"As the grandson of a golden-era Hollywood songwriter, acclaimed photographer Jim McHugh is heir to a particular experience and vision of Los Angeles that's all romance, noir, silhouetted buildings, and casual luxury. With his knack for photographing buildings in the intimate style of a portraitist, and in such a way as to erase all traces of intervening history, McHugh's photographs capture the ghost of what was — and might be again — LA's promise of beauty and the sunny, shadowy, glittering ch... [more]
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Posted on Advocate.com January 29, 2010 04:49:46 PM
Artist Spotlight: Tiger Munson
From his series on gay bar restrooms to action figure headshots, photographer Tiger Munson says he wants his work to create a lasting testament to beauty of the moment as both a participant, and an observer.
By Albert Smith
Tiger Munson is a photographic artist who lives in Los Angeles. He has a B.A. in Theatre Arts from UCLA, is a graduate of Har... [more]
Daniel Dove has several images that he likes to employ – airplanes either being reassembled or being taken apart, theaters, and jungle gyms twisting with colorful slides and tubes. As images, his paintings are deft and have a sort of old fashioned feel to them, and I admit, that in my first two viewings, the feel of the paintings bothered me. If these images are “content,” as in a story to be interpreted or a symbolic language to be cracked, then the paintings are not very int... [more]
The imagination finds a cozy harbor in Gustavo Godoy’s installation at Honor Fraser, entitled Fast Formal Object, Big White. In a way, “object” might not be the best word for Godoy’s piece. Like so much L.A. sculpture, the work is less intent on keeping its object status and more inclined to dissolve such a distinction. The dowels, scrap wood, particle board, and foam materials simply expand through the gallery, past objecthood into an environment to be inhabited, past an environment... [more]
FEEDBACK
"...exceptional workshop!! You were both absolutely awesome. Tons of information and a lot of positivity, which is a rare combo in the art world! Thank you for being so inspiring." V.C.
“Great ideas for reaching clients!” “You are great speakers and communicate well. Your humor adds to the stimulating information.”
“This was the most valuable business seminar that I have ever attended.”
... [more]
I like to see which corner stores get custom neon signage and which order LED’s. There ought to be more lit up signs (solar powered, of course); there cannot be enough. By internet order, anyone can edge their storefront windows with neon using the money earned from ten haircuts, or hook up some neon tube window diagonals with the money saved from knocking off a few less beers for four to five months. Los Angeles could do more; the city could be a fully constructed light exhibition, not Times Squa... [more]
Reviewed by Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, and an Advisory Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Institute, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
The winter of 2010 marks the long-awaited appearance of a remarkable work by conceptual photographer JONaEON –Chain of Belief is minimal and stripped down, a bare stage on which no human characters appear, and the drama is enacted instead by silent and inanimate forces – the moon, the night sky, billowing fabr... [more]
Corpus: a body is a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions. Heads, hands and cartilage, burnings, smoothnesses, spurts, sleep, digestion, goose-bumps, excitation, breathing, digesting, reproducing, mending, saliva, synovia, twists, cramps, and beauty spots. It’s a collection of collections, a corpus corporum, whose unity remains a question for itself....
– Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus: Fifty-eight Indices on the Body, 2008
“Succulent,” Rodney McMillian... [more]
...Very informative, well organized, thought out, well worth the time and money.. The whole experience was eye opening..
B.L
...An exceptional workshop!!... absolutely awesome. Tons of information and a lot of positivity, which is a rare combo in the art world! ...so inspiring. ... I will not hesitate to recommend it
V.C.
“Great ideas for reaching clients!”
“You are great speakers and communicate well. Your humor adds to the stimulating information.”
