Oil painting’s historical connection to wealth—and more specifically to the rise of capitalism—is not news to anyone. As the art critic John Berger pointed out, oil painting’s rise to prominence as a medium had a lot to do with its ability to express the changing worldview of the Western European ruling class of the 16th …
Continue reading “LOW VOICE OUT LOUD”
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While the majority of Americans, 72% according to a 2021 poll by Yale University, believe global warming is happening, only 47% seem to believe that it would harm them personally. This alarming second statistic seems to prove the national disconnect as to why most individuals don’t seem to “feel” the same urgency as those who …
Continue reading “Mapping The Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century”
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“Listen up, motherf*ckers! Now we’re having fun.” The lines come squawking through a speaker (as in, an object producing sound) on the floor, but who is the speaker (as in, the subject producing the thought)? Is it the African grey parrot, or the scarlet macaw represented in high definition on two vertically-oriented wall monitors? Do …
Continue reading “The Conversation”
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One of my favorite half-truths in the art world is that there really isn’t anything new, just variations of what’s come before. It’s true that what might appear undeniably “new” can be endlessly dissected into “old” components, merely recombined. This seems like a dispiriting process, but it reveals another truth: that something exists apart from …
Continue reading “We Are All Guests Here”
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In a moment of acceleration and rapid climate change artists must ask what it means and entails to approach this moment—the Anthropocene—from the vantage point of art-making. How can artists recalibrate notions of art to respond to this new planetary epoch? And how can artists use the sites of art to imagine a new future? …
Continue reading “Song of the Cicada”
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Perhaps it’s by default, reverence, or sentiment that we think of the progenitors of an art movement as having more difficult challenges than those who maintain it. But artists in the lineage of painterly abstraction increasingly face a new kind of problem, which verges on paradoxical: how does an artist advance an aesthetic when the …
Continue reading “Sacred Witness Sacred Menace”
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Desert X is an exhibition that exists in two modalities. One is in the physical world – the actual sites of the work scattered throughout the Coachella Valley The other is the virtual world of media – both that produced by Desert X, and the ad-hoc user-generated documentation via social media. After a year of …
Continue reading “Desert X 2021: Places and Ideas”
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Each of the five exhibitions currently on view at the California African American Museum (CAAM, www.caamuseum.org) stands on its own, but it is the sum total that makes the trip to Exposition Park worthwhile. On the whole, it’s intellectually, emotionally, historically, and contemporarily engaging. There’s a lot to see, but it’s digestible and not as …
Continue reading “2 monogrammatic shows, 2 historical exhibitions, and a familial notion”
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“All meaning accrues in duration.” -Ken Burns* Memory, nostalgia, duration, rhythm, repetition — time. A Journey That Wasn’t purports to show works of contemporary art that “[consider] complex representations of time.” It’s a pretty open brief, but one that allows for an unexpected and playful grouping of works from in and around the vast Broad collection. …
Continue reading “A Journey That Absolutely Was”
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The space is cavernous. The machinations at work creating the abstract play of light, shadow, and geometric shapes on the enormous floor-to-ceiling screen on the opposite end of the room are not readily apparent. The sound betrays only the occasional hint of having been designed – a chorus of construction sounds, piano strings, ratchets, and …
Continue reading “Light and Space and Reality”
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Hauser + Wirth Los Angeles opens three new exhibitions – Louise Bourgeois | The Red Sky; Greta Brătescu | The Leaps of Aesop; and Mark Bradford | New Works. Besides their conveniently alliterative surnames, each of the three artists’ practices can be described as working through personal narratives that echo in larger historical milieu. And, …
Continue reading “Bourgeois. Brătescu. Bradford.”
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“The work of art is above all a process of creation” -Paul Klee Architectural sketches and models take center stage in Robert Irwin: Site Determined exhibition at the University Art Museum at CSULB. This is the first exhibition that explores four decades of the artist’s outdoor projects through drawings and models. Starting with his first …
Continue reading “Robert Irwin: Site Determined”
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The Exhibition “Hot Flat” curated by Jeanne Dreskin & Santi Vernetti presents artists Michael Cataldi, Abigail Collins, Gelare Khoshgozaan, Fleurette West, and Richard Wheeler at the Angeles Gate Cultural Center takes as is jumping off point Himmelb(l)au’s architectural project called Hot Flat.
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Mike Kelley’s exhibition Kandors 1999 – 2011 at Hauser Wirth Los Angeles explores the spatial memory, relative to architecture and fantasy. Themes that Mike has been exploring in his earlier work such as ‘Educational Complex’ (1995).
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“It’s a pile of stuff.” Thus Paul McCarthy characterizes the reaction to the work of Jason Rhoades in the mid 90’s Los Angeles. Though Rhoades lived and worked in Los Angeles his entire career, many of his exhibitions were exported to Europe for exhibition. The problem, McCarthy continues, is that they couldn’t see the process, …
Continue reading “Jason Rhoades: Installations, 1994-2006”
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