May | 2017 | Jonathan Griffin

Frances Stark

Frances Stark, still from ‘The Magic Flute’, 2017

When artist Frances Stark was invited to participate in the prestigious 2017 Whitney Biennial, last year, she was in the middle of producing an opera. She had no time for interruptions. It was her first opera: Mozart’s Magic Flute, a re-orchestrated and retranslated version of which she recorded with a group of young musicians, and then turned into a text-based video with animated subtitles in place of the sung libretto. She considers the work – which premieres at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on 28 April – an experiment in pedagogy, an educative experience both for the players and the audience. It is the most ambitious and collaborative production of the 50-year-old Los Angeles artist’s career. Read the rest of this entry »

May 16, 2017

Judith Bernstein

The Box, Los Angeles

6375_web_bernstein_signature-mural_03

In the Bible, Judith was a beautiful and fearless Israelite widow who saved her besieged people from the army of King Nebuchadnezzar, which was led by the general Holofernes. She prayed to God to make her a good liar, then inveigled her way into the enemy camp where she hacked off Holofernes’s head after he tried to have sex with her. Read the rest of this entry »

May 13, 2017

Anthony Lepore

Anthony Lepore, Mirage, 2015, Pigment Print, 40×52 inches

For Christmas in 2012, Anthony Lepore’s father gave him a section of a bikini factory in eastern Los Angeles—rows eleven to fifteen, to be exact. A few months earlier Lepore had inquired whether his dad might have any surplus space that he and his partner, the artist Michael Henry Hayden, could use for a studio. Real estate in Los Angeles is increasingly expensive but Lepore’s father, whose bikini business has been declining since the 1980s, had more than he needed.

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Jonathan Griffin

Month: May, 2017

May 31, 2017