Top 10 Films 2021 - by scarlet cheng

BY SCARLET CHENG

What a year, and what a year for films—many of them delayed in production or distribution due to COVID, but roaring back as the theaters reopened. Below is my list of top theatrically released films of 2021; films I have had a chance to see thus far.

I’m struck by how many were directed by women—a group which usually represents less than 10% of directors in the top 250 grossing films in the US, according to the long-running “Celluloid Ceiling” study. In my list, they are more than half. It’s also interesting that several super-hero/sci-fi films made my list—it’s not a genre I’m fond of, because they usually rely heavily on traditional and very tired tropes with white guys saving the world—but the ones below are not typical.

Black Widow

Directed by Cate Shortland

More blow-’em-up action from the Marvel franchise, but the backstory to Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and her foster sister (Florence Pugh) makes this a better than average superhero saga. You see, both were raised to be spies and assassins by the nasty Patriarch to serve his nefarious ends.

CODA

Directed by Sian Heder

A coming-of-age film about Ruby, a 17-year-old living with her deaf, working-class family in Gloucester, MA. She’s discovered music, and yearns to leave and continue her studies, yet wants to remain part of that family. The film is anchored by a most winning performance by Emilia Jones as Ruby.

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

This quiet masterpiece takes its time unpeeling layers of the characters’ complicated and unhappy pasts. Trying to forget his wife’s untimely death, a stage director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) goes to Hiroshima, casting for and rehearsing a multi-lingual version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” while being chauffeured around by a young woman (Toko Miura) with an unexpected past of her own. Miura is mesmerizing, playing someone numbed by tragedy, and who survives by keeping a close watch on the world around her and filtering the truth from lies.

Dune

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

True, this film is ponderous and bloated, but wow, is it epic! In adapting the sci-fi classic by Frank Herbert, auteur Denis Villeneuve creates a good ripping yarn about a hero’s journey on a faraway planet patrolled by giant worms. Young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) has to protect his family and save the enslaved people of this strange new world. The casting of hypnotic Rebecca Ferguson as his sorceress mother is brilliant.

Clockwise from opposite page: The Velvet Underground, Dune, Black Widow, King Richard, The Power of the Dog.

Eternals

Directed by Chloe Zhao

Long ago 10 Eternals were put on earth to fight the Deviants whenever they showed up. This film has a slow burn, but at the end you feel the moral dilemma of the superheroes’ mission and the split in their loyalties to one another. Despite being handicapped with the need to tell too many stories, director Chloe Zhao has injected real heart into this increasingly eroded genre.

King Richard

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

The story of tennis-dad Richard Williams, whose ambition for his two daughters, Venus and Serena, led to their becoming world-class tennis champions. Will Smith plays the dad, with charm and conviction.

Lamb

Directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson

A childless couple on a remote sheep farm in Iceland find themselves with a gift child—except is the child theirs to have? You feel their loneliness, you feel their joy, and you feel their deep fear of loss in this remarkable debut feature.

Directed by Jane Campion

Campion returns to the big screen after a decade-long hiatus with this Western about the toxic masculinity that undergirds so many Westerns. Set on a cattle ranch in 1920s Montana, the movie has Benedict Cumberbatch playing a bullying Alpha male who decides to take his brother’s new bride (Kirsten Dunst) down a few notches— partly by training her “sissy” son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in manly ways.

Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska

This is a strange and strangely memorable fable about a kindly masseuse (Alec Utgoff) who works the homes in a wealthy gated community in Poland—entering lives filled with silence and sadness.

Directed by Nanfu Wang

This documentary covers the unfolding of the COVID crisis in China —including government denial followed by the complete shutdown of Wuhan, the first pandemic city. The interviews with ordinary people who caught the virus, lost loved ones, and worked in hospitals are compelling. Wang shows how the crisis has been twisted to political ends, in both China and the US.

