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Jared Baxter
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The desert, the edge of the city
by Jared Baxter
Karen Lofgren at Royale Projects
April 6th - May 18th
Posted
5/12/13
Those who say that Los Angeles has no history would do well to drive east. There, the signs of the past ten or twenty years, at least, are unmistakable. Ever newer developments, stamped with KB Homes' trademark homogeneity, impose a geometry on the landscape that feels immediately familiar, as though one had gone back in time to pass the same part twice. In a sense, one hears, these areas are having something of a second life. Investors of the sort who've been doing well lately are accelerating the conv... [more]
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An Uncomfortable Presence
by Jared Baxter
Llyn Foulkes at Hammer Museum
February 3rd - May 19th
Posted
3/18/13
Here’s a show whose reception seems to have been preempted by the mounds of publicity preceding it. The narrative, though likely familiar from one or another of the articles touting Llyn Foulkes’ resurgence, bears repeating here, this time in line with the chronology established by the retrospective itself.
A Los Angeles artist since forever ago, Foulkes began by working through influences both global (Rauschenberg, Dalí, de Kooning) and local (notably Richards Ruben, whose imprint is unm... [more]
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LA Cultish: Maria Demopoulos' and Jodi Wille's The Source Family
by Jared Baxter
Jodi Wille at Art Los Angeles Contemporary
January 24th 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Posted
1/22/13
Art Los Angeles Contemporary – the name itself has a certain blankness, being obviously designed to blend into the range of similarly named art fairs that have proliferated with particular intensity since the 90s. Undoubtedly, the same complaints everyone has about these events will hold true here – there's the difficulty of seeing anything in such a saturated environment, the claustrophobia induced by the crowds, the distasteful commercialism...
To be sure, ALAC is at least as capable as an... [more]
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Lost and Found
by Jared Baxter
Stephan Balkenhol, Michel Blazy, André Breton, Valentin Carron, Guy de Cointet, Philippe Decrauzat, Laurent Le Deunff, Bertrand Dezoteux, Vincent Ganivet, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Piero Golia, Camille Henrot, Thomas Hirschhorn, Fabrice Hyber, Nathan Hylden, Robert Kinmont, Vincent Lamouroux, René Magritte, Tony Matelli, Philippe Mayaux, Mathieu Mercier, Laurent Montaron, Julien Prévieux, Man Ray, Jim Shaw, Alexandre Singh, Tatiana Trouvé, Oscar Tuazon, Jean-Luc Verna, Robert Watts, Marnie Weber at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park (LAMAG)
December 1st, 2012 - January 27th
Posted
12/23/12
Knowing nothing about the TV show that provides the inspiration for this exhibition—and not really caring to learn more—I might suggest that the resonance of “Lost,” as theme, has at least as much to do here with the space of the Barnsdall itself. Passing from the entrance hall to the center of the exhibition area, one inevitably pauses, slightly disoriented, and wonders whether to go to the right or the left. The choice, in the end, matters little—either way, one enters an unaccountably... [more]
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Artissima's Back to the Future: Renewed Contemporaneity or Anachronism?
by Jared Baxter
at Artissima
November 9th, 2012 - November 11th, 2012
Posted
11/5/12
Particularly for those in the art world who can recall the rains that marked the closing of last year's Artissima with a city-wide flood watch, the title of this year's cultural initiative, It's not the end of the world, ought to cement the art fair's reputation for dogged optimism. To a large extent, this outlook is earned – at a time when instability in the art market has made other events of its ilk ever more desperate affairs, Artissima increasingly stands out for the ways in which it tries... [more]
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She's so...
by Jared Baxter
Dave Muller at Blum & Poe
September 28th, 2012 - October 27th, 2012
Posted
10/30/12
Fall in Los Angeles is something of a paradox. The heat breaks, sure, though wearingly late in the year, returning for second and third encores even as the first rains of the season turn the scorched hills to a striking emerald, far removed from the auburn palette elsewhere familiar. In the art world, it's a time when the often meandering group shows of summer give way to solo show-stoppers, a sense of renewed focus going hand-in-hand with a rekindled drive to impress.
It's in this climate that Dave Mu... [more]
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Abandon Everything Again
by Jared Baxter
Sarah Cain at Honor Fraser
September 8th, 2012 - October 13th, 2012
Posted
9/30/12
There's something to the way the show's title elides its source, a quotation from Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives that originally reads “Freedom is like a prime number.” It's a subtle change from simile to metaphor, a near-subliminal attrition that renders the phrase both more direct and abstract.
