Upon entering Pippa Garner’s show, “Immaculate Misconceptions,” at JOAN in Los Angeles, visitors are greeted by HOW TO COME UP WITH AN IDEA and HOW TO GET RID OF YOUR IDEA, a pair of vinyl wall text pieces whose contents are as wryly pedantic as their titles suggest.  “As ironic as it seems, keeping your […]

The resort city of Palm Springs and its surrounding conurbations boast stylish modernist houses with gleaming swimming pools; carefully arranged plantings of cycads improbably protected from excessive heat by semi-permanent sunshades; and touristic enticements such as a giant, flashy statue of Marilyn Monroe.  The trappings of this artificial oasis could hardly contrast more with the […]

The title of Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s show at François Ghebaly, “Soliloquy for Two,” highlights her work’s dramatic overtones while alluding to the interpretive relationship between artist and viewer.  In the anterior gallery hang three small birch lanterns whose decorous appearance belies their sinister laser-cut patterns of ribcages, moths, and veins.  Diminutive cathedral windows painted […]

The eight figurative sculptures comprising Emil Alzamora’s show, “Waymaker,” evoke somber aspects of the human condition.  Lacerated, contorted, and dismembered, these generic persons appear as victims of circumstances whose origins and nature remain tantalizingly mysterious.  Contributing to a sense of instability and disjunction, Alzamora’s combinations of motley materials such as wood, plaster, wax, and metal […]

Chimerical figures and nebulous forms sprout, mutate, and dance through the delirious dreamlike realms of Sara Kathryn Arledge’s films and paintings, which, once seen, are impossible to forget.  Although she earned a degree in art from UCLA, taught at several colleges, and acknowledged her indebtedness to art history, Arledge (1911-1998) retained a nonconformist ethos; her […]

Few had heard of Mike Winkelmann until reports of the $69.3 million sale of his digital collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, catapulted him to star level overnight, landing his name just behind those of Jeff Koons and David Hockney as the world’s third highest-priced living artist.  A self-taught graphic designer with a degree in […]

The entryway to “Substrata” at EPOCH Gallery consigns you to a steep snowy slope several yards from a building appearing as a futuristic ski lodge.  At your every pause, you find yourself revolving, as though involuntarily attached to the axis of a slow-moving carousel.  Turn around and see a white sun glowing in the haze, […]

Little need be said about the strangeness of 2020: A year inundated with historic events has brought to a standstill the customs and contact that once defined our lives. In March, as the reality of the pandemic set into Los Angeles, museums and galleries closed with the lockdowns, leaving in their wake a slew of […]

Milano Chow’s intricate black-and-white drawings at Bel Ami depict a dreamy world where decorous women peer out of elegant townhouses and pose languidly against ornate clocks that seem to double as architectural follies. This show, “Park La Brea,” is titled after an iconic Los Angeles mega-development of mid-century apartment buildings. However, despite its plausible reference […]

Evoking Modernist abstractions refracted through surreal prisms, Lesley Vance’s 13 paintings in “A Zebra Races Counterclockwise” showcase her brilliance as a colorist and contriver of optical puzzles. In previous bodies of work, which comprised easel-sized paintings rarely larger than 31 inches, she abstracted still lifes into oblivion; yet the nonobjective shapes did retain vestigial references […]

Mother Superior and her creepy bearded henchman have come to retrieve the septet of uniformed captives from their human beehive. It is time for the girls to go to work. As always, mysterious hypnotic forces compel them to mount their bicycles, starry-eyed, and follow their captors towards the tower. The tails of their habits become […]

During this time of quarantine, it’s enjoyable to get lost in The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot (1946) by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Delicately limned in egg tempera on a small panel, the scene is easy to enter online, and its cryptic serenity casts a rosy glow over one’s feelings of confinement. A sense of mystery […]

Few materials embody human experience as naturally as clay. In its malleable state, clay is fleshly, easily wounded but easily healed. Fired, it ossifies. Surface glazes pool and congeal like bodily fluids. Priceless porcelain masterpieces and preschoolers’ art projects attest that the urge to mold clay figures transcends age and class.  No wonder people throughout […]