The Velvet Underground Directed by Todd Haynes

The story of Lou Reed, John Cale and the band that created that pre-punk wall of sound against the backdrop of New York’s art scene in the 1960s. At one point they were the house band of Andy Warhol’s notorious Factory.

Courtesy Spy Projects.

By India Mandelkern Independence. Freedom. Unchecked mobility. We’re quick to attribute these qualities to the automobile: grand, sweeping, all-encompassing statements that turn the machine into an intractable, totalizing force to be glimpsed from the outside-in. We think less about the car as a collection of private spaces that each play singular roles: The war room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the sex den, the place you hide the body.

“Disassembly Line,” presented by Pietro Alexander, Sasha Filimonov and Gabriella Rothbard, investigates these interior, personal ways in which we’ve come to understand our cars. Riffing off the butchering and packaging processes of late 19th-century slaughterhouses that helped give birth to the Fordian assembly line, the curators set seven artists loose on a 1998 Oldsmobile 88––letting them gut it, manipulate it, and remake it from the ground up––in order to poke holes in the supposed intransigence of industrial systems, and obliquely, the role of the traditional gallery.

For the car is the gallery: Engine, windshield wipers, gas cap, door handles, antenna––all its functional features (except the parking brake) have been completely stripped away. A geometric floral skeleton––a ceramic signature for which Iranian sculptor Yassi Mazandi has built a reputation––blooms out of the steering wheel. Sculptor Mannix Vega, who daylights as a mechanic, painted the exterior in a gold-flecked, black matte patina and sharpened the edges of the hood, not unlike the way you’d soup up a hotrod. Except it’s not a hotrod. The car no longer functions: a point underscored by the parking tickets strewn across the windshield. Constructed by Daniel Healey, who copied, traced and duplicated real citations with vintage Letraset sheets and printer paper, the tickets combine real names, addresses, and phone numbers with snide, sarcastic comments (Terrible paint job! She lost control!) (2021) They’re so banal, so convincing in their stern straight edges and red-andwhite lettering, that you have to blink to remind yourself that they’re made by hand, and fall into the realm of art.

Pop the trunk and lift it up; you find two additional artworks. Ivan Rios-Fetchko’s Trunk (Hood) (2021), presents a quadriptych of landscapes: A vacant overpass, a concrete ribbon, a solitary tree. Painted from found slides reconfigured in the shapes of rear view mirrors––spare, lifeless scenes in oil and wax that we’ve all glimpsed from a moving car—they reflect on the automobile’s toll on our physical as well as our private mental landscapes. Reyner Banham’s ecologies come to mind. But there’s also something unsettling about roaming the open roads of radical self-realization that someone else has paved. Directly below it, Claudia Parducci’s Trunk (Body) (2021) also examines possibilities for disorder within larger systems. She has filled the trunk with playground sand; buried within it are resin-cast gas masks, shards of breathing tubes, and a single broken laptop. Even the preppers didn’t make it. Entropy ultimately prevailed.

“Disassembly Line” is hardly the first exhibition to engage with the car. Artists (especially in Los Angeles) have been dissecting them, lacquering them, repurposing them and crucifying themselves on them for decades. Nor is it the first group exhibition to play outside of the gallery’s walls (although the fact that the car was shown in the Beverly Hills garage of legendary dealer Molly Barnes, who gave John Baldessari his first solo show, was lost on no one). At times, the seven artworks therein failed to talk to one another, or conceptually meandered away from the theme. Perhaps that was inevitable, as the project’s experimental premise perfectly mirrored the title’s implied social critique. Labor was divided (none of the seven artists were really let in on what the others were up to). Workstreams were individuated (no one could anticipate how the finished product would look). Granting artists this kind of conceptual free rein was a challenge; until the last minute, the curators didn’t know what they’d be getting. “It was tough to write the press release,” Alexander said. “All we knew was that it was going to be a show in a garage with a car.”

