ARTILLERY/ Digital Issue 1: BEYOND THE GALLERY

Beyond the Gallery MAR/APR 2021

Momenta

by Lauren Kasmer

January 4—May 9, 2021 www.laurenkasmersmomenta.com

Momenta by Lauren Kasmer is a solo multimedia exhibition in five parts, presented online by El Camino College Art Gallery.

Still image of the Salton Sea, as seen in the film Mount and Equipoise installation.

A.M. ROUSSEAU

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MOLLY SEGAL Marrow Sucker On view thru April 2, 2021

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Presented at Wönzimer 621 South Olive Street Los Angeles

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Table of Contents VOLUME 15, ISSUE 4, MARCH-APRIL, 2021

16 Beyond the Gallery F E AT U R E S Virtual Care Lab - by kelly rappleye SF's 8-bridges - by barbara morris Jillian Mayer's Slumpies - by daniel austin warner Art Workers' Rights - by alexia lewis

22 24 30 32

C O LU M N S ART BRIEF: Trump's "Beautiful" - by stephen j. goldberg DECODER: Eccentricity/Diversity - by zak smith SIGHTS UNSCENE: Frieze LA - by lara jo regen PROVENANCE: Lakewood, CA - by c. kaye rawlings BUNKER VISION: Talking About Trees - by skot armstrong ASK BABS: Desert X and Politics

14 18 20 34 36 37

OBITS: Liz Young; Helen Rae; Van Arno

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C O N T I N U E D

»

ON THE COVER: Wheatpaste Pink Lady in Bandra, Mumbai, model for 2020 installation “Don’t Mess With Me” at the Asian Art Museum. Photo by artist Jas Charanjiva.

THIS PAGE: ABOVE: Amy Sherald in her studio painting Michelle Obama portrait, from Black Art: In the Absence of Light, courtesy HBO; RIGHT: Jillian Mayer, Slumpie 62 Pray Chair, 2017, photo by Signe Ralkov at Ofelia Plads (Coppenhagen).

NEXT PAGE: TOP: Illustration by Zak Smith for his DECODER column; BOTTOM: Karen Carson, Butterfly, 2018,Courtesy GAVLAK. Reviewed by Ezrha Jean Black.

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Table of Contents

From the Editor Dear Reader,

18 D E PA R T M E N T S SHOPTALK: LA Art News - by scarlet cheng FILM: Black Art: In the Absence of Light - by scarlet cheng POEMS: eve wood, john tottenham COMICS: Flash Matta - butcher & wood RECONNOITER: Jonathan Hepfer - by emily wells

12 16 37 45 46

R E V I E W S JOHN AHEARN; RIGOBERTO TORRES @ Charlie James FU SITE @ Kylin Gallery KAREN CARSON @ GAVLAK HAMISHI FARAH @ Chateau Shatto LUDOVICA GIOSCIA @ Baert Gallery AMANDA WALL @ The Cabin CAROLINE KENT @ Kohn Gallery DAVID HICKS @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery TRISTAN ESPINOZA @ Los Angeles Municipal Gallery JESSIE MAKINSON @ François Ghebaly

40 40 41 41 42 42 43 43 44 44

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It’s been a year now since our world started shrinking; lockdowns and quarantining made our worlds smaller. It was a foregone conclusion that the magazine would also start shrinking. One irony though, is that we gained two editorial pages. But this gain was a loss because we would no longer be running our popular society column, Roll Call, which consisted of snapshots of gallerygoers at art openings.

The photo collage was unique for any art magazine.

Artillery featured the two-page color spread in the very first issue, and it was in every subsequent issue—that’s 15 years of LA art openings. People loved looking at the pictures, spotting “art stars,” friends, and maybe checking to see if they were featured themselves. It was usually the first page Artillery fans turned to when they picked up a copy. Who could resist?

The cheeky column featured local gallery openings along with museum galas, international art fairs and fancy benefits.

We would accept pictures from local photogs, but mainly it was just me and my photographer, Lynda. We went to all the events, rarely missing a weekend. Sometimes it felt like drudgery. Who wants to work on Saturday night? Even though most gallery openings ended before 8, there were the after-parties, the after-after parties, the dinners and the bars that you might meet up at later.

While I did dread going to the openings more than I care to publicly admit, there were some openings that were great fun.

The most entertaining were the well-attended events, which would mainly be museum openings or fancy benefits—there was definitely an improvement in the food and bev department.

You could also choose to enjoy the anonymity and easily get “lost” in the crowd. Once we got there, Lynda and I would immediately make a beeline to the bar.

The main attraction at the tony openings was to hopefully get all the VIP's mugs. Flitting about, drink in one hand, a cheese breadstick in the other, getting tipsier as the night air turned cool and the music got louder—the Dutch courage would make it easier to ask the celebs for a picture. By then, everyone else was feeling good, and might even be hamming it up in front of the camera. Half the fun was being outside, drinking and smoking and laughing—who cared about the art?

Sometimes I didn’t even see the show! (I confess.)

It was fun mingling with a normally stuffy crowd, who would be getting a bit loose as the evening wore on. Stopping to share a puff with Henry Taylor or James Hayward wouldn’t be out of the norm. One time I dropped my full wine glass and it shattered to pieces right in front of Hammer Director Annie Philbin. She swiftly grabbed someone to clean up the mess and just brushed it off before going on her merry way.

"Beyond the Gallery" is our theme in this issue, where we look at new ways the art world may change. Things can never stay the same, which can be a harsh reality to accept. We know there can’t be art celebrations anymore, at least not in the near future. Should this epoch be something we learn from? I think and hope so, but it’s always fun to look back.

parrasch heijnen Ricci Albenda

Mildred Howard

Peter Alexander

Xylor Jane

Anne Appleby

Rosy Keyser

Edith Baumann

Forrest Kirk

Forrest Bess

Maysha Mohamedi

Sean Bluechel

Deborah Remington

James Case-Leal

Charles Ross

Christofer Churchill

Alexis Smith

Tony DeLap

Joan Snyder

Mark Gonzales

Daniel Turner

Alteronce Gumby

G. William Webb

Marcia Hafif

Yui Yaegashi

1326 South Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90023 info@parraschheijnen.com | +1 (323) 943-9373 | @parraschheijnen

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C O N T R I B U TO R S

Scarlet Cheng writes regularly about the visual arts, film and culture. In past lives she's been associate editor and picture editor at Time-Life Books, and managing editor at Asian Art News (Hong Kong).

In this life she is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and teaches film history at Otis College of Art & Design.

Alexia Lewis is an LA-based visual and performance artist and digital nomad. Her interests as an artist, writer and nightlife lover, lie in creating space for radical honesty, for artists and for Black women and girls.

Barbara Morris is a SF Bay Area– based writer and artist. Morris has written for Artweek, Art Ltd., Squarecylinder, and Art Practical, among other publications. She holds an MFA in painting from UC Berkeley, and is passionate about feminist concerns and artwork that challenges racial and gender stereotypes.

Kelly Rappleye is a curator, researcher, and arts writer based out of Los Angeles and Glasgow. She is currently completing the MA Contemporary Art Theory program at Goldsmiths, UOL. Her research and curatorial practice focus on critical media studies, urban studies, psychogeography, racial capitalism and pathology.

Daniel Austin Warren is a screenwriter and poet living in Los Angeles. His writing about art and culture has appeared in LA Weekly, Flaunt, among other publications.

S TA F F

Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher

EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Emily Wells - associate editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - proof/copy editor Dave Shulman - graphic design Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Scarlet Cheng, John David O’Brien, Tucker Neel

COLUMNISTS Skot Armstrong, Stephen J. Goldberg, Doug Harvey, Kelly Rappleye, C. Kaye Rawlings, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Anthony Ausgang, Lane Barden, Ezrha Jean Black, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Bianca Collins, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Max King Cap, Angela Groom, Tom Knechtel, Alexia Lewis, Richard May, Christopher Michno, Yxta Maya Murray, Barbara Morris, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, William J. Simmons, Cole Sweetwood, Avery Wheless, Eve Wood, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, John Haber, Sarah Sargent

PHOTOGRAPHERS Lynda Burdick, Rainer Hosch, Tyler Hubby, Eric Minh Swenson

ADMINISTRATION Anna Bagirov - sales director Mitch Handsone - new media director Kelly Rappleye - director of development & digital engagement Dusty Rose; Josh Neidorf - digital production interns

ADVERTISING Anna Bagirov - print sales Mitch Handsone - web sales Artillery, PO Box 26234, LA, CA 90026 213.250.7081, editor@artillerymag.com advertising: 323.926.4646, anna@artillerymag.com; editorial:

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GOLDEN HOUR

California Photography from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art February 7 – May 9, 2021

Local Access is a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by LACMA as part of the Art Bridges + Terra Foundation Initiative. @LANCASTERMOAH

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IMAGE CREDIT: Susan Ressler, System Development Corporation from the series Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1980, gelatin silver print, 11 × 14 in., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund, © Susan Ressler, digital image courtesy of the artist and Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California

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S H O P TA L K

Art Fairs Aren't Giving Up Delays, delays, and more delays. Last year Art Basel rather optimistically thought it would proceed with its Miami edition in December. That was finally cancelled when they came to their senses. I think there were online viewing rooms and talks. I think I even attended one or two talks but, like many of you, I’m Zoomed out and only Zoomed in to a limited number of online meetings, talks and virtual galleries.

