of the darker window sill and frame. In another painting, he allows a deep blue sky with a few floating white clouds to dominate another space framed by a fragment of interior architecture.

Exteriors at night include an image shot from inside a car of an empty country road receding into the distance. The cars headlights illuminate a two lane road, a grassy shoulder and a red barn. In another painting, Blair focuses on the way two tall trees are lit by lights in an otherwise empty and dark parking lot. He often photographs what he eats and drinks, here including a painting of a slice of orangey yellow fruit cake without a plate on a black table. Another painting depicts a cigarette in an ashtray next to a cup of coffee in a white mug and yet another is a cocktail in a translucent blue glass set on a tray on top of a labeled napkin on a United Airlines plane.

Blair has remarked that while his original photographs are not all that interesting, they are shot and composed with the knowledge they will be transformed into paintings that will be seen as a group so that viewers can construct a narrative. The works collapse space and time, as they come from various years and places, yet together become an intimate and personal look at the details of everyday life that surround us.

Click here for Dike Blair on its own page.

Julian Charriere
Buried Sunshine
Sean Kelly Los Angeles
September 14 - November 4, 2023


Julian Charriere

Julian Charrière is a Swiss-born, Berlin based artist whose work often focuses on nature, ecology and the changing climate. He was included in the Venice Biennial (2017) and was recently the subject of a solo show at the Dallas Museum of Art (2021). For his first Los Angeles exhibit, Buried Sunshine, Charrière was drawn to the subject of oil and researched the history and photographed the oil fields that dot the L.A. landscape. He has beautifully crafted a seductive, mixed media installation that includes the video projection Controlled Burn (2022) and a new series of heliographs titled Buried Sunshines Burn.

Controlled Burn is a 32 minute video that cycles through the sights and sounds of numerous implosions, flames and fireworks that fill the darkness of the night sky. Shot from above by drone, the footage documents ambiguous and deep quasi-military, yet now abandoned spaces including cooling towers, rocket silos and oil platforms that are surrounded by ricocheting projectiles. Amidst thunderous roars, viewers who look carefully may suddenly realize that what they are seeing is impossible and that Charrière is projecting the footage in reverse. This makes it even more bewildering.

Along the walls in the darkened gallery space are large-scale photographic images — heliographs. Scenes shot on location around Los Angeles' oil fields are imprinted on high-polished stainless steel with light sensitive emulsion that incorporates tar from the LaBrea, McKittrick and Carpinteria Tar Pits. Charrière traveled around the state to document local oil fields from above and presents them as subtle, reflective abstractions that need to be viewed in low light in order to see the nuances of the depictions. These heliographs, including the 86 inch tall Buried Sunshines Burn | 1Z.CXO (2023) hover between abstraction and representation, as well as art, history and science as Charrière takes into consideration Los Angeles' dependency on oil and the cities conflicting relationship to it, especially given the increasing environmental concerns.

As the title Buried Sunshine suggests, Charrière's images do not depict sun-filled skies and receding horizons or colorful sunsets. Rather, he is interested in how cities like Los Angeles appear from above and investigates how the intricacies of the natural and man-made worlds intermingle. The photographs, while amazingly beautiful and seductive, are about industrialization and the black fluids that travel beneath the earth's surface. Coupled with Controlled Burn, the exhibition serves as a warning of an imagined apocalypse to come.

Click here for Julian Charriere on its own page.

Cammie Staros
Monster in the Maze
Shulamit Nazarianh
September 16 - October 28, 2023


Cammie Staros

For her exhibition Monster in the Maze, Cammie Staros has transformed the normal pathways through the gallery into a maze-like display consisting of bare metal studs and a number of new walls of mixed heights which direct the viewer's trajectory. This labyrinth not only segmentizes the viewing of the exhibition, but also allows for unusual sight-lines and juxtapositions. As Staros presents three different kinds of works all based on classical Greek artifacts— vessels, coins and marble sculptures— the display is meant to play with the ways archeological relics and classical sculptures are presented in museums.

The vessels immediately stand out as extraordinary. Rather than being perfectly perpendicular and symmetrical, Staros' ceramic pieces are morphed and askew vases balanced on round, fluted, white columnar pedestals inset with shells and pebbles. For example, in Attributed to: Human and Earth (all works 2023) the entire red-orange terra cotta vase is decorated with quasi-narrative bands of imagery depicting warriors, Gods and animals. These forms are painted in flat black and often outlined in white. The enchanting Half Beast appears like a dancing figure whose handles resemble tusks. This time the vessel is more subtly painted — covered with slightly lighter markings and patterns.

In contrast to these delicate ceramic forms, Staros also created a number of life-sized carved travertine sculptures that appear to be fragmented human figures. Cora Kore presents the bottom half of a draped figure on a rectangular limestone pedestal. The arm is cropped above the elbow and connected to nothing as the hand grabs hold of the folds of a robe or gown. The figure's neck and head are not included but left to the viewer's imagination. A similar sense of disorientation occurs in Cult Classic, Staros' abstracted and sensual presentation of a partial torso. Though made of marble, these sculpted forms are etched with lines that give them an airiness while also alluding to flowing lava, melting ice or running water.

The most delicate and fascinating works on view are Staros' coin "tapestries." To create these intricate pieces, she first cast and then glazed hundreds of irregular coin-shaped ceramics so they resembled ancient corroded treasure. These were later assembled into expansive flat reliefs that are held together with thin bits of gold and silver wires and interspersed with elaborate and intricate web-like chains. Rather than place all the coin works on the walls, the largest, Undercurrent is suspended to function as another barrier along with the unfinished metal studs. The interweaving of the coins and spider webs draws parallels between presence and absence, past and present and the fragility and vulnerability of living beings and ancient artifacts.

Staros has looked to classical sculptures from the Greco-Roman period in much of her work. Her interest in these antiquities is formal, as well as narrative and she is mindful of how the past shapes the present and how what was depicted in Greco-Roman times can be recontextualized and reinterpreted today. Her installations and individual works use ancient Greek artifacts as a point of departure to comment on war, the Gods and mythologies. Staros pokes fun while also respectfully representing imagery that might be found on ancient vessels. On one side of Prize Amphora / Trophy Cup for example, she paints five naked men who appear to be dancing across the distorted vase. On the other side, she includes three horses, two ridden by headless riders as the third rider gazes at the headless forms leading the way across the composition. Staros' vessels, coin tapestries and marble sculptures have a post apocalyptic aura. She mines ancient forms, presenting "monsters in the maze," a maze of her own creation that speaks to destruction and preservation simultaneously.

Click here for Cammie Staros on its own page.

Vanessa Beecroft
Rules of Non-Engagement
Jeffrey Deitch
September 8 - October 21, 2023


Vanessa Beecroft

When she first emerged in the 1990s viewers found Vanessa Beecroft's practice so intereting— not only the participatory nature of her performances and the odd directives given to her performers, but also for the way she handled their nakedness. Fascinated by the nude models hired for drawing classes while in art school in Milan, she came to the realization that their actual bodies were more compelling than the drawings she produced, so she began to conceptualize performances with them. In 1996 when renowned dealer Jeffrey Deitch opened his New York gallery, it was with one of her performances. Now on view in his Los Angeles space is a thirty-year survey of Beecroft's work.

Printed large on the wall in all caps are sentences from Beecroft's "Rules of Non-Engagement" that include these statements: "Do Not Talk, Do Not Interact With Anyone, Do Not Whisper, Do Not Smile, Do Not Laugh, Do Not Move Theatrically, Do Not Move Too Fast, Do Not Move Too Slow, Be Natural, Be Detached." This large-scale wall text describes how her performers were told to act. Viewers can see these statements in action on a wall-sized projection that cycles through a selection of Beecroft's US and Europe based performances from 1996 - 2010. Seeing the documentation is a reminder of how radical and unsettling these stunning and strange pieces were when they first appeared. Though nudity and sexuality have a long history in performance art, Beecroft objectified her models who were often made to stand together en masse in huge empty spaces, sometimes barefoot, other times wearing only colored high heel shoes. These works are evocative and campy simultaneously.

Watching the clips of the eight performances adds up to just over three hours, more time than most viewers spend in a gallery, but seeing this footage (or even just snippets of it) informs the rest of the work on view. Over the last year, Beecroft has focused on painting and has transformed photographs from many of her performances into large scale oil on canvas works. Numerous paintings fill the vast gallery space in addition to recent ceramic sculptures — some heads and busts, others full figures.

Translating the relationships between performance and painting becomes an underlying subject of this exhibition. For example, one of the things that is the most eye-catching in performance VB43, Vanessa Beecroft Performance, 2000 Gagosian Gallery, London is the wild and brightly colored hair on some of the models. Beecroft exaggerates this in the painting Untitled (VB43), Gagosian Gallery, London, (all paintings 2023) leveling the flesh tones so the different models' red and orange hair becomes the focal point. The paintings that encapsulate but also enhance the performances are the most interesting and the least like amateur nude studies. In both Untitled (VB46), Gagosian Gallery 2001 and Untitled (VB50), San Paulo Biennial, Brazil, Beecroft darkens the background and in Untitled (VB50), San Paulo Biennial, Brazil, she even depicts bodies in blues and greens.

While some of the performers enact classical positions like contrapposto, most stand inert and blank and it is this calm aura of banality that Beecroft brings to the canvases. Her painting style is casually realistic, but with more than 30 paintings on view, the sketchy quality suffices to convey the gist of the performance. The paintings are less about reproducing bodies in exacting detail, than about transforming these excerpts and cropped moments into painted commodities. In addition to painting scenes from the performances, Beecroft also includes a number of portraits as well as ceramic heads and busts. Stunningly installed in the back gallery, alongside an expansive wall mounted plaster cast of disparate bodies, the oversized ceramic heads in contrast to the life-sized busts assert a different physical presence that is more abstract and interpretative.

Beecroft is a versatile and ambitious artist who is skilled in a wide range of materials. She is unabashed in her use of excess and abundance and this is the take away from the exhibition. In this case however, more is not better as it dilutes what could otherwise be a powerful presentation of female forms and interactions.

Click here for Vanessa Beecroft on its own page.

Jenny Holzer
Ready For You When You Are
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood
September 1 - October 21, 2023


Jenny Holzer

It comes as no surprise that Jenny Holzer is engaging with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate the texts in her dynamic LED artworks. She is best known for language based pieces, ranging from her Truisms (1977-1979) to more recent large-scale paintings, etched marble benches, projected displays and LEDs. Holzer's text-based works draw from political and historical sources, as well as the news media. In recent works she re-presents de-classified documents as found, transforming these pages into formally elegant and amazingly powerful artworks. For her exhibition Ready For You When You Are she has installed three large-scale robotic LEDs two of which display AI-generated texts that contrast those on her more subtle oil on linen paintings —covered in gold and platinum leaf — based on reproductions of redacted government documents.

WTF (2022) is a twelve-foot long LED sign that cascades across the vast gallery space swinging in irregular arcs as it moves back and forth along a rail from one side to the other. The animated text that fills the four sides of the thin rectangular sign are culled from tweets Donald Trump shared during his presidency, as well as posts by the "leader" of QAnon. Below this bombastic work are stamped lead and copper plates shaped like Greco-Roman curse tablets— thin sheets of metal incised with texts that call for harm or disruption to their victims. These works are displayed haphazardly on the floor under the path of the menacing LED column. They are also inscribed with fragments from Donald Trump's tweets. While there is much to read, it is not always possible to scrutinize every text as the installation is more about the accumulation of inanities, lies and dis-information put forth by the then president than any of his individual statements.

In many ways, the exhibition is an extensive research project where Holzer and her team amassed an archive of de-classified government documents and memos on subjects ranging from counterterrorism to the Patriot Act and The US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Heavily redacted, Holzer's reproductions present these pages as glowing and reflective rectangles akin to Mark Rothko compositions, yet rather than being washes of paint, Holzer juxtaposes different types and tones of metal leafing which give the works a constructivist aura. They are formally exquisite, as well as powerfully suggestive compositions that are also filled with occasional words, phrases and sentences that read like concrete poetry.

In two tall rectangular columns, BAD and GOOD (2023), Holzer used AI to generate the pulsating phrases that illuminate the LED surfaces. For GOOD, she instructed 'the bot' to generate text about "human and nonhuman, as well as physical and immaterial experiences" that relate to thought and emotions. Selections of the AI's output were sequenced into an animated display that traverses the vertical column as it spins on its axis. Conversely, in BAD the AI drew from extremist content and, according to Holzer, created texts filled with writing about "secret cabals, corrupt and illegitimate leaders, invasions and coups, deep state plots to eliminate free will, insurrection, information warfare, overbearing federal regulation, fraudulent elections, the deception of climate science, the socialist threat, political correctness, disinformation from the mainstream media, and a coming doomsday or civil war." A motorized system spins the column in quirky bursts that are paralleled by pulsing explosions of color that reinforce the sentiments expressed in the AI generated phrases.

Holzer's work is intentionally political, but also formal. It is beautifully crafted and designed. She excels as a visual artist, creative thinker and problem solver who loads content into her artworks without being overly didactic or pedantic. It is hard to take one's eyes off pieces like Sensitive Information (2023), a smaller-scaled painting where she contrasts shimmering sections of moon and red gold leaf, one covering the background and the other reproducing the lines of redacted text to create a beautiful geometric abstraction with an occasional readable word.

Holzer is interested in what can be read between the lines literally (as in her redacted paintings) and metaphorically when official documents are transformed into works of art. Throughout her fifty-year career, Holzer has continued to mine new territories to create rich and powerful pieces that resonate on multiple levels.

Click here for Jenny Holzer on its own page.

Miya Ando
Sky Atlas
Wilding Cran Gallery
September 2 - October 21, 2023


Miya Ando

The sky in southern California is a deep shade of blue or a subtle gradient transitioning from a lighter blue to gray to orange as it approaches the horizon. There may be billowing clouds or a canopy of small dots of white overhead, but for the most part the expansive sky gives the impression of being monochromatic. On days when the sunrise or the sunset fills the sky with fiery reds, oranges and yellows it is a cause for celebration and reflection.

Miya Ando is a New York-based, Japanese American artist who looks at the natural world from scientific, philosophical and visual perspectives. She is interested in the changing seasons, the cycles of the moon, as well as the different ways clouds fill the sky. She approaches her art making (as a press release states) "from a learned perspective that mixes Eastern and Western cultures through the lens of natural phenomena ... She harnessed the Japanese notion of mono no aware – an innate sensitivity to the fleeting nature of our world." In Sky Atlas, she presents a series of luminescent works— ink printed on aluminum composite— resulting in seductive and reflective surfaces that share a kinship with Tintypes and Daguerrotypes.

It is hard not to be transfixed by the works in Ando's Lunar Spring series. On view are three grids of twelve-inch square photographs presented in rows resembling the shape of calendars for February, March and April of 2023. Shooting one image per day of the sky outside her New York apartment, these pieces track the slight variations of clouds against the sky, which appears blue, gray, orange or purple depending on the time of day the image was shot as well as the light and angle of view in the gallery. March 1-31 2023 Cloud Grid With Lunar Phases NYC consists of 31 different photographs— all images of the sky with different cloud variations — where the darker toned images represent specific phases of the moon. When looking at the the grid, it is interesting to think about how the images track time and the ever changing nuances of the sky.

In addition to the three calendar grids, Ando also presents numerous individual large and small scale photographs from her Unkai (A Sea of Clouds) and Kumo (Cloud) series. Each of these images is titled by the time and date they were created. What is most striking about them is their reflective surfaces and luminescence— they capture the impermanence of light and represent a single moment from nature's ever changing continuum. At first glance, an image such as Kumo (Cloud) 07.27.2022 1:01 PM NYC, 2022 appears to be just a picture of semi-translucent white clouds on a silvery (aluminum) surface, but from different vantage points parts of the image reflect blue from outside the gallery window or a golden yellow from the interior illumination. This infuses the image with a sense of both depth and movement. 11.2 Cloud Study (2023) at just 12.25 x 12.25 inches oscillates between silver, white and light orange, the texture of the sky fusing with the grain of the aluminum.

While one might think of the works of Califonia Light and Space artists when regarding Ando's work, one reading of Sky Atlas could be that it is simply an exhibition of images of sublime sky-scapes. But Ando's practice is more than a formal exploration. She fuses observation with process, drawing from East and West, her knowledge of East Asian Studies, as well as metalsmithing (she apprenticed with a master metalsmith in Japan) to create unique works that are about perception and the ephemeral nature of the natural world. These seductive and captivating images leave a long-lasting impression while also inviting viewers to look up and contemplate the vastness of the sky and the clouds above.

Click here for Miya Ando on its own page.

Aubrey Levinthal
Tourist
M+B
September 9 - October 7, 2023


Aubrey Levinthal

In her first exhibition at M+B in 2021, Philadelphia based painter Aubrey Levinthal looked inward, making works about the isolation of the pandemic and the guarded interactions that followed. In her current exhibition Tourist, her paintings begin to look outward, depicting figures on the go, traveling and socializing, in addition to experiencing quiet moments alone. Levinthal works with a soft, muted palette rendering her scenes tenderly and somewhat abstractly, as often the figures merge with, or are bisected by the backgrounds. While based on observation, Levinthal also extrapolates and allows her imagination to infiltrate the scenes.

For example, Windowbox (13th St.) (all works 2023) is a painting of a woman passing by a windowbox filled with flowers on the exterior of a nondescript building. Levinthal presents a tight crop of the location so the dark, olive-green windowbox sparsely populated with red and purple flowers fills most of the composition. A woman passes by. Her shirt is rendered in translucent whites which allow the shadow at the base of the box to merge with her body while the skin tones of her head and neck take on the colors of the front of the container. In profile, she stares straight ahead with wide open eyes as if lost in thought and unaware of her surroundings.

A similar sentiment pervades Waiting for the El where Levinthal portrays a lone woman wearing a light blue dress and coat, carrying a darker blue handbag, as well as a backpack filled with flowers. She casually leans against a support column as she gazes down at her cell phone. While the woman occupies most of the left side of the composition, depicted behind her and on the right side of the image is the architecture of the empty train station painted in washy tans and grays. A second figure sits on a bench in the distance partially obscured by a dark vertical beam. While the woman's expression is complacent, there is an aura of loneliness that emanates from the scene.

It is not hard to imagine the artist among the woman seated in Three Women (Amsterdam) sharing a moment and a drink together as city life goes on around them, or even enjoying a moment of solitude and contemplation in Sauna Lady, a painting of a woman seated on a wooden bench with legs extended, surrounded by paneled walls and steam from the hot rocks in the sauna. Draped in only an opaque white-toned towel, the figure subtly fuses with her surroundings.

A narrative is inferred through the trajectory of the paintings that illustrates a range of human emotions and experiences: from vulnerability and melancholy to self-reflection and even joy. The narrative moves from leisure time, like Morning Aerobics, a painting of a man and a woman relaxing in a pool, to travel, as in Terminal A and moments of intimacy like Studio Nintendo that depicts a small boy sitting across the lap of a young woman seated on a huge pink arm chair. Both figures appear to be zoning out with their eyes closed, ignoring what might be on the computer screen.

Levinthal has an uncanny ability to express a lot with minimal depiction. Her painting style is light but expressive, a wonderful combination of lines and fills, transparencies and opacities. Figures dissolve into architecture as if to reinforce the impermanence of human life while simultaneously asserting their presence. Levinthal is both a voyeur and a participant, chronicling that which unfolds around her: wary, but also delighted to celebrate what it means to be alive.

