Ambach and Rice, Los Angeles
I’ve never met Jeffry Mitchell, but having seen his art, I’d imagine him to be a chunky fellow. Not fat, just well built. I’d also imagine him to be extravagantly hairy. Google reveals my hunches to be correct in the first instance, wrong in the second. Read the rest of this entry »
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Pietro Roccasalva’s work poses problems to those looking for legible meaning. Although his visual language of recurrent symbols and metaphors looks very much like it should be in some way translatable, most of its etymologies are so deeply entombed in Roccasalva’s eccentric logic that even those closest to him – assistants and gallerists, for instance – are sometimes at a loss to decode it. Read the rest of this entry »
Annie Wharton Los Angeles
Seven ninths of Bobbi Woods’ exhibition ‘COMA (so fine)’ is, ostensibly, exactly the same. She has sprayed identical movie posters with black enamel, masking out only the title, Coma, which stands out in dull, lithographed black against the oily gloss of Woods’ paint. Read the rest of this entry »
Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles
Analia Saban’s exhibition strives to entertain, despite its obvious handicap: all the paintings are grey. Within this austere limitation, Saban finds diverse and ingenious ways of dismantling the procedure of painting. By dispensing with colour (unless you insist that grey is a colour too), she directs our attention to paint’s constructive rather than representational qualities. Read the rest of this entry »
Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas
Jim Lambie made his first ‘Zobop’– the multicoloured, multilayered vinyl floor installation for which he is most widely recognised – in 1999. If a thing’s worth doing, the saying goes, it’s worth overdoing; for his exhibition at the Goss Michael Foundation in Dallas, the Glasgow-based artist reprised his 2004 iteration of the work, Zobop Fluoro, in the foundation’s expansive new premises. (His exhibition was the first solo presentation after an inaugural group show.)
Pepin Moore, Los Angeles
Paul Stoelting’s sculptures always seem to be sliding away from you. Objects that at first appear relatively straightforward – a length of timber, a picture frame – soon reveal themselves to be unstable, skewed and evasive. Stoelting’s exhibition Content Aware is dominated by a series of sculptures that look like supports for paintings: rectangular frames of wood hung on or propped against the wall. Closer inspection reveals the wood to be uniformly bevelled at 45 degrees, giving the impression that the object is oriented towards a vanishing point somewhere beyond one or the other of its corners. Since the frames hang against the wall on (what one assumes is) a deliberately ugly, pragmatic block screwed into the masonry, those rectangles whose bevels slope upwards are incapable of hanging without sliding off. Hence their positioning on the floor.
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.
Chisenhale Gallery, London
I might as well park it out front: to most people, the name DeLorean will forever be linked to time travel- specifically to the car modified for that purpose by ‘Doc’ Brown in the Back to the Future films (1985–1990). In Duncan Campbell’s film Make It New John (2009), we travel back to the late 1970s, when flamboyant American motor industry supremo John DeLorean elected to manufacture his new company’s only car – the DMC-12 — in West Belfast.
Jonathan Griffin 