They are going ahead with Art Basel Hong Kong on May 21–23, and the flagship fair in Basel has been moved to Sept. 23–26. The Hong Kong plan is a puzzler, not only because of the hazards of flying for people from many countries, but they currently do NOT allow nonresidents to enter Hong Kong, with a few exceptions such as those “approved by the Hong Kong SAR government to carry out anti-epidemic work.”Will they have an Art Basel exception? That would be imprudent.

Hong Kong has kept its COVID infection and mortality rate exceptionally low, and you’d think they would want to keep it that way. An old friend of mine, a long-term resident there, told me they were saved by everyone immediately putting on masks in public—they had had SARS and flu risks before, so knew the drill.

In the past year art fairs have slipped in importance as sales channels for galleries, from third to sixth place, according to Artsy’s Gallery Insights Report 2021. First on the list is the old school way—outreach to existing clients,

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as before. Second are websites, which overtook walk-ins; and third is social media. Of course those rankings are no surprise since virtual interactions have usurped real-life interactions. Also, the report says, the marketing budget for social media by the average gallery increased 92% over the previous year, so clearly the rise of social media as a sales tool is fueled by investment in social media strategies. Lots more fascinating stuff in this report; check it out at https://pages.artsy.net/rs/609-FDY-207/images/ Artsy-Gallery-Insights-2021-Report.pdf.

We did not have our January/February fairs this year, and Frieze LA has set a new date for the week of July 26.

Frieze LA used to take place in February, if you can think as far back as to early 2020. I must admit I barely can, my brain somewhat addled by Quarantine Fog, but I seem to remember it was a good one, and that it was freezing cold as I explored the Back Lot for art installations and performances. I have heard that the next Frieze LA will NOT take place at Paramount Studios—I don’t see this online, but heard it from a gallerist who has previously participated in the fair. Paramount is a notoriously expensive venue, not just for the space, but because of the amount of security that has to be hired. Where will Frieze LA pop up next? We have some amazing locations in LA, right? Felix has done remarkably well at the Roosevelt Hotel, and ALAC had a comeback last year at the Hollywood Athletic Club.

BY

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

Clockwise from top-left: Desert X installation view, Nancy Baker Cahill, Revolutions, 2019, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X. Desert X installation view, Cara Romero, Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits Of The Desert, 2019, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X. Desert X installation view, John Gerrard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017, 2017-2019, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X. Opposite page: Art Basel Miami Beach, 2019

Desert X is Back Desert X put off its February opening and has just announced rescheduled dates of March 12–May 16, 2021, focused in the Coachella Valley. Since it’s all outdoors, you can drive around to visit the art installations in your own safety bubble, your car.

They’ve cut back on the number of artists and the geographic reach of the installation pieces—due in part to financial and city partnership factors. Last year the city of Palm Springs dropped their support due to the launching of Desert X AlUla, held in Saudi Arabia and funded by the Saudi government. Several Desert X board members including Ed Ruscha resigned in protest, citing that country’s human rights abuses and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

This year there will be 13 artists from eight countries—four of them based in New York but only one from California, Kim Stringfellow, long known for her research and work on the “jackrabbit homesteads” made possible by land grants from the Federal government. She will be recreating a version of one of these homesteads—the real ones dot Highway 62 as you drive out from Joshua Tree. (Their previous events hosted 16 artists in 2017, 19 participants in 2019.)

Each project was commissioned by artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curator César García-Alvarez, and most of the artists traveled to the area to do research and visit sites.

Wakefield believes the new configuration is better for visitors.

“Geographically, it’s more compressed,” he has said, “and there are fewer artists, but at the same time it represents a much greater diversity of voices, with themes of social justice

and environmental equity running throughout in significant and powerful ways.”

There seems to be more local community engagement, from sending art kits to local schoolchildren for separate projects by Judy Chicago and Oscar Murillo, to eliciting words from women’s groups to be featured in Ghada Amer’s installation in Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage. Since Desert X’s launch in 2017, there has been criticism that they did not engage the community enough, and I’ve seen pieces that were insensitive to place.

Take that Richard Prince installation of blown-up Instagram posters featuring a dysfunctional extended family—presumably, one located in Desert Hot Springs where the installation was. The installation was vandalized soon after the opening, so it was shut down for most of that edition.

Attendance is free, and a map of the installations will be posted starting March 12 on desertx.org and via the Desert X 2021 app.

Kudos!

Let’s be thankful the world is still spinning, COVID vaccines are arriving, and artists are still making work and getting support for making work. Kudos to Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Rafa Esparza who won USA Artists grants this year— they are two of 60 across 10 creative disciplines to become a 2021 USA Fellow. It’s a terrific grant given through a nomination process, accompanied by an unrestricted $50,000 award.

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Architecture Must Be “Beautiful” According to Trump

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A R T

B R I E F

Editor's Note: On February 24, (the night we went to press) it was reported that Biden signed an executive order reversing the Trump order that required that new federal buildings should be "beautiful." See the online Art Brief column for a further update.

Above: Trump Tower in New York City, 721 Fifth Avenue.

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Former President Donald Trump left office in disgrace, having incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021, the day Joe Biden was to be certified by Congress as the winner of the 2020 election. Trump made a speech to his crowd of MAGA misfits promising, in the style of cult leader Jim Jones, (although unlike Jones, Trump did not drink the Kool-Aid) to march with them on the Capitol building.

Instead, Trump wimped out and watched the deadly assault on TV from the comfort of the White House while failing to send out the National Guard.

In view of the horrific acts of the last months of the Trump regime, a federal architectural executive order (EO) may seem to be a somewhat trivial matter.

However, the EO Trump issued on December 21, 2020, was part of a number of so-called “midnight regulations” promulgated during his final days, including a series of regulations issued by the EPA stripping Americans of many vital environmental protections.

The "beautiful buildings" EO had been in the planning stages for months, despite criticism from many architectural professionals. Trump favors neoclassical architecture, including such landmarks as the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial and the Capitol building (which he caused to be nearly destroyed). What seems to have ticked off Trump was the federal courthouse building spree over the last 20 years that gravitated toward modernist and postmodernist styles. (Trump is quite familiar with courthouses, having been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits.)

Ironically, Trump didn’t seem to grasp that many of his own glass skyscrapers were built in the modernist style, although few architects would consider the Trump Tower an improvement over the previous building on the 5th Avenue site—the Bonwit Teller building—an Art Deco gem that Trump rushed to demolish before the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission could save it. Trump Towers are late-stage modernist glass walled boxes—completely bland and forgettable.

Trump yearned for monumental and imposing government buildings in the neoclassical style favored by Hitler. The Führer’s architect Albert Speer’s massive Reich Chancellery and other planned, but never built, grandiose structures were intended to glorify the regime—matching the preferred style of dictators such as Mussolini, whose hideous white marble Victor Emmanuel II National Monument scars the center of the Eternal City.

The Trump EO states that “Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.” The order does not define “beautify.” “Beautiful” is frequently used in Trump’s limited vocabulary—he famously boasted that his Mar-a-Lago chef baked the most “beautiful” chocolate cake served at a 2017 banquet for China's President Xi Jinping.

The EO specifically states that the “Brutalist” style is disfavored—maybe the one thing that is sensible. The dreadful Brutalist FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue are falling apart and should be demolished as soon as possible.

However, the other specified verboten style in the order—Decontructivism— would rule out almost anything designed by starchitect Frank Gehry, including his recently opened Dwight Eisenhower monument on the National Mall.

The day the EO was released, the prestigious American Institute of Architects was ready with a press release which “unequivocally” opposed the order and said members were “appalled with the administration’s decision to move forward with the design mandate” one month prior to the end of the Trump government. AIA members sent the White House over 11,000 letters condemning the EO. Fortunately, President Biden should be able to nullify the Trump order with a skillfully drafted order of his own, although it may take a while, since his priorities are to marshal a federal government assault on the COVID pandemic, something Trump utterly failed to do. However, on the day after Trump’s EO was promulgated he appointed four new members to the US Commission of Fine Arts, making the commission completely white and male. It may be hard to reverse these appointments since they are for four-year terms and members may only be removed for cause.

The arts commission has wide-ranging sway over federal architectural designs.

Three of the members Trump appointed to the commission are ardent traditionalists. One of them, Perry Guillot, a landscape architect, had a hand in Melania Trump’s widely panned renovation of the White House Rose Garden. Another architect, Rodney Mims Cook of Atlanta, specializes in what can only be described as plantation-style architecture—think Tara from Gone With the Wind—fitting right into Trump’s retro-vision of how to Make America Great Again.

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Black Art: In the Absence of Light

BY SCARLET CHENG

F I L M

Amy Sherald in her studio painting Michelle Obama portrait, courtesy HBO

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Black Art: In the Absence of Light, is a most timely and info-packed HBO documentary, briskly propelled by terrific interviews with artists, curators and educators. It opens by introducing us to a landmark exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” that opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976 and toured the country. The curator was David Driskell, then a professor at Fisk University, and an artist in his own right.

The doc opens with vintage TV footage of Driskell interviewed about the exhibition by Tom Brokaw on the Today show, then quickly moves to the larger topic: contemporary Black artists in America. The exhibition focused on the period from 1750 to 1950, and in the doc we hear from those who have emerged since then, such as Radcliffe Bailey, Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold and Kara Walker—and also Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, the two artists who painted the official portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, respectively. These are artists who have made it into museum shows and gallery representation, and on their own terms.

