Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
When Aristotle imagined a technological future in which ‘every instrument could accomplish its own work’, it was to the weaver’s shuttle and the lyre-player’s plectrum that he turned for examples. It is probably just coincidence but, in ‘The History of Technology’, woven fabrics and the sonorous tones of a stringed instrument featured prominently. Read the rest of this entry »
The Mistake Room, Los Angeles
I seem to be in the minority in my cautious enjoyment of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s spectacular installation Letters to Chantri #1: The lady at the door/The gift that keeps on giving (2014) (made in collaboration with transgender artist boychild). Most people I spoke to professed to hating it. Arunanondchai is a divisive figure, as is any young artist who rises rapidly to international prominence on waves of hyperbole and who enjoys the rewards of a buoyant market enamoured with large abstract paintings made by people with unusual biographies. Read the rest of this entry »
Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles
A couple lie naked on a rug with their feet lolling in the air. She smokes; he holds his chin in his hands and gazes sideways at her, a quiet smile on his lips. They’ve probably just had sex. She is looking directly at us, or she would be – except her large, oval eyes have been entirely blacked out by the artist. They are unnerving empty holes. Read the rest of this entry »
Various venues, Portland, Oregon
In the April issue of frieze, Dan Fox prefaced his review of the 2013 Carnegie International with some observations about the perplexing lack of consensus around what, today, a biennial is actually for. ‘Portland2014’ is the third in this current formulation (the Oregon Biennial ran from 1949 until 2006) but its agenda and format are still, evidently, very much up for grabs. Read the rest of this entry »
Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
Math Bass was known, until recently, principally as a performance artist, although she has long made sculptures and drawings. Her performances – which, I admit, belong to a genre that I find rather pretentious – often combine solemnly delivered poetry or song with passages of improvised group activity. Dogs and Fog, an event Bass presented at Overduin & Kite in 2011, convened dry ice machines, cinder blocks and 20 or so dogs who padded amongst the crowd. A circle of singers, the artist among them, intoned in harmony a song written by the artist. The dogs seemed uninterested. Read the rest of this entry »
Like many children, when she was young Samara Golden liked to lie with her legs over the back of the sofa and look at the room upside down. She was fascinated by the space that appeared: when the ceiling became the floor, the room became strange, much bigger, more exciting – large items of furniture now dangling down from above and all the clutter lofted up there too – and though physically real, only accessible from Golden’s singular, inverted viewpoint. Read the rest of this entry »
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Some art works are so porous towards meaning, so sensitive to atmospheric conditions and the fingerprints of discourse, that we must be careful what words we use on them. Language can indelibly tarnish objects. Liz Larner’s best sculptures have always been hard to talk about with sufficient delicacy, none more so than the ceramic tablets which dominated her seventh solo exhibition at Regen Projects since 1989. Read the rest of this entry »
‘I smell things. I listen to things. I feel things. I taste things. I look at things. It is not enough to look and listen and taste and smell and feel, I have to do those to the right things, such as look at books, and fail to do them to the wrong things or else people doubt that I am a thinking being.’
Amanda Baggs’s YouTube video, In My Language (2007), shows her silhouetted against a window, fluttering her hands through the air in front of her. Her motions are repetitive: she rocks back and forth, she jangles wire around a doorknob, she passes her finger through the stream of water from a tap. All the while she is humming – singing along with what is around her, as she puts it. Read the rest of this entry »
Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles
Sean Kennedy is not a great painter. His brushwork is hesitant, his mark-making is sloppy and inconsistent, and his colouration, though vivid, seems uninterested in harmony. Against these odds, however, he has created a suite of great paintings. If indeed paintings is what they are. Read the rest of this entry »
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
When John Wesley makes paintings of women, which he does very often, he makes paintings about men. Against powder-blue backgrounds, he floods their lithe bodies with a flat shade of pale pink, except for a hotter tone used for lips, nails and nipples. These are pictures of heterosexual male desire. When men appear, they tend to be woefully disproportioned and eccentrically dressed. His women, by contrast, are the sylphs of an imagination fired by the dreamy perfection of women in magazines and dampened by the comic pathos of real-life encounters. Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan Griffin 