By Max King Cap There is a single painting that dominates this exhibition, a painting—if one can describe it so—of such singularity that it renders the other works as experiments, exercises, considerations. All are lesser and unworthy contenders. Its only and quite distant challenger is a mere study, of similar technique but diminished comparison.

Titled “States of Matter,” this exhibition is a collection of decorative abstractions. They indulge in a melding of metalwork and painting, employing silver leaf and black clay or iron filings and jute, to produce a series of bas-relief ornaments that neither excite nor awe.

The materiality of the compositions is indeed striking, as the numerous works luxuriate in a game of periodic table hide-and-seek; palladium over here and silver over there, yet the culmination of all this alchemy produces distinctly less than the sum of its parts. The ingredients of its craft fair conjurings are even set on a display table to prove that only pure constituents were used in the production of these grand baubles, as lacquered hardwood blocks (Pour Box and Red Pour Box, both 2021) appear to ooze gold as well as puns that become distinctly less humorous mere seconds later.

A pair of grand vertical works slathered in gold leaf, Moon Gold Mountain (2018) and Lemon Gold Sunlight with Rain (2017) both measure 102”x72” and are less suggestive of works of art than the doors of a local house of worship. The artist no doubt employs the lavish use of gold leaf as a critique of consumerist indulgence— particularly in the art market—as gilded age impersonation is a gratification that never seems to go out of style, but such a conceit rings hollow in a commercial art gallery, where sticking it to the man is less a consideration that crushing one’s competitors.

The lone painting of import—a grand princessing of its stunted little sister Mercury (2021) that features mother of pearl inlay—and the worthiest of these works is titled Flight (2021) and hangs at the end of the hall, nearly filling the wall at 96” X 132.” It is the work to which one’s eyes are immediately attracted and appropriately so: nothing else approaches its scale, confidence, complexity or conviction. It is also the only work that delivers the elemental exuberance at which the other paintings swing and so badly miss. Featuring ingredients that include gold leaf, lemon gold leaf, resin, iron filings, pigment, lacquer, and gilder’s clay on wood panel, it is materially complete and completely successful. The imagery is equally indulgent and complex, suggesting a cosmos richly envisioned, liquid and gaseous and full of elemental wonder. It is here that the members of the periodic table play hide-and-seek, combine and transform, and where the artist has most successfully captured the ideas that have been suggested but not fully realized in any of

Nancy Lorenz, Gold Pour Box, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles | Palm Beach. Bernardo Fleming, Dreaming in Smell, 2021, photo by Shana Nys Dambrot.Courtesy Institute for Art & Olfaction.

By Shana Nys Dambrot An art show without images or really even objects, Dreaming in Smell presents a suite of micro-stories that express themselves not in pictures or shapes, but in scents. It includes a smell so cool it’s like a breeze on the skin; a face-crinkling assault of mold and hairspray; incense over Led Zeppelin; a non-binary cop trying to be his authentic self. Few experience scent while in dream states, but artist Bernardo Fleming does. As an industry professional with International Flavors and Fragrances, he also has uncommon access

to collaborators with whom to create the scents he’s jotted down in his dream journal. Even though few have experienced this kind of oneiric odorific, we are all aware of the unique power of scent to prompt à la Proust sudden cognitive shifts, visceral reactions and mysterious emotions. Don’t be surprised if you encounter a memory that diverges from the artist’s story, because although the dreams belong to the artist, olfactory perception makes its own special way through everyone’s brain and simply finds what it finds there.

The aroma delivery system is soft and clean pastel-colored bed sheets and pillows (gently evoking bedtime); as you enter, the gallerist darts ahead and spritzes each with its appointed scent. It lingers there for you alone. A printed handout gives titles and summaries of the dream which gave rise to each crafted smell. Dentista—May 2016 (with Ricardo Moya) presents clean and cool sweet mint and medicine like a dentist’s office, which Fleming readily admits may not be a calming memory for everyone. But for him, it’s about his mother, the after-work smell of her, and the comfort and safety she provided. Dýer Mak’er—18 September 2021, Nijmegen (with Meabh McCurtin) reminds him of his youth as well, but the teenage part of burning incense and listening to trippy rock music and figuring out who you want to be. It’s sweet like cocoa butter and musky like palo santo and there are other things too, sharp and sour notes that seem to change or flicker as you try to capture them. It’s a liminal scent for a liminal time of life.