One common thread is the legacy of Black artists and how new generations have been inspired by those who came before. Take Marshall, who studied at the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art & Design) and took classes with Betye Saar and Charles White. Marshall realized that he not only wanted to be an artist, but one who addresses Black life—the subject of his large tableaux are events and moments of Black life, as we saw at his “Mastry” show at MOCA LA in 2017. Ralph Ellison and his novel Invisible Man have also been an important inspiration, he says, “This condition of being seen and not seen simultaneously.”

Now and then, the film returns to the “Two Centuries” exhibition history, including mention of a Hilton Kramer review in The New York Times that questioned the quality of art in the show. Driskell says in that long-ago interview that this was to be expected from a mainstream writer, “These persons are not familiar with what we might refer to as the Black experience.” Driskell is also interviewed more recently, and provides more astute observations.

I have two bones of contention with this doc, and one is the title. Why is “the absence of light” especially relevant?

It is mentioned at the end by one artist, but hardly the leitmotif carried throughout. The other is why it needs to open with Tom Brokaw—literally, his is the first face we see—as if the audience needed the credential of whiteness to validate the subject matter.

The good news is that this is a good moment for Black artists. They are getting long overdue recognition and even being actively courted by commercial galleries. Sherald sees the current enthusiasm as a kind of “gold rush,” but adds, “I say it’s because we’re making some of the best work, the most relevant work.”

BLACK ART: IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT Directed and produced by Sam Pollard Currently airing on HBO

Eccentricity Isn’t Diversity

BY ZAK SMITH

D E C O D E R

Illustration by Zak Smith

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So I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would jabber on about perspective when his wife told him to come to bed.

Artists’ assistants, art dealers and nieces who move in after strokes and ladder accidents all report that artists are weird and ask them to do weird things. This is true: I know multiple people who kept fat rabbits and they were all artists.

But y’know what? If someone asks me about my cherry-peach homemade soda I tell them how I spent two weeks vomiting because of whatever I was eating or drinking and then so my friend was like “Here, look, you need to be drinking more cherry juice and peach juice because of your blood type” and I don’t know but, importantly, this friend was hot. And also she was one of the only people I knew who’d got consistently hotter over the decade I’d known her—so I was inclined to take her dietary advice. And now I make this three-bottle drink and I vomit much less. You tell someone that and they don’t shake their head and go “Oh man, you artists!” they go “Oh, shit, that makes sense.” And, really: who doesn’t want to look at a fat rabbit?

You know who else is notoriously eccentric? Rich people. Also children. I don’t actually think the popular theory is true: that rich people are all pretentious and think they’re artists and artists are immature and act like children and children are too stupid to act normal—I think there’s a simpler reason we’re all eccentric: we don’t have day jobs.

None of us have to get used to Quizno’s because it's the only thing to eat that’s walking distance from the office, none of us have to not wear things with Spider-Man on them, none of us come home every night at six far too destroyed to even consider building a birdhouse out of books we already read and didn’t like.

People would like to be eccentric and don’t, by and large, begrudge artists the right to be just that (unless they’re related to us). They would like to have the time and, especially, the freedom—or, freedoms, rather. Children have to beg their parents for so many things but have the freedom of having no responsibility; the rich have the freedom of having no morality; the artists have the freedom of not having to be reliable or productive—at least the way capitalism usually defines these things. Eccentricity does not reveal the eccentric person: it reveals the extent to which everyone is kept in line by their obligations. We all begin multifarious and then are narrowed.

Eccentricity isn’t diversity. Diversity is: everyone belongs! Eccentricity is: No one does! You can’t campaign on eccentricity. Non-cooperation hasn’t got much of a ground game. Yet everyone dreams of not cooperating. That’s why even people who aren’t eccentric like art: it shows them what things would be like if they didn’t have to make sense to other people. Diversity, which capitalism is learning to get along with, is: I belong here in Los Angeles, but also to the hidden and discontinuous community of the Jewish Diaspora. Eccentricity is: I belong here in Los Angeles, but also to the hidden and discontinuous community of people who love the tiny miniature-glass fronted worlds of Joseph Cornell.

I have more to talk about with the other citizens of this invisible and polyglot empire than with any other group I might more easily name.

We Cornell-ists love small secrets, and the spider-magic of tiny spaces.

Just as every zoo is nothing more than a catalog of ways to survive, the museum is a catalog of ways to be human—of what we’re like when we aren’t obligated to be something for someone. This antelope thing with a butt like a zebra? It had to be that way. This iron disk, tilted at an angle, with the details in copper wire? That is someone’s heart’s desire.

This is what’s suppressed by all our surface similarity.

Francisco Toledo, La Escalera, 1976, Drypoint, aquatint and roulette on wove paper, Gift of the Estate of Dr. and Mrs. James L. Sheehy, © Estate of Francisco Toledo.

Aquí y Allá A VIRTUAL EXHIBITION SERIES FEATURING ARTISTS FROM THE FISHER MUSEUM PERMANENT COLLECTION

Francisco Toledo Carlos Almaraz Laurie Litowitz James & Alexandra Brown Jesus Lugo Demián Flores Roberto Gil de Montes Elsa Flores George Moore Selma Guisande Marta Palau Eduardo Leyva Herrera Rufino Tamayo Einar & Jamex de la Torre BEGINNING SPRING 2021

fisher.usc.edu/aquiyalla

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S I G H T S

U N S C E N E

Scene from Frieze LA, Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, 2020

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The Artist's Destination Since 1993.

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GETTING TOGETHER, APART Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection

BY KELLY RAPPLEYE The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness, collaboration, participation and community abound across the VCL, which describes itself as “a series of creative experiments in remote togetherness” and offers a plethora of trans-disciplinary workshops that live up to this mantra.

The homespun, early-internet aesthetic of the VCL’s virtual home base invites experimentation, with bright colors, endearingly mismatched and haphazardly placed images that maintain a consistently welcoming vibe. VCL is created and run by two kaleidoscopic artists and cultural workers—filmmaker and sound artist Sara Suárez and digital arts virtuoso Alice Yuan Zhang—in partnership with NAVEL, the vibrant community arts space and nonprofit that has been developing a presence in DTLA since 2014.

While COVID brought a sudden surge of digital alternatives across arts and cultural platforms, and long overdue attention to digital and expanded practice art, the VCL seems to have estab-

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lished a digital arts platform uniquely suited for longevity. VCL’s primary focus is cultivating inclusive publics and experimenting with non-commodified ways of getting together. Serial, processual community events and workshops, like the monthly Organizers Hour for local activists, provide a consistency and regularity that pushes against the fractal, alienating temporality of internet immediacy and the constant onslaught of “newness” and real-time engagement demanded by social media platforms.

Every Saturday (2 p.m. PST), Kenny Zhao takes VCL participants on “field trips” to explore and learn from community spaces on the internet, with guided discussion exploring what kind of social glue holds each together. Zhao describes these events as experiments in “collaborative ideation,” a concept delineated by author-activist Adrienne Maree Brown. Brown’s theoretical framework for activism is inspired by LA sci-fi icon Octavia Butler, and fights to reclaim creativity, imagination and radical dreams of futurity from the jaws of capitalism, colonialism and the cult of neoliberal individualism, through collective creative practice.

The VCL’s digital infrastructure is spread across a home web-

site, a VCL Discord page, and a profusion of inventive, horizontal digital platforms—including withfriends.com, yourworldoftext. com, Twitch streaming service, theonline.town, padlet.com, and are.ne (visual notepad)—among an array of more familiar tools to facilitate modes of remote group collaboration and live participation. On the VCL homesite, the community can access an events Calendar of upcoming “Gatherings,” and a digital archive chronicling past VCL projects; a weekly “Lab Hour” invites community ideation and experimentation. A selection of hand-drawn talismans with flashing collaged imagery bids visitors to enter the VCL “Portal,” each object linking to a different ongoing digital, participatory arts project.

One project created by Kehkashan Khalid (username) is inspired by sci-fi writer and leftist darling Ursula Le Guin’s theory of flash fiction as a thought experiment. The Untold Edition— Collective Diary (2020–21) hosted on Padlet (collaborative digital notepad), displays a watercolor map of the world with sprinkled geotags marking doodles, short fiction musings and snapshots uploaded by contributors across the globe to produce a collective diary.

Through another “Portal,” Poetry Soup (2020), a Frank O’Hara poem is accompanied by interactive audience prompts that invite users to create a visual poem in a collage-style webpage.

One highlight of the Lab, Sites of Passage (2020), is a digital video piece by artist Lucy Kerr that was produced in a Gathering, and includes an audience score for ongoing remote participation.

The piece explores the themes of embodiment, disconnectivity and the alone-together nature of socializing-by-Zoom. In the

hours-long long piece, the eerie voyeuristic eye of the Zoom lens is obscured by a distinct fogginess over the domestic settings, reminding us how similar each of these spaces becomes in the seriality of the Zoom box. Bodies move in and out of the frames performing the mundane daily tasks, while blurred faces read monotonous, matter-of-fact accounts of the rituals and routines that occupy the expansive banality of home-time in lockdown.