Click here for Aubrey Levinthal on its own page.

Annetta Kapon
Proxy Gallery 10 Years
The Floating Gallery LA
August 5 - September 30, 2023


Proxy Gallery 10 Years

In 2013, Annetta Kapon held her first exhibition at Proxy Gallery: a cube that measures 12 x 12 x 12 inches. In the ten years since its opening, Proxy has presented 85 exhibitions. Invited artists and curators can use the space however they choose, decorating the inside and/or the outside of the box, or even not using it at all. Proxy has been nomadic at times. It lived for a while on a wall at the Otis College of Art graduate studios in Culver City, but also traveled to Greece and Paris. To celebrate this achievement, The Floating Gallery (another nomadic space) is exhibiting documentation of each project, as well as the physical gallery where viewers can see exhibit #85 by Mirena Kim.

Kapon is a long time educator and visual artist who created Proxy Gallery as a "conceptual project that allows a platform for discourse." It was formed while she was an MFA professor and came out of discussions with her students about creating their own conditions to make and show work, regardless of limitations. Proxy fits within the parameters of Kapon's art production. While she creates collages, sculptures and installations, she has also been influential as a professor of art as her students (many of whom have exhibited at Proxy) can attest. In this unique space, she is the sole proprietor and decision maker. She invites other artists as well as accepts proposals. She writes insightful press releases "to get the discursive ball rolling," as she states. Like any conventional gallery, Proxy has a website, opening and closing receptions, is occasionally reviewed and has printed business cards and invitations. The fact that it is small is beside the point. Yet, it is its small size and the challenges it brings for each artist that makes her project unique.

For the exhibition at The Floating Gallery, the entire history of Proxy is presented. Each exhibition is represented by a single square image that is dated and captioned. These are installed in two long horizontal rows across opposing walls of the space. The works are hung chronologically so viewers can easily trace the history of the exhibits and exhibitors. Some may be well known, others unknown, perhaps students or artists from Greece or Paris where the gallery traveled. A few, but not that many artists have had multiple exhibitions over the ten years. Kapon and her student Katie Thoma inaugurated the gallery with an exhibition of their works in January 2013. From there, contributors rose to the challenge in different ways: Shiva Akibadi covered it in faux fur (referencing Meret Oppenheims's Le Déjeuner en fourrure (1936)) and carried it to myriad commercial gallery openings in the Los Angeles area. Susan Silton created Exchange in 2015, covering the front of the gallery cube with a box of expired Agfa Photography paper that belonged to Allan Sekula. Silton inserted a peep hole into the center of the Agfa box that allowed viewers to see into the gallery where they confronted a hand written message that states, "Who is it... Who's There?" In 2022 in her second Proxy exhibition, Renée Petropoulos inserted her head into the box to create a performance piece entitled Outburst-Conjugation 2 presented at the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece.

During Covid, the exhibits were virtual and documented by the artists. In some instances, the exhibitors forgoed the actual box in favor of surrounding walls, as in the installation Holla Holla Holla by Sharon Barnes in 2021. What is most striking about the exhibition at The Floating Gallery is the fact that uniformity of Kapon's presentation (each exhibit is represented by a single still photographic image) does not diminish the uniqueness of any of the projects but rather calls attention to the different creative ways that the artists approached the given parameters of the space. As an exhibitor myself in 2016, the representation of my work is a partial experience as I drew on all the different sides of the box and created a 3D image inside to be viewed via red/blue stereo glasses through a small opening. This could not be represented by a single image. However, in the context of the exhibition it resonates as yet another approach to solving a complex and unusual problem. Not to say that creating an exhibition is simply a problem to be solved, but in certain ways it is.

Kapon gave each of her artists "carte blanche" to create a new work that was not, as she states, "a miniature version of what they usually do," but rather a thought provoking and conceptually savvy solution to the specifics of a space that happens to be a 12 x 12 x 12 inch cube. While primarily documentation, Proxy Gallery 10 Years is also a work of art, one created by Kapon over ten years that is nuanced and smart and a celebration of works being made by a range of artists in Los Angeles and beyond.

Click here for Annetta Kapon on its own page.

Clovis Schlumberger
Virtual Cravings
YiWei Gallery
August 19 - September 17, 2023


Clovis Schlumberger

Keith Haring's iconic figures (on exhibit at The Broad May 27 - October 8, 2023) have permeated art and popular culture for almost forty years. While his canvases, stickers and buttons are filled with dancing, playful characters that radiate humor and joy, his works also were imbued with political and social commentary about issues that included racism and homophobia. Clovis Schlumberger's paintings on view at YiWei Gallery in an exhibition titled Virtual Cravings are filled with figures reminiscent of Haring's. Schlumberger's people populate imagined landscapes as well as cityscapes and interiors— his figures cavorting through these spaces individually, as well as in groups. Schlumberger's illustrative style also extends from his canvases to merchandise. Three of the gallery walls display his paintings while the fourth serves as the backdrop for his various commodities: t-shirts, stickers, phone cases, socks and pillows displaying his yellow hued genderless characters — a rounded version of the universal symbol for figures — in a range of poses.

Rather than install the canvases along a line, Schlumberger presents his works quasi-salon style, hanging them at different heights. He also paints a few of his figures directly on the wall as if they jumped out of the paintings. Game (all works 2023) is a canvas installed on a wall that matches the golden yellow color of the border and background of the work. Within the image, Schlumberger depicts a landscape filled with blue trees outlined in black against a blue sky. The trees emanate from a golden ground populated by three groups of lighter gold-hued figures who appear to be at play. Toward the back of the composition is a lone dog that stares out into a distant blue expanse. Other animals include disparate butterflies that float through the flattened space. Although it is hard to discern exactly what "game" is being played, the atmosphere appears to be joyful.

Dismissed depicts a somewhat chaotic interior space that could perhaps be a school room where each figure is positioned on or behind a gray rectangle that signs for a "desk." The twelve figures gesticulate and interact with each other and their desks within a space that has been subtly subdivided by what appears to be an EKG line or stock market graph.

The scenario within 45 inch model-Cling is a mountain landscape that recedes toward concentric gold circles on a blue background surrounding a vertical golden rectangle hovering like a monolith in the sky. Light-gold hued figures play and walk amidst the rocks and hills. All of this takes place within a painted computer monitor that is centered in the gold-hued canvas.

While 45 inch model-Cling, Dismissed and Game contain Schlumberger's idiosyncratic figures, other works including 37 Inch Model-Steep, 38 Inch Model-Searching and Bloom are people-less natural and urban landscapes created as outlined forms, filled with gradients and flat areas of color. Bloom for example, the smallest painting in the exhibition, is an image of a flower with a long green stem that bisects a rectangle that could be a screen or window. Scattered throughout the composition are white flower-petals that have fallen off the plant and litter the frame.

There is both humor and seriousness to Schlumberger's endeavors. His genderless figures stand for everyone and while mischievous and cunning, they are also quite endearing. They are placed within simplified backgrounds both real or imagined that reference the digital world. Schlumberger makes images of screens as well as the landscape, asking viewers to think about the impact of the virtual on everyday life.

Click here for Clovis Schlumberger on its own page.

Candace Thatcher
Scroll Interference
The Landing
July 22 - September 2, 2023


Candace Thatcher

An algorithm is defined as a set of rules that are followed in calculations or problem solving operations, more often than not using a computer. Yet, there are also many artists (working in both analogue and digital formats) who create their pieces based on algorithms that rely on a set of "rules" or instructions. An example of an analogue artist working this way is the Conceptual Minimalist Sol LeWitt whose wall and paper drawings were often made by others following a set of precise instructions. How artists use computers and code and the different ways instructions can be created and followed has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. These ideas were explored most recently in Coded Art Enters the Computer Age 1952 - 1982 an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (on view from February 12 - July 2, 2023). Except for the fact that they were created after 1982, Nevada City-based Candace Thatcher's paintings could have fit within the premise of that exhibition.

In her exhibition Scroll Interference, Thatcher presents recent paintings from her Archive Scan series. At first glance, these acrylic on panel works appear to be complex geometric abstractions that share a kinship with Josef Albers, as well as the Op Art patterned paintings of Victor Vasarely and with digital artist Casey Reas' recent homages to Vasarely— METAVASARELY and An Empty Room — (both 2023 and presented online by LACMA as part of the Coded exhibition). These mesmerizing pieces follow a programmed sequence based on Vasarely's works that generate an infinite array of visual patterns.

Thatcher's works are process based and labor intensive as she follows a specific sequence of steps to transform found digital images into abstract paintings. Using the program "Processing" (coincidently developed by Reas), she translates the pixels into topographical lattices which are then output as vinyl screens used as stencils to create complex multi-layered paintings. The layering of the different lattices suggests an illusion of depth in these multi colored and dimensional works.

What is striking about Thatcher's Archive Scan pieces (2022-2023) is how they read as abstractions rather than translations of actual photographs. As completed paintings, there are no obvious referents to an image, only to screens or distorted grids in various colors that are layered on the surface to create intricate moire patterns. Archive Scan XXI, (2022) is a 36 x 36 inch acrylic on panel work in which hues of reds, oranges and blues oscillate across the composition creating depth on the flat surface. While the majority of the pieces are in color, Thatcher also presents a handful of paintings that are simply black and white. Looking closely at Archive Scan XXXIX (2023) reveals an all-over, but not repeating pattern comprised of short and long white lines on a black ground that undulate throughout the composition. Another black and white work, Archive Scan XXX (2023) appears to be a pattern of overlapping squares that form a gridded moire. The blue-green hued Archive Scan XXIII (2022) has the tonalities of highly saturated camouflage: that pattern conflicts with a subtle circular shape in the center of the image.

Thatcher's abstractions are absorbing and perplexing. They are difficult to decipher, perhaps because they are computer generated, yet created by hand. The pieces allude to topographical maps, moire patterns and layered window screens and while they are completely devoid of imagery, they resonate with a power and depth that references something tangible, yet also unknown.

Click here for Candace Thatcher on its own page.

Jorge Méndez Blake
I remember it was raining...
1301 PE
June 1 - August 26, 2023


Jorge Méndez Blake

Jorge Méndez Blake is an artist based in Guadalajara, Mexico whose art takes apart and re-construct literary texts and re-present them as concrete poetry. Méndez Blake works on paper and canvas in addition to creating wall and ceiling based installations. In his exhibition I remember it was raining..., Méndez Blake uses the writings of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1971) as a point of departure rather than universally recognized authors such as Kafka, Joyce, Borges or Dickinson. Bishop was known for her highly detailed, objective and distanced point of view with an avoidance of personal subject matter and Méndez Blake tries to turn that distance into something more personal and familiar. For example, the silkscreen print I remember it was raining (Bishop), (all works 2023) simply states, "I remember it was raining and I was reading Elizabeth Bishop."

The largest work on view, Proposal for a Ceiling Landscape fills the upstairs gallery ceiling across two rooms. Because Méndez Blake leaves the walls blank, the viewer's eyes are immediately directed upwards where the ceiling which has been painted a deep blue and is covered with irregular lines of type in a white serif font. As the language (taken from Elizabeth Bishop's work) extends from the stairs to the windows across the ceiling, it forms clusters that ebb and flow. Words repeat and overlap, making it difficult to read the text in its entirety. Méndez Blake is interested in the visual aspects of language and fragments the original text, transforming a narrative into visual poetry that in many ways shares a kinship with Fluxus and other concrete poets. When viewing Proposal for a Ceiling Landscape, it is necessary to look up at words that hover above like stars in the sky. While some might try to read across the composition to reconstruct Bishop's work, Méndez Blake wants viewers to ingest selected fragments and think about visual poetics and the power of language.

Like in many of Méndez Blake's other works and installations, while the source is specific and important, he consciously obfuscates any direct reading. In a smaller painting, I Remember It Was Raining (The Flood. Elizabeth Bishop), large and small sized white letters descend from top to bottom on the black canvas, reminiscent of falling rain. The cadence of the letters, rather than the meaning of the words, are what makes this image resonate. Méndez Blake similarly distorts "Calligrammes" by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in two new additions to his ongoing Il Pleut Fort paintings, again allowing the words (in their original language) to become vertical lines of type that fill the space like rain.

The words Méndez Blake uses are often presented in the language in which they were written— be it English, Spanish or French. He is neither interested in providing translations to aid in the reading of the works nor citing specific sources: rather his concern is with the flow and visual structure of the words, as well as the different ways they can be abstracted.

Click here for Jorge Méndez Blake on its own page.

Urs Fischer
Denominator
Gagosian
July 20 - September 16, 2023


Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer's Denominator (2020-22) is four high-definition LED screens forming a 12 foot by 12 foot cube. It displays a constantly changing array of clips culled from various international television commercials from the 1950s to the present. This bombastic work is presented alone in the center of a cavernous but otherwise empty space across the street from the main gallery where it can be seen from the street beckoning curious passersby to come inside. It is an ever-moving, fast paced digital collage that is more about information and information overload than a critique of the strategies of advertising.

Denominator follows on the heels of Fischer's other recent technically sophisticated digital projects -- CHAOS #501 (2022) and the series CHAOS #1 - #500 (exhibited at the Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles in 2022 and also released as NFTs)-- for which 500 found objects were 3D-scanned from every angle and shown as pairs projected on three large screens oscillating against a white background. The objects connected and intersected with each other in mysterious and unpredictable ways. Fischer later combined all 500 into the single channel work CHAOS #501. Here, the individual objects move independently rather than as pairs. This movement is generated by a computer program that sets the flow of the objects as they cascade across the 349 inch wide LED screen. The objects range from toys to furniture to clothing to detritus and are meant to represent every-day "stuff" that has been discarded for whatever reason. Through the scanning process however, the objects are "repaired" and "cleaned up" to giving them a new life. A similar strategy occurs with the collection of advertisements in Denominator.

Browsing anonymously using a VPN, Fischer and his team collected thousands of advertisements from online sources such as "YouTube" which were compiled into a database. Later, an AI engine / custom algorithm was employed to sort through the clips according to specific "directions" -- grouping them by color or theme to be displayed in sequences that move as different sized rectangles across the LED surfaces. As the images flow over the four sides of the cube they appear to be carefully choreographed rather than a random layering. While the number of clips presented within the display is not stated the imagery does not appear to repeat. Rather, fragments traverse the sides and around the corners, layered on top of each other and often obscuring what is below. Objects, talking heads and textual fragments in different languages appear and then disappear. The display is seductive and mesmerizing. Some of the clips are for well known products like Coca-Cola though others are for European products less familiar to U.S. audiences. While recognition is a factor, what stands out is the relationship between the fragments and the way they behave on the display to become a collage of different sized rectangles that move in front of and behind each other similar to the movement of the found objects in CHAOS #501.

Both works are more about the collective -- imagery and experience -- rather than the individual assets. The takeaway is not a product -- whatever the original advertisement was created to sell -- but a feeling -- a cacophony of clips that are familiar and discordant. It is interesting to try to follow a single clip as it travels around the cube changing its size as well as its position within the numerous layers until it eventually disappears, only to be replaced by another clip that catches the eye for whatever reason to be tracked and lost over and over again. For those of us drawn to the big screen, yet loathe to commercials, this artwork is surprisingly playful and provides much to contemplate as it presents, or rather re-presents years of diverse and unrelated content organized by machine learning or an AI algorithm rather than being choreographed by human eyes and thought.

Click here for Urs Fischer on its own page.

Hank Willis Thomas
I've Known Rivers
PACE Los Angeles
July 15 - August 26, 2023


Hank Willis Thomas

Is more (always) better? That question has become more relevant when looking at artworks with the advent of Augmented Reality and other technology driven processes that create multiple viewing layers or experiences for the audience. There have been numerous artworks that offer something "else" when seen through mobile devices, be it an alternate view or a moving image. Hank Willis Thomas has been experimenting with retroreflective materials and uses them to create images that have two distinct but interrelated layers. Retroreflective materials are made from tiny glass beads that reflect light back at the viewer and are often used in the fabrication of traffic signs and pavement markings. For the second layer in Thomas' works to be revealed, it is necessary to make a flash photograph with a mobile device, or view the images with a flashlight available from the gallery attendant. To capitalize on these dualities is cumbersome as it necessitates looking at the work with or through a device. To what end remains an enigma.

Thomas makes visually stunning works that intertwine art and politics. He freely appropriates from art history and advertising to explore issues ranging from race, colonization and globalization to identity politics. For the exhibition I've Known Rivers, the titles of the individual pieces use lines from Langston Hughes' 1921 poem The Negro Speaks, anchoring the images to a literary context. Thomas simultaneously references art history with works by Henri Matisse and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as Romare Bearden.

Formed from irregularly cut pieces of vinyl, many of the large-scale pieces are infused with tones of blue that suggest bodies of water. In My soul has grown deep like rivers and I've known rivers (all works 2023), a silhouetted figure (reminiscent of Matisse's late collages) — either sitting on a rock or drifting below what appears to be a night sky — is juxtaposed with a blue ground comprised of abstract shapes in different hues. When seen with a flashlight or photographed with a flash, these areas are transformed into dizzying collages filled with overlapping fragments of people alone, or in crowds, in addition to snippets of protest signs and newspaper headlines, as well as different types of currency. How these references relate to the unmediated image is something to ponder.

The largest work on view, I Looked upon the Nile and raised pyramids above it pays homage to Roy Lichtenstein's Pyramids (Corlett 87) (1969), an image of three triangles partially filled with his signature benday dot patterns against a yellow background. Thomas' transformation respects the structure and tones of the original image, but adds a gigantic and abstracted silhouette of a reclining man with African features in front of the triangular pyramids as well as references to nature — leaves, a red flower and the suggestion of an undulating river. This is the initial view of the image. It is striking and powerful. While Thomas has mastered the dual effect and the layering of non-reflective and retroreflective materials, the "afterimage" becomes dense to the point of being indecipherable.

Thomas layers his work with content that is appropriated from a wide range of sources. His works are graphically sophisticated and visually compelling while what they are about suggests different possibilities. While the use of the retroreflective materials takes the works in a new direction and allows Thomas to present two images simultaneously, the journey from past to present, from black to white, from day to night and from abstraction to representation becomes a burden for the viewer who must entrust the viewing of the 'other' content to an external device. Once the wow factor has worn off, there is still much to reflect upon as these beautiful works resonate on multiple levels without needing anything more.

Click here for Hank Willis Thomas on its own page.

Sculpture into Photography
Moskowitz Bayse
July 15 - August 19, 2023


Sculpture into Photography

Sculpture into Photography is a group exhibition that takes a contemporary approach to a show that was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970: Photography into Sculpture, which received both praise and criticism. It celebrated a more expansive approach to "photography" that went beyond "flat prints" in the documentary style. The exhibition was one of the first to present photography as "art," a subject that continued to be debated over the years. Robert Heinecken was in the MOMA show and is also represented at Moskowitz Bayse with the iconic work Fractured Figure Segments from 1970.

The fifteen artists included in the exhibition take an experimental approach to photography, fashioning images into sculptures in addition to collaging and cutting apart their pictures (as Heinecken did), as well as working with video and digital technologies. While Sculpture into Photography is in no way inclusive, it serves as an introduction to a number of artists working today who are interested in challenging the commonplace, technical, illusionistic and conceptual parameters of the medium.

