Night Gallery, Los Angeles
Is it possible to talk about art made in Los Angeles without crediting the city with everything that makes its art unique? Why are artists in Southern California so often asked to explain how their work is influenced by its infrastructure or climate? Is “Made in Space,” the exhibition curated by artists Peter Harkawik and Laura Owens, an antidote to these tendencies or is it a symptom? Read the rest of this entry »
REDCAT, Los Angeles
The HIV virus, in case you didn’t know, is depicted in molecular biology as an icosahedron (a 20-sided polygon) or a sphere, out of which protrude peg-like nodules representing the glycoproteins that fix onto and infect other cells. Dozens of these jolly red forms bounce across the screen in Jordan Wolfson’s part animated, part live-action film Raspberry Poser (2012). Their rubbery pegs wobble as they jump on the sinks in posh showrooms and across the wooden floor of a luxury gym. They bound through the sunny streets of New York’s Soho, and swell to bursting against photographs of scantily clad teens on spring break. As they frolic amongst these scenes of shameless desire they are buoyed by the heavy, synthetic beats of Beyoncé Knowles’ Sweet Dreams from her 2008 album I am … Sasha Fierce. Read the rest of this entry »
Ratio 3, San Francisco
Have you seen ‘The Twilight Saga’ (2008–12)? Me neither. But, like you, I know who Robert Pattinson is. For a spell last year, the vampire movies’ British star seemed to be everywhere, the dramas of his private and professional life broadcast on all channels of the news media. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise to find him framed, glowering through darkened glass, in Lutz Bacher’s exhibition at Ratio 3, the first at the gallery’s new premises in San Francisco’s Mission District. But it was a surprise, nevertheless, despite Bacher’s reputation as one of the most consistently surprising artists working in the US today. Dissonance, elision and confusion have been her stock-in-trade since her career began in the 1970s. Even Lutz Bacher is reportedly a pseudonym. Read the rest of this entry »
Liam Everett’s art stands, first and foremost, as testament to the processes of its making. In spite of their rich optical pleasures, his art works claim a solemn dignity as battered survivors of previous punishments. It is fun to imagine just what these wild, intense forces might have entailed. Read the rest of this entry »
Ltd Los Angeles
The day I visit David Ostrowski’s exhibition, it’s raining. The unusually inclement weather seems appropriate for these battered, defeated-looking paintings. I am reminded of the terrible storm that hit New York recently. Ostrowski’s work corresponds to images of Chelsea-gallery employees hauling drenched canvases out of waterlogged crates. Read the rest of this entry »
Night Gallery, Los Angeles
A blacked-out gallery, with opening hours of 10pm to 2am, is liable to give the art on its walls a certain transgressive frisson. Night Gallery is such a location. For more than two years, it has staged exhibitions in a space that seems more like a club than a gallery. ‘Upbraid’ by Alika Cooper – the final show at its original Lincoln Heights premises before it moves into whitewashed architecture and daytime hours – both plays up to and dissents from the louche tone of the space. Read the rest of this entry »
ltd los angeles, Los Angeles
In contrast to an art gallery, a barn is designed more for efficient storage than for carefully poised display. Rachel Foullon has transformed the white space of ltd los angeles into an uncannily refined vision of a barn, and filled it with artworks old and new, some rescued from her archive and some made specially for the exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »
Honor Fraser, Los Angeles
Have you figured it out yet? It took me a while. ‘ACIREMA’ is America spelt backwards; this exhibition, curated by Cesar Garcia, takes as its conceptual motif the famous drawing by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García of South America upside down. América Invertida (Inverted America) (1943) does not feature in the exhibition. Instead, curator Garcia has convened eight artists from South and Central America born since 1980 who, he argues, ‘actively challenge the conventional framing and contextualizing mechanisms through which their practices are often situated’. Read the rest of this entry »
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
What is the difference between a “standard operating procedure” and a formula, an algorithm, a set of instructions, a program, a system, a recipe or a run book? This exhibition, which takes SOPs as its theme, never makes it quite clear. But its curator, Piper Marshall, contends in her press release that “Today, SOPs are determining the conditions of everyday life,” through such esoteric formulations as search engines, dating sites, self-help books, and targeted advertising.
Hammer Museum, LAXART, and LA Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles
Who needs another biennial? Los Angeles does, according to the Hammer Museum. The reason: ‘Simply put, the artists,’ says Hammer curator Anne Ellegood in her catalogue essay. While artists are undeniably thick on the ground in LA, not all are good. The curators of ‘Made in LA 2012’ – Ellegood and Ali Subotnick from the Hammer, joined by Lauri Firstenberg, Malik Gaines and Cesar Garcia from its ‘sister institution’, LAXART – set themselves the challenge of finding 60 biennial-worthy artists who are either emerging or under-recognized. These criteria allowed for the inclusion of several artists born in the 1980s alongside more established elders such as Channa Horwitz, now in her 80s. Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan Griffin 