March | 2016 | Jonathan Griffin

Every day, about US$1.2 billion worth of cargo flows in and out of the Port of Los Angeles. It is the busiest container port in the US, seconded by the Port of Long Beach, which directly adjoins it. Amy Yao, whose studio is situated near the ports, has to contend with queues of thundering lorries every time she drives to work. Some of their cargo found its way, circuitously, into her exhibition ‘Bay of Smokes’, as indeed it probably does into most exhibitions by most artists in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

March 23, 2016

Diana Thater

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

img-thater_121518380324.jpg_x_1600x1200

In Diana Thater’s survey “The Sympathetic Imagination,” organized by the National Gallery’s Lynne Cooke and LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim and gathering work made between 1992 and the present, the artist floods many of her exhibition spaces with colored light. This technique and its philosophical implications may remind visitors of James Turrell’s use of light in his 2013-14 LACMA retrospective. Color is fundamentally illusory; it is humans who make the sky blue, thanks to the cones in our retinas. Further, in an environment saturated with blue light, every other perceptible color is revealed to be contingent. The absolute purity of nature is impossible, Thater shows; all is culture, or something between nature and culture. Read the rest of this entry »

March 13, 2016

Martin Kersels

Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles

Barry-Manilow

Brown furniture, they call it. It’s the stuff that nobody wants: wooden wardrobes, dining tables and armoires, too bulky for the contemporary home, once family heirlooms but now superseded by disposable Ikea furniture. When an artist needs some wood, the source closest at hand is usually not the lumberyard but the thrift store. Read the rest of this entry »

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March 10, 2016

James Turrell

CAPE HOPE (S. Africa) Elliptical Wide Glass, 2015

In the Skyspace meeting room at Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery in Los Angeles, James Turrell is telling me about the Antikythera Mechanism. In the spring of 1900, a group of Greek sponge divers discovered the sunken wreck of a Roman cargo ship off an island in southern Greece. Among the coins, jewelry, glass and statuary that they recovered was a corroded hunk of bronze and wood, about a foot in width. An archaeologist at the time suggested it might be an astronomical clock, but its complexity did not fit with its estimated date—a century before Christ. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Griffin

Month: March, 2016

March 31, 2016

Amy Yao