Along with Heinecken's works (also on view is TV Diner from 1971, a crinkled hand-colored image of a TV dinner printed on linen), the other "historical" works are by Barbara Kasten. nstruct NYC 9 and onstruct XXII (both 1984) are Cibachrome photographs of assorted mirrors and objects assembled to be photographed from a fixed vantage point. These share a kinship with Anthony Lepore's 2023 Looking at Each Other in the Mirror, a large-scale, Trompe-l'oeil image comprised of wooden supports, some with red edges, that are both shelves and a frame simultaneously. While it appears to be a geometric abstraction, it is also a physical object dramatically lit so it comes across as flat and three-dimensional at the same time.

It is always a pleasure to view works by Matt Lipps, here represented by Camera (2013), an arrangement of black and white cut-outs of different types of cameras as well as many other iconic images (culled from Time-Life educational volumes) presented on glass shelves against a red-orange background that appears to be a brightly toned image of an eye. Lipps' arrangements are created to offer new associations and relationships between historical images. While Lipps works with appropriated images, Soo Kim cuts shapes out of her own. In the double-sided, free standing large-scale image The DMZ (Ballad of branches and the trunk (side 1) (2018), Kim has removed most of the information from the original photograph leaving a structure that suggests architecture without providing the details. Seeing through and beyond are also themes Valerie Green explores in works such as I think We're Alone Now (2023), a physically layered black and white image filled with textures and patterns cut into the surface to reveal others below. Though not a static photographic image, Brian Bress' slow moving video HalfZebraHalfAcrylicHalfMan: I turned rainbow, closed my eyes watch my brain glow (2023), is a thirty-two minute loop revealing a costumed yet mostly hidden Bress moving colorful-cut out images along the surface of the screen to subtly change the composition over time.

The artists in the exhibition are interested in expanding the boundaries of photography and while some of their works begin with a photographic referent, they are open to cutting, collaging, drawing on and turing their images into sculpture. With digital technologies and the proliferation of imagery generated with AI, the notion of a "photographic truth" has become even more outdated so creators feel free to push the envelope and manipulate images that were once held sacred into something new and unexpected. Audiences are no longer really wowed by the "wow" factor, so content and the integrity of the artist's intentions is what makes the works in Sculpture into Photography resonate. The relationship between the image and the object it becomes, as well as how the two interact is at the crux of this thought provoking exhibition.

Click here for Sculpture into Photography at Moskowitz Bayse on its own page.

Keith Haring
Art is for Everybody
The Broad
May 27 - October 8, 2023

Jean-Michel Basquiat
King Pleasure
The Grand LA
March 31 - October 15, 2023


Keith Haring & Jean-Michel Basquiat

Both Keith Haring (1958 - 1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988) were prolific artists active in the New York Downtown scene in the 1980s. Both died young and left behind an expansive legacy. Haring and Basquiat catapulted to fame for their idiosyncratic works that not only resonated at the time, but continue to have impact now, more than thirty years after their deaths. They were crowd pleasers in many ways. Haring capitalized on that fact by creating The Pop Shop and distributing buttons, stickers and tee-shirts emblazoned with his iconic graphics like the barking dog and the crawling baby. Basquiat might have been lesser known outside the art world at the time, but his collaborations with artists like Andy Warhol eventually put him in the public eye as well.

Two concurrent exhibitions in downtown Los Angeles showcase works by Haring and Basquiat and create a curious conversation across Grand Avenue. At The Broad, in Art is for Everybody there are more than 120 pieces on view, many selected from The Broad's own holdings as Eli and Edythe Broad were early collectors and supporters of Haring's work. The show was organized in conjunction with the Keith Haring Foundation and is the first museum exhibition in Los Angeles to present an expansive body of his work ranging from documentation of his subway interventions to ephemera, drawings, paintings and sculptures.

At The Grand LA (a new Frank Gehry designed building complex which is not a traditional exhibition venue), is Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, a large-scale exhibition produced by Basquiat's estate that features more than 200 works. In addition to paintings, there are recreations of Basquiat's studio, rooms from his family home, the VIP room at the Palladium in NYC, as well as numerous videos where family members recount personal narratives. The Basquiat exhibition develops a context for his work via a timeline and trajectory that illustrates his influences, political and social concerns, education and family life. It outlines his proclivity for drawing at an early age and his interests in comics, cartoons and graffiti. Basquiat began as the tagger SAMO and was determined to be a "star." While his paintings continued to develop, he got involved with partying and drugs and the "downtown" scene. Although his work was widely shown and collected during his lifetime, there were many works left in his studio at the time of his death and it is these pieces, as well as childhood and teenage works (all of which now belong to the estate) that comprise much of the exhibition.

While Basquiat developed a personal iconography that drew from popular culture and music, his works were gritty and expressive in contrast to Haring whose pieces were more playful, imbued with humor and joy. Haring had his "dark" side as well but for the most part the works, even when about AIDS or other political topics, radiated "fun" as his lines danced across his compositions. Haring's exhibition brings smiles of remembrance to those who first saw his works in the subways of New York City at the same time that it brings inspiration to those new to his creations. Haring and Basquiat knew each other and were included in numerous exhibitions together, but now exhibiting in two very different venues, the motivations behind the presentations direct the readings of the works in ways that are less about the why and when they were made and the scene the artists belonged to, but more about commodification and legacy. Struggling with and investigating issues surrounding racism, homophobia and celebrity, both Haring and Basquiat brought issues of art and life together. How that conversation would have continued thirty years later is at the root of these concurrent exhibitions.

Even without describing specific pieces, the names Keith Haring and Jean-Michael Basquiat elicit images, personalities and tragedy— The AIDS epidemic that took the lives of so many in the 1980s and 1990s including Haring, and the struggles with drugs and addiction that Basquiat confronted and finally succumbed to. That being said, both exhibitions are celebrations: of life, of vision, of creativity and of artists who followed their own paths and left large bodies of work that continue to have influence today. That the organizers are sponsoring workshops and the galleries are filled with school children attests to these artists remarkable and long lasting legacies and importance. Both exhibitions are not to be missed.

Click here for Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat on its own page.

Francesca Gabbiani
Mutations
Wilding Cran Gallery
June 29 - July 29, 2023


Francesca Gabbiani

Francesca Gabbiani is best known for her cut paper works-- images created by collaging and layering precisely cut bits of colored paper into compositions that draw from both the natural and urban landscapes. Her subjects have included surfers, interiors, spaces that are overlooked and forgotten, as well as the effect of wildfires on the environment. For Mutations she combines her iconic cut paper collaging with ink, gouache and acrylic to create works that focus on devastation -- inflamed palm trees and forests, off colored seascapes and skies -- calling attention to the beauty and the horror simultaneously. The standout in this exhibition, however is the seven-minute stop-motion film Sea of Fire (2022) that tracks the movements of a giant black spider accompanied by a pulsating sound track by Eddie Ruscha.

The film is an exciting extension of Gabbiani's studio practice. The hand-made qualities of her works on paper beautifully translate into stop motion animation and this gives the film its charm. Gabbiani does not try to hide the puppet-like motion of these elements but rather ingeniously combines fragments from her paintings and collages with actual footage of flames and their destructive aspects. The film "stars" a large black spider that careens through the landscape on a journey to the sea— a place spiritually and metaphorically far from the encroaching flames.

In conjunction with the film are new large-scale paper pieces dated from 2020-2023 that isolate and capture spectacular moments like flaming silhouetted palm trees blowing in the wind against a surreal orange sky as in Mutation XLVIII, Hot Panorama III and Hot Panorama V. In Phosflorescence VIII (2022) Gabbiani presents the setting sun as a large orange-yellow ball hovering above the horizon where night sky meets the sea, its glow spreading out across the ocean and illuminating a bank of phosphorescent waves.

Gabbiani's individual works are time consuming masterpieces— a combination of hand cut papers and painted grounds that reference the environs of Los Angeles: specifically when there are fires in the distant hills that cause the sky to turn gray and the sun to become a ball of fire that casts an eerie aura across the city. Gabbiani perfectly captures these odd and unsettling times. Seeing the works on paper in conjunction with the film infuses Gabbiani's project with a sense of urgency that looks at the vulnerability of the landscape and the dangers of climate change coupled with a sense of humor and narrative sophistication. In the film, the spider weaves its way through the landscape, ambling, as well as skateboarding away from fire-filled skies toward the magical salvation of the ocean, it is transformed from "animal" to "athlete"— a surfer riding away from the flames balancing on majestic blue waves— an image of hope amongst the devastation.

Click here for Francesca Gabbiani on its own page.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Coming Back to See Through, Again
David Zwirner Los Angeles
May 23 - July 29, 2023


Njideka Akunyili Crosby

During a visit to Victoria Miro Gallery in 2013, I happened upon pieces by Njideka Akunyili Crosby in the group exhibition Cinematic Visions, Paintings at the Edge of Reality. It was my first encounter with her work and I was blown away. They were unlike anything I had seen and they resonated both for their straight forward representations of Black life and their inventive use of photo-transfers combined with drawn lines and painting. Who was this artists from Los Angeles showing in London that I had never heard of? Ten years later, I have had numerous opportunities to see Akunyili Crosby's works and I remain in awe of her skill and the beauty of her works: now more nuanced and sophisticated.

In her first exhibition at David Zwirner's new Los Angeles gallery, she presents a selection of multi-layered works on paper that juxtapose photographic transfers and painted depictions of interiors and exteriors some with, but many without people. Poetically titled Coming Back to See Through, Again, collectively and individually, these large-scale works on paper suggest a range of periods of time, as well as the possibilities of different worlds, glimpsed through windows and doorways.

Blend in - Stand out (2019) is a large scale work that spans 95 x 123 inches. The image depicts an interior setting, but true to form, Akunyili Crosby simply suggests the room, with walls and floor presented as flat solid colors. Within this closely cropped space are two figures —-a woman hugging a man-— seen from the side, four chairs, a rug and a table with a plant on it. An abstract painting of plants, similar to the flowers in a pot on the table, as well as other paintings in the gallery, hangs on the wall. Akunyili Crosby's blend of painting and collage is evident in this work with the beautifully collaged elements creating an interesting contrast to the painted areas. While aspects of the background —walls and flowers, the seated man's arm, white T-shirt, sneakers and green trousers, as well as the woman's hand and legs— are painted, almost everything else is carefuly constructed or overlaid with collaged (transferred) elements that come from both personal and historical sources. Akunyili Crosby's use of collage infuses her works with a sense of history that implies a continuum from then to now and helps to define her characters.

Like Blend in - Stand out, the painting Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens (2021) is a self portrait. Akunyili Crosby sits on a chair with her young child on her knee outside her home surrounded by vegetation. The interior of the home is visible through an open door. The work is a layered composition juxtaposing flatly painted areas with painted patterns and collages made from photographic transfers. Seen both in front of and behind them, the mingling of plant life, patterns and photographic montage both obscure and concretize the figures. Akunyili Crosby draws from her childhood in Nigeria, the African diaspora and notions of displacement and identity to weave together narrative paintings that are at once personal and universal. That the child wears a T-shirt that reads "Black is Beautiful" is visually subtle, yet politically specific.

Interspersed with the figurative images are works that foreground nature. At first glance, pieces like Dwellers: Cosmopolitan Ones (2022), Persistence of Vision: Screen Walls & Fruit Tree (2022) and Potential, Displaced (2021) appear to be images of dense vegetation and architectural details in both solid tones and Akunyili Crosby's patterns of transfers. She is interested in the origins and migrations of plants (as well as people), their cultural and historical associations and has done extensive research on plant-life in both Los Angeles and Nigeria. The green-hued leaves on a tree positioned at the bottom of the composition in front of a light-tan screen/wall that dominates Persistence of Vision: Screen Walls & Fruit Tree are in fact green painted transfers culled from photographs and magazine pages. While seemingly an image of the type of residences built in Nigeria in the 70s and 80s, Akunyili Crosby connects it to those who inhabited the area.

Akunyili Crosby's layered works can be seen on numerous levels. From afar, they are exteriors, portraits and landscapes that explore issues of family and nature. Upon closer examination, they become encyclopedic adventures that integrate past and present, Los Angeles and Nigeria, paint and photographic transfer, abstraction and collage to become evocative, seductive, engaging artworks that reveal more and more the longer they are observed.

Click here for Njideka Akunyili Crosby on its own page.

Elaine Reichek
Frock-Conscious
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
June 10 - July 22, 2023


Elaine Reichek

Over the years, numerous artists have used the works of others as a point of departure for their own creations. The list is long and includes a wide range of approaches. Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman re-staged famous paintings as photographs, while Deborah Kass and Elaine Sturtevant replicated paintings by their male counterparts, often infusing them with a feminist agenda. Elaine Reicheck also draws from pre-exisiting works.

In her compelling exhibition Frock-Conscious, Reichek appropriates artworks of varying styles and periods to explore the relationship between textiles and paintings. Choosing both well and lesser known examples, she recreates aspects of original drawings, designs and paintings as delicate embroidery, both hand sewn and digitally fabricated. The term "Frock Conscious" comes from a quote from the Diary of Virginia Woolf that reads, "My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, &c." Reichek uses the idea of "frock consciousness" as a jumping off point for this series to look at the representation of clothing or fabric. Each small piece reproduces a fragment of texture or pattern from the original artwork and often centers it within a solid colored background, also derived from the source. Because the source material is not always that obvious and she often isolates a small section, her finished pieces at first glance appear to be colorful abstractions. To aid viewers' understanding, the gallery provides a helpful handout that illustrates Reichek's sources.

For example, Bronzino Curtain on Green (2020) presents a section of drapery from the background of Lodovico Capponi (ca. 1550–55), an oil painting by Agnolo Bronzino. Reichek focuses on the folded green fabric behind the subject, rather than the portrait. Similarly in Tissot Ruffle (2020), she recreates a section of the pink ruffled dress worn in Jacques Joseph Tissot's Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née Thérèse Feuillant (1866). Rousseau Dress (2018) is a striated abstraction centered in a rectangle of raw linen that comes from the garment worn by the sleeping gypsy in Rouseau's painting. More contemporary borrowings include Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Gallery), (2016) and John Currin's, Tapestry (2013) presented as two fragments positioned on the wall at the same distance that they appear in the painting.

The twenty-four works are installed salon-style on the wall and become a curious sampling of art history as Reichek appropriates from male artists to transform their painted works into what is commonly thought of as a woman's craft. Together, they create an interesting conversation about appropriation, women's work, the relationship between thread and pixels (as many are digitally produced) as well as the relationship between fine art and craft.

Also included in the exhibition are curious homages to Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse. JP Textile/Text 1 and JP Textile/Text 2 (2021) are large-scale works where Reichek has embroidered citations from Jackson Pollock's bibliography in different fonts and colors atop commercially produced fabric that emulates one of Pollock's all-over drip paintings. A second reference to Pollock is a triptych of digital photographs printed on silk. Vogue, March 1, 1951, Photographed by Cecil Beaton against Jackson Pollock Paintings (2023) is taken from Vogue magazine and shows women modeling ball gowns from the 1950s in front of paintings by Pollock.

Reichek has transformed the back gallery into a sitting room or showroom devoted to the work of Matisse and his circle. Here, Reichek's embroideries are presented with commercially produced fabrics inspired by Matisse: two chairs, a rug and a number of potted plants whose shapes are similar to Scattered "Sheaf" with Felt and Fabric (2022). The installation uses Matisse's colorful, graphic shapes of leaves and his depictions of bodies as the inspiration for a suite of small scale embroideries. Screen Time with Matisse (2022) separates the different aspects of the installation: a folding screen collaged with fabric swatches, embroidery and photographic reproductions.

Although Reichek loads the installation with a wide range of references and implied conversations between past and present, the installation is more playful and humorous than didactic. It is a delight to compare Darning Sampler: Lewitt's Color Grids to Darning Sampler (both 2018) and acknowledge the similarities as well as the differences between traditional embroidery patterns and LeWitt's algorithmic process of combining lines and colors. Reichek looks hard at the history of art and creates her own timeline— in order to critique and to celebrate certain modes and methods of representation.

Click here for Elaine Reichek on its own page.

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982
LACMA
February 12 - July 2, 2023


Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age

With Artificial Intelligence, or AI, on everyone's mind, it seems pertinent to go back in time to 1952 and think about a pre-digital world, a time before the personal computer, cell phones and social media. The exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 conceived and curated by LACMA's Leslie jones, harkens back to this era, showcasing early experiments in graphic arts, conceptual art and art made with primitive computers. The works span from the creation of the first purely aesthetic image made on a computer to the replacement of the main frame by the personal computer. While terms like mathematics, generative and informational appear often in the exhibition, Jones’ keen awareness of aesthetics has led to a show not about information, but of stunning artworks influenced by and created with the aid of available technologies of the time.

The exhibition features paintings, sculptures, drawings and projections that weave through the different ways artists were experimenting with what was new and inspiring. In the first room, viewers see Edward Kienholz' The Friendly Grey Computer— Star Gauge Model #54 from 1965 and Lowell Nesbitt's I.B.M. Disc Pack)— neither of which are works that use technology. Kienholz’ piece is an assemblage made from industrial parts, while Nesbitt’s is a hyper realistic large-scale painting of I.B.M. discs. As the show progresses, Jones juxtaposes art output by plotters, like Frederick Hammersley’s Computer Drawings (1969), with more conceptual by artists like Sol LeWitt who created hand-made pieces that followed specific algorithms. Examples of Minimal and Op art are shown alongside generative patterned works created on computers by for example, Vera Molnar, as well as Coletter Stuebe Bangert and Charles Jeffries Bangert. As Hans Haacke’s News (1969)— a telex machine that prints headlines from newswires in real time—endlessly spews text printed on ever flowing rolls of paper that spill onto the gallery floor, one can’t help but think of how things have changed from when getting news in real time was not available to the general public.

An underlying theme in the exhibition is how artists work with code and think about motion and movement. Pausing to watch one of the video and film works — be it Sheila Pinkel’s Intuition (1977) or Stan VanDerBeek's Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version), (1967) or Permutations (1968) by John Whitney Sr.— takes viewers back in time, but also forward to compare current high tech animations with the inventive low tech experiments on display.

While Jones relies on a specific trajectory through the exhibition, the takeaway is about the relationship between now and then: how ideas are generated, what inspires artists and how they use what is available—be it paint, pencil, words or a snipped of code. The process of creation from inception to execution is what drives these artists, and with all the talk of AI, it is interesting to ponder process and whether AI (now in its infancy) will transcend the evils that surround it in much the same way art made with computers or code has come to be appreciated, respected and valued today.

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 poses and answers questions that are as relevant now as they were then. It is doubtful that in 1952, or even in 1982, one could have predicted that most everyone would carry a small computer in their pocket and be globally connected at all times. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to each of us. Regardless, the ways technology has inspired creativity continues to grow.

Click here for Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 on its own page.

Karla Klarin
Big Pink
Vielmetter Los Angeles
May 20 - July 8, 2023


Karla Klarin

A native of the San Fernando Valley, the painter Karla Klarin has been interested in the cityscape of Los Angeles throughout her career. In documenting her surroundings, Klarin sees the sprawl as abstraction and fills it with different colors that extend across her compositions in many directions. In her early paintings, she often captured expansive freeways and receding hills like in Valley View (1984), as well as modern high-rises like those in Monster Twins (1983). Her larger-scale cityscapes including LA Boogie Woogie (2022) and For Piet (2019) are, as their titles suggest, Mondrian-esque works with criss-crossing diagonals that reference the planes of a landscape that lead towards a horizon filled with mountains and the sky beyond.

