Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles
The unresolved debate around the work of Nathan Mabry seems to hinge on a question of belief: to what extent does Mabry mean what he says? Is the cynical humour and teenage innuendo in his work an expression of a mind deeply concerned with the unstable meanings and values of cultural artefacts, or is the artist just playing wilfully, provocatively dumb?
China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles
There is a moment in Thomas Helbig’s exhibition ‘Use Your Relatives’ that I can’t stop thinking about. A large oil painting comprises two pale pink egg shapes on a dirty white ground. The forms touch – kiss – at one edge; as we approach, the mess around them clarifies into a constellation of distinct, deliberate marks. In its lower left corner, a caterpillar-sized lozenge of paint, straight from the tube, has rolled from the point where it was applied and come to rest against the bottom edge of the frame, leaving sticky lemon-yellow tracks across the surface of the painting. Where it began, another squeeze of paint has been applied, making the trail double-headed and seemingly offering an inversion of the work’s downward gravitational pull.
Spread the Word
Over the past few years, Brian Kennon has emerged as one of the most active and generous participants in the Los Angeles art scene. Aside from his practice as an artist, which regularly involves collaboration or appropriation of other artists’ work (many of them his friends or mentors), he single-handedly runs 2nd Cannons Publications, an independent publishing house that produces a wide range of artists’ books and editions. In 2008, 2nd Cannons opened a project space, a glass-fronted vitrine in Los Angeles’ Chinatown; the current exhibition, by The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, will be its last. Kennon’s work as an artist has taken the form of prints and publications, and his latest exhibition, ‘Documents Remain’, will be at BQ, Berlin, until 25th February 2011.
Milton Keynes Gallery, UK
Eighteen Mexican Pieces (1993) Photo: Andy Keate
At the end of Milton Keynes Gallery’s exhibition of work by Andrew Lord, upstairs past three galleries of exquisitely installed ceramics, plaster sculptures and drawings, is a one hour 43 minute-long video of Lancastrian morris dancers performing in blackface. Lord, a Lancashire-born artist now living in New York, has said that ‘Making objects has been a way for me to understand things I’ve found incomprehensible’. Britannia Coconutters dance through Bacup, Easter Sunday (2009) is one of a series of films made by the artist over the past three years in and around the area in which he was raised. Despite his incomprehension, it is possible that Lord recognises something of the tradition’s defiant oddness, and its anachronism, in his own practice.
Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles
In the work of Amanda Ross-Ho, bigger is not necessarily better. Her exhibition ‘A Stack of Black Pants’ is packed with images, objects and interventions, some of it grand in scale and some nearly invisible. One of the show’s pivotal pieces isn’t even acknowledged in the list of works: it consists of five tiny pieces of haberdashery – a zipper, an earring, a couple of unidentified bits of jewellery and a gold heart – fixed directly to the wall. Between them, a ruled pencil line connects one to the other; all roads, however, lead to the heart, which is positioned to one side. It looks like a symbolic diagram.
Jonathan Griffin 