Los Angeles has a reputation for not only its excess, sprawl, and exploding population, but also for its unruly, anarchic and highly changeable landscape.  Rethink/LA: Perspectives on a Future City, an interactive exhibition currently on view at the Architecture + Design Museum, explores that overwhelming potential for metamorphosis.  Kellie Konapelsky and Jonathan Louie, co-directors [...]

The nature of painting – its objecthood, its permanence — demands a level of resolution and wholeness to which other more ephemeral art practices need not always answer.  Hence the exciting and complex impact of Unfinished Paintings, an exhibition that opened last week at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) featuring paintings by 38 different artists [...]

Last Saturday, March 19—the day that the US began air strikes in Libya—I passed an anti-war demonstration while driving to LACMA to see Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966. It was a few minutes before I realized that it was also the anniversary of the war in Iraq and these protests had been organized across [...]

“It’s really about the magical and the mysterious in the everyday,” says Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood, in the online video introducing the museum’s newest exhibition, All of this and nothing.  Ellegood worked alongside chief curator Douglas Fogle to select artists who use mundane moments and everyday materials to delve into complex existential explorations.  The contemplative, [...]

I first experienced the California Biennial in 2008 as a participant in Mary Kelly’s Flashing Nipple Happening.   Kelly had recruited around five dozen young women to gear-up in black clothing and, using elaborate harnesses, strap blinking bicycle lights in front of our crotches and breasts.  At the opening reception, we crouched behind walls and [...]

Since last year’s Top 10 list was posted, we have seen the passing of two individuals who have greatly impacted both the art world as well and entertainment world.  Dennis Hopper died just before his retrospective, Double Standard, opened at MOCA this summer. And last week, rocker Captain Beefheart, known in the gallery scene as Don Von [...]

During last week’s panel discussion in conjunction with M.A. Peers‘s exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Peers recalled a pivotal moment during her graduate studies.  Painter Linda Day told her to “paint the most embarrassing thing you can think of.”  Hence, Peers’s ongoing series of mammoth dog portraits was—in the punny words of panel moderator [...]

00

Last week, Art21 treated Angelenos to the very first preview screening of William Kentridge: Anything is Possible at the Hammer Museum‘s Billy Wilder Theater.  As Art21′s executive director Susan Sollins noted in her opening remarks, the Hammer was an ideal host, as the two organizations share a common vision.  With innovative programming and impeccable curatorial [...]

Last month, I opened my email to find a “Call For Furrie Interns.” The call came from LA artist Marnie Weber and was forwarded to me by a mutual friend who thought of me “for some reason.” Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. I soon found myself at furrie rehearsal, amongst a group of bright-eyed [...]