“This was the most valua... [more]
Though sometimes we’ll grill the gallery or the artist in between gulps of cheap white wine at crowded openings for their take on their work, more often than not the press release gives at least one version of meaning. A little background is never a bad thing, the press release in some odd way becomes a part of the exhibition, an extension of the presentation, a part of the charade. Us critics usually ignore or mock the press release if we mention it at all, but sometimes they can b... [more]
Two glossy posters hang in the 2nd Cannons vitrine: a yellow poster with yellow cartoonish font that says “Foolin Around’” and a red poster with yellow writing that says in a mustardy squirt “Waiting…” Deadpan, simple, obviously pop, but vague in specific reference, without knowing these two films, as I didn't, the works are stripped of meaning in a way where we could fill in the blanks, though I did try to figure out the exhibition through it's references.
With the lack... [more]
Abstraction at ACME by Ed Schad Alexis Harding, Robert Linsley, Michael Murphy, Sasha Pierce at ACME
January 9th - February 6th
Posted
1/12/10
The front gallery of Acme’s somewhat recently enlarged space positively pops with abstraction at the moment with a curious little group show curated by writer and critic Jan Tumlir. Exhibition artists Alexis Harding, Robert Linsley, Michael Murphy, and Sasha Pierce came surprisingly together in a lab funded by a science grant in Canada earmarked for the interaction between science and painting. (When, oh when, will America be so generous.) Linsley and Tumlir, partially to lay out their... [more]
Allison Schulnik can be called a traditional painter. She approaches all the age-old varieties of representational painting in her practice, using her own particular style to articulate this gamut of long-established modes: still lives, portraiture, landscape. Each show seems to trot out multiple examples of each. But a few themes emerge – the lovable clown or hobo (think of classic clown painting with the poor prankster losing the patch off his coat and you’ll see what I mean), puffed... [more]
by Alex Gartenfeldhttp://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2010-01-11/gerald-incandela-edward-cella/Careful to differentiate his photographic output from photography as such, Gerald Incandela's series of "photographic drawings" take on the figure study as a tool to propose the erotics of the sketch and the formal potentials of the nude. Incandela alters his photographs of men in relaxed poses and various stages of undress by hand-brushing developer on the print. The results are th... [more]
Reaching Through the Glass by Mary Anna Pomonis Price Latimer Agah, Nick Agid, Laurent Ajina, Lita Albuquerque, Francis Alys, Mecca Vazie Andrews, Alexandre Arrechea, Molly Barnes, Linda Besemer, Suzanne Deal Booth, Simmons & Burke, JoAnn Busuttil, Kendell Carter, Marie Chambers, Michal Chelbin, Rosson Crow, Roman de Salvo, Martin Denker . Luke Dubois, Richard Ehrlich, Fouad Elkoury, ANDREA FELDMAN FALCIONE, Cao Fei, Veronica Fernandez, Danny First, Lauri Firstenberg, Andrea Fiuczynski, Peter Frank, Yvette Gellis, Dorothy Goldeen, Edward Goldman, Homeira Goldstein, Bobbie Greenfield, Sue Hancock, Heather Harmon, Sandra Vasquez De La Horra, Salomon Huerta, Deborah Irmas, Alex Israel, Donna Anderson Kam, Brooke Kanter, Marina Kappos, Trek Kelly, Robert Kingston, Yumi Kiyose, Bettina Korek, Ilene Kurtz-Kretzschmar, LACMA, Hye Rim Lee, Helen Lewis, Kai Loebach, Justin Lowe, Rosa Lowinger, Shana Lutker, Lee Lynch, Nathan Mabry, Peter Mays, Lisa Melandri, Caroline Messensee, Kimberli Meyer, Daniel Milhaud, Marilyn Minter, Julie Miyoshi, MOCA, Yasmine Mohseni, Lorraine Molina, Jim Morphesis, Andy Moses, Shirin Aliabadi & Farhad Moshiri, Sandeep Mukherjee, Takashi Murakami, Steven Neu, Thao Nguyen, Jennifer Nocon, JoAnne Northrup, Elizabeth Orleans, Marc Pally, Patricia Parinejad, Tom Peters, William Pope., Amanda Ross-Ho, Leslie Rubinoff, Sterling Ruby, Mark Ryden, Bruce Samuels, Amy Sarkisian, Cindy Schwartz, Eric Shiner, Robyn Siegel, Richard David Sigmund, Stefan Simchowitz, Mukesh Singh, Jennifer Steinkamp, Louis Stern, Joel Tauber, James Thegerstrom, Samantha Thomas, Roy Thurston, Marika Krissman Tsircou, William Tunberg, Elinor Turner, Aya Uekawa, Koen Vanmechelen, Nicola Vruwink, Julie Weitz, Pae White, Miriam Wosk at Royal T
January 20th - January 20th
Posted
1/8/10
For years LA has been host to any number of group shows with varying themes and ideations, some more successful than others. “In Bed Together” is another one of these group exhibitions curated by Jane Glassman at the Royal T Café in Culver City and features the work of 50 artists. Glassman invited collectors, artists and curators to select a favorite Los Angeles artist to put in the show, and the results here are impressive. Glassman utilizes the unique properties of the space with... [more]
A Year in Review with Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
“Maybe that disturbing confusion is good …. Maybe.”