The works that comprise Big Pink are specific. They explore Klarin's memories of a pink-hued house that belonged to her neighbor Natalie. In the earliest paintings from the series (not on view), Klarin depicted a typical Los Angeles tract home combining architectural precision with broad washy brushstrokes. The dwelling is a one story house with an attached garage and low pitched roof in Klarin's rendering. It appears as an array of rectangular, textured shapes filled with swirling lines. What stood out about this particular home was its color and she uses its particular pink hue as a point of departure in the subsequent paintings.

In the later paintings, Klarin delights in abstraction by allowing the planes of the architecture to morph into a more expansive landscape of interlocking triangles and trapezoids in different shades of gray against a light pink sky. While she creates both small and large paintings, it is the larger works (more than 90 inches across) like Big Pink LA 1 (2017), Big Pink LA 2 (2016), and Big Pink LA 4 (2021) that evoke the sprawl that characterizes the terrain of Los Angeles.

The thick black brush strokes that criss-cross Big Pink LA 1 are reminiscent of the freeways that cut the city into odd shaped pieces. While Klarin's works are not necessarily maps, they have a map-like presence with the paintings unfolding as irregular grids beneath an impasto sky. Klarin cites Richard Diebenkorn and his Ocean Park paintings from the 1960s as an influence and there are parallels in the way both artists abstract the landscape into geometric shapes and striations. Her pink and gray palette is also reminiscent of Philip Guston. While there is no 'real' pathway to navigate Big Pink LA 4, an area of dripping black brush strokes toward the bottom left of the painting suggests the on/off ramps of a freeway that extends along the diagonal of the two panel composition into a pink haze. The painted sections are assembled like pieces of a complex puzzle that are combined to create what Klarin terms "spacial vistas" and "gridded neighborhoods."

Klarin's smaller paintings are a bit more intimate and can be thought of as excerpts from the larger works. These numbered "Landscape Studies" range in size from approximately 13 x 27 inches to 25 x 53 inches and have the same colors and fragmented perspectival space as the larger works. For example, Landscape Study 88 (2018) is simultaneously a geometric abstraction filled with gray and white trapezoids of differing opacities, as well as a representation of a slice of urban sprawl whose focal point is the horizon line — where flat land becomes mountain and meets the sky. The large triangular shape that dominates both Landscape Study 125 and Landscape Study 140 (both 2020) recalls "sci-fi" excavations drawn in perspective. In Klarin's imagination, these are undeveloped and/or uninhabitable places, rendered in black and white and set against a faded pink horizon, foretelling the Los Angeles of the future.

Klarin has been a longtime resident and astute observer of how Los Angeles changes. While she portrays LA as a decentralized concrete jungle and a barren, people-less place filled with an uncanny pink sky above an ever-changing grid, it is done with admiration and respect rather than distain. It is clear that Klarin loves to paint that which surrounds her and to represent the sprawl as an evocative geometric abstraction.

Click here for Karla Klarin on its own page.

Sarah Charlesworth
Neverland
Karma Los Angeles
May 6 - July 7, 2023


Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth first exhibited the photographs from her Neverland series in 2002. These brightly colored images followed 0+1 (1999), a much more subdued series that explored the threshold of vision and were all shades of white, which made it hard to distinguish the picture from the background. Charlesworth (1947-2013) was an artist associated with the "Pictures Generation" and well known for her conceptually based works that often incorporated appropriated materials. Her iconic images from "Modern History," including Herald Tribune January 18 - February 28, 1991 and Arc of Total Eclipse, 1979 presented the front pages of different newspapers with everything removed except the header and a selection of images (for example, a photograph of a solar eclipse in Arc of Total Eclipse). These works were often displayed in a line or as a grid to allow viewers to compare and contrast image size and placement of the featured image within the layout of the front page. Charlesworth's approach to photography, including the formal elegance and conceptual rigor of her works influenced generations of artists and photographers.

Seeing Neverland again is not only a reminder of the tragedy of the untimely death of an artist in her prime, but also poses questions like what might have come next? How would she have reacted to AI? What kind of images would she have created with this new technology? In Neverland, Charlesworth stepped aside from appropriation in favor of photographing objects in the studio, each one placed on a matching monochromatic and vividly colored background. The results are striking and unsettling. For Teapot (all works created in 2002) Charlesworth placed an ornate yellow teapot against a similarly hued background. The teapot appears to be in mid-pour although there is no hand holding it nor liquid coming from its spout. A typical household object, in this context it also references Aladdin's magical lamp. Devil, Candle and Pencil are all bright red photographs with each displaying the similarly colored object of their title. Centered in Devil is a completely red devil mask, whereas in Candle, the flame stands out as a realistic orange-yellow and in Pencil, the point and end are true to life— black lead surrounded by wood.

While it is noted that in Neverland, Charlesworth digitally manipulated her images for the first time, it is impossible to know the extent. Did Charlesworth find a red candlestick holder that matches the red of an extremely long candle that floats in a deep red shadowless space, or did she use a computer to match the colors? Unusual scale shifts also occur across the images. What size was the small tree in Tree? Was it smaller or larger than the pipe in Pipe, an homage to Réne Magritte's The Treachery of Images (1929)? While Magritte's painting of a pipe was not a pipe, Charlesworth's depiction is neither a pipe nor a painting, but rather a photograph of a pipe. Other art historical associations include references to still lives as in Fruit Colored Fruit — red and green apples, a lemon, bananas and grapes draped over a white bowl against a black background, as well as in Teacups, a precarious tower of teacups and saucers.

By titling the series Neverland, Charlesworth evokes the fictional, faraway, magical island associated with Peter Pan and the images are infused with a surreal, impossible aura, despite the fact that for the most part, Charlesworth frames ordinary objects. Through her lens, coloration and conceptual savvy, she elevates these "things" into something extraordinary. Whether straightforward, or digitally manipulated, the photographs from Neverland have a long-lasting and powerful resonance and it is a privilege to see them together again.

Click here for Sarah Charlesworth on its own page.

Ricardo Cabret
Un Neuvo Manglar
Kohn Gallery
May 6 - June 17, 2023


Ricardo Cabret

Ricardo Cabret is a Puerto Rico based interdisciplinary artist who uses painting and software to revel in the tensions between technology and the natural world. At Kohn Gallery, he unveils a new body of work titled Un Neuvo Manglar (a new mangrove) that includes several paintings as well as a generative artwork presented as a large scale projection filling one wall in a darkened corner of the gallery. Cabret has degrees in computer science and electrical engineering and his artwork draws from his technological background.

Guión Criptográfico 3.0 (2021) is a web based software piece that generates ever-changing compositions of different colored squares filling a gridded space. He draws from popular encryption algorithms and protocols that are commonly found in the building blocks of cryptocurrency blockchain networks and specifically focuses on phrases that echo current concerns in his native Puerto Rico. The resulting display is a mesmerizing composition that nods to neo-geo painting as well as other browser based works with ever changing abstract compositions.

It is interesting to think about the relationship between code and paint. How does the generative display based on an algorithm translate into paintings and is there a connection, or is Cabret making two discrete bodies of work? The paintings are not geometric or brightly colored. Rather, they are soft hued and atmospheric. They could, perhaps relate to the receding spaces in sci-fi themed computer games, but that feels like a stretch. For example, Barracas (2023) is an evocative landscape with what appears to be a city in the distance. Tall buildings painted as jagged abstract shapes fill the middle of the canvas. In the foreground is a flat multi-colored field comprised of different colored rectangles that perspectivally recede toward the horizon. The top half of the work is sky — a hazy blue expanse with floating areas of white suggesting clouds. The painting has a second layer where it seems as if Cabret covered the surface with arcs of concrete-colored gel. A middle layer features a set of arches that cut across the horizontal of the composition and suggest open ended Quonset huts.

El secreto subterráneo (2023) (The underground secret) is also a sci-fi cityscape covered with more open Quonset huts that resemble extended underground arches or tunnels. The purple hued sky gives the work an apocalyptic aura. Smaller works titled Estudio de textura are intimate fragments where Cabret focuses on layers of paint and varying textures created by overlaying gel polymer. These pieces have a grid-like structure, yet lack the movement of the digital iterations.

Cabret's people-less paintings allude to futuristic worlds. If based on systems or specific structures, they are overwhelmed by the process of painting and making something by hand. The imprecision makes them intriguing. Though based on Cabret's memories of the Puerto Rican landscape, the works are not specific but rather a melange of past, present and future.

Because the paintings are seen in conjunction with the projected software work, one wants to draw connections, but the pieces seem to exist in different realms and rather than intuit relationships, it is best to enjoy both for what they are.

Click here for Ricardo Cabret on its own page.

Chris Engman
Prism
Luis de Jesus Los Angeles
April 29 - June 10, 2023


Chris Engman

Chris Engman creates photographic illusions with an exact vantage point where the images cohere. In the past, he has transformed gallery spaces by covering the walls and floors with images, pinpointing a spot on the floor from which to view the illusion. More often than not, these architectural interventions are fabricated in his studio and he documents them to present images within images. Engman's subject is often the natural landscape— be it an ocean, desert or mountain scene. That being said, he has also made works featuring crinkled paper inscribed with lines and geometric shapes extending out of a wooden frame, as well as pieces that confounded the geometry within the frame to disrupt the immediate of perception of a photographic image. He explores the many different ways he can play with illusions.

For Prism, he collaborates with his young son Elio who draws and paints atop the photographic murals placed on the walls of the studio, in many ways disrupting or breaking the perspectival illusion. Engman states that a prism "allows us to see what is present but not perceived." He continues that a camera is a prism and his son is his prism... "The world I see through his eyes is new and strange, terrifying and beautiful."

The best way to understand the images is to dissect one. At first glance, Play Room (2021) is a color photograph depicting a horizon where the sky meets the ocean. Centered in the image however, is a rectangle that is, in fact a window backlit from the light outside the space. Upon close examination, it becomes evident that this is not an image of the ocean, but rather an image of an interior space that has been covered with large-scale photographic images of an ocean and sky. Many prints have been fragmented and reconstituted to appear as a single image. Placed along the walls and corners of the room are children's toys that are not covered with these image fragments while squiggly marks in different colors of chalk cover parts of the walls and floor, in essence breaking the illusion.

In addition to numerous enigmatic images like Play Room, Engman also includes a few objects in the gallery space— a ladder, a stool and a shelf— that help those not familiar with his process comprehend how the works were constructed for the camera. For example, the object Stool (2023) comes directly from the setting of Play Room. Here, Engman covers a wooden cube with a photograph of children's toys and markers adhering them to the surface so that from a certain perspective they become a flattened image. Ladder appears in the work Cliff (2022) leaning against a wall covered with an image of a cliff, as well as being a stand alone object covered with the same photograph as it appears in the image, yet now removed from its setting.

Looking at Engman's works is often like trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle. What at first glace appears to be a landscape is in reality a composite of multiple image fragments. From a distance in Pour (2022), the picture coheres as a forest of lush trees. Looking closer, one makes out steps leading up and a wide plank at an angle that parallels the stairs. Though covered with photographic murals that comprise the forest, soon it becomes evident that there are long drips of paint that have cascaded down the incline and pooled up where it meets the floor. Once the mind recognizes the representation and the actual setting of the image, it vacillates back and forth between the two possibilities in much the same way as the duck or bunny brain teaser.

Many of the pieces in Prism are covered with marks by Engman's son. Using his son's interventions as a point of departure, Engman covers Monsters (2023) -- a large work that spans 120 inches square and depicts a rocky peak -- with blobs and gestural lines in acrylic and oil pastel. Gone is the illusion in favor of the pleasure of collaboration and the pure joy of spontaneity. Engman's exhibit delights in the juxtaposition of complex and precisely constructed mind teasers with lines drawn by a child. By allowing an aspect of play to enter the work, he has expanded the boundaries of his practice.

Click here for Chris Engman on its own page.

James Busby
Suspirium
Lowell Ryan Projects
May 6 - June 10, 2023


James Busby

James Busby is a South Carolina based artist whose Los Angeles debut is an intriguing mix of abstract and representational works. One of the most striking factors in the otherwise subtle installation of small scale works is how Busby extends the geometric lines from some of the pieces onto the walls to create a structure and container. The works alternate between abstract oils on canvas that consist of patterns of short brush strokes and contrast with representational but sketchy drawings in graphite on gessoed panels that reproduce trees and animals seen on the grounds of Busby's rural studio.

At first glance, the 11 x 14 inch Double Tracked (2023) appears to be a white on white minimal abstraction, but upon close viewing a beautifully drawn deer comes to life between two linear elements. Busby carefully renders the deer, reducing its size, taking it out of context by isolating it in a white field, yet illustrating it with tenderness as an artifact. Birds of a Feather (2023) similarly presents an exquisitely drawn fragment of a bird that is cropped by intersecting lines that divide the otherwise barren white ground. Numerous depictions of trees as seen in Dreamsicle and Half my Mind (both 2023) are presented at angles nested within hard-edged lines that distort any connection to real physical space or perspective.

Contrasting these minimal yet beautifuly rendered elements from nature are pure abstractions such as All the Go In-Betweens (2023), Trying to Catch a Deluge in a Paper Cup (2022) and Middle Distance Runner (2023). To create these paintings, Busby dips his brush in paint, applying dabs to the canvas over and over again until the paint has run out. This creates a pattern of lighter and darker tones that extend across the composition and share a kinship with stitches or knitted designs. These works feel like fragments from a greater whole in a way that seems similar to Busby's drawings on panel. Seen from afar, these paintings have an internal structure and geometry that punctuates the sequence of images on the wall and relates to the lines painted within the gallery space.

The wall markings are hand painted dark lines that form irregular polygons on the wall extending from floor to ceiling. In some senses, the relationship between the lines and the paintings parallels the relationship between the graphite trees and animals and the lines Busby has inscribed within the individual panels.

The anomaly is a 2019 work titled Detlef Schremph #2 a colorful geometric abstraction on hand-shaped wood that is a melange of painted lines and shapes centered within a dark grey background that has a Russian Constructivist sensibility, alludes to the shape and markings on a basketball court (Detlef Schrempf was a German NBA player) and relates to Busby's earlier works.

The latin meaning of "suspirium" is "deep breath" and is a fitting title for Busby's installation that is both contemplative and aggressive simultaneously. Rooted in process, the works illustrate Busby's patience and interest in the meditative qualities of repetitive mark making as well as his interest in observing the world around him and transforming what he sees into refined illustrations. With a deep inhale, time stops and a moment of calm ensues. Busby's installation also gives viewers the opportunity to look close and reflect upon that which surrounds them.

Click here for James Busby on its own page.

Alex Hedison
A Brief Infinity
Von Lintel Gallery
April 22 - June 10, 2023


Alex Hedison

During the pandemic when people were confined to their homes, photographer Alex Hedison began to experiment with "chemigram" works that explore the interactions of chemicals and light on black and white photographic paper and are made without a camera, so they are devoid of a "representational" subject. She applied different "resists" to the paper to block its exposure to light and changed the duration of time the paper was exposed.

Even after learning how to control these elements the results were often surprising and somewhat unexpected particularly in terms of color and texture. Due to the fact their existence on unfixed photographic paper, they also continue to change over time. Knowing the images would begin to fade, Hedison "photographed" them at different stages to preserve specific instants and even applied silver metallic paint to parts if the surfaces. These photographs of the original "chemigrams" comprise her exhibition, A Brief Infinity.

The abstract patterns are extremely painterly and while they vary in size each piece has unique characteristics. At only 6 x 8 inches, ABI_059 (all works 2022) is a layered composition of interrupted horizontal bands in varying opacities of olive green and dark pink. The palette and composition is reminiscent of abstract paintings from the 1950s, yet upon close viewing, the nuances of chemical interactions appear. Many of the images were made by applying metallic paint and varnish as well as adhering strips of tape to the paper, exposing it to light and then submerging it in a chemical bath. The lines from the tape and speckled array of color splotches are remnants of Hedison's process. Sometimes Hedison enhances these patterns by applying more metallic paint to the printed images.

Another small-scale picture, ABI_052 resembles an abstracted snake skin with golden highlights among striations of white, brown and black. ABI_056 alludes to intricate stained glass windows, its complex geometry a delicate pattern of white, yellow, rust and brown that is reminiscent of details in the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Among the highlights of the exhibition are ABI_048, a two panel work where abstract metallic shapes akin to John Chamberlain car parts recede into a deep yellow void as well as ABI_045 where vertical strips that appear like different kinds of fabric that descend from the top of the composition. ABI_023 and ABI_022 are printed on glossy metallic paper. Their vivid blue hues become a background for wavy, thick, white-yellow lines that undulate across the composition becoming borders of irregular rectangular shapes.

Hedison's experiments are complex and evocative. The images transcend their material nature to become spiritual journeys into an unknown world. The photographs draw you in and keep you looking as the more time one spends with them the more there is to see.

Click here for Alex Hedison on its own page.

George Porcari
Things: A Story
As-is.la
April 22 - June 3, 2023


George Porcari

The subject of each photograph in George Porcari's exhibition Things: A Story is a narrative that can be constructed from the relationship between what appears on the cover of a book and the objects Porcari has also placed around it in the image. Titled Still Life With Books, each picture is followed by a number and dated 2008-2023. Shot with natural light in Porcari's Los Angeles apartment, the pictures have wide-screen proportions to reference cinema, yet are tightly cropped to juxtapose the books with carefully arranged commonplace household objects. While many of the volumes are about filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni or Roberto Rossellini, others are works of literature by authors like Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, Charles Bukowski and Georges Perec. The choice of books is specific and in many of his photographs, Porcari has chosen a book where a black and white portrait of the author or filmmaker is centered in the frame.

Though referred to as "still life's," the photographs in Things: A Story resonate as extended portraits that use the title of the book and its cover image as a point of departure. For example, in Still Life With Books 2, Porcari chooses the edition of "Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes" where the author is depicted in a black and white photograph with his right hand gently placed below his lips as if in a moment of contemplation. The book rests on what appears to be a slim, silver DVD player or radio receiver next to a pair of headphones, a green ceramic bowl with Asian calligraphy, as well as other miscellaneous objects that are cut off at the edges.

The focus of Still Life With Books 40 is Joan Didion's "The White Album." Porcari places the hardback book in an empty freezer and stands it upright on one of the shelves, perhaps in reference to this passage: "We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." During a conversation with Porcari at the opening, he intimated that he put the book in the freezer based on his close reading of it.

Still Life With Books 47 features a paperback version of "Godard on Godard" face up on a table surrounded by various computer cables and hard drives. The bright red lettering on the books cover is echoed by the round top of a pill bottle as well as the red heart in a "I Heart…" button that is partially obscured by the aluminum arm of a desk lamp. The black and white photograph surrounded by red text on the cover of the book depicts a couple gazing into each other's eyes with the woman's hand gently placed on the man's neck. Underneath the book is a cartoony drawing of a white gloved cartoon hand (perhaps from Bugs Bunny) on blue material, that appears to be an extension of the man's arm, adding a touch of humor and irony to his representation.

Still Life With Books 130 contains César Vallejo's "Aphorisms" placed in a grimy sink and shot from above. The book is next to the drain and adjacent to a soapy cup from which an orange handled utensil emerges. Again, Porcari selects a volume with a black and white portrait of the author with his hand curled around his chin. The grainy image has an affinity with the texture of the sink. Why it is placed there is anyone's guess, but like Didion's book in the freezer, this strange juxtaposition makes for an interesting image.

Although Porcari's photographs are filled with cultural icons and references, they are not one liners directed to those in the know. They are intimate and personal images that include books that are significant or have personal meaning for Porcari. They are also beautiful and intriguing photographs that invite viewers to think about the bigger picture and perhaps the relationship between their books and the other objects that surround them.

