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Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
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Raspberried
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Jordan Wolfson at REDCAT
December 2nd, 2012 - January 27th
Posted
1/15/13
I could watch Jordan Wolfson’s Raspberry Poser for hours and hours, which is to say far longer than downtown parking affords. Having the large-scale projection all to yourself in the middle of the day, splayed out or dancing on wall-to-wall white carpeting is a pretty sweet, cozy thing.
The third in the artist’s new (and suddenly signature) series of hybrid CGI, hand-drawn animation, and live footage videos (following Con Leche, 2009, and Animation, Masks, 2012), Raspberry Poser is the first to... [more]
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Against Spectacle
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Scott Olson at Overduin and Kite
May 27th, 2012 - August 4th, 2012
Posted
7/14/12
Heather Brown at Carter and Citizen & Scott Olson at Overduin and Kite Preamble: It has been true for years, I am way over spectacle. Maybe you’re like me. I thought a lot of people felt this way but clearly not enough do because 2012 still looks a lot like 2007. Celebrity continues to be watered down. Like warm piss in the toilet bowl, it holds charm no more. The otherwise charming word Franco has come to signal the knee-buckling weakness formerly serious institutions have acquired for dull gl... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Ozzle’s Summer Harvest
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
7/14/12
Lynn Ozzle shuttered his studio. It was time. He would explode otherwise. The canvas and linen have been rolled up. The table saw unplugged and lumber stacked in a corner. The tubes of oil paint closed and spirits capped. The palette wiped clean. Nothing may ever be painted there again. He has gone outdoors, to turn some very special soil and plant some very special seeds. Ozzle had been preparing for this for two decades. It all started with this recurring lucid dream in which he was Gregor Mende... [more]
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Against Spectacle
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Heather Brown at Carter & Citizen
June 30th, 2012 - August 11th, 2012
Posted
7/14/12
Heather Brown at Carter and Citizen & Scott Olson at Overduin and Kite Preamble: It has been true for years, I am way over spectacle. Maybe you’re like me. I thought a lot of people felt this way but clearly not enough do because 2012 still looks a lot like 2007. Celebrity continues to be watered down. Like warm piss in the toilet bowl, it holds charm no more. The otherwise charming word Franco has come to signal the knee-buckling weakness formerly serious institutions have acquired for dull gl... [more]
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Vaseline on the Lens
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Robert Overby at Marc Selwyn Fine Art
April 28th, 2012 - June 16th, 2012
Posted
5/22/12
Having established himself in LA during the sixties as a highly successful and award-winning graphic designer with credits for huge companies like IBM, CBS, Boeing, and MGM (as well as LACMA), it wasn’t until 1969, in his mid-thirties, that Robert Overby switched gears away from advertising and decided to become an artist. When the switch happened it happened fast and opened a floodgate of parallel outpourings. The trigger was actually a job for CBS in which Overby was hired as an art-buyer. He immer... [more]
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Fulsome, Familiar, And As Ever, Brazen
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks Gallery, North Orange Grove
January 20th, 2012 - April 7th, 2012
Posted
2/28/12
What would it be like to see an Ellsworth Kelly, any Ellsworth Kelly abstraction for the first time? I try to imagine…mostly muteness, blankness, brightness, largeness. I try but it’s hard to know. Maybe I mean it’s hard to remember back to the first encounter because there is so much familiarity built into viewing Kelly’s work. In fact, familiarity and its shades of offness have often seemed to me to be employed as a complex force and mined as a hotspot of thinking in his shapes—part of his g... [more]
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Almost Exactly Five Things from 2011
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
1/3/12
5: Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones is the best new series on television, of this past year or the prior. I desperately long to travel the seven kingdoms of Westeros, traverse Winterfell cloaked in furs, peer from the monstrous heights of the Wall into the whiteness of winter coming, ride a Dothraki stallion, punch a midget Lanister in the face, and hatch my own dragon eggs. And I don’t even like magical medieval fantasy epics. I can finally stop pretending to really be really into Lord of the Rings... [more]
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Summary of Exhibition Checklist
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Roland Reiss at Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA)
September 18th, 2011 - January 8th, 2012
Posted
12/6/11
Summary of Exhibition Checklist of “Roland Reiss: Personal Politics: Sculpture from the 1970s and 1980s”: Twenty-five dioramas, each generally a couple feet square, raised individually on pedestals to easy viewing height. One actual-size 1970s-era American living room diorama of over three hundred discrete and detailed particleboard objects (unpainted, monochrome sculptures), ranging from a full-scale sofa, coffee table, lamp, television, bar with stools, and bookshelf with books to a pack o... [more]
