Jonathan Griffin

Walk Artisanal

3716 Eagle Rock Boulevard

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It’s no secret that the eastside of Los Angeles is gentrifying fast, and that most of us in the contemporary art community wring our hands in weak perplexity over the part that we play in the process. Nevertheless, many residents of Glassell Park were happy to see a new coffee shop open on Eagle Rock Boulevard in early 2015. Yelp reviewers have approved of the “clean and creative atmosphere.” (“Super chill place and the quality of people is very high as well,” wrote Anthony E.) Notwithstanding the “rude” servers, the clientele seems broadly to approve of the new establishment. Read the rest of this entry »

May 31, 2016

The Ocular Bowl

Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles

Agnes Pelton, Star Gazer, 1929

The eye, wrote Jacques Lacan in his essay ‘The Line and the Light’, ‘is a sort of bowl’ which light is wont to overflow. ‘A whole series of organs, mechanisms, defences’arerequired to deal with this excess; the shrinking pupil, in bright conditions, ‘has to protect what takes place at the bottom of the bowl.’ Read the rest of this entry »

April 29, 2016

Evan Holloway

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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It is possible to argue—and, indeed, I heard it argued while visiting this exhibition—that Evan Holloway belongs to the first generation of artists in Los Angeles that did not look outside of California, to New York or to Europe, to define their work, whether through aspiration or through contradistinction. If that sounds like hyperbole, it may not be as far-fetched as it initially seems. In any case, it is undeniable that in the late 1990s, a loose group of L.A. artists—including Holloway, Liz Craft, Jason Meadows, Jeff Ono and Kristin Calabrese—emerged with a distinctly homegrown vernacular. Read the rest of this entry »

April 27, 2016

SPRAY

John Knuth, Angeles Crest, 2015

Ultimately, it’s about God, or at least a whiff of the divine. And also about not getting shit on your hands.

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March 31, 2016

Amy Yao

Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

Every day, about US$1.2 billion worth of cargo flows in and out of the Port of Los Angeles. It is the busiest container port in the US, seconded by the Port of Long Beach, which directly adjoins it. Amy Yao, whose studio is situated near the ports, has to contend with queues of thundering lorries every time she drives to work. Some of their cargo found its way, circuitously, into her exhibition ‘Bay of Smokes’, as indeed it probably does into most exhibitions by most artists in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

March 23, 2016

Diana Thater

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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In Diana Thater’s survey “The Sympathetic Imagination,” organized by the National Gallery’s Lynne Cooke and LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim and gathering work made between 1992 and the present, the artist floods many of her exhibition spaces with colored light. This technique and its philosophical implications may remind visitors of James Turrell’s use of light in his 2013-14 LACMA retrospective. Color is fundamentally illusory; it is humans who make the sky blue, thanks to the cones in our retinas. Further, in an environment saturated with blue light, every other perceptible color is revealed to be contingent. The absolute purity of nature is impossible, Thater shows; all is culture, or something between nature and culture. Read the rest of this entry »

March 13, 2016

Martin Kersels

Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles

Barry-Manilow

Brown furniture, they call it. It’s the stuff that nobody wants: wooden wardrobes, dining tables and armoires, too bulky for the contemporary home, once family heirlooms but now superseded by disposable Ikea furniture. When an artist needs some wood, the source closest at hand is usually not the lumberyard but the thrift store. Read the rest of this entry »

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March 10, 2016

James Turrell

CAPE HOPE (S. Africa) Elliptical Wide Glass, 2015

In the Skyspace meeting room at Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery in Los Angeles, James Turrell is telling me about the Antikythera Mechanism. In the spring of 1900, a group of Greek sponge divers discovered the sunken wreck of a Roman cargo ship off an island in southern Greece. Among the coins, jewelry, glass and statuary that they recovered was a corroded hunk of bronze and wood, about a foot in width. An archaeologist at the time suggested it might be an astronomical clock, but its complexity did not fit with its estimated date—a century before Christ. Read the rest of this entry »

February 23, 2016

Ed Ruscha

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One Sunday in 1966, Ed Ruscha was driving a Buick Le Sabre back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas with his friends Patrick Blackwell, a fellow artist, and the guitarist Mason Williams. With them they had an old manual typewriter, a Royal ‘model X’, its frame bent beyond repair. For a lark, they decide to heave the thing out of the passenger window, at ninety miles an hour. It exploded on the tarmac, disappearing in the rear view mirror as they sped onward through the desert. Read the rest of this entry »

January 8, 2016

Frances Stark

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

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I don’t believe it is cruel or unfair to say that a museum is probably not the natural home for Frances Stark’s work. The artworks that she has made over the past 24 years (the timespan covered by this retrospective) are many things – epistolary, diaristic, notational, self-referential, accretive, serial, slapdash, intricate – but they are not, in the main, the kinds of forms that museums are traditionally built to house. Read the rest of this entry »