Lingering questions run through the varied VCL projects—How can art practice provide a critical social realm to imagine creative modes of collectivity outside the auspices of commodification, borders and capital? Can digital communities dream of alternate futures to the apocalyptic one we seem to be careening towards?

The VCL invites submissions for community-led projects centered on “Care As Practice,” defined as an ongoing project that engages active participation through remote access. This concept of collective care traces to notions of radical care in Black feminism that posits a lived, habitual ethos of communal responsibility and the cultivation of collective nurturing practices as the antidote to neoliberal atomization and alienation. Scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa conceives of a “triptych of care—labor/ work, affect/affections, ethics/politics” in which care is the “concrete work of maintenance in interdependent worlds.” These dimensions are interwoven throughout VCL, where an insistence on the real presence of the disembodied other in digital space cultivates a digital practice of mutual care. This paradoxical tension of disembodied collectivity seems to be where the Virtual Care Lab situates itself most comfortably.

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Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion Rendering 2020 © Asian Art Museum and wHY

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8-BRIDGES Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond

BY BARBARA MORRIS

Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save the date for a panel discussion featuring the directors of three cutting-edge Bay Area arts venues: Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the new director of UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Alison Gass, who has assumed leadership at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José (ICA) and Jay Xu, Director of the Asian Art Museum since 2008.

With these museums unable to open their doors to visitors these days, all have had to become very creative. Xu referred to “turning the museum inside out” when describing a trio of murals visible from the street, all newly created by Asian American feminist artists. Gass turned the entire exterior of the ICA into an exhibition space with a message aimed at getting out the vote.

And Widholm is excited by the potential of a large outdoor video-projection screen, recently used to display photographs by Catherine Opie. This was the first in a series of three terrific panel talks, each featuring a trio of diverse museum directors.

So what is 8-bridges, the driving force behind the panel discussion? Named for the eight bridges connecting the Bay Area, it is the brainchild of a group of SF-based art leaders whose casual conversations evolved into a new online platform to increase the energy and vitality of the Bay Area arts scene in COVID times. The founding committee members are Claudia Altman-Siegel, Kelly Huang, Sophia Kinell, Micki Meng, Daphne Palmer, Chris Perez, Jessica Silverman, Elizabeth Sullivan, and Sarah Wendell Sherrill. Most of these are gallerists, running some of the best and brightest venues in SF. I spoke with Kinell and Silverman, as well as Altman Siegel gallery Director Becky Koblick. The whole concept focuses on the idea of collaboration, and the premise that the best way to support the Bay Area art scene is by selling artwork. Kinell explained that 8-bridges evolved over “many weeks of conversations” between a group of colleagues, and involved many “minds and voices.” Koblick concurred: “Since we were unable to travel as much—which is such a huge part of our industry, to meet new artists and clients—we wanted to work together in the community to make sure we still had a voice during this time.”

Echoing the 8-bridges concept, the platform rolled out a schedule of online exhibitions by eight galleries presenting eight works each month. Another key feature of the platform is to feature an alternative space or institution each month, showcasing its mission and encouraging viewers to donate.

Sophia Kinell, the regional lead of the San Francisco branch of Phillips contemporary auction house, spoke with me of a recent New York auction: ”It was our best ever. We set major records for artists like Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Amy Sherald, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Vaughn Spann—an incredibly diverse roster of artists.“ Kinell said that “With 8-bridges, we are putting our muscle behind the institutional beneficiary. In the inaugural month of October, this was the Museum of the African Diaspora; in November, Creative Growth (Art Center), and in December an institution near and dear to my heart, the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito.”

While 8-bridges is fresh to the Bay Area scene, it shares a concept implemented successfully in other locales. Similar ideas were born in Los Angeles’

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GALLERYPLATFORM.LA, and in New York, where megadealer David Zwirner launched Platform: New York. These online platforms are currently extensions of the gallery system but could certainly evolve into something else, with even more potential to expand the ways we interact with art. Artists increasingly have the ability to show and potentially sell their own work online as well. The challenge lies in making the experience richer and more authentic.

A theme emerging across the board in the Zoom panel talks is this shift to the virtual. When I spoke with Widholm she emphasized that at BAMPFA, “Our staff has done a brilliant job pivoting toward digital programming… primarily with our virtual cinema programs streaming cinema accompanied by panel discussions and live interaction with filmmakers and people behind the scenes.” Another recurring theme is greater engagement with the local community. Mari Robles, incoming director of the Headlands, alluded to a shift in its involvement with local artists: the former “affiliate artist” program dissolved, to be replaced by something more integrated with its internationally acclaimed resident artist program. Finally, an idea that seems particularly urgent is creating internship programs for young people, particularly for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) youth for whom a career in museum work might seem off the radar. Monetta White, Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora wondered aloud, “Why did it take George Floyd for us to begin having these conversations?” With the reset on our cultural institutions provided Catherine Opie, Political Landscapes displayed on BAMPFA's outdoor screen, 2020. Photo by Dave Taylor, courtesy of BAMPFA.

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by COVID, and magnified by the racial justice movement, it’s obvious that no one really expects, or wants, to go back to “business as usual.”

A key piece not only to 8-bridges, but to the future as an arts community, is collaboration, with various parties working together to share resources and promote art. While the impetus behind the new platform is to survive the COVID crisis, it also reflects a certain zeitgeist: the need for change in the art world as a whole. As sky-rocketing rents and exorbitant art fair fees have increasingly priced the smaller brick-and-mortar galleries out of the market, for many the shutdown may be the last straw.

So how will emerging artists bridge the gap from obscurity to recognition? It’s great to hear brainstorming on ways in which galleries and museums, even auction houses, may work hand in hand with artists, creating opportunities and bonds that had not existed. Alongside these institutional shifts, one hopes that a new spirit of cooperation, rather than competition, may arise within the broader art world. With a teeming population sharing diminishing resources, perhaps it’s time to rethink some of our longstanding assumptions about images and objects.

Will 8-bridges disappear once we are able to return to "normal"? As Jessica Silverman says, “I think it will continue. I really believe that virtual and online programming alongside the physical is going to be the new paradigm. I think that it’s here to stay.” With the reshuffling of the deck when things reopen, many changes loom ahead. Art galleries will need to adapt and evolve, and in many ways, that’s a good thing.

Sanctuary of the Aftermath curated by Jason Jenn ‘ and Vojislav Radovanovic On view April 10 - June 19, 2021

angelsgateart.org The Uterus, performance

by Ibuki Kuramochi Photo by Ming-Tarng Chen

Visit the Museum of Latin American Art's newest virtual exhibition

Women Artist in the MOLAA Collection. molaa.org/herland

Amalia Caputo (Venezuela, n. 1964) Heroínas III, 2007 C-print H 73.66 x W 99.06 cm.

Gift of the Artist M.2009.056 Amalia Caputo (Venezuela, n. 1964) Heroínas III, 2007 C-print H 73.66 x W 99.06 cm.

Gift of the Artist M.2009.056

Patssi Valdez (USA, b. 1951) Broken, 1992 Acrylic on linen H 121.9 x W 91.4 cm.

Museum purchase with funds provided by the Lynne O. Scholnick Fund M.2019.028

Smithsonian Affiliate

SLUMPING AROUND Jillian Mayer's Sculptures for a Digital Age

BY DANIEL AUSTIN WARREN

Miami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space.

Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable public-accessing of cyberspace. Taking it a stretch further, the Slumpie (as the artist herself claims) envisions “a practical solution to the contemporary world of cellphone–dependent humans cum ‘post-posture’ persons.”

This makes the art object a real answer to a pseudohypothetical question: What do we do when our necks are crooked from too much doom-scrolling, or from walking-and-talking with our phones pressed to our ears, or from reposing bedridden and binge-watching for hours on end? It renders the series like a revolving showroom of imaginary solutions, as if some

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furniture-based corporation was hypothetically hiring the new Man Ray or Herman Miller to design a response to our self-obsessed, imaginarily fractured state of being, along with its subsequent, and expected, deformations.

In light of this speculative marketing brief, the resultant objects are a hilarious hodgepodge of disjointed calamity; some “Slumpies” attach to walls and support akimbo elbows; others resemble lounge furniture, but with contorting undulations like mock medieval devices of detainment; some Slumpies resemble plinths or daises; others appear as both pedestal and trophied art object (therefore appearing quite useless in comparison to their also-mangled kin).

Variation and multiplicity aside, in the simplest sense, any given “slumpie” comes to life through its own publicity. Because

Slumpie 65- Thicc Zucc, 2017.

Photo by Signe Ralkov at Ofelia Plads (Coppenhagen).

of its being anti-sensible, the Slumpie is nonsense in privacy—it might even suggest a certain madness. The object invites the awkwardness of interaction, the seen-ness of the user overcoming its preposterousness.

Regardless of the artist’s statement, I would argue for the Slumpie as being meaningful through public engagement. That’s because the Slumpie is not actually a tunnel to a more comfortable internet experience; it is an object encouraging self-identification through its tandem participation—a union of IRL and URL, if you will.

I only re-encountered the Slumpie lately because I follow Mayer on Instagram; she had reposted others’ photos of themselves straddling, contorting and bending to fit the molding of a variety of Slumpies. And in this reposted sense, this post-

Dadaist object becomes like an antenna directing a field of related, social-media transmitted objects, perhaps what would be replicating evidence of similar encounters.