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Parallel & Past: Crestwood Hills
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
11/2/11
On the occasion of LACMA’s California Design show, I’d like to pass on to you the story of one of the most ambitious and utopian efforts to holistically implement the progressive worldview of mid-century California modern design on a communal level. It is the story of the Mutual Housing Association and the Crestwood Hills neighborhood perched high above Sunset in the Brentwood hills, a few minutes west of UCLA and the Getty. Having visited the site and toured one of the meticulously, lovingly... [more]
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Space Age Trigger
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
at LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
October 1st, 2011 - June 3rd, 2012
Posted
11/2/11
Some of us (all of us) in Los Angeles who take deep, sometimes guilty, pleasure in the domestic sphere of the material world, have looked forward to LACMA’s main Pacific Standard Time exhibition with real excitement. In a way, and for whatever reasons still not entirely clear to me, my anticipation was vaguely more urgent (i.e. rooted in desire, internal) than usual, while also being less externally contrived, less informed by my own professional considerations and duties. It is strange how sepa... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Death Defier Comics Enters Middle Age
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
9/6/11
The latest issue of Death Defier Comics summarizes its thirty-year history as an outlandish, outsider, outlier, outspoken, genre-bending comic. Full disclosure: We contributed the preface to the issue. When asked, we were initially excited, having been fans of the comic since we first learned about it however many decades ago. Excitement fermented into bewilderment when we realized that the task of summarizing such a wide-ranging chameleon of a publication would... [more]
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A Preview of a Dozen Openings this Coming Week
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
9/6/11
Eric Wesley at China Art Objects: New work by Eric Wesley, a beloved artist’s artist around these parts, is not to be missed. A not-new quote from him tells us: “Yeah, I think I am very productive, and what is eventually realized is a small fraction of the ideas, and what is seen is a small fraction of a small fraction. I don’t pay attention to keeping a tight studio. What sucks is the same few things are shown.” With Eric Wesley’s “The Same Ol’ Frontier,” we look forward to seein... [more]
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Perceptual Jolts and Kaleidoscopic Confusion
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Taft Green at Human Resources
July 9th, 2011 - August 6th, 2011
Posted
7/26/11
Irregular polygons, disjointed trapezoids, and angular fragments of exploded Bucky balls vogue their way through Taft Green’s new sculptures and collages on paper. Geometric units get cut up and recomposed in new configurations that emphasize the perceptual jolt and kaleidoscopic confusion of offset layering and overlapping filters of erratic patterning. The triangle is the basic building section, doubled into diamonds and seen two-dimensionally as pie pieces forming unstable hexagonal wheels o... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Lucian Delacroix in the High Desert
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
6/14/11
It seems like all we’re ever thirsting for is a moment of magic. We want and love to believe that something impossible is real. It must be hard-wired genetically, an evolutionarily beneficial tendency that helps us to survive this world—optimists live longer. I don’t know about you, but I got mine last week at Lucian Delacroix’s The Way I Move Myself Around, 2011.
A New Orleans native currently based in Brussels, Delacroix initially trained as a classical dancer, a star rising in the ranks... [more]
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Talking May Only Ruin It
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Sarah Conaway, Lisa Williamson at The Box
June 4th, 2011 - July 9th, 2011
Posted
6/14/11
I usually avoid qualifiers and hedging, but let me briefly say this: I know it can be done, and will be done, but at the moment it feels like a shame to have to talk about such a pleasurably complete, beautiful, tight, surprising, weird, subtle, restrained, and resistant show. Its sense of humor might be a place to start talking. The title of Lisa Williamson and Sarah Conaway’s superb collaborative exhibition, “Weird Walks Into A Room (Comma),” reads like the set up for a joke.... [more]
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Allison Miller’s Visceral Idiosyncrasy
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Allison Miller at ACME
April 23rd, 2011 - May 21st, 2011
Posted
5/9/11
In trying to figure out why I feel this weird, instinctive pull towards Allison Miller’s paintings, why I like her newest exhibition of abstractions more than similar efforts by others (including those next door by Charline von Heyl, doyenne-ascendent of compellingly erratic and irregular abstraction), I ended up putting off words and turning to the act of painting itself.