Click here for George Porcari on its own page.

Pam Posey
Thereabout
Praz-Delavallade
April 15 - May 13, 2023


Pam Posey

Observing: the trees that line the path during a walk in the woods; the distant view of a mountain through clouds; the light on a branch arched over a pond. These are the kinds of things Pam Posey notices and captures in her magnificent paintings. The modest-sized oils record a mood and a sense of place and though representational, are not hyper-real. They are thoughtful impressions that depict the wonders of nature and how they are transformed from lived experiences into memories that come alive once again as paint on canvas.

While each work stems from observation, they are in fact created in the studio and become fictions — places reimagined. Titled Thereabout, her exhibition of more than twenty paintings completed between 2020 and 2023 offer an intimate glimpse into the natural world. It is easy to get lost in Headland (2023) following the criss-cross of wild grass along a bluff that overlooks a body of water extending toward a gray horizon. The foreground of the painting is an array of tufts of brown and green toned grass pointing in all directions and stopping where the bluff intersects with the water above. The composition is comprised of three planes of color — gray (sky), blue (water) and green/brown (grass) that cohere to suggest an infinite expanse.

Point of Return (2022) is about light. Here, the eye moves down a shadowy tree-lined path to the center of the image— a bright spot where leaves sparkle, illuminated by a patch of sun. The leaves and branches at the edge of the painting form a darker circle that surrounds the light. Where the path ultimately leads is unknown but the luminescence radiates a positive aura. Soothsayers Mountain (2022) and Displacement (2020) are more expressionist images. Soothsayers Mountain captures a hilltop encased in clouds presented as a textured field of connected and undulating, irregular forms, whereas Displacement focuses on the explosive spray of a raging waterfall. Here, Posey brackets the turbulence with two groupings of delicate plants, contrasting the dispersion with elements of calm.

In Island in the Subjunctive (2022), a cluster of plants float like an island in a blue-green pond. Brightly painted stems extend up from a small patch of green reflecting light as well as casting a subtle shadow below. In the distance, Posey defines a darker green forest — as a series of expressive brush strokes — at the far edge of the pond. The island is a microcosm and a metaphor for a feeling of isolation, simultaneously welcomed and dreaded.

Rather than install the works along a fixed line, the paintings are placed at different heights on the gallery walls paralleling the way one views nature — up close as well as from a distance, at, above and below eye level. The installation draws viewers to each work as a separate entity. Together, they create a narrative about the beauty and power of nature and offer a respite from endless media bombardment. Posey does not turn away from the political, but rather explores conflict and resolve as it manifests in the natural world.

Click here for Pam Posey on its own page.

Jay Mark Johnson
Íslenskir Fossar
William Turner Gallery
April 8 - May 27, 2023


Jay Mark Johnson

Many of the ten large scale color photographs that make up Jay Mark Johnson's current exhibition Íslenskir Fossar depict Iceland's volcanic landscape, specifically raging waterfalls and geysers captured using slit scan technology— a digital way of using multiple exposures to create one image. The subject is recorded through a "slit" a thin slice that only allows a small portion of the image to be exposed resulting in a succession of horizontal or vertical bands that often appear animated or even blurred.

Johnson has been making pictures with this technology for the last decade, exploring what he calls timeline photography— a way to capture motion —presenting moving objects like trains, people walking and ocean waves as they traverse space within a single image. His process turns the natural world into evocative abstractions. Though based on reality, his pictures have an otherworldliness.

His works are panoramic in proportion and consist of striations of color that appear to extend across the composition moving from from left to right. In this body of work (from 2021), Johnson transforms glaciers and geysers into abstractions that accentuate the way light is refracted off particles dancing in the sea and the sky. The horizontal bands approximate colored pixels that have been dragged across the surface and recall the striped paintings of Gerhard Richter, as well as some of the digital manipulations by photographer Rory Donaldson and video works by Golan Levin.

GEYSIR #1  (Haukadalsvegur, Iceland), (all works 2021), is surreal. In this image, a huge amorphous white shape emerges from a colorful ground fusing into the sky above, its white coloration reflecting the blue of the sky, as well as the tones of the sea. The lower portion of the image is composed of long horizontal stripes ranging from gray to brown to blue with bits of red, green and even yellow. These bands cascade across the image implying motion and are in contrast to the undulating form that rises above.

In SELJALANDFOSS #4, (Rangàrthing Ekstra, Iceland), Johnson's image is a melange of water and sky presented as a layered abstraction that unfolds across the horizon. Across the center of the image is a wide band of light blue, bisected by lines that are a pinkish-white and recall clouds. Above this is a green gradient and below, a receding ground presented in more earth-toned colors. Covering these colors is a veil of blurred vertical lines that flow up and down somewhat diagonally across the image as if spray from crashing waves or streams of rain falling from the clouds.

The exhibition also includes two earlier works depicting Stewart Falls, shot in Sundance, Utah in 2019. STEWART FALLS #43 and STEWART FALLS #6 are dizzying and expressive photographs that turn the powerful movement of raging waterfalls into colorful abstractions that suggest the force and awe of nature.

In his works, Johnson embraces the cameras ability to capture and transform the atmosphere and landscape, presenting instants that represent something unfolding over time. He has learned how to manipulate 'slit-scan' technologies to create incredibly beautiful and colorful abstractions that, although derived from nature, come across as digital fabrications.

Click here for Jay Mark Johnson on its own page.

Michael Hilsman
Man In Water
Various Small Fires
March 25 - April 29, 2023


Michael Hilsman

Michael Hilsman's paintings are quirky and somewhat disorientating. Many of the works feature a central character— based on the artist himself— that is often obscured or covered, as in Man With Face In Book (all works 2023). In this small-scale painting, Hilsman presents a close-up of a head in profile. The balding, bearded man's face is hidden by a book with a red-orange cover and decorated with two flowers and a box of matches. In Man With Cutlery And Citrus, a similar sized painting, the bald man's profile faces the opposite direction, but this time it is draped by dangling vines with oranges and floating cutlery (a red handled knife and fork). Roughly centered in both paintings and taking up a third of the composition, is the man's ear, although it is neither paintings focus.

Among the larger works are Man With Book in Landscape and Man Touching Thorn, both spanning 78 x 114 inches. For Man Touching Thorn, Hilsman depicts a white t-shirt, blue-jeans wearing figure from the side. He is positioned behind and partially obscured by flowering cacti. All of this is set against a blotchy blue background (representing the sky) and a thin strip of brown (referencing the earth or soil) that hugs the bottom of the canvas. Although both the man and the plants are rendered in flat tones with few details, they come across as more realistic than abstract. The man extends his arm out horizontally pushing one finger from his oversized hand into one of the thorns of a cactus. At this intersection, a blood-shaped tear appears. The cacti are flowering and in the prime of their life, yet the man's expression is never revealed. The fact that he is touching a thorn makes his relationship to the plants curious and ambiguous.

Man With Book in Landscape is similarly obtuse. In this painting, Hilsman divides the composition in two. The narrower upper portion of the image is filled with a mountain landscape painted in brown and green hues. Below is an expanse of deep blue that covers the bottom two thirds of the canvas. On top of this blue expanse floats a male figure: his face is covered by a red book, his feet extend out from what appears to be a long white sheet draped over the figure to become a quasi table. Carefully laid out on the sheet are an array of objects including a pistol, a vase of flowers, plates of fruit, a single black glove, an animal skull, as well as three playing cards. The arrangement feels like it could be the figure's last meal, or some gesture before departing into the blue void.

Hilsman's paintings illustrate unsettling narratives. The works while physical are also metaphysical — theatrical, dream-like and absurd while simultaneously grounded in reality. In most of the paintings, the figure's head is masked. In Man With Roses the same man carries a bouquet of red roses in his hands so they obscure his eyes and mouth but not his complete face. His right leg is bent behind him and parallels the ground, his black shoe points straight down and just touches the green floor as if resting on a shelf. Surrounding him is an orange dial telephone, a scissors, numerous teeth and three sunflowers that enter the composition from the top. Again, the elements are evocative and suggestive but do not add up to any logical conclusion.

Hilsman's paintings pose questions that cannot be answered. They invite viewers to contemplate how the elements in the still lives and landscapes come together to form a greater narrative about the ambiguous man and his relationship to what surrounds him.

Click here for Michael Hilsman on its own page.

Hannah Morris
Acting Ordinary
Steve Turner Gallery
March 25 - April 22, 2023


Hannah Morris

Hannah Morris is a painter based in Barre, Vermont whose narrative works incorporate images culled from stories and advertisements in American magazines from the 1940s-1970s. Morris collages disparate reproductions filled with figures, furniture, objects and urban or natural landscapes and then overpaints them with Flashe and Gouache on panel. She masks the photographic veracity of the originals while creating new contexts for the characters. The eight works on view present a range of scenarios filled with people going about their business and not necessarily interacting with each other, even though they seem to occupy the same space.

Depicted in Cottage Industry (2022) is a man relaxing and reclining on a bed atop a patterned flower quilt, two other figures building a clay pot, a boy shuffling index cards, as well as a woman parading with a small red flag in celebration or protest. Knowing that Morris gets her source material from various magazines — craft, lifestyle, humor and news — and that she choses fragments that she initially composites in her mind, before actually collaging them together. These backgrounds serve as the sketches and under paintings for the final works. Conscious of gender, race and class differences portrayed in the now historical advertisements and editorial stories, she juxtaposes people and objects that might not otherwise coexist. Although little remains of the original images, the contours of the magazine fragments are still visible below layers of often translucent water-based paint.

In The Crossing (2022), Morris presents the goings on at a busy city intersection. While there are no cars, the urban scene is filled with figures of varying ages, shapes, sizes and colors in different types of clothing ranging from the formal (a suit and tie) to the casual (patterned shorts). Toward the back of the painting are tall buildings rendered with a childlike simplicity. A number of unrelated figures dart along a crosswalk— what appears to be a tour guide holding a flag, a worker in carpenter's pants, as well as two men who could be dancing. The mood is festive as these individuals come together within the composition, representing the different strata of the city. What stands out in the image and what makes it interesting is the skewed perspective of the buildings as well as the isolation and the disconnect between the varied figures. Morris unites disparate scenarios to create a sense of simultaneity.

This idea is further explored in Summer Camp (2023) where Morris juxtaposes two awkward and off kilter men who appear to be throwing a ball back and forth on a blue-green basketball or tennis court, a girl perched on a bicycle wearing shorts and red sneakers featuring a yellow Nike swoosh, an abstractly rendered picnic area and a crowd of festively dressed people looking off toward the distance as if ready to run forward, their backs to the viewer. At the bottom of the image are a bird and a duck standing in the grass. Myriad flowers and trees are also depicted within the composition

In these nostalgic works, Morris collapses space and time. She collages unrelated elements, creating narratives that unite in surprising and satisfying ways. The images are playful reinterpretations of appropriated materials taken from different source that cohere through Morris' creative juxtapositions and painterly style.

Click here for Hannah Morris on its own page.

Urs Fischer
Ice Cream Truck Democracy
Gagosian Gallery
March 9 - April 22, 2023


Urs Fischer

As an artist, Urs Fischer is unpredictable and full of surprises. For his 2022 exhibition at the Marciano Art Foundation (another Gagosian space), he presented Chaos #1-#500. The front room of the installation consisted of long tables filled with hundreds of found objects in all shapes and sizes. In contrast to the actual objects, three giant screens were suspended in the back gallery displaying tumbling intertwined pairs of these objects as digital scans. In the scans any disintegration of the object was erased so they were seen as unblemished, as if new.

The source material for his current exhibition at Gagosian is a printed book titled, like the exhibition, Ice Cream Truck Democracy. In the book, Fischer fills the pages with photographs of things that caught his eye around Los Angeles: the sky and the street; facades and window displays; myriad cars, live animals and their stuffed counterparts. Some of these colored images are inverted (printed as negatives). The book also includes photographs showing his paintings in the studio.

On the gallery walls are large-scale blow ups of portions of these images that have been silkscreened to the canvas as a collage. Many are overlaid with hand-painted or stenciled elements to create a kaleidoscopic bombardment. Fischer emphasizes the fragmentary nature of Los Angeles and presents the urban environment as a montage of fleeting instances. When seen together, these fragments begin to coalesce to create an idiosyncratic narrative that weaves through the sprawling expanse of the city.

Schmalifornia (2022) combines photographs of advertisements of an upcoming reality television series ("The Come Up") plastered on the walls of a construction site. The sidewalk adjacent to the posters is strewn with trash. In what appears to be a puddle or cloud overlaid on the scene is an upside down shot of the Los Angeles skyline. The work juxtaposes what is cliché and what is exemplary of L.A. For Numbaste (2023), Fischer montages two renditions (one positive, the other negative) of a headless, dancing, cartoon-figure originally painted on a wall over a green-tinted photograph of a craftsman style house situated on the corner of an L.A. street and partially blocked by a sign post with a banner for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The textured figures have been screened onto the canvas so they sit above the flat background image giving the painting depth.

High Maintenance (2022) uses an image depicting a quintessential Los Angeles sunset as the background over which he composites a photograph looking into a store window where a broken Batman doll rests against the wall below toy cars coupled with a tall blue inflatable tube figure located behind a bus bench whose sign reads "Just a Prick" (it is an ad for HIV testing). Fischer pays attention to chance juxtapositions and through digital montaging also plays with scale shifts when compositing the images. While the photographs in the book are crisp and exact, he plays with opacity changes in the paintings while creating the final compositions to allow multiple layers to be seen simultaneously.

In Mulholland Drive (2023), he focuses on the twisting curves of the road. The original photograph depicting a sports car driving down the street is presented as an inverse, so the cars shadow appears white rather than black and the trees more light than dark. A painted abstraction fills part of the background paralleling the curves in the road and giving the image a sinister, nightmare-like aura.

Fischer cleverly transforms his photographs into evocative compositions that speak to the diversity of Los Angeles, not in terms of its population but in terms of the experience of the natural and urban landscape and how that defines the city. While the paintings are large composites, the book of photographs is a thoughtful and insightful document that illustrates the complexity of the city— a place where one can witness a coyote crossing one street and a stuffed monkey sitting in a tree on another. Fischer is an astute observer who captures the nuances that make Los Angeles such a unique and special place.

Click here for Urs Fischer on its own page.

Robert Russell
Porzellan Manufaktur Allach
Anat Ebgi
March 9 - April 22, 2023


Robert Russell

Robert Russell is a Los Angeles painter whose conceptually based process often begins with an internet search. Be it for other people named Robert Russell, artist's monographs, tea cups, or for his current exhibition, Allach porcelain figurines, Russell culls online sources for imagery which he then transforms into large-scale paintings.

The images that comprise Porzellan Manufaktur Allach, come from auction catalogues offering the few remaining and now extremely rare figurines produced in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s with concentration camp labor in factories funded by former Nazi party leader Heinrich Himmler. Russell was cognizant of the loaded history of the figurines and wanted it to contrast with the beauty of his paintings. Originally, the figurines were meant to celebrate the 'purity' of German culture and were given as gifts among SS soldiers. They often took the form of cute animals like rabbits and deer and were depicted with large eyes and complacent expressions.

Russell speaks about his works as "painterly interpretations of photographic images." To create the final compositions, he manipulates the originals in Photoshop, removing backgrounds and replacing them with sombre colors while adjusting the contrast so the painted animals 'pop' in relation to the non-spaces they occupy. What is so striking, as well as off-putting about the figurines in the paintings is their scale and the shifts and transformation that occur in the process of going from the original objects (which are around twelve inches high) to their photographic documentation on a computer screen to giant-sized paintings many spanning a height of 80 inches. .

Junger Hase (2023) features a painting of a bunny in a crouched position. The white/tan bunny with brown around its feet and eyes has a glossy and reflective surface that Russell has perfectly preserved. Situated in a purple-gray 'no mans land' Russell has painted the animal very close to all the edges of the canvas and gives it very little breathing space. It is simultaneously repulsive and something to cherish. Junger Hase Sitzend (2023) is another painting of a bunny, though this time it is seated and looking in the opposite direction. Liegendes Rehkitz (2022) depicts a fawn lying down (a sympathetic Bambi-like creature) that elicits a sense of compassion. Among the ten paintings are also statues of a puppy, a bird, seated and standing dogs, as well as a large bear on a pedestal. These are creepy chotzkies with a history usually found in antique shops.

Russell paints in a vanitas and memento mori style making faithful reproductions that are hyper-real. The size of the paintings removes the preciousness of the original porcelain figurines and imbues them with a power and dominance that is reminiscent of their Nazi heritage. The unsettling history of the objects and their manufacturing can't be separated from the paintings and that is Russell's intent: to fuse the beauty and the horror and to let the viewers come to terms with how they chose to interpret what they confront on the canvases.

Click here for Robert Russell on its own page.

Vanessa Prager
Portraits
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
February 14 - April 1, 2023


Vanessa Prager

Just looking at her paintings, it seems obvious to conclude that Vanessa Prager loves paint. Her canvases are filled with thick blobs of oil paint that become bubbly-textured surfaces reminiscent of multi-colored cottage cheese ceilings. Over the years, she has created abstractions as well as figures, faces and flowers, all encased in gloopy paint. For her current exhibition, she creates evocative quasi-portraits replacing sitters' heads with elaborate floral arrangements. These hybrid plant/people are humorous and grotesque simultaneously. The paintings undeniably pay homage to the works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th Century Italian painter who created portraits made by combining a variety of foods and plants. While Arcimboldo's depictions were illusionistic, Prager's portraits are expressive and abstracted. For example, The Card Player (all works 2023) is a monumental diptych that spans two long large canvases. An overabundant bouquet appears as a huge plume of brightly colored hair rising above a bit of white and green diamond patterned clothing covering the neck of a figure at the bottom of the image. Although it is hard at first to discern if Prager is depicting the front or backside of the person, upon close examination, two deep blue off kilter eyes emerge from the wide swirl of flowers. More monster-like than human, a face slowly appears from the mass of colors.

While Prager's paintings clearly draw from Arcimboldo, they also reference paintings of flowers by artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, as well as many other Impressionists. They also derive from portraits of Florentine women from the 15th Century, many wearing jewelry on exposed necks, their gazes toward the viewer. Although these art historical references can be cited, Prager's portraits are uniquely her own and speak to a transformation from person to thing, be it real or imagined. As a self taught painter, she is knowledgeable about the history of art, yet chooses a style of depiction that is more naive than realistic.

Viewing the exhibition can be like a treasure hunt, looking for eyes and mouths amongst the foliage. The works play with personification and it is interesting to think about how the constructions of these towers of flowers take on different personalities. In Visit of the Sun, Prager paints a torso wearing a white shirt with black rectangles supporting a blossoming array that recalls Van Gogh's images of Sunflowers. The shapes of the sunflowers can be seen as a cartoony face and give the painting a comical aura. Silhouette in Yellow is a side, rather than front view of a female figure. Here, the flowers form her hair, brow and chin, as well as suggest decorations in her hair.

Prager's impasto and sculpted surfaces are filled with flowers, created with true to life colors— red, yellow, purple, blue, pink— and often dotted by areas of green (leaves). They can be seen as elaborate masks, like those worn at masquerade balls that obscure the faces of the wearer. Who these faceless entities were and who they have become is part of the intrigue. Prager embraces transformation and imbues her paintings with a raison d'etre that celebrates an uncanny sense of beauty and opulence.

Click here for Vanessa Prager on its own page.