This shift, of course, has much to do with Sarah Cain's work, whose fearlessness in the face of excess is closely tied to her insistence on the expressiveness of color and form, however esot... [more]
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Death on the Assembly-Line
by Jared Baxter
Mark Bradford, URS FISCHER, Julie Mehretu, Sterling Ruby, Rudolf Stingel at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) at Grand Ave.
April 29th, 2012 - August 20th, 2012
Posted
9/5/12
The second my shoes hit the white wall-to-wall carpeting that blanketed the galleries, I was struck by how radically this simple addition—actually, as it turned out, an artwork by Rudolf Stingel—shifted both the acoustics and the register of the space. With the hushed voices and dampened footsteps, I felt like I’d wandered by mistake into a showroom whose wares I obviously couldn't afford. Of course, this feeling of displacement might've had something to do with the fact that I was oscil... [more]
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Meet Trevor Paglen: Under the Radar
by Jared Baxter
Posted
8/16/12
There's at once more and less than meets the eye. On the face of it, an atmospheric wash darkens from plasma to clotted blood. In between, the colors roil with a complexity suggesting vastness, calling to mind the Romantic sublime and a few of its heirs, from J. M. W. Turner's paintings of the night sky and Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of clouds to Mark Rothko's brooding color fields.
Underneath, however, Trevor Paglen's The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas), 2010, is pure Enlightenment. Electromagne... [more]
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Words Fail Me
by Jared Baxter
Robert Barry, Barbara Bloom, Carol Bove, TROY BRAUNTUCH, Tom Burr, Andrew Cameron, Michelle Elzay, Morgan Fisher, Wade Guyton, Richard Hamilton, Adrià Julià, Louise Lawler, Frank Stella, Yves Tanguy, David Weldzius at David Kordansky Gallery
July 14th, 2012 - August 18th, 2012
Posted
7/26/12
This is a funny show, really. Over there, scattered along the main wall, a conversation between analyst and analysand traces a kind of erratic through-line around an idiosyncratically hung collection of diverse works, ranging from an Yves Tanguy knock-off and a Frank Stella lithograph to more recent pieces (Wade Guyton, Carol Bove, and Louise Lawler to name a few) with little regard for chronology. At times, the patient's breakthrough seems to be on the tip of his tongue, as he dredges through m... [more]
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The Province of Provinces
by Jared Baxter
Scoli Acosta, Kathryn Andrews, Sarah Conaway, Fiona Connor, Kate Costello, Meg Cranston, Roy Dowell, Zackary Drucker, Rhys Ernst, Patricia Fernández, Dan Finsel, Morgan Fisher, Liz Glynn, Mark Hagen, Zach Harris, Channa Horowitz, Pearl C. Hsiung, Vishal Jugdeo, Mimi Lauter, Thomas Lawson, Meleko Mokgosi, Ruby Neri, D'Ette Nogle, Alex Olson, Camilo Ontiveros, Joel Otterson, Karthik Pandian, Laura Riboli, Analia Saban, Brian Sharp, Ryan Sluggett, David Snyder, Jill Spector, Koki Tanaka, Caroline Thomas, CODY TREPTE, Erika Vogt, Lisa Williamson at Hammer Museum
June 2nd, 2012 - September 2nd, 2012
Posted
7/1/12
Los Angeles, a city of developers and opportunists, store-front mystics and varyingly legal working-class migrants, is also by some lights a city of artists. The Hammer Museum recently unveiled its first Los Angeles biennial, an inward-looking affair solely showcasing the work of locals.
Can an exhibition thus conceived add up to anything more than narcissism?