Cana (Cop)—6 October 2021, Nijmegen (with Birgit Sijbrands) offers some curious humor. In the dream, a policeman pulls the artist over in his car, but as he approaches, he’s partly dressed and made up as a woman; his breath smells intriguingly of wine and cigarettes. The scent does indeed evoke a kind of after-a-party-morning, but it also contains contradictory notes that the mind recognizes but can’t reconcile. Less pleasant but just as mysterious is Departures—23 February 2021, Nijmegen (with Anh Ngô Nguyen Viet), a meditation on old-lady perfume and moldy casino carpet. It’s pretty intense and

its own description admits it, promising “musky sillage” and “suffocating floral accords.” It’s hideous and marvelous and it repels but it cannot be ignored. This piece perhaps more than any other makes it clear that while not all scents are, strictly speaking, perfume, all scents do tell someone’s story.

By Jody Zellen For New York based multi-media artist Hank Willis Thomas, art and politics are intertwined. He draws from history, advertising (he made a series based on the Nike swoosh), and current events to create works that address issues of racial injustice, identity politics, and more recently, the meaning of freedom. With formal integrity and conceptual savvy, the impeccably crafted fabric pieces in the exhibition Another Justice: Divided We Stand are assembled from American flags and prison uniforms and literally “investigate the fabric of our nation.” Across the works, Thomas juxtaposes the red and white stripes from the American flag with prison garb in various colors. While works like A New Constellation and Imaginary Lines (all works 2021) separate and repurpose the stars and stripes, it is the text-based pieces carefully cut and collaged from prison uniforms and flags that are the most compelling.

The huge Land of the Free (orange), appears at first glance an intricate maze made from interlocking strips of fabric culled from prison uniforms and fashioned into a landscape of concentric shapes. As the eye traverses the composition and begins to separate the red/orange from the white, letters and then words—Land of the Free—begin to cohere. Once recognized, (akin to the duck rabbit visual illusion), it is difficult to unsee the letterforms. Thomas plays with this and other dualities like the fact that while America is considered “the land of the free,” it also imprisons more people than any country in the world. The reference to prisoners is more overt in Liberty (blue) and Capital (green) where the word “INMATE” from the uniforms is included at different corners of the compositions. Yet the words “Liberty” and “Capital” slowly emerge from the graphic abstractions, and Thomas’ juxtaposition becomes more evident.

The words entangled within the stripes of these works explore the meaning of freedom and liberty, as well as issues of discontent within our so-called “land of the free.” The artist questions—who are “we the people” and what does “justice” really mean—as he dices prison uniforms and dismembers flags, a gesture some would consider sacrilegious, as well as a violation of the proposed Flag Desecration Amendment. That aside, in his carceral tapestries, Thomas draws parallels between prison bars and the stripes on the flag, calling attention to injustices and inequities within prisons as contradictory to the supposed freedom “America” offers.

The notion of conflict continues in the gallery courtyard with Strike, a polished stainless-steel sculpture depicting two giant arms that burst forth from the gravel. One arm raises a police baton ready to strike, as the other attempts to hold it back—referencing the 1934 lithograph titled Strike Scene by Russian-American painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick—as a gleaming, symbolic protest.

Thomas investigates and reveals how justice really works in this “home of the brave” where people of color are disproportionately imprisoned. In a tense and potentially change-filled moment in history—burdened by a pandemic, continued racial tensions, and the effects of climate change—the artist employs American symbols to undermine what they supposedly represent.