Refik Anadol
Living Paintings
Jeffrey Deitch
February 14 - April 29, 2023


Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol has quickly risen from making humble data driven artworks that adorn public facades, filling them with undulating colors based on different systems and information sources to become an international super-star whose generative imagery covers museum walls and even recently served as the backdrop for the 2023 Grammy Awards. The Istanbul born, Los Angeles based artist creates large-scale, ever-morphing generative imagery that uses AI and draws from various datasets. 

His first solo commercial gallery exhibition also serves as an introduction for those not already familiar with his work and his process, as some of the pieces on exhibit are as didactic as they are visual. Included are explanatory videos that illustrate the concepts and research that went into creating the works. While it is helpful to understand the why and how, the power of the exhibition is its visual and sonic bombardment.

One of the exhibition highlights is a huge LED wall that alternates between Artificial Realities: Coral Dreams and Artificial Realities: Winds of LA, Pacific Ocean, California Landscapes (both 2023). These pieces are based on datasets collected from the Los Angeles area and the display alternates between abstract and representational imagery. Through the sequence, coral and sea plants become undulating and twisting abstractions derived from data-mapping the source imagery. Anadol often collaborates with scientists and composers on the development and final presentation of the works and Artificial Realities resonates with such impact in part because it is coupled with a frenetic soundscape that increases the intensity of the experience. While it is easy to be mesmerized by the nuances of this ever-changing large-scale display, it is only one of many works in the exhibition.

Moving from the front to the very back of the darkened gallery, one finds Anadol's Los Angeles rendition of Infinity Room (originally created in 2015), an immersive mirrored environment filled with black and white projections featuring lines and geometric shapes that completely surround the viewer. A four channel soundscape accompanies the work which runs for fourteen minutes and was created through Anadol's custom software. The installation is purposely disorienting. Upon entering the room, one's equilibrium and conventional modes of perception are skewed, creating a jarring sense of space. 

In contrast to the more immersive works, the exhibition includes a scale model and video documentation of Anadol's 2019 projection on the Walt Disney Concert Hall. For this site specific commission, Anadol developed a unique machine intelligence program that culled through the Los Angeles Philharmonic archives to create a visual artwork that was projected on the facade of the building. The work traces the history of the LA Phil, integrating images and graphics in a kaleidoscopic collage. Another explanatory video engulfs the far back wall of the gallery from floor to ceiling. This piece illustrates some of Anadol's environmentally based visualizations and is juxtaposed with three small square screens on pedestals showing versions from Machine Hallucinations: California Landscapes, a work based on a dataset of 155 million images of nature. As described on his website, "using StyleGAN2-ADA to capture the machine’s hallucinations of California landscapes and colors in a multi-dimensional space, Anadol and his team trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archive. Each image in the series displays a cluster of chosen "hallucinations," and Anadol makes selections from countless serendipitous allusions to landscape images occurring in the machine-mind." Anadol has dedicated resources researching machine learning and trains his computers to be "artists." Using AI, they "generate abstracted landscapes, constructing new aesthetic visuals and color combinations based on the dataset and through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections." Using a term like hallucinations suggests an embodiment of machines that is reminiscent of the current frenzy around newly released AI tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E.

Along the central space, twelve vertically oriented LED screens span opposing walls, displaying looping videos that visualize different aspects of the California landscape. Each screen houses a sixteen minute sequence that illustrates the diversity and complexity of Anadol's algorithms. It is interesting to try to reverse engineer the process to understand how the machine interprets data, turning pictures of natural elements into arrays of ever-mutating pixels. Relationships can be made between recognizable depictions of the landscape and the machine's interpretations. Anadol's works at any scale are filled with undulating and swirling arrays of colored imagery, presented as tiny pixels that are forever breaking apart and coalescing. The motion is always mesmerizing and eye-catching. 

Anadol explores the intersection between technology and aesthetics. As the technologies become more complex, they move further and further away from "artistic" subjectivity and while Anadol is interested in the brain and the way memories can be visualized, the works are mostly about process — how the machine learns and how AI can sift through data and transform it into graphic arrays that wow audiences, but ultimately don't do much more than that.

Click here for Refik Anadol on its own page.

Peter Fischli
Ungestalten
Rena Spaulings Fine Art
February 17 - April 1, 2023


Peter Fischli

Peter Fischli is best known for his collaborative works with David Weiss. They began collaborating in 1979 and although they created numerous projects and exhibited regularly as Fischli/Weiss, they are best known for their Rube Goldberg-est film The Way Things Go from 1987. While the duo worked together until Weiss' death in 2012, Fischli now makes works that stem from their collaborations and exhibits on his own. For his exhibition, Ungestalten, Fischli presents nine new sculptures and a series of photo-collages.

Hung as diptychs, the mostly black and white photo-collages were shot in Zurich over the last three years and while they are based on images of vandalism, Fischli has transformed them into humorous urban interventions. The images collage different shaving cream blobs made by teenagers on poles or on the ground throughout the city — a form of temporary graffiti as the shaving cream dissolves overnight — with out-of-focus negative images also taken in Zurich's urban areas. Fischli's creations celebrate the foamy shapes, turning them into mountains and other three-dimensional elements. While the photographs occupy the perimeter walls of the gallery, the sculptures are presented in the center of the open space.

They appear to be ad-hoc traffic lights that resemble minimalist sculptures as well as gallows composed of vertical and horizontal beams with dangling light boxes that flicker on and off at indeterminate intervals. These free-standing structures are haunting and dysfunctional as traffic signals. The boxes contain circular lights and are hung at different heights like fruit on a tree and display either white, red or yellow illuminations that cycle on and off at different rates. Some of the devices work, while others are unplugged or in different stages of disrepair— with missing fixtures and rogue cords and wires. Fischli has fabricated these works out of wood, glass and cardboard and has allowed patches of different tones of gray paint to accumulate on their surfaces to suggest repetitive repairs. They have a ghost-like appearance and though modern in their design, they feel like they were constructed for a stage set or rescued from a defunct city model. Though some are functional, their purpose is ambiguous and their signaling unclear. Walk or wait? Stay or go? The atmosphere they collectively create is at once daunting and comical.

Seen together, the sculptures and photographs allude to a decaying city, once a place of beauty but now undergoing a slow and irreversible demise. One further work is situated outside the gallery and embedded under a steel grate covering a hole in the sidewalk near the front door. As one enters the space, a careful listener will notice music emanating from below, another example of Fischli's intervention into the fabric of urban life. While much of Fischli's work is conceptually driven, he is also a formalist whose works nod to Minimalism, while simultaneously exploring the fragile nature and vulnerability of city spaces.

Click here for Peter Fischli on its own page.

Clayton Schiff
Close Quarters
Harkawik
February 11 - March 25, 2023


Clayton Schiff

Clayton Schiff's paintings metaphorically depict psychological states and emotions that everyone can relate to. While his characters have some realistic qualities, they are for the most part cartoony exaggerations featuring male figures situated in interior and exterior spaces. In Subject (2022) the large, bald head with huge ears and bulging eyes of a body-less figure lifts himself up by his hands to peer across an expanse where a much smaller version of a man (perhaps the figure's older self) walks away toward the lower edge of the gray-brown canvas. The intense stare and confused expression reflects the subject's surprise. Council (2022) features four iterations of a similar figure. Here, an older man without clothes is stretched out across the diagonal of the painting, head toward the bottom left and feet toward the upper right. He is lying on a beige colored carpet, or perhaps the ground, which could also be sand. From a large hole in his midsection emerges the head and shoulders of a younger version of this figure who stares directly at the older man. Two other figures pop up from holes in the ground and gaze upon the head of the outstretched figure.

While the spaces in Subject and Council are undefined, the setting of Sanctum and Check-In (2023) are urban exterior scenes. In Sanctum, a gigantic green figure slouches against a building as if leaning on and merging with the facade simultaneously. His head rests on the flat roof as his feet extend out along the ground completing the curve made by his slack legs. One of the figure's elongated arms stretches across the top of the building, it's hand droops over the edge and grabs the upper portion of an open window for support. The other arm and hand fuse with the green foliage that grows from the buildings corner. The painting radiates a moment of obscure tranquility as well as sci-fi absurdity. The facade of an Art-Deco building is pictured in Check-In where a Gumby-like figure climbs up a ladder and looks at a window only to see his reflection looking back. The two figures hold each other's gaze and do not appear to think this is out of the ordinary.

A naked old man with a wrinkled forehead is wedged between large light-colored rectangles that resemble three-dimensional paintings or Minimalist sculptures in Close Quarters (2023), and in The Clipper (2022), another elderly figure with extremely long legs and arms, wearing only socks (with holes in the toes) sits on a wooden school chair clipping his fingernails. An eerie light filters in from the windows behind him casting a green-toned aura around his head. At the end of the long hallway illustrated in Getting In (2022), a man who has the body of a bear puts a key in the lock of the door to his apartment. He appears to be returning from shopping as he is carrying bags, two of which are draped over his wrists, the third rests on the floor against the wall. As in Schiff's other paintings, this solitary figure is depicted in a space that is recognizable and realistically rendered. At the same time, he appears to be an apparition— both human and not human simultaneously.

Schiff's humble figures go about their business, be it the intimate tasks of personal grooming or the everyday activity of shopping. His characters appear to be at peace with their abnormalities. While recognizable places are depicted, Schiff's closely cropped views are surreal. They have a cinematic and dream-like fragmentation and suggest an unknown journey into the character's and perhaps the artist's unconscious.

Click here for Clayton Schiff on its own page.

Jake Kean Mayman
Ergonoptics
Le Maximum
February 4 - March 12, 2023


Jake Kean Mayman

Comprised of just six paintings strategically placed on the gallery walls to form a conversation with each other, Jake Kean Mayman's evocative exhibition Ergonoptics not only illustrates his technical skills as a painter, but also his conceptual wit. The title of the exhibition is a made-up word combining "ergonomics" and "optics" that both explains and confounds the work. The paintings range from the depiction of strange, uncanny objects like obscure medical devices and an ergonomic keyboard for one hand to single sheets of upright folded graph paper. Each large scale oil painting has a monochrome background, be it black, blue, green or light pink-orange. Within these colored fields, Mayman presents realistically rendered objects, strangely illuminated as if placed on seamless backdrops and softly lit with colored gels.

Suture Pad (Ethicon) 2023 greatly enlarges what is actually a small polypropylene suture pad designed for the practice of stitching skin. The flesh-toned pad is scored with straight lines and curves that represent different shapes of surgical incisions. It is an unusual subject for a painting and could easily be misinterpreted as a drawing template. In Mayman's presentation, it is larger than life and rests in an otherwise empty space, appearing more like a discarded mattress than a medical instrument. Suture Pad (Polydioxanone) 2023 is similar in color, though it depicts a suture pad with raised mouth-like shapes rather than thin recessed lines. One corner is raised at the edge and jumps off the canvas with trompe l'oeil veracity.

In contrast to these two flesh-toned works are two paintings with light blue backgrounds, matching the color of the lines on graph paper. Again, playing with trompe l'oeil, Mayman presents these creased pages standing upright as if dancing. In Coordinate Paper (Primary Scatter Plot, Off Grid Yellow) 2022, a small folded yellow paper dot jumps out from the background in the upper right corner of the painting and draws the viewer's eye diagonally down the composition to a filled in red square in the lower corner of the gridded paper. Coordinate Paper (Primary Scatter Plot, Off Grid Red), 2022 is in some ways a mirror image as here the dot at the top of the canvas is red whereas the filled in square is yellow. From a certain position in the gallery, these paintings can be viewed together allowing the viewer to compare and contrast their subtly different blue backgrounds and the intensity of their painted shadows.

The largest painting in the exhibition, Orthotic Leverage Augment (Gary Fay Articulated Fingers) 2023 features a disembodied arm that cuts across the horizontal of the canvas jutting out from a mottled black background. Attached to each finger is a brightly colored (purple, red, blue, yellow, green) mechanical extension. Are these devices meant to aid or to entertain? The beckoning hand is a curiosity, both inviting and off putting. Mayman is interested in where the natural and the technological intersect and in Ergonoptics, he has constructed a suite of paintings that juxtapose man-made objects (some designed to help the human body adapt to machines, others designed for the hand to mark upon) with pure color to explore how the optical and the ergonomic mix.

Click here for Jake Kean Mayman on its own page.

Phillip K Smith III
Light + Change
Palm Springs Art Museum
November 25, 2022 - May 7, 2023


Phillip K Smith III

Phillip K Smith III makes works that glow. His individual pieces and his installations share a kinship with California Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell as they are primarily about light and the nuances of shifting colors of light over time. Differing from that earlier group of artists, Smith is interested in "light + change." His works are durational and in order to be experienced in full, viewers need to stand in front of them taking in subtle transitions in colors. Some of Smith's sculptures are high tech— created with LEDs, electronics and other man made or synthetic materials, while others are built from wood.

Presented in the natural landscape, many of Smith's pieces are site specific and immersive, yet they are still quite engaging and successful when seen inside museums and galleries. Light + Change includes works dated from 2004 to 2022 and these floor and wall based sculptures fill a specially designed darkened space in the museum. The earliest pieces (located in the center of the installation) are Smith's Cylinders (2004), floor based sculptures that are lit from below and comprised of interlocking Douglas fir stakes fashioned together to create towering, complex, geometric forms that emit an internal glow as they rise from the ground.

As viewers move from space to space, the different types of glows become more apparent. Twelve 90's (2022) opens the exhibition. It consists of twelve glass and aluminum "boxes" positioned on the wall at 90 degree angles, each side emitting a different color of light. The sculpture appears to change as viewers pass because it is programmed to cycle through different colors and displays infinite combinations. Numerous, ever changing colors also occur in Two Corners (2022) where large mirrored light boxes filled with LEDs are installed on adjacent walls that meet in a corner. Viewers see themselves in the mirrored surfaces, along with numerous receding rectangles that slowly morph from hue to hue. In his site specific installations, Smith choreographs experiences that explore not only principles of color theory, but also how the human eye perceives colors that radiate, mix and contrast with each other.

Smith’s seductive and captivating work is simultaneously architectural and perceptual, sculptural and environmental. He is a master craftsman who is as skilled in shaping large acrylic formations into curved shapes, as he is at programming electronics. Sky Torus 2.1, 3.1 and 4.1 (2022) are large illuminated disks of concentric rings of different widths and changing hues, installed on three separate walls. While each Sky Torus is an individual sculpture, they work in concert with each other to create an environment. Both alone, but more so when seen together, Smith's awe inspiring pieces have a meditative and even spiritual aura. While the "wow" factor is huge in Smith's installations, the works retain their initial appeal and illustrate Smith's sensitivity to the changing light in the desert landscape where he makes his home. He is a thoughtful observer interested in echoing natural phenomena and translating that experience into powerful and memorable works of art.

Click here for Phillip K Smith III on its own page.

Elliott Hundley
Echo
Regen Projects
January 14 - February 19, 2023


Elliott Hundley

Elliott Hundley's creations have always been superabundant. His dense canvases are usually filled with thousands of small cut-outs— shapes, figures, snippets from advertisements— pinned to the surface of the works and extended out at different heights to turn the two-dimensional paintings into three-dimensional sculptures. For Echo (an exhibition named after his parrot), he uses the gallery space as a grand "canvas" and fills it with both new and old paintings, sculptures, works on paper, neon and objects from his collection. The result is an immersive installation that invites viewers to travel through a carefully curated trajectory that culls together different aspects of his work spanning twenty years.

The poster for the exhibition features his parrot Echo posed in front of The Plague (2016), one of Hundley's densest compositions. The parrot was the inspiration and partially responsible for the piece Echo (2022), a mixed media sculpture and one of the first works viewers encounter, comprised of broken bits of light purple foam compiled into a dilapidated structure. As Hundley worked in his studio, his parrot also made art — tearing apart the foam— and these discards became the focus of the piece. Purple foam (he uses this material like a palette to support his pins) walls also encircle the front room of the gallery presented as readymades— combinations of paintings, framed works on paper and Hundley's now iconic assortment of pinned shards that are interspersed between the works, not as an afterthought, but rather as a connecting thread.

It is interesting to try to figure out which works are the most recent and which are earlier as Hundley has created abstract paintings throughout his long career, some covered with pins, others not. The overall motifs are swirling interlocking spirals, be it wires, paint or collaged fragments. The works are filled with literary references and often take their point of departure from Greek tragedies (Euripides) or other iconic writers like Jean Genet. One of the most spectacular pieces in the show is the multi-panel, forty foot long work Balcony (2021), titled after Genet's 1956 play set in an unnamed city in the throws of an uprising. The chaos within the play, brought to life within Hundley's work, is depicted as a cacophony of overlapping elements that explore the relationship between fantasy and reality, as well as issues of resistance, protest, hysteria and pleasure.

Because there is so much to look at in the exhibition, the experience becomes a colossal collage. The impact of the totality is greater than the power of the individual pieces. While it is interesting to see Hundley's development and the interconnections among the works, the real thrill is the discovery that comes with looking closely. To learn that a voluble parrot follows him around the studio and was a quasi-collaborator on one work inserts a human element into what otherwise can come across as impenetrable because it contains so much. By breaking things down and exhibiting his process and history, Hundley opens up a space for dialogue and conversation. This can be interpreted as a pause rather than a bombardment and thus invites close scrutiny and further contemplation.

Click here for Elliott Hundley on its own page.

Calder/Tuttle
Tentative
Pace Gallery and David Kordansky Gallery
January 21 - February 25, 2023


Calder/Tuttle

To fully experience Calder/Tuttle: Tentative one must cross La Brea Avenue and visit both David Kordansky and Pace Galleries. On view at Kordansky are Richard Tuttle's new, small-scale, wall based sculptures, as well as intricate and minimal works on paper. Pace Gallery is showing works by Alexander Calder from 1939 selected and installed by Tuttle. The relationships and conversation between the two exhibitions flows forward and back with a force equal to the cars criss-crossing the avenue.

At Pace, one assumes they will encounter an exhibition featuring Calder's graceful mobiles and sculptures flowing freely within the space, but that is not the case. Each of Calder's works seem to be barricaded: surrounded by large sheets of white PVC hinged together to create walls and plinths that enclose or elevate the sculptures. These "pavilions" function as interruptions and are dominant enough to change the way the pieces are experienced. It is not unusual for Calder's works to be placed on special pedestals or for walls to be built to isolate the mobiles and sculptures from surrounding artworks and to direct where the shadows are cast. Tuttle's intervention is extreme, presenting Calder's works as if they are held prisoner. That Calder created these delicate works in 1939 amid the outbreak of World War II comes into play. Perhaps Tuttle's enclosures are a form of protection? Where these pieces fall within the trajectory of Calder's ouevre may be important, yet their history and even their visual beauty is overshadowed by the installation.

The floor-based red wire sculpture Sphere Pierced by Cylinders is placed in front of two freestanding "walls" forming a "V" that limits the view to only one side. A smaller untitled work rests on a pedestal that is enclosed by four "walls" with small rectangular slots that form windows to provide cropped views of the piece. Tuttle also clusters a group of small sculptures/maquettes together, placing them on an ad hoc "shelf" that extends horizontally about waist high and is bordered by tall vertical partitions. He presents Calder's work Little Mobile for Table's Edge balanced not on a table's edge, as it is usually displayed, but on a tower of nine small cubes that resembles a Minimalist (Sol LeWitt/Carl Andre) sculpture.