Sharon Lockhart
Lunch Break
Blum & Poe
November 21, 2009 - January 9, 2010
“… works beyond the earth, literally out of this world… he teaches the rewards of not taking some things, some art, seriously.”
Stephen Kaltenbach
Another Year in LA
October 30th, 2009 - December 5th, 2009
“For the first time in recent memory, the government took an affirmative and... [more]
The Year in Reviw with Ed Schad
“…often elegant, sometimes clumsy, but ultimately insightful.”
Michael Rashkow
China Art Objects Galleries
June 27th, 2009 - July 18th, 2009
“Sometimes the cacophony of shapes and color spirals into pure chaos and sometimes they are downright symphonic.”
Aaron Morse
ACME
July 11, 2009 - August 15, 2009
“…remarkable retrospective…. extraordinarily powerful… outright cunning.”
LARRY JOHNSON
... [more]
Art critics are never quite shilled in the same way as critics for other avenues of culture. Yes, our reviews likely get listed on CVs and not read, adding some vague imprimatur to an artist's career that might help move some product, but we're enver exploited in quite the same way, as say, the movie critic, who's thoughtful well-composed reviews (okay not always) get diced into a few words to grace a promotional poster. Oh, if only some art critic (someone from October would be ni... [more]
Campus Circle by la@newfilmmakersla.com Lock Speed Action (Dir. Russell Griffith), Angels, Il Male Assoluto (Dir. Francesco Colangelo), Death In Charge (Dir. Devi Snively), I’m Not Matt Damon (Dir. Jim Rothman), Open Ends (Dir. Arnold Chun), Junior Extra-Terrestrial (Dir. V Sassmannshausen), What’s Your Flavor (Dir. Sean & Debi Bradshaw), Dinner With Isabella (Dir. Dana Turken), JET, The Kiss (Carey Williams), Judy Lamont, Mama & Nardo (Dir. David Polcino), True Beauty This Night (Dir. Peter Besson), Decent People (Dir. Amir Shoucri), Movie Star (Dir. Eric Yang), Thru at NewFilmmakers LA at Sunset Gower Studios
January 19th 5:30 PM - 10:45 PM
Posted
1/5/10
The Company, Los Angeles (Chinatown)
Alexander May’s solo show On the Verge of a Response (Conversation with Everything) at the Company in Chinatown closes today. For me this show places a perfunctory quotation mark on the year 2009 in all its gutsy and gory glory. May’s response gesture overtakes the entire company space unifying every piece of square footage by hand cutting a custom (albeit clumsy) linoleum floor and spray painting a line between the floor and the wall space.... [more]
Four Anthropologies by Marcus Civin Joseph Beuys at LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
September 19th, 2009 - July 18th
Posted
12/28/09
One
Students currently occupy the attic of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Students are translating all instances of language in holdings of works by Joseph Beuys.