Hank Willis Thomas, Liberty (blue), 2021, photo by Flying Studio, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles. Laura Lima, Communal Nest #7, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

By John David O’Brien Diaphanous panels of fabric, suspended from the ceiling appear to float throughout the main gallery, yet upon closer inspection these tulle panels reveal some areas that have been tightly stitched while others are allowed to billow freely. Color is insinuated with a very light touch and often one side of a composition is a different hue than the other. At regular intervals small chunks of dry ice are added, creating fleeting white twirls that come from the bottom of the composition and waft outwards. Each work in this group is numbered and titled Levianes. This title underscores the contradictions that this artist explores in the opposed meanings of ‘light’ in Spanish and ‘malicious’ in Portuguese. With Levianes #8 (all works 2021), two triangular sections are grafted together with a larger plane of pinkish tulle. Vaguely suggestive of lingerie, the addition of dry ice in the downturned triangles vaporously activates the space of threads, cloth and the viewer’s perception.

In a darker chamber behind the main gallery, all the works play off a starker palette. The sizes of the black, white and gray meshes vary, causing the light to skim between the layers. In Levianes #4, the overlay creates a moiré pattern, counterfeiting motion. The deftness of the needlework is rich but not exaggerated. The surface of Levianes #9 is festooned with small black triangles and the material at the bottom of the panel is free flowing, reminiscent of a shawl or monk’s hood. There is something both palpable and vaporous about these works, suspended from the ceiling, both fragile and mobile, creating their own atmosphere—floating in the air, clouded by evaporating swirls of dry ice, the sense of transformation from a solid to an airborne element is quite palpable.

Anchoring everything at the center of the main gallery is another series that uses woven straw, wood and thread that antithetically mirror the Levianes, constructions of billowing cones that expand into space. These numbered works are titled Communal Nest. Richly folded upon themselves, they suggest that winged creatures might

soon come to stay in these exotically fashioned abodes. Communal Nest #7 is perched in a skylight and offers the same temporary habitat for the avian mind as the others, and offers a horizontal array of multicolored wood elements as its base.

Four other works from 2019 are in the front gallery. For these portraits, the artist hired professional tailors to translate drawings of various figures who inspired her. Each portrait depicts an individual personality in abstraction. Details about the specific identities of each are secreted in the back of the framed art and therefore unknowable.

Laura Lima explores materials that are flexible and undergoing constant transformations. Her poetic invention is founded in a softly framed but finely tuned sensibility that plays with the distinction of things pliable, those in which we may wrap and cloak our physical selves and the textiles that simply have their own materiality.

Mary Weatherford, The Birds of Kilauea Point, 2021, Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

By Ezrha Jean Black Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense.

The title of her current show is “Mountains Mud Prisms Air.” Whatever the inspirational specifics, Weatherford has gone in for a deep dive. The linen surfaces are covered nearly edge to edge. Yet movement seems to animate the work as much as color. In Through the Trees (all works 2021), streaky whites slash through greens and aquamarines as if opening a piece of the sky. Working with Flashe pigments, Weatherford takes a light hand, applying color in even, transparent layers. In The Birds of Kilauea Point, pigments and brush strokes indicate wild flight before exuberant color (local seabird populations are in fact not exceptional in coloration). Here, a tube of blue neon bisects the picture plane, casting more shadow than glow on a greige mid-section, making a kind of diptych.

Elsewhere, Weatherford evinces a keen sense of the way art narrates an experience of nature in terms of both chromatic layering and composition—the subtle redirection and inversions of line or contour and coloration; how the interstitial event or phenomenon becomes crucial, the ‘main event’ a footnote. In Yellow Sun, for example, the sun becomes a sinking yellow ball caught beneath a snarl of madder rose and cresting amethyst passages. Or—still more willfully abstracted—consider the sun as a mere pebble lost at the center of a blurred ‘grid’ of rosy loops, hooks and arches roiling over a blue ground (Yellow Sun Far Away). Setting aside the ambitious scale of the largest works (which are mural-sized—133” x 287”), these mid-size panels are by far the most adventurous work exhibited here—not that they are uniformly successful. Air churns with indigo, cerulean, greens and scarlet, bisected by a green neon tube, but for all its technical prowess it feels more like a dress rehearsal for a section of one of the quasi-operatic mural panels—say, Below the Cliff—which makes sense if what we infer pictorially from this epic is a kind of myth composed of earth, water, fire and air; and, given that air and fire will assert their dominion on the beach and off, it does.