I admit bias, though. I love the Slumpies series, if only because sometimes I see an unoccupied one and lack the imagination for its usage. I then see it in use, a person straddling it awkwardly, bent and turned in surrender to its absurdist design, and I enjoy a rush of endorphins, an unforced exhalation of windy suspiration.

Mayer portrayed a concern when she presented her most recent grand-master Slumpie, Fort (2020), at Miami’s Hotel Confidante, a hotelier’s structure of glass and orthogonality reminiscent of scenes from Brian de Palma’s Scarface. Mayer’s December exhibition was part of Art Week Miami Beach's No Vacancy public art competition and exhibition. It kindly featured pump-station hand sanitizer for visitors and was wiped down between uses for pandemic safety. Fort included Wi-Fi honoring the zeitgeist of the series, i.e., web access. This latest Slumpie proved the tallest, widest, greatest of them all: less a solipsistic object of satire and more a carnival-size tiered cake, some 10- to 15-feet tall, begging to be climbed and played upon.

In conversation with Mayer at the end of the year, she brought up some points: (1) The Slumpies refuse design efficiency by being molded with uncycled materials: resin, wax, styrofoam, and even wood from used palettes. (2) These materials hearken back to Miami’s leisure activities: boating, surfing, wood lifeguard towers. (3) Theoretically, these sculptures float—meaning they should persist long after the ocean’s rise.

Mayer describes Fort as part of a series of “quasi-functional sculptural furniture” that is “a rejection of contemporary design efficiency” and that is “presented as an interactive sculptural installation… ” The artist goes on to claim: “Fort is motivated by my concern that our cities, buildings and furniture will soon resemble the computer programs in which they were designed; clean lines on horizontal planes based on the optimization of manufacturing and their ability to be shipped flat efficiently...

Fort is a rejection of this.”

So after volumes of user-centered selfies and conceptual ad– satirizing textual documents furnished by the artist herself, the key to grasping the Slumpie concept is to consider what it is not.

The Slumpie is not comfortable; the Slumpie is not functional; the Slumpie might offer Wi-Fi access based on solar recharging capabilities (but it also might not; you’ll need to contact the gallery ahead of time, wink wink); the Slumpie is not public or private (a gallerist can be contacted to purchase them; others are cycled in and out of various public displays; some are just in artist limbo, either in transit, storage, or in rotation between galleries). And, if one accepts my argument, the Slumpie is not unless it is posted online.

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Photography by Lara Jo Regan, 2021

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SAFETY FIRST Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions

BY ALEXIA LEWIS

What sort of working environment will the Los Angeles arts workforce return to once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Or maybe a better question to ask is: How will we honor the skilled work of the preparators, installers, instructors, docents, assistants and more, whose combined efforts are semi-invisible to the public, yet without whom everything would fall apart?

Pre-COVID labor conditions were not always ideal for the average arts worker. One can peruse the Instagram account called @cancelartgalleries (its first post was on July 11, 2020) for a glimpse into the sort of abuse, neglect and underpayment that gallery staff have suffered throughout the years. Interns and assistants from Los Angeles and New York to London are sharing their accounts of maltreatment by some of the most blue-chip outfits you can think of. Additionally, many gigs associated with the deployment, installation and de-installation of gallery exhibitions were handled by independent contractors. Sometimes arts organizations hired permanent employees for these roles.

As a consequence of the lockdown last summer, however, most of these workers saw their incomes freeze in an instant, with independent contractors especially wondering how they would survive.

I spoke with Prima, a freelance art handler (who uses they/ them pronouns) about their experience in the spring of 2020.

“There were just no jobs,” they said. "And there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. I’m in the US on an artist visa, which doesn’t allow me to apply for any federal aid.” Born in Thailand, Prima was slated to begin a well-paid contract with an LA museum when the lockdown mandate brought California to a halt.

Another of Prima’s clients includes a gallery that they, for privacy reasons, leave unnamed. “I was able to readapt my skillset for an online version of the exhibition space,” Prima said. This, by its nature, is much safer than the work they were doing before the pandemic.

Safety for the art worker has probably never been as high a priority as it is now. In the entertainment industry, studios, producers and unions spent months deliberating over COVID production process standards. Billions of dollars were on the line for them; they could not afford to wing it. From those deliberations rose a new profession: the COVID Safety Officers, and their teams. On the flip side, by nature of the art installation process, the art world does not have an equivalent emergent role. In 2019, a preparator named Evelia transitioned away from her contract work for museums such as CAAM and the Hammer to become fulltime and salaried at an LA-based gallery. “Thankfully I’ve been working throughout this whole period. But I do know plenty of freelance workers who have been struggling.” As a former freelancer who is now in the position of hiring freelancers, safety is foremost in her mind. The workforce at the gallery that employs her has gone as remote as possible. She has tightened the pool of freelance talent from which she’ll hire for exhibitions—what may once have taken six people to do is now reduced to two at the most. To protect staff, in-person viewings of art are limited to one day a week and the gallery is producing online exhibitions.

“People want to work, but under what conditions? And galleries can only promise so much, museums can only promise so much.”

Evelia says that one consequence of the pandemic is maintaining relationships with preparators at other institutions in a way that she never did before, simply because everyone is sharing resources and information about what is and isn't working as they develop COVID safety procedures. “I think that there’s no interest in moving away from real exhibitions,” Evelia replies, when I ask for her opinion about what the future looks like for the gallery. “We are working under the assumption that things will get better. Maybe not like before, but with certain measures, things can be safe enough that someone could experience art in person.”

A safe post-COVID gallery or museum experience will be determined by how well its semi-invisible workforce is taken care of.

Unlike in the entertainment industry, installation crews are rarely unionized, nor are their workplace standards governed by OSHA or a similar organization. And independent contractors have no work guarantees. “I still feel that we [as freelancers] are considerably underpaid and that we haven’t been afforded the substantial help that a part-time or fulltime employee would,” said Prima. There was some work that became available to them soon after the pandemic began, but as they didn’t have good health insurance, they sometimes declined: “As time went by and it seemed we weren’t going to come back to normal, I started taking some gigs. And it makes me feel a little compromised.”

Prima also maintains their own art practice, which is why they made the choice to remain independent. “I made a conscious and empowered choice to do this kind of work. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t want things to be much better.”

Just this January, the Center for Cultural Innovation commissioned the Urban Institute to research and author a report addressing the plight of the California-based art worker from the standpoint of worker classification: freelancer vs. employee.

It’s titled “Arts Workers in California: Creating a More Inclusive Social Contract to Meet Arts Workers’ and Other Independent Contractors’ Needs.” It arrives on the heels of the passage of last year’s controversial AB5 bill. The bill’s author and advocates meant well in trying to protect all sorts of gig workers from rampant misclassification, yet ultimately AB5 harmed many of these workers in the process.

Thankfully, the report isn’t just an accumulation of facts and data; the coauthors also spent time providing solutions for arts workers to build power. One macro-level solution could be to reform federal labor law so that independent contractors could collectively bargain. On the local level, one option could be scaling worker co-ops to include creative workers. While the report is available for download on both CCI and Urban Institute websites, they make it clear that the views expressed are the authors' alone—six diverse experts, researchers, and fellows who regularly work on matters of workforce development, racial justice in employment and other pertinent social issues. That such an institutional effort was made is a testament to the times we live in. We are seemingly at a boiling point in our society when it comes to worker treatment—our previous ways of working are fast becoming unsustainable. Hopefully, the decision-makers for California’s museums and galleries and arts nonprofits take this report to heart.

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The City of Tomorrow, Today

BY C. KAYE RAWLINGS

PR OV E N A N C E

Photograph by J. R. Eyerman, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty.

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In a 1953 photograph for a spread in LIFE magazine on LA County’s city of Lakewood, a bird’s-eye view looks down onto a newly paved suburban street. The street is lined with moving trucks as far as the eye can see as family after family busily unpack their belongings. The burst of activity counterbalances the monotonous sprawl of two/three bedroom homes that fill the frame. The exuberant families are unfazed by the severity of the surrounding tracts, where telephone poles stand in place of any tree. While today we know that the photograph was staged, it is not altogether misleading. Within the first month of opening, 200,000 people came to admire Lakewood’s accessibly priced model homes. By the time this photograph was taken, the self-proclaimed “City of Tomorrow, Today,” boasted an incredible 17,500 new homes—making Lakewood one of the largest developments of its time. As many as 50 homes were sold per day with a record 107 being sold in a single hour; people wanted into Lakewood.

The subdividers responsible for the project broke ground in February 1950 and proceeded at breakneck speeds. A new home was completed every 7 1/2 minutes, some 40 to 60 houses a day, with a record of 110 houses erected in a single day. To entice future homeowners, the developers centered Lakewood’s 17,500 private, single-family homes around what was briefly the largest mall in America, surrounded by an unprecedented 10,000 free parking spots. The neatly gridded suburban tract reflected the burgeoning ideals of the midcentury era. As low-interest FHA loans made buying a home possible for white middle-class suburbanites, residential developments like Lakewood ballooned. With well-paying jobs in aerospace at either the nearby Douglas or Hughes plants, the community offered an ideal locale for young families seeking a secure place to raise their families. However, the midcentury American dream fortified by the proliferation of low-interest FHA-backed mortgages perpetuated racial divisions; the United States government granted less than 2% of FHA loans to people of color.

