An Aquatic Video Performance Immerses Us in the California Drought / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Imagine you are trying to get dressed underwater but every time you lift your arms the water you’re wading through pulls them back down. Like a blinded, injured fish you want to sink into the abyss of your tank and just flounder. You can see the...
Your Art Entertainment Experience Is Here! / Hyperallergic
MONTRÉAL — In the 24/7 news cycle of BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and every other “content producer” on the internet, there is a fine line between news and entertainment. In the group exhibition You Won’t Believe (. . .): A Group Exhibition about Entertainment at...
Someone Made a Book of #artselfies / Hyperallergic
The selfie exists everywhere that people own smartphones. DIS Magazine’s #artselfie, published by Jean Boîte Éditions, attempts to freeze one aspect of this cultural moment — the art selfie — by parlaying its meaning into a gleaming, print-only book that contains a...
When Consumer Goods Blossom into Otherworldly Fungi / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Benjamin Lord’s grossly delectable photographs, on view in his exhibition The New Retail Mycology at Monte Vista Projects, invite viewers to closely consider the social construction of a landscape. In each of the seven photographs on display, viewers...
An Artist Turns Surveillance into Affection / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Artist Jennifer Moon is not the first or the last to experiment with self-surveillance, documenting selfies of her every moment for anyone and no one. Her solo exhibition Will You Still Love Me: Learning to Love Yourself, It Is The Greatest Love of All,...
Blowing Up Normcore at the LA Art Book Fair / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The LA-based artist and comedian Molly Jo Shea asked me where my Dell computer was as I took out my MacBook Pro to take notes on New York collective K-HOLE’s presentation at the LA Art Book Fair, organized by REDCAT. Shea’s comment was spot-on because,...
Gillian Wearing’s Masked Confessions / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — For her exhibition Everyone, Gillian Wearing hired palm readers to tell her fortune without knowing her professional identity. Each one came up with drastically different predictions, suggesting the fallacy of set-in-stone definitions of destiny and...
Jacolby Satterwhite Keeps Reality Virtual / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Jacolby Satterwhite’s solo exhibition How lovly is me being as I am is born out of a maternal virtual hive mind. Satterwhite fills OHWOW, a spacious white cube in West Hollywood, with 10 large-scale C-prints from the series Satellites and En Plein Air,...
Freestyling Animals and Signifying Rappers / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Behind every face there is a mask. In Ray Anthony Barrett’s solo exhibition Word is Bond at Diane Rosenstein Fine Arts in Hollywood, the artist investigates American cultural identities through the use of anthropomorphized masks. Dividing up the four...
A Character Actor Gets a Trilogy of His Own / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — “Who is Tony Longo?” my editor inquired, after I pitched her on this piece about Thom Andersen’s new short film “The Tony Longo Trilogy” (2014). It makes sense that Andersen, the director of Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which discusses how the city...
Young Joon Kwak’s Trans/Feminine Visions / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — There is a new mutant form emerging, pushing its way past the thin layer that separates the interior and exterior world. In Young Joon Kwak’s exhibition at Commonwealth & Council, Mother Spill, the artist’s body overtakes her mind, erupting into the...
An Encyclopedia of Kitsch / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — It took a while for me to actually sit down and stop flipping through the channels and start leafing through Sara Cwynar’s gorgeous book, The Kitsch Encyclopedia. Published by Blonde Art Books, a project of Brooklyn-based curator/publisher Sonel...
Warhol’s Little Red Face Book / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The name Andy Warhol is synonymous with Pop art, a movement often written off as apolitical and shallow in its engagement with American culture. Reflections of this assumption are all contained in Little Red Book #296, an album of 18 images that...
Exposing the Blood and Guts of Hollywood’s Teen Girl Fantasy / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Laura Parnes’s four-disk video series Blood and Guts in Hollywoodexposes the idealized teenage dream for what it is: A boring, vapid fantasy of “love” that is marketed and sold to an audience of young dreamers searching for their soulmate in the...
In the Spirit of Summer Memories / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The summer months are a time of slowing down, going out, hitting the beach, and drinking far too many iced coffee beverages. And yes, I even remember you., a five-person group show at Aran Cravey Gallery curated by Eric Kim, wraps up the summer season...
Ancient Statues Pose for Selfies / Hyperallergic
It’s one thing to take a #museumselfie with a work of art, as if to say, “yes, I was here with this artwork” or “yes, here is my reflection in the surface of this piece.” It’s another thing to make Greco-Roman statues look like they were chiseled specifically for...
Artists Present Alternative Instagram Models / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The art world has a lot of feelings about Instagram. On a humid Saturday night in Los Angeles, the roving cultural hub ForYourArt spilled their #instaguts about it all through the Instagram Mini-Marathon. Curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, writer and curator...
Minor White’s Vulnerability / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Minor White’s photographs offer a portrait of a life lived in collaboration with the natural world, other people, and the great beyond. This collection of crisp photographs make up the retrospective Manifestations of the Spirit. It is a carefully...
Curating the Mind of John Altoon / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — John Altoon lived in Venice, California, back in the day, during the 1960s, before the ’70s kicked into polyester high gear. In his current retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curator Carol S. Eliel organizes a view of this Los Angeles...
This Journal Is Not a Market / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Here’s the problem: “It is how people come to see art as a tool, a flavor, or a device.” So says Charlie White, editor of the The Enemy, a triannual online journal that publishes long-form essays on criticism, social science, poetry, celebrity, and other...