That the painting holds together as well as it does is almost miraculous. The similarly scaled Light Falling Like A Broken Chain; Paradise, which suspends two similar spirals, yellow and white, at the top-center of the panel, asks a bit more of the viewer, but seems to deliver less—as if buffered by a School of Paris restraint.

Weatherford includes two smaller panels with neon transversals (red and vertical for Signal; white and horizontal for Warm Weather), which both hearken back to the period immediately before and after her 2012 “Bakersfield Project” paintings (her first incorporating neon tubes) yet are clearly distinct from them—filling the panels, variegated yet slightly more monochromatic, self-contained yet richly evocative—masterpieces. Mountains and jungles are picturesque by definition; but as Weatherford knows quite well, from a cave wall one can make poetry.

By Bianca Collins When one enters the massive gallery at California African American Museum occupied by “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” it’s easy to be seduced by the cacophony of bold color, textures and geometric patterns. Power symbols appear and disappear like a nickelodeon on fabric, communicating in code such blights on American

Sanford Biggers, Harlem Blue, 2013, © Sanford Biggers.

history as lynching, blackface minstrelsy, and slave ships. In the hands of Sanford Biggers, quilts from the 19th century are desecrated, embellished and beautified, building up a material African American history within a conceptual framework.

In Sakura (2014), Biggers returns to his familiar meditation in the form of a tree (one of Biggers’ most well-known works, Blossom (2007) resides in permanent installation at the Brooklyn Museum). While the work’s title and bright blue tree with pink cherry blossoms undoubtedly alludes to the artist’s years spent in Japan—appreciating the kimono textiles, banzai and Buddhism—it also references America’s dark history of lynching Black citizens.

Biggers’ iconic Cheshire smile appears again and again. At times it is obscured in the depths of texture and pattern, or turned on its side as in Chesire (Guapa) (2014), at first appearing to be an image of a woman’s genitals. While the Cheshire grin might be most often associated with the mischievous cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it also refers to the more sinister history of blackface minstrelsy.

Patches with lotus flowers are found on many of these quilt works. Look closely, and you may realize that each petal’s form is made from the image of an aerial view of a slave ship. These images have been reappropriated from slave-trading manuals directing how to best pack human cargo for a cross-Atlantic trip. Early slave trade abolitionists got ahold of these manuals and mass distributed posters to show the atrocities of the practice, creating some of the first graphic propaganda programs against slavery—a practice Biggers continues with these works.

In whence/wince (2020), one of the largest pieces in the gallery and one of two new works in the exhibition, two red-white-and-blue quilts are sewn together. The phallic forms of four Greek columns are cut from the cloth and lie flaccid and defeated on the ground. A negative void of sizable volume, subtracted from quilts made from the colors of the United States flag, might represent the decline of democracy—a visual tale that history is doomed to repeat itself and fall to ruin like great Greek temples dedicated to undefeatable gods like Zeus.

The contested history that quilts acted as signposts for enslaved peoples on the Underground Railroad is perhaps not widely known. Such quilts are said to have contained secret messages that could only be deciphered by a community rooted in conversation, to direct their people to freedom. Through these new works in “Codeswitch,” Biggers becomes a late collaborator with the original creators of the quilts, continuing a long history rooted in orality and performance, shaped and defined by connections not always visible to everyone.

