June | 2013 | Jonathan Griffin

Prison Landscapes

Alyse Emdur, Four Corners Books

Remi Emdur, Bruce Emdur and Alyse Emdur, Bayside State Prison, Leesburg, N.J. 1988

“MY SISTER AND I could go to the beach,” writes the artist Alyse Emdur, “but our brother could not go with us.” That is because he was incarcerated at the Bayside State Prison, in Leesburg, New Jersey. Instead, the trio posed in front of a photograph of a tropical beach at sunset, two palm trees framing the glowing sky. A Polaroid photograph of the make-believe excursion, taken in the late 1980s, is included on the back cover of Emdur’s recent book, Prison Landscapes. Read the rest of this entry »

June 10, 2013

MHMMML

International Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles

The cartoon is from the Daily Mirror, 6 January 1967. In an art gallery, a man is pinned to the wall inside a picture frame. The caption underneath reads ‘… and then I thought to myself, what can I put in the exhibition this year?’ It’s a lame joke. But it seemed fitting in this extraordinary exhibition, in which intense blooms of sensation were prised from their original habitats and transplanted into the subdued environment of an art gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

June 5, 2013

James Turrell

“This used to be my studio!” announces James Turrell to the customers of Starbucks in Ocean Park, Santa Monica. The coffee drinkers seem nonplussed. Little do they know that this white-haired, extravagantly bearded figure has a triumvirate of retrospectives this summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, as well as a solo exhibition at LA’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery.

Jonathan Griffin

Month: June, 2013

June 25, 2013