When Joan Didion published her 1993 New Yorker article “Trouble in Lakewood,” the racial demographics of Lakewood had remained largely unchanged, but the communities’ stint of economic prosperity was beginning to dwindle. The self-proclaimed “City of Tomorrow, Today” could hardly have anticipated the changes to come. In 1989 alone, half of California’s aerospace workers had been laid off and only 16% of those workers would find another job over the next two years. The newly depressed city was overrun with violence; countless sexual assaults, burglaries, a pipe bombing, and numerous other felony arrests marked the community in 1993. The bucolic haven had transformed, even while residents insisted the community remained “upper-middle class.” Today’s Lakewood has suffered from the continued ebbs and flows of the market, facing lost jobs, closing malls and enduring confusion on the definition of “middle class.” A short drive to the infamous neighborhood today reveals the decaying white picket fences of the idyllic midcentury landscape. Visitors today are no longer greeted by the city’s original, cheery motto, but instead by the words: “Good Ideas Last for Generations.”

Specializing in Press for Artists & Organizations Take charge of your story with dedicated press using major newswires

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Still from Talking about Trees (2019)

SIZE MATTERS

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

B U N K E R

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V I S I O N

The pandemic has brought many issues to the fore, including health care, basic income and housing. Further down the list (but inspiring outsize passion) is how we consume movies. After nearly a year without much production and very few theaters allowed to remain open, prestige projects are headed straight to premium streaming. Films that were made to be seen on giant screens are available as first-run films on your telephone. Theater owners have the biggest stake in the outcome of this.

After being forced to re-tool for digital projection, 3D and other expensive amenities, people have had a year to get accustomed to seeing first-run features at home.

As televisions get bigger and family entertainment budgets grow tighter, families may start budgeting for the streaming price for a movie, which often entertains a whole family for the price of a theater admission.

A recent Sudanese movie (streamed during the New York African American Film Festival) examines the realities of enticing an audience back into theaters after decades of watching films on their phones, because a repressive government caused all of the theaters to close. Talking About Trees (2019) follows the efforts of a group of filmmakers, unable to work in their home country, to show a movie in a theater. The tone is set for the universal appeal of cinema when one of the directors breaks into a spontaneous imitation of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950). The four filmmakers who spearhead this effort call themselves the Sudanese Film Club. They were all educated outside of Sudan, and their films show such influences as French New Wave and early Russian montage. Most of their films are lost or missing, so much excitement occurs when one of the directors is able to locate his student film from a Soviet film school. Enough of their work survives to offer clips throughout the documentary that display a finely tuned film sensibility. Since the country is under Sharia Law, the only cinemas that operate are in the capital city of Khartoum. These show censored versions of Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters.

Their efforts start with guerrilla outdoor showings with a small digital projector. It is the first time that many people in the audience have seen a film projected. As they question local residents about what might get them into a theater, they land on the film Django Unchained (2012) as meeting the necessary mix of ingredients. Looking at the challenges of restoring a long-shuttered theater, locating a working projector, finding a time slot that won’t be interrupted by calls to prayer, and facing the risk of arrest, they finally are forced to abandon their plan. One of the film’s conclusions is that people who have fallen out of the habit of watching movies in a theater are not that easily lured back. As we contemplate the future of how we consume movies, there is a lot of food for thought here.

Perhaps seeing movies in theaters will be like listening to records on vinyl. People will still do it, but not the majority of them.

P O E M S

A S K

B A B S

All the Paper in My Life

BY EVE WOOD

We are born into paper— Our lives bookended in signatures, A certificate To prove you exist And another to prove you Do not, each day teeming With permits, credentials For entry and forms to depart, Passports, agendas, Records of evidence and Evidence of nothing But paper, reams of it, A million loose leafed sheets Let go on the wind, snippets From diaries and highly classified Lies, love letters and all The annulments of love Floating suddenly over the embankment After the explosion That leaves you Naked and alive.

Holding Pattern

BY JOHN TOTTENHAM

She demanded to be held.

So I held her.

She collapsed lifelessly into my arms and remained there, while I lay there, with mind elsewhere, wondering how much longer I was supposed to hold her for.

After what seemed like a long time, I gently disengaged myself and got out of the bed.

She looked coldly up at me from the pillow.

She said that she would find somebody else: somebody who would want to hold her for two hours after an act of love that lasted two minutes.

ART CONSCIOUS Dear Babs, Desert X is putting their show on in the Coachella Valley this spring, after art-washing the murderous Saudi Arabian regime with a big outdoor show over there. In case you missed it, Saudi leader MBS had Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed and cut into pieces—not an accusation, there was overwhelming evidence of the crime and who ordered it. How is Desert X able to do this and continue working in this country with no repercussions? Is the art community in this country really as morally bankrupt as the Republican Party?

—Sick to my stomach in SoCal Dear Sick to My Stomach, In 2019 Desert X partnered with The Royal Commission for AlUla to produce an exhibition of public sculpture in the northwest desert of Saudi Arabia. In doing so, Desert X provided an art-infused PR-makeover to the repressive monarchy, which was facing global condemnation for repeated human rights abuses, including Koshoggi’s murder at the direction of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who also helms the AlUIa Commission. In its defense, Desert X claimed the whole public art exhibition was a successful opportunity for “cross-cultural exchange,” which among other things brought art by and about women to a country not known for its embrace of female representation.

There were consequences. Shortly after the partnership was announced, three Desert X board members resigned in protest.

The LA Times’ Christopher Knight labeled the show “Desert Bonesaw.” More recently, the Palm Springs City Council pulled funding from a 2021 Desert X artwork because of the Saudi connection. More controversy is likely to come.

My advice is to turn your outrage into action. Create unsanctioned Desert “eXtra” artworks calling attention to the problem of arts organizations cozying up to dangerous benefactors. Coopt the Desertx hashtag to interject news about the Saudi-led war in Yemen into the avalanche of Instagram selfies the event will generate. Use your voice to get the artists, media sponsors and galleries attached to Desert X to publicly answer some difficult questions.

Like art institutions that took money from the opioid epidemic-inducing Sackler family, or the museums who tolerate arms dealers on their boards and looted artifacts in their collections, Desert X decided that morally repugnant means justified culturally ambitious ends. But the amorphous “art community” you mention is NOT as morally bankrupt as the Republican party; to equate the two diminishes the real threat the GOP poses to American democracy. Desert X may have nefarious backers, but it’s not the agent of a fascist coup.

The Future is Now by Gisela Colon at Desert X AlUIa in Saudi Arabia, 2020.

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A few times over the years when I would reach my breaking point with the hectoring negativity of certain people I would ask point blank “How can Liz Young be so bubbly, upbeat and engaging stuck in a wheelchair and you can walk around freely but are such a fucking downer?” I confessed to Liz that I did this and she asked, “Have you ever got a good answer?” and she meant it, she wanted to hear a good comeback to my question, and that is how I will remember her—totally engaged.

—Mat Gleason

Lynda Burdick

Liz Young had an almost preternatural understanding of mortality and the earth itself, the claim of place upon identity and the existential contest of these elements; and her work reflected their full compass. Yet she engaged that vision—and the rest of the world—straight on, and her community with unstinting generosity, courage, spirit and verve.

—Ezrha Jean Black

An Appreciation Liz Young (1958–2021) LA artist Liz Young passed away in December. I’ve been going to Los Angeles art openings as far back as the late ’80s— and Liz Young was always there. Then one day I was at the Y where I swim downtown, and there she was again. I would go to the lap pool and see the assistants lower her down into the water—always with a big smile beaming from her face as she made eye contact with me. Her art was dark and compelling, but uplifting, which is some feat unto itself. We, in the LA art community, will miss Liz’ spirit and tenacity, and perhaps we can learn a few things from such a brave soul. Here are some shared memories of Liz from LA artists, curators and friends.

—Tulsa Kinney, Editor Liz’ last project at LACE was a performance called I Know What Danger Is. It’s What You Run Away From, as part of "Irrational Exhibits 9" in 2016, curated by Deborah Oliver. She was an enduring influence on her students at the LA County HS for the Arts and helped organize a year-end group show of her students’ work for several years at LACE. On a very personal note, my daughter was a student of hers and says, “I would not be the designer or artist I am today without her teachings, and I only wish I could have told her so.”

—Sarah Russin When I first met Liz, she was a grad student at Otis in the early ‘80s and we remained close friends until her life ended so unexpectedly. Her work was extraordinary. She could make dark subject matter so accessible and inspiring. Liz was a formidable artist and also a teacher. She became a seamstress, embroiderer, taxidermist, whatever it took to bring her ideas to fruition. Nothing stopped Liz. If you spent anytime with her you realized that what she made seem so easy—having to use a wheelchair to get around—wasn’t easy at all. She truly overcame obstacles daily with finesse and a matter-of-factness, never afraid to ask directly for help to literally get over something.

—Joy Silverman

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We met in a whirling spree of light, noise and euphoria, one night almost 40 years aback. We were both dancing to the same music, in the same blurry state. I almost landed on her lap. She smiled a smile that froze me midair. Just enough time for her to move to one side. Swept off my feet, I fell… deeply and never really recovered.