Currently on view at LA Louver, Ed and Nancy Kienholz’ playfully eerie mixed-media tableau, The Merry-Go-World or Begat by Chance and the Wonder Horse Trigger (1988-92), evokes the feeling of exploring an abandoned carnival. It’s as though the clowns have departed, the crowds have disappeared, and the games have been packed up; but for some […]

“Harvest.” The very name cultivates savory mental images: farms bearing crops in extensive rows; gardens dotted with aromatic delights; green fields as far as they eye can see; fruits and vegetables plucked from fertile earth. Indeed this tillage is productive, though its yield is not so lush. There are no farmers gleaning fruit from the […]

Rob Thom’s paintings resemble funhouse mirrors tilted towards pleasure-seeking crowds, magnifying follies and foibles that extend to American culture at large. His works in “The Beast” at M+B depict mostly white middle-class throngs at leisure in typical venues such as zoos, carnivals, and wrestling matches. Each scene appears ordinary enough until you notice comical panoplies […]

Forty-two photographs and videos present a panoptic view of Persian youth culture in “Focus Iran 3: Contemporary Photography and Video,” the third Iranian photography biennial at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Sponsored primarily by Farhang Foundation, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Iranian art, this sweeping juried exhibition suggests that despite our respective governments’ […]

Nothing seems right in Emma Webster’s No Man’s Land (all works 2018): toadstools are weirdly spotlighted; wispy arboreal cutouts contain more than mere foliage; and a nearby cervine, possibly an antelope, is impossibly dwarfed by a distant moose. Such incongruities lead one to wonder: what sort of location does this painting depict? Webster painted No […]

Los Angeles encompasses so many neighborhoods, districts, and suburbs that nary a local can keep track of them all. In a city so sprawling and diverse, the idea of boundaries seems especially salient during our current epoch when notions of acceptability shift like sand in the wind even as divisive talks revolve around building permanent […]

Possibly the earliest visual record of shell shock, the above photograph shows a Crimean War infantry captain whose eyes appear as windows to a hollow, desperate soul. Two years later, he died from the hardships of war shortly after returning home to Britain. In a similar manner about 150 years later, “Sgt. Will Gardner,” a […]

“‘I’m living my life out in a cell in a row of beehives and when I wake up and think of it like I did last night it seems to me I’ll just go crazy! …All these flats just exactly like this one—all of ’em with exactly the same maroon in the furniture and rugs, […]

“The Price of Everything,” a 98-minute documentary directed by Nathaniel Kahn, tenders a panoptic window on the contemporary art market’s upper echelon via a carefully orchestrated sequence of interview segments with a wide array of prominent art world influentials. Seeming particularly timely in light of the $90.3 m Hockney auction record set just three days […]

Karon Davis’ sculpture installation at Wilding Cran Gallery transports you into an eerie dreamlike flooded world where time has been suspended and all that remains is a melancholy sense of emptiness tinged with despair. This show’s simple evocative atmosphere poignantly distills disaster victims’ sorrows and black Americans’ larger struggles. A recent evacuee from devastating California […]

You likely haven’t heard of taiga dramas, and even more likely, have never watched one. Let me employ my first contribution as AEQAI’s film critic towards attempting to remedy that, for these classic yearlong Japanese television programs deserve far more attention than they receive in the U.S. Taiga dramas: a brief introduction Not to be […]

“We are all collage artists today, switching from one channel to another, re-editing as we go,” the late British artist Jeff Keen (1923-2012) once declared. In this age of ubiquitous smartphones, where we devour and re-synthesize words and images in staggering quantities at lightning speeds, Keen’s idea has accreted new resonance; and so has his […]

Cleverly convoluting scientific and sociological meanings of the word “culture,” Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings portray clear disks brimming with mysterious vignettes in “Petri Dishes,” her show at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles. Each canvas functions as a petri dish for von Hellermann’s painted explorations where microbiologic vessels serve as symbolic spheres for testing paint’s […]

Los Angeles is home to so many eccentric museums that the city practically has its own ever-growing genre of weird museums with sundry specialized themes ranging from ice cream to death.  Among these, one of the oldest and most intriguing is the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Everything about this institution is so otherworldly that it […]