By Genie Davis In his new collection of powerful figurative images and mysterious abstract photographs, Brendan Lott proves he is both “Looking In and Looking Out.” The exhibition is curated across two rooms at Walter Maciel, allowing viewers to move between intriguing and intimate images of individuals observed through windows and the photographer’s quiet abstractions. This work continues Lott’s exploration of life in a pandemic, originally seen at the gallery last year in “Safer at Home.” Both series are poignant, haunting and poetic in composition and subject.

As the pandemic greatly altered lives, initially confining people in their homes and changing busy lifestyles to those more restrained, Lott’s camera followed. The result is an intimate look at these isolating circumstances, and the expression of human longing for connection. Balanced on the knife-edge of the voyeuristic, Lott photographed inhabitants viewed through the windows of an apartment building across from his own. The result are candid shots composed in painterly, even formal styling; narrative work that grew from Lott’s own isolation. They capture loneliness, boredom and solitude, as well as small gatherings or couplings as the world began slowly, gestationally to expand. Body language is sometimes languid, sensual; always deeply personal.

Lott’s work reveals a wide gamut of human emotion, even without seeing the faces of the individuals he depicts. A bedroom embrace blazes with the vivid red of a woman’s dress bent over a figure hidden beneath white bed sheets for a sleepy hug in “September 12, 2021, 6:14 am.” The New Year, marked with glittering holiday lights reflects on a man holding a microphone, clad in silver spandex leggings in January 1, 2021, 1:57am. The party has just begun, or possibly ended. “April 20, 2021, 4:22pm” reveals two iPhones charging in a kind of technological intimacy, while a lone woman, apparently partially nude, is concealed behind a concrete post. Her hand holds a cigarette, drooping gracefully outside her balcony window. She appears almost subsumed by the concrete around her, held in by it, perhaps in need of personal recharging and companionship.

In one work, we see a lone figure sprawling face down, only legs showing, on a rumpled bed; in another, a woman leans down to tenderly kiss or whisper to a seated man in a bright jacket. She is reaching in, but he is immobile, closer to the green leaves of a house plant than the woman. Each image invites viewers to explore or imagine the story behind it; to relate, to remember both the feelings of anxiety and fear, and the growing sense of everyday comfort from others.

Exhibited along with these narrative visual stories are Lott’s closeups of urban streets, from the trash on the sidewalk to the fading and peeling advertisements plastered on crumbling walls. Human connection—and the longing for it—appears more resilient than these vestiges of city landscape.

Brendan Lott, April 20, 2021, 4:22pm, 2021. Courtesy Walter Maciel Gallery.

By Peter Frank It has been a while since David Rubin ended his long and distinguished career as an institutional curator, but he continues to write and curate—and continues to produce art as well. Rubin had put aside his youthful artmaking once his curatorial direction took over, but began drawing again about twenty years ago, when the stimulus of constant exposure to artists—especially postwar American artists and their spiritual quests—finally became too great to resist. Since then, Rubin has concentrated on drawing media, sometimes subject to photographic documentation—intimate media indicative of the role, part creative, part intellectual, that he has played in the American art world.

Since moving back to his native Los Angeles Rubin has concentrated on his drawing, refining his approach so that his images consist entirely of myriad small bubble-like forms strung together in various tendrilous shapes. They suggest microscopic aquatic protozoan life, not least in their lyrical fluidity, but also concatenations of heavenly bodies—stars and detritus alike—into incipient galaxies. This bridging of the micro- and macrocosmic is not accidental; such cosmological harmonizing comes naturally to Rubin in the wake of the metaphysical revelations provided him by the likes of Lee Krasner, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Al Held, and Clare Falkenstein. Even the seemingly mundane imagery of the late Martha Alf has informed Rubin’s transcendent insight, translating the monumentality of her humble subjects and use of light into linear form—what he considers automatic writing. In this regard, the overall title Rubin gives this series—“Pearls of Wisdom”—is not a boast but an homage; the

David S. Rubin, Pearls of Wisdom (3), 2020, Courtesy California State University Northridge, West Gallery.

wisdom refined into pearlescent little beads is that of his influences and mentors.