—Brett Goldstone Liz had an artful life. Making work by “making it work.” Needle and thread, paper and pen, knife and suture. She was clever with words and deeds. She loved life. She was curious and lively, amusing, industrious and resilient. Liz was a force of nature. I will miss her forever.

—Debbie Spinelli Four Questions For Liz: Where are you my lovely friend? Who am I going to eat noodles with? I can hear the scratchy echo of your ball point pen in the background when we talk on the phone: Red or black? Missing you, I ask myself a lot these days, “What Would Lizzy Do?” —Raghubir Kintisch Liz’ last installation [at Track 16] was trenchant: a figure floating head-first above a small sea of sewn leather balls. Or maybe the figure is falling. The balls are scattered, possibly left behind. We were just about to de-install the piece when we received the news of her passing. Goodbye, Liz. We miss you so much already.

—Sean Meredith Loving, Fierce,Inspirational, Indomitable, Bottomless, Forgiving, Unforgiving, Intuitive, Critical, Industrious, Kind, Aware, Blank, Sly, Collaborative, Singular, Beautiful, Strange, Caring, Nostalgic, Rooted, Prissy, Open, Free, Trapped, Ethereal, Romantic, Country, Longing, Gentle, Rugged, Knowing, Hurt, Transcendent, Unrelenting, Strength, Artist, Maker, Self, Identity.

What I Love About Liz. — Barry Markowitz Liz Young was a “bad ass” from the making to the installing of her work. Her joy of artmaking was everpresent and her generosity of spirit was palpable. She made large-scale installation durational performative works that were always incredibly articulate and visually powerful. Her work was inspired, touching and always unexpected. I’m so grateful our paths connected.

Rest in Power. —Deborah Oliver Liz. Artist. Beautiful. Forever young. Genius. Graceful. Generous. Strong. Kind. From darkness to light. Lighter still. Brilliant.

The Sun. To stare at the Sun. Eyes wide open. You are the Sun. I will always remember you.

—Donald Dunham

Helen Rae

Van Arno

(1938–2021)

(1963–2021)

Self-taught artist Helen Rae passed away on February 18, 2021 at the age of 83. Helen was a trailblazer who broke down the walls of common art theory regarding MFAs, age and disabilities.

She started making art at the Tierra del Sol studio arts program the first day they opened in 1990. She worked diligently at her practice in the studio five days a week, finding inspiration from fashion magazines while pushing boundaries of portraiture using ordinary tools such as graphite, colored pencils and paper. LA Times critic David Pagel wrote in his 2016 review: “Rae flattens volumes, collapses space and fractures planes in ways that make Picasso’s Cubism seem amateurish.” Helen inspired everyone who saw her drawings, paving the way for others to follow in her footsteps. Her work is widely collected around the globe, crossing the divide from “outsider” to contemporary artist with works promised to major museums. Rest in peace Helen, and thank you for sharing your voice and spirit with the world.

—Paige Wery, Tierra del Sol Gallery Director

Van Arno’s paintings had all the technical qualities necessary for his inclusion in the Low Brow Art movement when it coalesced in the mid-’80s. Consequently, art critics, dealers and collectors firmly placed him in that camp, even though the subject of his narrative paintings had little to do with its cultural influences. His four years at the Otis College of Art & Design, LACC and the UCLA Extension Program separated Van from the self-taught artists with whom he found himself surrounded, so when Van exhibited at the 01 Gallery and the museums that accepted Low Brow, his figurative paintings always stood out.

Art, for Van, was a vehicle to greater exploration; as he famously said, “I want to paint everything on Earth at least once.” As a result, his paintings are crammed with detailed characters ancillary to the main story. Still, the sum of all these objects added to Van’s prodigious talents at figurative painting and put him in the forefront of a new American Regionalism, a place where he excelled at accurately depicting human muscles, not muscle cars. As Van’s talents matured over the years, he became a formidable draftsman; after all, if he wanted to paint everything, he had to draw it first.

Van exhibited his paintings throughout his life and had a show scheduled in 2021 at Keep Contemporary in Santa Fe. Van’s interest in ancient mythology segued to the overriding theme of his late work: powerful women in action. To this end he hired a variety of female models to pose in his studio, and it was common to see Van at art openings with the most striking woman in the room.

Perhaps Ron English, the noted Popaganda artist, put it best when he wrote, “Van was a person that was a delight in every possible way, from his art to his ease of being.”

—Anthony Ausgang

OBITUARIES

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John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres Charlie James Gallery

Fu Site Kylin Gallery

By Cole Sweetwood

By John David O’Brien

“The Bronx Comes to LA” features artworks from the larger body of work set up in Bronx storefronts by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, dating from 1990 to 2020. The life casting process for making the figures is fairly complicated, but even more importantly, requires a very trusting relationship between the person applying the mold-making alginate and the sitter who must breathe through small straws as the goopy green liquid sets up. Afterward, there still needs to be a plaster external cast made so the person must continue to be patient, staying immobile while it all coalesces. When these molds are finally cast, the artists intervene with paint to build back the person being portrayed.

One of the figures, Ingrid (1992/2002), is concentrated on a shelf in front of her. Jutting out from the wall, the green squared counter is being scrubbed with a bright blue dishrag while on the left side is a bunch of green bananas and on the other side is a can of jalapeno peppers. There’s something majestic about this simple set of gestures. Its everyday quality is offset in part by the bright colors of the red sweater and yellow glasses, but in the end, there’s something equally monumental and intimate about it.

Mounted on the wall above the door leading into the gallery, Ismael (Tire Shop) (2017), leans out with an impact wrench in hand.

Observed up close there are clearly marks of sculptural modification on these cast plaster surfaces. Small grooves, crosshatching and careful treatments of the surface emerge and the paint is drawn out of the representational into the expressive. There is a compelling mix of recognizability and abstraction.

In a smaller back room, the two artists, as well as Ahearn’s wife Juanita and child Carlos, are portrayed. The very disconcerting white eyes of Ahearn and the extremely bright orange T-shirt of Orange Self (2010) is across from the fractured and reconstructed vertical slices of Split Portrait (1997–2000) of Rigoberto. Together, they foreground the emotional engagement of the artists. It is what allows them to make such captivating and individualized portraits.

What is most compelling about this work overall is not only the social context from which it emerges but the way it documents the inhabitants of the area around where the artists live and work. There is something very discerning yet participatory about making life-size portraits of the people around where they are living and having that portrayal completed in public view.

Top: John Ahearn, Ismael (Tire Shop), 2017. Bottom: Rigoberto Torres, Split Portrait (1997-2000), Courtesy Charlie James Gallery.

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“Fictions in Fragments,” the latest show by Fu Site at Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an adventure not to be missed. Mixing ghostly characters and cracking lightning with influences stretching from modern architecture to baroque drama, Fu’s paintings alternately look like haunted mansions and dreamlike lands.

The first painting you encounter is an excellent introduction to Fu’s style, Daydreamer (2018) which features a man in formal attire, back turned to the viewer, as a cloud of blue-gray smoke drifts from his mouth. The figure seems just barely lifted out from the gray fog which dominates the piece, barely visible, yet it is the singular focus. With the slightest tilt of the head, Fu injects a deep sense of contemplation.

From his time at Tsinghua University in Beijing—one of the most prestigious art schools in Asia—Fu has a considerable capability for portraiture and figuration. This skill shines in the impressionistic figures, where Fu is able to again convey strong emotion through these misty, ethereal characters. Strangers (2016), with the trio of temporally displaced characters in a modern mansion, oozes tension. Three figures, all turned away from one another, feature in the painting which straddles contemporary and classic, indoors and outdoors, reality and memory. They exist together in this space, yet seem estranged from one another, caught up in their own individual neurotic mysteries.

This tension is a theme throughout many of the paintings, including the ominous Landscape with two gentlemen (2015). In a thick swamp of muted tan and green reeds, two spectral men wrestle one another as they look off into the horizon. Here again, their faces are hidden from us, and we are left to guess what happened to bring us to this point in the misty marshlands. There is a downward arrow pointing at nothing in particular—or something critically important.

Earlier works are featured in the back room, but as Fu’s style developed, his need for a firm reality lessened, culminating finally in The revelation of violence (2018). This work is a complete departure from baroque mansions, translucent specters and men in fields. It shows two Greco-Roman gods fighting one another in a Surrealistic expanse, accented by lakes of color. Some grid lines—vestiges from the earlier emphasis on architecture—create a strong sense of depth, as if we are watching from atop Mount Olympus.

“Fictions in Fragments” is a dazzling display of mystery and magic, and Fu Site’s talent and creative ability is truly not to be missed in a rare showing on the West Coast.

Fu Site, Strangers,2016. Courtesy Kylin Gallery

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Karen Carson GAVLAK

Hamishi Farah Chateau Shatto

The title of Karen Carson’s show of new "bas-relief" paintings, exhibited alongside some of the zippered canvas works that marked her debut into the Los Angeles art world almost half a century ago, “Middle Ground” is a kind of conundrum, consistent with the kinds of conundrums her work has presented throughout her career.

Presenting those earliest works as a reference point, the show toggled between that ‘primary’ conversation and the larger, more encompassing conversation of her evolving body of work.

This is not the first time her work has incorporated bas-relief elements or wood moldings, though she has never exploited the latter technique as variously or virtuosically. Inverting that original ‘primary,’ these prismatic, often kaleidoscopic compositions further deconstruct, dissolve or refract the object into a kind of folding screen, moving forward and back in depth as well as horizontally and vertically.