Students are translating the words and sentiments of the German artist into languages from Korean, to Armenian, to Spanish, to English, to Arabic. These bilingual students are writing translations of Joseph Beuys: declarations to accompany hopeful/absurd gifts... declarations now wri... [more]
I go to the 99¢ Only Store to have a look around. I look up. On a two story metal pole, in a five foot by three foot metal box, the wood sign for the store. From the parking lot, I can see the paint on the sign is about to start peeling in long, two-inch fat, vertical streaks. In a long, red oval on a white background, I read: “99 cents ALWAYS +UP.” Barbed wire tops the parking lot fence.
On a card table in the parking lot, a man around seventy-five years old sells five dollar p... [more]
Hulett Muni, Wyoming lies in the far shadow of Devils Tower, which rises up like a gargantuan petrified tree stump in the distance, out of view from the small town but not unfelt. The whole local region has a special geothermal signature that likely relates to the bizarre electro-magnetic microcosm of activity there which the area’s indigenous Native American tribes regarded as signs of a spiritual center. Jericho “Coco” Fitzsimmons grew up and lived behind closed doors in Hulett... [more]
In “Lunch Break,” Sharon Lockhart’s recent body of work that is the first solo show in Blum and Poe’s enormous and enormously monied new space, the artist presents two new films and twenty-seven photographs related to her investigation of industrial working life at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. Departing from the fixed camera composition of her past films, a long sustained tracking shot moves the frame slowly and steadily over its eighty minute duration down a tremendous narrow... [more]
The paintings of Dianna Molzen are only paintings if we stretch the words further than the usual limits of canvas over bars. At first glance (and too quick a glance at that), I nearly dismissed the wall works as the garden variety, common mill of early twenty-first century (through retro –modernist) abstractions. But, upon closer examination, strange and subtle narratives began to reveal themselves. Reduced to a simple set of gestures, the works in another time could be easily interpret... [more]
Art criticism is, always, in crisis.
Shortly after the first scribblings about art were likely made by the first scribbler, he or she likely wondered all too deeply if it at all mattered. Art, and writing about art by turn, has a value that’s hard to nail down, and therefore, always in question. Artists wonder if they’re meaningful, so do art critics, only more so. This is not a short essay about that. This is a short essay on art critics in newspapers.
It never paid very well to be an... [more]
The dynamic and eclectic body of work in the CAFAM retrospective of Dora De Larios celebrates 50 years of the artist’s work and life. A native Angelino, Larios grew up in a downtown neighborhood where Japanese and Mexican cultures co-existed. Her exposure to diverse cultures, religions, and art runs like an artery through Larios’ own work that embraces the viewer in a rich tapestry that delicately weaves the earthly and the surreal, the utterly fantastical and the escape into reverie... [more]
Bayles in Chinatown by Ed Schad Dan Bayles at Francois Ghebaly Gallery
November 21st, 2009 - January 23rd
Posted
12/7/09
Dan Bayles paints the dead of winter, perhaps the day the wind lifts and knocks the tired and long departed leaves off their branches -- outside Bayles’ windows, broken paths and cracked sidewalks, faded colors rustling out their last passages of defeated whimsy. The paintings are not apocalyptic scenes, but instead are grey exercises in mid-winter chill as pale hues. Resolve towards spring has not yet arrived.
Each scene out in the world -- the winter, the leaves, the trees, are viewed through a window, the window of painting,... [more]
Pryde off Beverly by Ed Schad Josephine Pryde at Richard Telles Fine Art
October 31st, 2009 - December 19th, 2009
Posted
12/7/09
Josephine Pryde is audacious. Think about it. In a world of cuteness to the point of nausea, where we are flooded with constant Facebook albums of our friends’ little tikes, with lines around the block at Royal T for a Hello Kitty show, and an ocean of cupcakes, Pryde fills a gallery, a quite serious gallery no less in Richard Telles, with pictures of a cute little boy. With the exception of one black in white, they are all the same size and the same format. Sometimes the boy laughs, so... [more]
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