Having pervaded Western societies for centuries, the archetype of huge and showy artworks seems to have reached a pinnacle in our era where large and loud look better online. Karen Margolis’ delicate, meditative collages, on view through May 12 at Garis & Hahn in Los Angeles, pull the proverbial rug out from under the preconceived […]

On January 6 in Los Angeles, Ernie Wolfe Gallery opened a show titled “Eddie M and the FAVs,” featuring Ed Moses’ paintings alongside elaborate Ghanaian coffins which the proprietor calls “fantastic afterlife vehicles (FAVs).” Eleven days later, Moses died of natural causes. It seems eerily opportune that this show’s opening was the last public outing […]

Inside Frary Dining Hall at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, beyond extensive rows of tables and chairs, one encounters a singular sight atop the arched central panel of the back wall: a large 1930 fresco by José Clemente Orozco. Designated Prometheus, this mural depicts its titular Greek titan painted in Orozco’s signature El Greco-esque style. […]

Are there any media that Eduardo Sarabia doesn’t employ? The Guadalajara-based, Los Angeles-born artist’s current show features ceramics, sculptures, drawings, paintings, murals, photos, performance documentation, and a video, which together add up to an engrossing installation addressing the fantasies, violence, and symbolism of narco-culture. Sarabia’s first hometown solo show in almost 10 years and part […]

Despite Southern California’s large Hispanic population, Latin American art is seldom shown. Aside from some museums’ pre-Columbian sections and paintings by well-known artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the Americas south of ours might as well be unconnected to our landmass, perhaps on the opposite hemisphere. As of this month, all this has changed, […]

Paradoxically, Jonathan Monk’s show at Cherry and Martin exists simultaneously as a well-curated group show and Monk’s single-authored conceptual installation. Surprisingly, instead of leeching all significance from its constituents, the show embodies its title, “Perfectly Concocted Context.” Individual artworks are shown to advantage while uniting to form a more meaningful whole that resounds their spirit […]

Truly, SeaWorld seems like a world in itself. That the aquarium-amusement park hybrid offers an experience unlike any other explains its success since 1964. Surrounded by ambient piped-in music, bubbles, and sundry other artifices, visitors can watch shows, ride roller coasters, play with animals, and immerse themselves in huge aquariums, all in the same day. […]

What makes Jean Dubuffet’s art so captivating? Dubuffet Drawings, 1935-1962, which closed April 30 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, offered insight into elusive qualities that vivify his work. The rawness characterizing Dubuffet’s oeuvre is especially palpable in his drawings. This medium’s immediacy seems ideal for embodying his characteristic roughhewn aesthetic. “I must learn […]

People can be so truculent, never missing an opportunity to censure others. That’s what makes Planet Fitness’ storied promise of a “Judgement [sic] Free Zone” so appealing. Yet behind the appeal is a shadowy void; the very act of establishing such a zone involves judgment. In his current show at And/Or Gallery in Pasadena, Jacob […]

“Capriccio,” Michael Dopp’s show in Roberts & Tilton’s small secondary gallery, features 18 ink drawings brimming with symbolism. From afar, their washy Old Masterish monochromaticity suggests pictures one would find hanging in a musty museum or library display case rather than on the walls of a contemporary gallery. Closer observation reveals that the venerable academic […]

As I reflect on my experience of this year, two dates stand out: June 14 and August 16. On those days, Riviera hotel and casino buildings exploded on the Las Vegas Strip, disappearing in seconds before the eyes of hordes of onlookers including me. All pales in comparison to those events crystallized ablaze in my […]

This summer, Los Angeles hosted two biennials: the inaugural iteration of a city-sponsored public art biennial called “Current: L.A.,” and the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.,” the third iteration of Los Angeles’ original biennial. In response to these exclusive exhibitions, two artists, aided by the sponsorship of various organizations, created a broadly inclusive, do-it-yourself exposition […]

“Man cave” is a term used by both Guillermo del Toro[1] and press materials for his exhibition, “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters” to describe the celebrated film director’s atelier. More formally styled “Bleak House,” it is a suburban abode filled with panoplies of objects that inspire del Toro and some artists and designers […]