Sure, but whether this is possible in LA, a city with a profoundly neurotic self-regard, is a question left open by the biennial dubbed M... [more]
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The distance between a sound and its echo
by Jared Baxter
Group Show at Los Angeles Nomadic Division
January 25th, 2012 - April 21st, 2012
Posted
4/16/12
Strip malls are a particularly fertile place to show art in Los Angeles. In a city often written off as discontinuous, whose art scene grew in part out of a handful of MFA programs that until only a few decades ago were mainly way stations to New York, the site can work to integrate often insular forms of cultural production alongside the 24-hour donut shops, laundromats, and ethnic restaurants that structure a large part of daily life in our metropolis. The space can also be used to reflect on the i... [more]
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Painting Machines and Destructive Drives
by Jared Baxter
Richard Jackson at Armory Center for the Arts
February 11th, 2012 - June 17th, 2012
Posted
3/31/12
Appropriately enough, the first thing one sees is Richard Jackson's signature. A series of miniscule points, scored into drywall with small pieces of lead in a presumably tool-intensive application process, form the cursive letters of the name, evoking a playful and dual irony. On the one hand, there's the use of industrial-strength equipment to reproduce the typically effortless and everyday act of signing one's name; on the other, the very hubris of the gesture is deflated by the white expanse... [more]
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Tongued
by Jared Baxter
Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken at Armory Center for the Arts
October 3rd, 2011 - January 22nd, 2012
Posted
1/17/12
It seems appropriate, if almost certainly fortuitous, that at this early though nonetheless media-saturated stage of the election season the Pasadena Armory should choose to foreground the linguistic element of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken's work of the 60s and 70s, presented here in dialogue with each other for the first time. Although the show's title specifically references glossolalia, its three subdivisions—Code, Narrative, and Gesture—emphasize the two artists' shared attentions to the r... [more]
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Night Terrors
by Jared Baxter
Alexandra Grant, Channing Hansen, Amy Howden-Chapman, Devon Knowles at Night Gallery
December 17th, 2011 - January 26th, 2012
Posted
1/17/12
Through the storefront windows, the yarn web gives the impression of something more baroquely layered, denser and less penetrable. My first thought on this collaboration between Alexandra Grant and Channing Hansen was that I wanted something more absorbing and encompassing than this merely skeletal suggestion of an interior within an interior drawn flimsily over the gallery's literal black-painted brick perimeter. Given the show's title, I wanted something more expressive of the annihilating desire t... [more]
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Other Visions
by Jared Baxter
Sister Karen Boccalero, Marie J. Calloway, George Clack, Dan Concholar, Houston Conwill, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Sheila de Bretteville, Mark Disuvero, Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Suzanne Jackson, Virginia Jaramillo, Ulysses Jenkins, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Samella Lewis, Ron Miyashiro, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Joe Overstreet, William Pajaud, Noah Purifoy, John Riddle, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Elizabeth L. Taylor, Ruth Waddy, Gordon Wagner, Charles White, Tyrus Wong, Andrew Zermeno at Hammer Museum
October 2nd, 2011 - January 8th, 2012
Posted
11/28/11
This worthwhile, though problematic, exhibition begins simply but evocatively, in a small antechamber, with a juxtaposition of two works that manages to suggest a number of the historical and aesthetic trajectories that will unfold in the rooms to come.
The first of these is a 1964 drawing by Charles White, who came to prominence as a WPA muralist before accepting a teaching position at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. The piece, entitled Birmingham Totem, was created in response to a 19... [more]
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The Present Afterlives of Richard Newton
by Jared Baxter
Richard Newton at Jancar Gallery
September 10th, 2011 - October 1st, 2011
Posted
10/6/11
There are few places where history disappears faster than downtown Los Angeles.
Even the exact location of the original pueblo, to which this quarter owes its claim to being the city's oldest, has been lost to memory. It's known, at least, that Governor de Neve's original plans for the land called for streets running north-south and east-west, in keeping with the grid that has come to typify the megalopolis grown around the site in the 230 years since its founding. Yet the present-day streets... [more]
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Fight This Generation
by Jared Baxter
Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow, Aaron Young at OHWOW Los Angeles
June 30th, 2011 - August 27th, 2011
Posted
8/22/11
It may be true, as OHWOW's press release breathlessly claims, that theirs is “a group exhibition distinct of a decade and definitive of era,” but if so, it's an era that, thus defined, is distinguished mainly by its forgettability. Poorly curated, with equally little to offer to fans of the nine artists represented in the show as to the uninitiated, Post 9/11 fails to make the case for the significance of the ten or so post-millennial years of New York art-making with which it's concerned.The... [more]
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“I Shall Have a Sense of Humor at All Possible Times”
by Jared Baxter
Paul Thek at Hammer Museum
May 22nd, 2011 - August 28th, 2011
Posted
7/12/11
“Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted” is written in yellow cursive in Paul Thek's painting of the same name, a chiasmus formally echoed by the phrase's uncertain relation to the purple surrounding it, in which neither color decidedly emerges as foreground. The picture thus reveals in miniature one of the most consistently used and yet least visible structures at play in a body of work marked by contrasts: the cross.
For an artist as obsessed with Catholicism as Thek, after all, the... [more]
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