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 »
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 »
The Box, Los Angeles
The doubling begins immediately. An exhibition across town, organized by MOCA and James Franco, called “Rebel,” themed (incredibly) around Franco’s resemblance to James Dean, finds its evil twin in “Rebel Dabble Babble.” It began with Franco inviting Paul McCarthy to collaborate on a project based on Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and ended up with McCarthy and his son Damon creating house-sized sets in their studio, staging auditions, filming, and performing in scenes with actors (who played hybrids of cinematic characters and the actors who originally played them) and, ultimately, shooting scenes for a pornographic version of Rebel Without a Cause featuring an actor named James Deen, who, like Franco, is a dead ringer for its original tragic star. A watered-down version of the project remains in MOCA’s exhibition, but at The Box it unfurls into full exhaustive glory. Read the rest of this entry »
Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles
In Sanya Kantarovsky’s painting Events (2012), a kneeling figure clutches his head and grasps a sheet of paper. The unfortunate conductor in Sinfonia #2 (2012) is frozen in horror as a gust of wind sends his music flying about his head. An empty table and chair awaits the protagonist in A New Talented Writer, while the man from An Episode from History (both 2012) smokes at his desk, gazing into the distance and hoping for inspiration. 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 »
China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles
For all those (myself included) requiring an introduction to David von Schlegell’s art, the sculpture Five Birds and its attendant Untitled Study for Five Birds (both 1988) greeted visitors at the entrance to his exhibition. Birds in flight, cobbled from shards of aluminium tube and hanging on monofilament, cast fluttering shadows over the cut-paper studies on the wall behind. These were far from the most sophisticated works in the show, but they announced, for the uninitiated, the artist’s fascination with dichotomies of form and weightlessness, land and air, the man-made and the natural. Read the rest of this entry »
Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles
The facetious joke – or is it a wry compliment? – about white monochrome paintings is that they hardly differentiate themselves from the walls they hang on. Despite choosing as his pictorial subject rectangles of blank white wall, Nathan Hylden worked hard to make the paintings in his exhibition ‘So There’s That’ as unblank and as unneutral as possible. Read the rest of this entry »