Rubin’s Date Drawings—actually photographs of, among other things, drawings—take their cue from On Kawara, one of the earliest and “simplest” conceptual artists. Kawara’s ongoing project was the noting of date (“January 19 1967”) and/or time (“Today I awoke at 11:08 am”), refining existence into the perceptual system of temporal measurement. The Date Drawings are rather more voluble, posing the sprightly articulations of Rubin’s hand with hard and fast objects such as an alarm clock and a blood pressure monitor. Rubin marks every day with this photographed set-up, making sure to post each one on social media. In this way he both actualizes and obviates—and personalizes—the performative aspect of Kawara’s method.

Rubin also regularly posts his Pearls of Wisdom, but those works are not photographic or conceptually disembodied. There is pleasure and resonance to be gained by seeing them before your eyes. Rubin’s touch is tender and exacting, like that of a manuscript illuminator, and his colors glow as they rest on paper. The small survey at CSUN provided a captivating IRL experience with these drawings. It also gave Rubin a chance to make prints of some of his Date Drawing photos, and, designed as they may have been for dematerialized media, they charmed even more from the wall.

By Sarah Sargent Curated by former MOCA LA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, “Ruth Asawa: All is Possible” at David Zwirner, New York expands our understanding of this remarkable artist by presenting a selection of lesser-known pieces together with her iconic sculptures. Asawa’s drawings, in particular, with their scenes of family members, chairs, flowers and plants, describe the rich life of creativity Asawa enjoyed despite the prodigious responsibility of raising six children.

These tranquil pieces reveal so much about Asawa’s practice, character and life. Initially, they may appear a departure from her sculptures, but line is the unifying element. Asawa’s crisp botanical sketches seem to emerge from one assertive line and the single wire from which each sculpture is created, evokes a line. Asawa embraced this, likening fashioning her sculptures to drawing in air. In her hands line becomes a dazzling filament that bends and turns to form a metal loop or glides boldly across a sheet of paper to render petals and leaves.

Suspended from the ceiling, Asawa’s sculptures evoke the organic—jellyfish bells or seaweed stalks, a cascade of ruffles. Asawa weaves the wire into her distinctive looping mesh to produce a continuous surface which includes interior and exterior shapes.

Eight sculptures hang together in one room. The interplay between the shapes and forms of the works commands the space. One is drawn to how the sculptures inhabit the air, claiming the negative space around them and expanding beyond their physical boundaries to include the shadows they cast.

With her drawn meanders, Asawa takes a linear pattern and repeats it across the page in a similar manner to her sculptures, building upon a single motif to create, through repetition, something substantial. For Asawa, the repetitive nature of the work was possibly meditative, providing a portal into deeper concentration and taking her out of her busy maternal reality for a time.

Over 50 bisque-fired lifemasks of friends and family members confront you en masse from one wall. Beautifully rendered in terra cotta, white, bone and black, this assemblage of humanity is profoundly moving.

Asawa operated in the traditionally feminine realm of weaving and sketching domestic scenes, creating work of remarkable heft and muscle. She was no wuss. Her sculptural work required enormous patience and stoicism, as entwining the metal wire was a tedious process that shredded her fingers. She carved enormous doors from redwood planks that have such simple, yet imposing beauty, that they rival the most magnificent bronze versions.

Continuing to make art as the house filled with kids must have been exceedingly challenging. Asawa’s work lent itself to being made on the fly during stolen moments, using simple at-hand materials. She was ideally suited for this, having, in addition to her obvious artistic gifts, the fortitude and resourcefulness, forged in the internment camps she inhabited as a teenager, to make the best out of any situation. That this paradigm of inventive multitasking also achieved such transcendent beauty, shows us that for her, all really was possible.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.055, Hanging Asymmetrical NineInterlocking Bubbles) c. 1955. Courtesy David Zwiner / New York.