It opened something up, but not necessarily to words. The impulse did, however, clarify. What makes Miller’s paintings gra... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: The White Lodge
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
4/5/11
A shockingly unique apothecary teahouse opened earlier this year in Los Feliz, California. The first of its kind, The White Lodge, is inspired in its pharmacy-counter, Dewey-decimal-drawer format by traditional Chinese herbal medicine shops and Mexican hierberias (herbal folk remedy stalls). It functions as if it were a bodega at some mythic crossroads simultaneously servicing Oaxacan priests, Oriental alchemists, Sufi shamen, Ayurveda practitioners, Haitian witch-doctors and dazzle-eyed miscreants bent o... [more]
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In The Best Way
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Al Taylor at Santa Monica Museum of Art
January 21st, 2011 - April 16th, 2011
Posted
4/5/11
An artist’s artist, Al Taylor tinkered like a junkyard inventor or delusional handyman.
Lifting the diagrammatic schemes and flat shapes of his ink drawings into three dimensions, Taylor’s sculptures are distinctively planar and linear in logic, not volumetric or massive. Commenting on his methods, he said: “This isn’t sculpture. It’s more like a pile of drawings that you can walk around.” He relished the move from two to three and back to two dimensions—a pivot from the horizontal... [more]
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Lovingly Polished and Laced with Drugs
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Eli Hansen at Anat Ebgi
January 21st, 2011 - March 5th, 2011
Posted
2/15/11
Things to think about when looking at Eli Hansen’s show Next time, they’ll know it’s us:
1. Hansen’s hand-blown glass beakers and vessels are impeccably formed, passing as mass-produced, like the several store-bought laboratory containers mixed in with the home-made rest (the former differentiated by telltale signs of industrial manufacture such as corporate labels and measurement lines). On closer inspection, the many hand-blown pieces (the majority of pieces on view) soften and warm... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: “Kaputtt” by Creator and “Kaputt” by Destroyer
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
1/10/11
Creator’s debut album, Kaputtt, will be released January 24th, 2011, the day before Destroyer’s much buzzed about ninth LP, Kaputt, of which the former is a full, track-by-track cover. So 2011: the cover preceding the original. Injecting a nonlinear hiccup into the historical flow, firstness is not always an easy matter of order and chronology—and, anyway, firstness is only a starting point.Destroyer’s Kaputt, the work of master mind Dan Bejar, is full of woozy, Wave-worthy sax passages a... [more]
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Long Live 2nd Cannons
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
at 2nd Cannons
January 8th, 2011 - February 19th, 2011
Posted
1/10/11
After three years (already?!) of mounting shows in the ever-endearing smallness of Chinatown’s Bernard Street cul-de-sac glass closet (née Trudi under the guidance of Matthew Chambers), Brian Kennon’s 2nd Cannons is closing with a final exhibition of the Institute of Social Hypocrisy. The Institute of Social Hyposcrisy (ISH) is the collaborative, Paris-based project of artist Victor Boullet. Calling itself “a protracted performance piece,” ISH (Boullet) invites artists into... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Ptolemy Anderson Puts Weights in his Canvases
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
11/29/10
Portrait of Cosmo / Piss on Mt. Whitney. (2010)
Ptolemy Anderson sends us postcards from the domestic familiar, mundane, close-at-hand, environmental, routine, banal-but-vital daily sphere of contact and lived experience.
Splayed Book with Cracked Spine / Juggle Four Balls for Four Minutes. (2009)
These are small paintings painted at home,
one-a-day in a cumulative and repetitive calendar practice.
Breakfast on the Balcony / Run a Six Minute Mile. (2009)
That’s the first part.