Across the road, Tuttle is "Tuttle the artist" rather than "Tuttle the curator," where two new series are on view: Black Light (wall based sculptures) and Calder Corrected (works on paper). In keeping with Tuttle's "paradoxical relationship to dematerialization," the seemingly fragile works that comprise the Black Light series are constructed from paper, tape, glue and t-pins, tinted with watercolors and marked with graphite. They are abstract forms— appearing as casual assemblage of shapes — long rectangles, curves and squiggles that are more like three-dimensional drawings than robust sculptures. As in Tuttle's previous works, these pieces display a gracefulness and simplicity that alludes to more philosophical and conceptual ideas relating to confidence and certainty as referred to in the exhibition title: Tentative.

In Black Light #10, two tall thin boxes or miniature "beam-like forms" painted with a light brown wash are crossed by a third angled at a diagonal that could be seen as a hashtag missing one line. Above and in front of the single angled cross bar is a purple quotation mark reminiscent of a tear-drop against a small white parallelogram shape with a bit of yellow that seems to function as support. From the side, the dimensionality of the forms becomes evident, as does their funky construction: folded paper shapes painted delicately on their front sides only. Black Light #22 is a vivid yet washy orange and yellow assemblage consisting of intersecting beams that could stand in for long warehouses seen from above, nested against a more compact central office. From the front, the shapes appear to flatten out and become a single entity while from the side, Tuttle's stacking of the elements is more apparent. Many of these works have small hand written numbers and letters, as well as words indicating placement like "top," as if the pieces were maquettes.

While there may be anticipation that the Calder Corrected series will in some way relate to actual works by Calder, they in fact are pairs of pages from Tuttle's notebooks containing doodles, lines and shapes that have been interrupted, yet come together as incongruous juxtapositions. In Calder Corrected, 8 two white and one yellow-gold rectangle meet along an imaginary center line. The yellow-gold rectangle is covered in scribbles whereas the collaged white rectangles cover stray pencil marks. Calder Corrected, 2 is comprised of four disparate groups of slightly curved parallel pencil lines with all but one group covering a third of the pages. A rectangle overlaps the one set of lines that extend to the edges of the paper.

The ambiguous and provisional nature of these works also references the exhibitions title. While Tuttle's works may appear tentative, they are always purposeful. The linkages to Calder are not obvious in Tuttle's pieces, yet, both artists are interested in weight and balance as well as the relationship between positive shapes and negative space. It is enough to have Calder in mind when regarding Tuttle's work and Tuttle's in mind when viewing Calder's to think about how making art in pre-war 1939 may parallel the menacing and fragile world we live in today.

Click here for Calder/Tuttle on its own page.

Mungo Thomson
Time Life
Karma, Los Angeles
January 14 - March 4, 2023


Mungo Thomson

Time Life is an installation by Mungo Thomson consisting of eight short stop motion animations that cycle through pages of books accompanied by soundtracks composed by Andrea Centazzo and Pierre Favre, Laurie Spiegel, Sven-Åke Johansson, Lee Ranaldo, Ernst Karel, Pauline Oliveros, Adrian Garcia, and John McEntire. Time Life has myriad associations— the iconic magazines Time and Life, as well as a series of books (published between 1961 and 2000) spanning various topics from art and photography to science and history. The title of the show brings to mind the works of Matt Lipps who created a series of photographs based on the 17-volume book set, Library of Photography, published by Time-Life Books in 1970-1972. For this series, Lipps cut out and assembled pictures from the actual books, placing the black and white fragments on shelves and then rephotographing them against colored backgrounds. Printed large, these arrangements explored how new spatial and conceptual relationships could be created through the juxtaposition of unrelated images. Lipps was also interested in the connections between the analog and the digital, a subject that Thomson also explores.

Thomson's eight films touch on a range of seemingly arbitrary topics: Volume 1. Foods of the World (2014–22), Volume 2. Animal Locomotion (2015–22), Volume 3. Flowers (Nahbild) (2015–22), Volume 4. 1000 Questions (2016–22), Volume 5. Sideways Thought (2020–22), Volume 6. The Working End (2021–22), Volume 7. Color Guide (2021–22), Volume 8. Seashells (for Shane). In each fast paced film, the reproductions fly by at such speed that it is often impossible to read or retain what is depicted. Each work is carefully composed and choreographed in addition to being syncopated with a unique soundtrack that enhances the flow of information.

In the first film Volume 1. Foods of the World (2014–22), snippets of pages from cook books are presented ranging from fragmented recipes, pictures of food— wine, fruits, vegetables, all kinds of meals— as well as titles and other details from the various pages. As the film cycles through the images, it becomes obvious that they have been photographed at different orientations so some pictures are on their side or even upside down. Many are cropped to create a quasi-narrative that moves in close, then further back to isolate different aspects of the pages. Sometimes the grid of the copy stand is present, alluding to the apparatus used to create the work.

A similar disorientation occurs in Volume 2. Animal Locomotion (2015–22) where Thomson captures images of both men and women doing various types of exercises (the title refers to the famous photographic series by Eadweard Muybridge). For Volume 3. Flowers (Nahbild) (2015–22), the sequence moves through reproductions of flowers while oscillating between close-ups where the printed dot screen becomes an abstract pattern to images of the flowers with their names pictured in the landscape, or in gardens. In Volume 4. 1000 Questions (2016–22), every question from a 1992 book set called Understanding Science and Nature bombards the screen, whereas in Volume 7. Color Guide (2021–22), the entire frame is filled with colors culled from more than 2000 Pantone swatches that appear to extend across the room while creating an ever-changing glow in the space.

As the current news is filled with stories about AI and machine learning/vision, it is easy to imagine accumulations of data like Thomson's collection of images being fed to a computer. That his starting point is printed rather than digitized source material resonates. It also brings up questions between the digital and the analog, especially with respect to how-to manuals. For example, when still images are filmed in sequence, they become animated and when they were originally created, the aim was to provide step-by-step instructions, whereas today if one wants to learn how to cook, or tie a knot, or perform a certain stretch, thousands of videos can be found online. Although Thomson's films are fast paced, they harken back to a bygone era and retain the CMYK dot patterns of pre-digital mechanical reproduction. The films are mesmerizing and sophisticated and hard to turn away from. While one can imagine a machine being instructed to scan through and preserve millions of pages from books, Thomson's films are hand crafted to appear mechanical and use a carefully sequenced progression of imagery and sounds to draw viewers in and hold their attention. They are amazing progressions that resonate formally, structurally, aesthetically and conceptually long after the screen goes dark.

Click here for Mungo Thomson on its own page.

Christopher Murphy
Tangle
Billis Williams Gallery
January 7 - February 18, 2023


Christopher Murphy

Since his first exhibitions in the early 2000s, Christopher Murphy has presented paintings and works on paper, often derived from found photographs. Murphy looks closely at both people and their surroundings, including the built and natural landscape, and he appears to faithfully reproduce the originals with exacting detail. While at first glance, his works are "normal" and "believable," there is always something purposely off, or "surreal" in his depictions. Murphy's works are disorienting as he uses images of the past to comment on the isolation and need for connection missing from recent times.

In the exhibition Tangle, Murphy focuses on groups of people, often closely pressed together. There is something strange about these works. As the title of the exhibition suggests, what is most striking is how the figures intersect to become a tangle of intertwined bodies and limbs. For example, I thought We Settled on Florals (all works 2022) is a closely cropped image looking down at a crowd of young men, all (but one) wearing mustard yellow t-shirts and matching caps. They are gathered together: perhaps waiting for an unknown event. All have close cropped dark hair. Some wear thick black glasses, while the facial features of others are obscured by their hats. Centered in the composition is an individual with crossed arms dressed in a floral patterned shirt and hat, obviously the "odd man out."

Hang in There is equally familiar and disconcerting. In this painting, (presumably based on a photograph from the 1970s or 1980s) Murphy portrays six girls from the just above the knees, many wearing patterned sweaters over white, button-down, collared shirts. Their hair rises toward the top edge of the painting against the sand-colored background. The painting seems to be oriented incorrectly to show the figures right side up. After a "double take," it becomes evident that these kids are hanging upside down at a park or a playground with their long brown hair pulled down toward the ground by the force of gravity. That two of the figures are wearing the same sweater as well as pants gives pause and invites closer examination as to whether these are indeed the same person repeated in different outfits.

While Murphy describes the starting point for his works are found photographs culled from family albums, thrift shops and estate sales, he also speaks about the fact that he often re-contextualizes the figures, re-stages the action or creates invented scenarios. While photographs are instantaneous, paintings take time. The surface of a photograph is often smooth whereas a finished painting is the result of many layers that become a combination of textures resulting from different applications of paint over time. If one squints, the paintings verge on pattern, as Murphy repeats gestures and forms across the compositions like in Four on the Floor and Shake a Leg where "cheerleaders" or "dancers" are duplicated and become visual rhythms consisting of cropped bodies.

What is unique about Murphy's work is how he translates the photograph into a painting. The skin of the people in many of Murphy's paintings is a fractured texture akin to peeling, modulated paint or a scraped cottage cheese ceiling. In some senses, this texture is off putting, as in Coordinate, a painting of four young women all wearing the same multicolored striped sweaters, perhaps sisters, or even the same person at different moments in time. The contrast of the textured skin with their refined hair and the abstracted background not only illustrates Murphy's dexterity as a painter, but also his interest in complicating the formal aspects of painting to combine abstraction and representation in a single image.

Click here for Christopher Murphy on its own page.

Petra Cortright
sapphine cinnamon viper fairy
Palm Springs Art Museum
September 26, 2022 – March 26, 2023


Petra Cortright

Behind the huge entry wall with a large-scale, multi-panel digitally created photographic landscape is an array of 50, same-sized monitors looping numerous different short videos created by Petra Cortright between 2007 and 2022. Cortright garnered attention with a series of video self portraits uploaded to YouTube made by posing or performing in front of the web-cam on her computer. Often these campy videos would depict her in costume, cavorting and twirling seductively for the camera. She also incorporated stock digital effects and screen savers by overlaying them into the imagery. These performative videos are juxtaposed with several screen recordings of her layered Photoshop compositions. Here, the process of building some of the digital landscapes prints on view in the rest of the exhibit is revealed.

Though not the first thing viewers see, this video wall serves as the index of the exhibition and provides the trajectory of Cortright's process. She emerged as a net artist in the early 2000s, then segued into showing videos and installations and has now transitioned to creating printed images filled with fragments of appropriated imagery, as well as her own digital/drawn gestures. While the mesmerizing video wall serves as a summary, the focus of the exhibition is her printed digital landscapes.

Five small-scale framed works — Flash Stills — serve as an entry point to Cortright's process. The label accompanying these prints relates how she created the series by hacking into the software used to generate animated screen savers to extract 'content' that she later manipulated and collaged together resulting in a suite of surreal images that purposely disrupt the calming nature and intention of the originals.

To fabricate her larger pieces, Cortright composites thousands of layers of textures and photographic imagery. While some of her pictures are her own, most of her imagery is culled from online sources. In her complex collages, she often plays with the relationships between different digital artifacts, as well as high and low resolution graphics to confound viewers about scale and source material. While some of her imagery is clearly recognizable, for example in SHIRLEY'S OF HOLLYWOOD_Seismologist essay_sea kayaker magazine SCHEMATICS GUITAR, (2021) "real" flower petals, leaves, fruit and a vase are intertwined with abstracted lines and gestures made by stroking through layers of color and imagery in Photoshop that criss-cross and obscure any photographic veracity.

Gazzetta Ufficiale SCHOLARSHIP SEARCH "smoking fetish" uk hardcore (2021) is a large-scale (59 x 84 inch) digital painting on anodized aluminum that shimmers and appears to change hues and tonalities depending on how the light reflects off its surface. The imagery resembles elements found in the landscape or seascape as it is filled with clumps of plant-life — tufts of salmon colored grass that could also be interpreted as flames. Cortright's source material is forever mutable and because she is not overly concerned with differences in resolution, these elements are repeated, enlarged, silhouetted and blurred. She unabashedly appropriates from "the endless digital realm" to fabricate works that feel both real (recognizable) and surreal (otherworldly) simultaneously. Rather than obscure her process, Cortright exhibits variations that allow viewers to compare and contrast how adding or subtracting layers changes the work. This is most clearly evident across 1 yr tbill const mat wkly_1998 election results Yavapai County Arizona, Africa Map_anime+manga+background_arbeitsbl‰tter fernsehen, Babyface_Behandlung Muskelkrankheiten.calendar 1998, and 70's television cartoons_Accommodations in Sidney, Australia (all 2022) — where a central "tree" is surrounded by different compositional elements.

Using fragments, pixels and broken down imagery, Cortright has invented a new vocabulary of paint-like gestures that are extracted and repurposed from aspects of the original source material. While she is a painter who does not use paint, her works (although sometimes printed on canvas or linen) do not transcend the digital and in fact are more successful when they embrace their "digital-ness," rather than when she attempts to mask it.

The works are abstract and ambiguous and more about reaching for a digital sublime than about the goings on in the world. That being said, Cortright's titles root the pieces in the present as they are mash-ups of words and phrases from the internet that often don't seem to relate at all to the content of the images. These titles are as enigmatic and puzzling as her imagery and harken back to her career as an internet artist. Cortright's tools are computer software and a range of digital printers, while her material is the internet. She uses these elements as artists from pre-digital eras used brushes, pens, pencils, paint and canvas. It is with insight, skill and determination that this prolific artist has mastered her tools and continues to push boundaries. Petra Cortright: sapphire cinnamon viper fairy, her first museum survey in the United States is an intriguing introduction to the range of her past and present works.

Click here for Petra Cortright on its own page.

Poppy Jones
Body & Soul
Overduin & Co.
December 10, 2022 - January 28, 2023


Poppy Jones

At first glance, Poppy Jones' small, intimate, single hue paintings appear to be photographs. They are close cropped depictions of everyday things — jackets, folded shirts, boots, flowers, lamps, a candle and most beautifully, a page from a spiral bound notebook covered in shadows. These highly detailed paintings have a photographic veracity. They feel like contact prints from vintage negatives that have been selectively hand colored.

For the exhibition, Body & Soul, like in her past installations, the works are given ample space and presented in a line along the gallery walls suggesting a quasi-narrative. The first, (or last) image in the sequence is Shell (all works 2022) a realistically rendered conch shell resting on a table in front of a darker toned vase. The shell approximates its "actual" size and fills most of the 7 5/8 x 10 1/8 inch canvas. A light source outside the frame illuminates the scene, creating a fluted shadow on an adjacent wall. Because it is painted on suede (Jones sometimes cuts up her own garments or uses fabrics such as suede, silk, or cotton as a surface), there is an unevenness to the ground that accentuates the texture of the shell in this case. Here, Jones' focus is on the way light illuminates objects and while she depicts fragments and interior scenes, she is conscious of presenting moments that radiate quiet. Her "still lives" are just that — still.

Lumen, Interior (Evening) and Lux are also painted on suede in singular sepia tones. In Lux, the metal arm of a floor or desk lamp enters near the bottom left side of the composition and extends toward the right across the frame. Jones depicts the bright glow of a light bulb housed within the shade in contrast to the black of the lamp and the gradient of mid-tones on the wall behind. There is nothing else in the picture. Interior (Evening) and Lumen are less contrasty. In these subtle and minimal paintings, there is little that differentiates the object from the background. As if created in low light, Jones delineates the shapes of a candle, as well as the shade of a table lamp filling the image with a soft, glowing aura.

While none of the paintings depict people, they are present and alluded to. Folded jackets or shirts fill the space in Dawn, Mortal Form (Autumn), Mortal Form (Spring), Sea Weather and Summer Leaves. Titled after seasons, times of day, or the elements, these works are a combination of painted fabric (stripes, quilted down) and the marks or shadows that happen to fall on them. The pieces beg questions— whose garments? Are they in use or discarded? Where are they placed to capture the light and shadow? Each painting suggests a narrative or a story and one of the pleasures in regarding the work is to imagine the scene beyond the image. For example in Glass/Edge, questions arise as to who left the empty wine glass on the edge of the bannister? Why is it there?

While Jones' works are skillfully painted, they resonate beyond their formal qualities. It is not surprising that she draws from literature where descriptions of rooms and objects allude to ideas beyond. A previous exhibition was titled "Cutting Shade" after a verse in a Gertrude Stein poem and for this exhibition, the press release references Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," pointing to the silence of dilapitated spaces. Like Woolf, Jones brings inanimate objects to life. She captures indistinct moments and imbues them with memories. Her paintings give a delicate presence and a satisfying permanence to that which might otherwise be overlooked. These small works have an expansive intimacy and a lasting aura. 

Click here for Poppy Jones on its own page.

David Hockney
20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures
LA Louver
November 16, 2022 - January 7, 2023


David Hockney

The combination of his versatility and his ability to embrace new technologies and methods of working sets David Hockney apart from many other artists of his generation. He has had a long and very successful career making paintings, prints, drawings, photographs as well as operas and stage sets. Most recently, he has been creating works with an iPad. Since 2008 when he first got this device, he has experimented with the application Brushes and a custom stylus provided by Apple, developing ways to create drawn lines on the screen that have depth and texture. There is a casualness and spontaneity to Hockney's iPad drawings. They are humble and expressive. When speaking about his early iPhone works he stated, "I draw flowers every day on my iPhone and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning... And my flowers last."

In February 2021, Hockney began painting the flower images that make up his current exhibition, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures. Flowers in vases could be construed as old fashioned and easy but it is remarkable the way Hockney uses his iPad to transform the arrangements, capturing the light and the individual shapes and colors of the stems and petals, as well as the way light reflects through the glass vases. Images of landscapes and flowers have long been the subject of Hockney's work. During the pandemic when travel was limited, a vase on the table caught his attention. He states in the wall text accompanying the exhibition. "I was just sitting at the table in our house and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table. Being February the sun was low casting a deep shadow on the table. I decided to draw it, the background was dark so I made a rich brown for it. After printing it I put it on the far wall facing the table. There it stayed for a few days. It looked very beautiful to me. A few days later I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase, this took longer to do. I then realised if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off."

Twenty flower prints (each 35 x 25 inches) are evenly spaced along deep blue walls, bracketed by small and large versions of 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed). In this multi-panel photographic print created via three-dimensional scanning, Hockney is depicted twice, both times from the back, sitting in different chairs, but wearing the same cap and bespoke plaid suit. A stool with an aqua colored vase and a single pink rose (like those in some of the images), as well as a low table with two packs of Camel cigarettes and a bottle of water separates the two depictions of the artist. He regards a deep blue wall covered with the twenty flower images in the show, each in a different decorative carved frame. Hockney delights in the contrast of the old-hand carved fames and his hand-drawn pictures, created in a new way — on the iPad.

In addition to the twenty flowers-- variations on a theme -- are "some bigger pictures" also made with the iPad. Here, Hockney ventures outside again and records his impressions of the area around his studio focusing on trees surrounding a pond, as well as a flowing stream, in addition to a more abstract work, August 2021, Landscape with Shadows, a twelve panel work that depicts a more Cubist view of the landscape as each panel (individual iPad painting) contains wide areas of bright colors and textures, that when presented together don't exactly line up. This creates the illusion of movement, as well as depth. Not only is Hockney an astute observer, but he has the unique ability to transform 'reality' into the flattened picture plane, in such a way as they still retain their crispness and the subtleties of experiencing nature.

That Hockney is prolific goes without saying and while he might create similar images, each work has its raison d'etre and becomes an integral part of the series. He has not only embraced digital technologies, but has excelled in making the tools disappear -- for him, painting on the iPad is like using a pencil on paper or a brush on canvas. His iPad images continue to get brighter and bolder. This, coupled with changes in ink jet printing technologies and three-dimensional scanning (photographing subjects from all sides and digitally compositing them), has enabled Hockney to create bigger and more complex works that continue to wow viewers.

Click here for David Hockney on its own page.

William Kentridge
In Praise of Shadows
The Broad
November 12, 2022 - April 9, 2023


William Kentridge

The first work I saw by the South African based artist William Kentridge was in Germany at Documenta X in 1997. On view was the mesmerizing, just under nine-minute animation Felix in Exile (1994), a narrative about the horrors that occurred during apartheid in South Africa. The story was created through a stop motion process that captures a succession of ever changing gestural, charcoal drawings. It chronicles the relationship between the fictional characters Felix Teitelbaum and Soho Eckstein as they navigate the terrain and politics of 1990s South Africa. To make this and his later animations, Kentridge executes a scene or a figure in charcoal, erases parts and adds to it, documenting the steps along the way with a camera. The drawings, as well as the finished video are sometimes exhibited together. Over the years, Kentridge has expanded his practice to include multi-channel projections, stage sets for theatre and even opera. I have had the great fortune of encountering many of Kentridge's stop motion animations and installations in museums and galleries in the United States and abroad since my first encounter with his work and was pleased to see some of his iconic pieces: The Refusal of Time (first shown at Documenta 13 in 2012) as well as Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (at MOCA Pacific Design Center in 2005), which are also included in the survey exhibition at The Broad.

In Praise of Shadows spans thirty-five years and gives viewers the opportunity to view his sculpture, stage sets, animations and works on paper at the same time. The underlying subject matter of much of his work documents the history of apartheid and the fight against it in South Africa. Kentridge is an astute and thoughtful reader of history, as well as an informed observer of current events who skillfully integrates political messages into his art without overwhelming it.

Whether through a single channel video, a multi-screen projection, or a miniature stage set, Kentridge takes his viewers on a journey. Sometimes the journey is metaphysical, sometimes it is actual, and often it is both as in 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Journey to the Moon and Day for Night. Projected together in a large room at The Broad, these films take viewers from the earth into space through a series of ad hoc scenarios. Kentridge cleverly uses props in his studio to create the surface of the moon and the rocket ship needed to travel there. These pieces are breathtaking, delightful and even humorous at times. In addition to these films, other highlights of the exhibition include the spectacular The Refusal of Time (2012). Set within a darkened room filled with crates, chairs and sculptures, The Refusal of Time is accompanied by a cacophony of sounds, as well as five separate video projections in which Kentridge and other actors appear. This bombastic and frenetic piece explores the nature of time and topics relating to both colonialism and industry.

While it is impossible to describe each of the more than 130 works in the jam packed exhibition, the take away is that for over thirty-five years, Kentridge has surprised and amazed audiences, whether through drawing, sculpture, video or installation. He has the uncanny ability to create politically and socially engaged works that are never didactic. While the pieces are beautiful, extremely well executed and emotionally riveting, they more importantly explore past and present injustices in the world and are inspirations for both their candor and exquisite execution.

Click here for William Kentridge on its own page.

Uta Barth
Peripheral Vision
The Getty Center
November 15, 2022 - February 19, 2023


Uta Barth

Uta Barth has been exploring the way light interacts with walls, surfaces and spaces throughout her career. The work is often minimal, showing empty areas or flattened planes and it relies on repetition and difference, sometimes subtle, other times drastic or dramatic. Peripheral Vision, an exhibition organized by The Getty Center that traces the highlights of her career includes examples of her graduate student works created at UCLA in the mid 1990s (black and white photographs made in the darkroom) as well as a recent commission that combines color digital photography with a subtle slow-moving video, in celebration of The Getty Center's twentieth anniversary. What is unusual about the way the show is installed is that many of her series are recreated and presented in full as they might have appeared in previous exhibitions. Rather than choose just a few representational photographs, viewers can experience the works as Barth conceived of them— as extended sequences rather than as individual images.

The exhibition opens with the new multi-panel piece titled ...from dawn to dusk (2022), which was shot on site at the Getty over a years duration. Twice a month, she would photograph the entrance to the Harold A. Williams Auditorium every five minutes from dawn to dusk and this archive of images, now printed in different colors and tones, at a range of scales and with a variety of croppings extends across the room, allowing viewers to meditate on the way light and architecture interact and play off each other in this particular location. While some of these images simply record the way light falls on the building, others have been digitally enhanced— colorized, inverted, solarized and/or blurred. The installation spans three walls and is presented in an uneven grid of different sized square photographs, formally paralleling the square blocks of Richard Meier's architecture. It becomes a study of difference, absence, presence and the power of light and its opposite — shadow.

Jumping from the present to the past, many of Barth's early images, while still concerned with architecture, depict more ambiguous spaces. Photographs from series like Ground (1984) and Field(1995-6) are purposely soft and extremely blurry. Ground #41 depicts an out-of-focus bookshelf and Ground #42 features two blurry framed artworks on an aqua-colored wall. Both these images call attention to the periphery and even the space beyond the edges— what might be outside the frame becomes part of the focus, albeit out of focus. For the series Field, Barth photographed distant landscapes and cityscapes to appear like those in the background of films that allude to unspecified locations behind the actors. white blind (bright red) is a suite of work from 2002 in which Barth documented trees and power lines seen through her window. These images are exhibited as a long row that transitions from detailed views to monochrome colored panels — interspersing photographs that are both abstract and representational. Similarly, and to draw a bright white line with light (2011) is made up of photographs that extend horizontally across the gallery space, illustrating the undulations of light and its transition to wavy lines as it passes through drapes covering Barth's bedroom window.

Two very different series from 2017 are examples of more recent work, whereas the commission ...from dawn to dusk is her most current project. The photographs in Untitled (2017) focus on a large blank stucco wall filled with an array of subtle shadows and textures defined by subtly evolving qualities of sunlight. Each mostly "white" or "blank" image is bordered by a strip of gravel at the bottom and a patch of sky, seen through a band of windows or spaces separated by two-by-fours at the top. The shape and large scale of these photographs pays homage to canvases made by colorfield painters as Barth is interested in mood and the emotions elicited by the play of light. The works in In the Light and Shadow of Morandi take their point of departure from the still lives of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Here, Barth assembled differently colored glass vessels horizontally along a table (or desk) and a long shelf, turning them into stunning dark silhouettes with magical flares and highlights. These objects were carefully lit to emphasize their volume as well as their flatness simultaneously. Barth accentuated the distortion by presenting them as trapezoids within rectangular frames rather than simply as rectangles.

Barth's photographs are never straightforward and while seemingly minimal, they are carefully constructed and conceptualized. Though many of the works feel more empty than full, the emptiness contains patterns of light and shadow or reference distant spaces or are about foreground background relationships. At its core, Barth's work is about perception and the act of looking. Her pictures frame what is seen as well as what is absent and this duality and ambiguity is what makes her work unique.

Click here for Uta Barth on its own page.

Nancy Holt
Locating Perception
Sprueth Magers
October 28, 2022 - January 14, 2023


Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt is best known for her iconic Sun Tunnels (1973-76). But in addition to making land art, site specific installations and sculptures, Holt (1938-2014) was also a prolific photographer whose serial works, often installed in expansive grids, had visual savvy, conceptual underpinnings and a poetic flare. In the first exhibit of her work in Los Angeles since 1985, Sprueth Magers presents Locating Perception which brings together works from the 1970s and 1980s, including three series of photographs: Light and Shadow Photo Drawings (1978), California Sun Signs (1972) and Western Graveyards (1968), as well as "Locator" pieces and the amazing site specific installation Electrical Systems from 1982.

The nineteen square photographs that comprise California Sun Signs are playful pictures containing illustrations of the sun and signage using the word 'sun' that are often featured in street signs and business names. Shown salon style, but not as a precise grid, the photographs recall California's golden era and promise of hope, as well as its inherent contradictions. Though taken in the early 1970s the images feel very current, as if they were recently shot, except for give-a-ways like the photograph of the Sunland Gas Station where the price of gas is 33-35 cents.

To create the photographs for Western Graveyards, Holt photographed dilapidated grave sites in Lone Pine, CA and Virginia City, NV. Across the sixty color photographs (like California Sun Signs, they were also taken with a square format camera), Holt focuses on the shapes of the actual grave sites, the accompanying names and epitaphs, as well as their relationship to the landscape beyond. Though the images are for the most part documentation of found objects, they physically and conceptually resonate as "land art."

In contrast to the square, color photographs shot in the landscape, the black and white images in Light and Shadow Photo Drawings were created in the studio. Holt would shine light through curved cutouts and carefully frame, within the camera, the varying shapes and shadows that appeared on the wall. These grainy abstractions featuring interlocking and overlapping arcs and circles in differing shades of gray recall celestial expanses— they evoke the shape of the planet Saturn, as well as the movement of the stages of the moon across the sky. Through photographs, Holt referred to them as drawings— as they were more about line, shape and texture than the capturing of something found outside. The inclusion of two pieces from Holt's Locator series complements this multi-panel photo-work and helps viewers understand the way Holt conceptualized framing space. In these sculptural pieces originally installed in her studio in NY, an open ended metal tube was placed on a stand and directed toward a window, a wall, and/or the floor. At Sprueth Magers, a large black circle is painted directly on the wall that corresponds to the area framed by the pipe. In many ways, these Locator works are precursors to Holt's monumental Sun Tunnels — large tubular sculptures placed in the Utah desert.

Electrical System occupies the upstairs gallery. Comprised of industrial materials — electrical fixtures, wire, light bulbs and 3/4 inch steel conduit— this site specific sculpture criss-crosses the space, filling it with undulating forms that ebb and flow, rising from the floor towards the ceiling. An accompanying drawing, Electrical System (for Thomas Edison), is a proposal for an installation at John Weber Gallery in 1982 that illustrates how Holt conceived of the work, configured it for that particular space and where it would tap into the existing electrical system. For Sprueth Magers, the installation is re-designed specifically for that space, as here, it wraps around columns and extends horizontally along the walls. Captivating to look at and created by organizing more than seventy lightbulbs and many yards of steel conduit, the work is a three-dimensional rendering of a closed system. It celebrates the rhythms and patterns that form when industrial materials go beyond their intended means.

Throughout her long career, Holt examined the act of looking, be it through, at or beyond. She was interested in the many aspects and manifestations of human perception and the ever changing relationships between light and space. Seeing these early pieces allows viewers to better understand her contributions to the fields of conceptual photography and site specific installation as well as her importance in the canon of environmental art.

Click here for Nancy Holt on its own page.

Brad Stumpf
Shadow Plays
Harkawik
November 18, 2022 - January 20, 2023


Brad Stumpf

Thirteen modestly-sized paintings comprise Chicago based artist Brad Stumpf's exhibition Shadow Plays. The paintings are beautiful, personal and intimate. Formally, Stumpf combines thickly applied paint that defines spaces— walls, desks and objects— with more sparsely painted areas representing pieces of paper. These are filled with subtle pencil drawings— flying birds, couples in bed or riding bikes, in addition to affectionate nude depictions of a woman (his wife) and himself. Conceptually, the pieces are about the nuances of home and everyday life. Stumpf arranges and lights still lives inside wooden boxes that rest on table tops, filled with an array of props including small drawings. He then carefully paints these scenarios, flattening the space to fit the two-dimensional picture plane.

For Beating in Sync (2022) he juxtaposes a white bird with a small blue (matchbox sized) toy car: both are expressively rendered with thick brush strokes and wide areas of color. Dangling above the bird and car are four yellow butterflies hanging from strings. Stumpf portrays the scene a glowing yellow as if illuminated by the setting sun. Centered in the composition is a white piece of paper (painted, not collaged) taped to the back of the box and featuring a pencil drawing of two figures lying head to head, their bodies extending horizontally toward the edges of the frame. Though more ambiguous, the painting references the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell and celebrates the beauty that can be inferred from a collection of random things.

Our Hearts Half Submerged (2022) is a painting of the exterior of a blue house with a triangle shaped roof set against a lightly washed pink background. The house rests at the back of a table (another one of Stumpf's intricate constructions) behind an orange conch shell in the foreground of the composition. Across the facade at either edge of the house are drawings of a naked man and woman holding their hands out toward each other. Centered in what could be construed as a 'picture window' are more nuanced drawings of the couple with prominent orange dots where their hearts would be. Stumpf enjoys creating enigmas and his juxtapositions are poetically suggestive rather than didactic.

In To Be Eclipsed By You (2020) the still life within the box includes domestic objects. Two coffee mugs, one sitting on top of a piece of white paper with interlocking stain-rings like those created by spilled coffee, the other at the right edge sit at the base of the box. Above the mugs, is a pencil drawing on dark orange paper resembling the jagged lines of an EKG, and below that, two pages torn from a spiral drawing pad have been push-pinned to the back of the space. These feature two tiny figures (one male, the other female) riding bicycles on what appears to be a wide concrete expanse. Next to this, Stumpf again includes the detailed drawings of the couple with the orange hearts from Our Hearts Half Submerged, only in this painting a larger orange circle covers and partially obscures another circle that is painted a darker blue. As the title suggests, Stumpf muses on the myriad meanings and presentations of 'eclipse.'

In his quiet and charming paintings, Stumpf focuses on the relationship between painting styles— simply and thickly rendered household objects— and more lovingly detailed pencil drawings of figures. For each work, he creates an elaborate maquette that is carefully lit, filled with specific objects and then faithfully reproduces it as a painting. What he has to say about house, home and relationships is illustrated with both humor and honesty, making these paintings an inviting pleasure to view.

Click here for Brad Stumpf on its own page.

Lucy McRae
Future Sensitive
Honor Fraser
October 1 - December 17, 2022


Lucy McRae

Lucy McRae describes herself as a science fiction artist, filmmaker, inventor and body architect. While the terms inventor and filmmaker do not need clarification, what does it mean to be a body architect and science fiction artist? McRae combines technology with industrial and clothing design to create sculptures and wearables: essentially machines that are welcoming. These cushioned and sometimes womb-like objects are meant to provide comfort and support, while simultaneously investigating the impact technology might have on human evolution. McRae's work is collaborative as she often works in partnership with others like a design or architecture studio. Her studio's output "considers how human biology might be augmented by a mixture of physical design, modification of genes and emotions –– technology transforming the body and ethics." McRae has given TED talks, exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica and created projects for NASA. She is currently a visiting professor at SciArc.

In her evocative exhibition, Future Sensitive (coming just a few months after Futurekin and including pieces from this recent installation created for SciArc), McRae fills the gallery with photographs, films and sculptures, fabricated in a variety of materials, that imagine a future world. Her references to the body, interests in sci-fi and the physicality of her installations brings to mind works by Matthew Barney, Andrea Zittel and Lita Albuquerque, artists who also engage with film and sculpture and explore the relationship of the body to a futuristic landscape.

Like Barney, Zittel and Albuquerque, McRae often appears in her own pieces — or designs them for the proportions of her own body. In sculptural works like Post Apocalyptic Sherpa (2019) McRae is depicted in photographs wearing a brown, tan and orange hiking outfit and like a sherpa, carries this load— a futuristic survival kit— on her back. The "kit" is an elaborate, multi-part object equipped with a modified black-out mask, cushions and mats that can be spread out on the floor, or in the natural environment to provide shelter and comfort. A similar work designed to support a single person, Solitary Survival Raft (2019) is a rust and orange hued, full-size fabric raft that imagines what might be necessary to survive when lost at sea.

Heavy Duty Love (2021) is cushioned weightlifting/workout station installed in what appears to be a modified basketball court within the gallery. In this complex contraption, a would-be user pushes their body into the machine and is cradled by soft fabrics that surround them. The work was "designed as an aid to compensate for lack of human touch early in life" and while alluding to betterment, it reads more like a fantasy. McRae constructs detailed narratives for each of her works, creating backstories and scenarios that are prescriptions for life improvements. While at first glance, the outfits and machines in the installation seem confining and even intimidating, akin to stepping into a straight-jacket, McRae asserts that they are devices and places that offer a replacement for human connection.

While technology plays a role in McRae's work, it is often implied and not present. The pieces, while futuristic, are neither mechanical nor infused with sensors or other high-tech devices. Many of the works are soft-sculptures, rather than hard-edged machines. Also featured within the exhibition are three short films including Institute of Isolation, 2016, Delicate Spells of Mind, 2022 and Futurekin, 2022 where McRae's invented worlds come alive. To see the costumes and machines in use by McRae and other actors in the films gives them context and allows for a better imagining of the range of her explorations in relation to the post apocalyptical world that she envisions.

Click here for Lucy McRae on its own page.

Daniel Dove
reAnimal
Philip Martin Gallery
October 29 - November 26, 2022


Daniel Dove

In the exhibition Picasso Cut Papers (Hammer Museum October 1 - December 31, 2022), numerous animal forms emerge from folded and cut pieces of paper. Picasso had the ability to maximize the minimal and elicit creatures from just a few marks or gestures, often crafting them into playful and whimsical works. Many of the paintings in Daniel Dove's exhibition reAnimal feature recognizable animals as Dove pays homage to Picasso. An interesting dialogue about influence, inspiration and appropriation occurs as one thinks about the shows in relation to each other.

Dove's painting Grrrl with Guitar (all works 2022) is a "riff" on Picasso's Girl with Mandolin (1910). Here, Dove has modernized the image— while maintaining the Cubist fracturing— depicting the musician in profile with long flowing hair, strumming a guitar. She is set against a background that could be seen as abstracted bright stage lights, suggesting the energy of the Riot Grrl movement, rather than the more sedentary playing of a mandolin. Equus II also draws from Picasso. In this work, Dove isolates the large horse with pointed-tongued in the center of Picasso's iconic painting Guernica (1937). He removes it from its environs and places it in a surreal desert landscape where it appears to be trapped in a modified Marc di Suvero sculpture located in a graffiti filled concrete park.

Giant, isolated creatures centered in the natural landscape are the focus of many of the smaller paintings. In these works, Dove also channels Picasso, painting his animals with minimal features and flat planar bodies. These depictions are more machine than flesh-like, recalling reproductions of sculptures assembled from metal detritus and exhibiting a childlike innocence, despite their monumental scale. The 'beast' painted in Edge Lord is comprised of rusted steel sections, covered with unreadable scrawl, that coalesce into the shape of a bear. The incongruity of the setting — a large sculpture in a desert landscape — recalls the dinosaurs on Interstate 10 near Cabazon, CA. Stance and Nocturnal similarly contain depictions of sculpted animals, functionless anomalies placed in beautifully rendered, innocuous landscapes: something out of place and not quite right.

In Faint Heart, Dove combines a curvaceous human form presented in both two and three dimensions. He merges the trompe-l'oeil foreground and its shadows into the flat background shapes to create a composition that defies expectations and reality. For Embedded, he fragments a kneeling female, placing the individual sections, each painted a different bright color, into separate compartments of a jagged-edged box as if displaying evidence. One of the arms is presented as an orange cylinder, and gives the painting a Surrealistic aura that is reminiscent of Rene Magritte and Louise Nevelson.

Dove is an accomplished painter with the ability to realistically render actual, as well as imagined subjects. In these works, he explores the relationship between flatness and volume by placing invented sculptural forms into California desert landscapes. His fascinating works draw from observation as well as art history. By recontextualizing recognizable elements, he creates new contexts to explore the familiar against the unknown.

Click here for Daniel Dove on its own page.