Then... [more]
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When Wit Ends
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Matthew Brannon at David Kordansky Gallery
October 30th, 2010 - December 4th, 2010
Posted
11/29/10
Start with Tour Guide (all works 2010), the hybrid print-and-sculpture that serves as entry into Matthew Brannon’s exhibition, “Wit’s End.” Following the artist’s familiar retro-Madison-Avenue/cover-of-The-New-Yorker illustrative style and image-text format, its letterpress print centers on a flute of viridian champagne fizzed with Braille-like white bubbles that sits atop a sideways iPod. In a characteristically demure visual pun, tipsiness twins tipped over music. Below the... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Notes on Myra “Sugartits” McGillicutty’s Road Tripping Project, 2010
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
11/9/10
1. In the late 1960s, Richard Artschwager disseminated his flat ovular, pill-shaped ‘blips’ on his cross-country roadtrip and all over the urban skin of New York City. They were absorbed topically into the landscape, a staccato tattoo showing up unexpectedly like a coded message or a rare bird you learn to spot with excitement. Artschwager’s interventions added an incongruous but inconspicuous level of visual detail to the environment; easy to miss in plain sight. He distr... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Five Questions for Mag Earwhig
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
10/18/10
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer: You had a show at Kharms & Kraut in Vancouver earlier this year. Can you describe it?Mag Earwhig: Kharms & Kraut has two adjacent spaces. For my show, “So Much Ink,” one room had works—about ten or so paintings, drawings, and sculptures—that I made realizing or taking cues from specific aesthetic, conceptual, and compositional passages of analysis I found in art criticism and reviews. It came out of aporia generating impetus out of thin air an... [more]
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Post-Minimalist Dance Party
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Brandon Lattu at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
September 16th, 2010 - October 16th, 2010
Posted
10/18/10
Constructed inside Brandon Lattu’s Eagle Rock studio (exhibited offsite from the MAK at 2861 W. Avenue 35), Reciprocity of Light is an interactive room wired with a grid of light-sensitive cells and lights embedded in the walls and ceiling, concealed behind a screen of tracing paper. A single bare, incandescent bulb hangs low in the center of the space. As my body enters, joining the two others already present, it casts its moving shadow on the wall which activates the built-in... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous New Initiative: ArtAudio
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
9/28/10
The newest venture by the folks who brought us such innovations in viewing as EyeHabit and RemoTour is their best yet. ArtAudio is a new publishing house/record label for art lovers, putting out a very select group of art books on tape.
Founded at the outset of 2010, ArtAudio was first conceived in response to the realization that art books (and their busy and/or blind readership) were being left out of the growing audio book market. But it really emerged as a surprising and provocative project t... [more]
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Balancing Bodies with Foreign Geometries
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Erika Vogt at Overduin and Kite
September 12th, 2010 - October 23rd, 2010
Posted
9/20/10
Hooks and handles are everywhere—objects on the ground, hieroglyphs in drawings, pictures on video. Round weights are tied up with stiff, upright ribbons. So are long, thin wooden sticks, each painted monochromatically: navy, pine, wheat, lake, cloud, road, and pink. Left here and there on the floor, the head of a spade and the spine of a scale point in haphazard, non-cardinal directions toward other instruments of seeming weaponry and possible torture—or, more likely, persecut... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: First-Ever Interview with 1960s Artist and Extreme Recluse, CLYDE DILLON
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
9/7/10
Clyde Dillon may be a total unknown today, but that was not always the case. At least, not exactly. Dillon dramatically entered the downtown New York art world in 1968, disappearing soon after and nearly as suddenly, and with as little explanation, as had been his appearance. In a certain sense, he is just one of the many, many forgotten casualties of those exciting, heady days. But much more than most, his biography and trajectory have been heavily shrouded in layers of thick impenet... [more]
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Parallel & Simultaneous: Vic Ferrari’s Video Chest
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Posted
8/23/10
Two years ago this September, due to an afternoon programming snafu, Vic Ferrari was asked to fill an hour of television at last minute. Back then he was a junior coordinator at a public access television station. Instead of throwing on some rerun of the normal show (which broadcast popular music videos), Ferrari hastily slapped together his first episode of Video Chest. By the end of the hour, the phone was ringing off the hook with compliments and complaints. Over fifty tim... [more]
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