Although both palette and composition give some evidence of environmental or even bodily inspiration—as in Butterfly (2018), a vulva-like lozenge contained within a trussed rectangle extended outward on either side as if by a camera’s accordion bellows—these are fairly rigorous abstractions, their deliberation underscored by graphic and geometric elements.

Carson plays with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions, opening out a space or hollow, only to break it apart or push it forward in another quadrant.

This is a collapsible universe. Yellow Diamonds (2018) frustrates the ‘movement’ of its kaleidoscopic fractalization by containing it within the rectangle of its frame/enclosure; yet its visual operations might be extrapolated beyond its virtual perimeter, an infinite expansion and recession, progression and regression.

In the meantime, she draws our attention to the painted surfaces, the expressive dimension deliberately restrained as if to underscore the temporal impermanence or entirely conditional aspect of the configuration.

Carson is also interested in the straightforwardly fractured image or surface, the arbitrary divisions or abrupt discontinuities that stop or turn the eye in another direction entirely.Gray Swirl (2018) and the most recent of her featured works, Red Fracture (2020), are essentially diptychs and remarkably true in their perfectly mirrored reflection/reversals.

Again, the painterly element unsettles this perfect symmetry.

In other words, the painterly imperfection here is a device like any other to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about both surface and structure—from which the show shifts our view to the landmark zippered canvases which challenged the Minimalist discourse of that moment.

Taking an expansive, sophisticated and painterly approach, Carson here revisits some of her original foundational concerns, leaving it ultimately to the viewer as to what may constitute that ‘middle ground,’ or indeed if there is any middle ground at all.

Portraiture is almost certainly the artistic genre in which power and privilege imprint themselves most legibly. To "represent" can mean to depict, but also the right to speak on behalf of a group.

The tension between these two meanings is at the heart of Hamishi Farah’s debut solo show at Chateau Shatto. Two distinct groups of portraits make up this conceptually ambitious exhibition: oil paintings of people who have, by one means or another, altered their face, and five self-portraits in charcoal, pastel and acrylic commissioned from Rachel Dolezal. Farah’s approach prioritizes the referential capabilities of portraiture over formal innovation. These paintings point to compelling issues, but their pictorial language is conventional.

Two of Farah’s paintings depict white men who have drawn on their faces with a black marker. A man with a scruffy beard sports an amateurish version of a batman mask across his forehead, nose and cheeks, while a more youthful guy stares blankly towards the viewer with what looks like half-assed blackface. Both images feel like mugshots, evoking the specter of criminal archetypes. So-called "black" markers actually contain deep purple ink, and these racially-tinged facial alterations come off as unambiguously pathetic. However, these jagged purple lines are the most visually exciting parts of the paintings. Rendered with energetic brushstrokes into wet paint, these passages stand out from the static, at times stiff quality of portraits painted from photographs. Farah’s other paintings depart from this racial binary: a bearded man with entirely purple skin, a sumo wrestler wearing a sheet mask, a woman with her head covered by a stocking, and a closeup of a bee. These portraits add complexity and humor to the theme of self-presentation while sticking to a relatively conservative painterly technique.

Rachel Dolezal, whose claims of Blackness have been widely rebuked and ridiculed, makes self-portraits that are as strange as you would expect them to be. She deploys clumsy metaphors to emphasize her own victimhood and uses a Jewish cookie to claim bi-racial identity. Black and White Cookie (2020) portrays Dolezal in a black headwrap holding the titular cookie in front of her, having just taken a bite—you guessed it—right down the middle. I spent the most time looking at Banished (2020), a charcoal drawing that reads as a surrealist allegory for depression. It shows a somber Dolezal standing next to a fence with a large hole missing from her abdomen. A black sun the size of her missing section looms ominously above. These amateurish works are ‘interesting’, in that they ask you to look more as a sociologist or psychologist. As with some of Farah’s own portraits, they illustrate how fixated humans can be on visual markers of identity, positing race as a particularly dangerous type of formalism.

Karen Carson, Butterfly, 2018. Courtesy GAVLAK

Hamishi Farah, Joey, 2020, Courtesy Chateau Shatto.

By Ezrha Jean Black

By Peter Brock

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Ludovica Gioscia Baert Gallery

Amanda Wall The Cabin

By Jody Zellen

By Avery Wheless

It is difficult not to be taken with Ludovica Gioscia’s exhibition “Arturo And The Vertical Sea.” Upon entry, viewers confront three free-standing wooden structures akin to unfinished walls that crisscross two gallery spaces at different angles, dividing them into discrete areas. Some of her double-sided works are draped over the wooden supports while others hang from or on them. A few handmade bark shelves span sections of the faux walls and contain collections of small works made of paper-mâché and ceramics. The Arturo of the show’s title is actually Gioscia’s cat who she sees as a collaborator. In an interview with the gallery director, Gioscia talks about the collaboration (consciously for her, unconsciously for the cat), her desire to connect to her cat’s dream world, the soothing impact of the cat’s meowing and purring on her psyche and the inclusion of cat hair as one of many disparate materials.

Cat imagery appears in the small watercolor Arturo and the Vertical Sea (all works 2020), a charming child-like rendering of undulating blue and green waves filled with disembodied cat heads and personified images of full-bodied cats, as well as in collections that include cat-shaped heads like Making Kin and Arturo.

However, the majority of works are comprised of colorful floral patterns and geometric abstractions. Small sketches for Gioscia’s Dream Robes and Portals are pinned to the supports, often in close proximity to the much larger finished pieces they envisioned. The Dream Robes are wearable textile artworks that function as magical tools. As Gioscia states, "I see the Dream Robes as catalysts that help me imagine artworks in my dreams, which I then re-create at [the] studio."

Dream Robe 2 is a transparent Kimono-shaped garment draped within the open-framed walls covered with hand-sewn fabrics, in pink, orange and green tones, adorned with cut-out geometric shapes and criss-crossing threads. Similar textures appear in Portal 22, a quasi-transparent plastic window bordered by scallop-shaped, screenprinted fabrics.

Although the exhibition is filled with myriad backstories, it is not necessary to know them in order to be seduced by the installation. The works are precisely arranged and presented as individual objects, as well as in groups. For example, the ceramic and twine pieces that make up Earth Couture are mounted to a large irregularly-shaped wooden disk. The different pieces work in concert with each other to become a conversation that unfolds as viewers traverse from the front to the back sides of the works and come into contact with surprises along the way.

Gioscia draws from fashion, theory and the natural world to create these intriguing ensembles. Though derived from personal and emotional relationships, like her bond with Arturo, her installations are also formal investigations into the rubrics of daily life.

Amanda Wall’s debut solo show, “JUICY” at The Cabin entices us into the intimate gallery. The exhibition space, which is in fact a small cottage-like structure in the backyard of artist and collector Danny First’s residence, immediately evokes a sense of casual closeness between the viewer and the work. One must walk through a side gate into the backyard to access the gallery space, as if visiting a close companion.

The Cabin sits at one end of a large yard and its strategically opened door draws the eye towards a painting of a larger-thanlife female figure encompassed in a neon glow, BABY NEW YEAR (all works 2020). Silver confetti falls around her as she reclines, her feet extended forward and towards the viewer, with one sock on and the other seemingly missing. She remains aloof, feminine and provoking. With a nonchalant demeanor and flexible form, she summons us into the quaint space of the Cabin.

In all of the works, Wall utilizes vibrant hues and energetic brushstrokes, giving a sense of enthusiastic urgency. She combines graphic shapes and colors, with aspects of figures remaining only partially defined, engaging and challenging our sense of the figure as certain edges of arms, legs, and faces dissipate, grabbing our attention and then slowing us down with nuanced clarity to inspect further. For example, in BENT, the figure faces away from us, her torso completely folded over a chair while her legs are tangled in an impossible fashion, like that of a twisting barber pole. In PUDDLE, two figures interact as one stands above the other who has seemingly melted onto the floor, exploring provocative figurative abstraction as forms blur into backgrounds while other sections of the paintings remain crisp. Through this use of mark and subject matter, Wall creates an intriguing push and pull.

The show is “JUICY” in every sense: in PEACH, the figure sinks her teeth into the fruit, absorbed in its flesh with eyes wide shut, unaware and seemingly unconcerned with anything else. SHOWERER, 2020 depicts a man standing exposed and naked in the center of the composition, yet his form remains blurred.

Wall’s generously playful images invite us to find comfort in the ability to distort and yet make sense. Her figures, depicted voyeuristically on display, never quite acknowledge us; each holds a mysterious secret—one so juicy it leaves you salivating for more.

Ludovica Gioscia, Dream Robe 2, 2020. Courtesy Baert Gallery.

Amanda Wall. BENT, 2020. Courtesy The Cabin.

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Caroline Kent Kohn Gallery

David Hicks Diane Rosenstein Gallery

By Ezrha Jean Black

By India Mandelkern

Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as "non-space," for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids alongside ‘cut-out’ figures in white that echo the more prominently placed pigmented shapes, and—further confusing her "non-space"—shallow, quasiillusionistic depths in which undulant and organic segmented forms in gauzy charcoal-grays seemed to emerge from behind the deep-black torn-out surround like protozoa or plant stalks, only to sink again behind interior black shards and stalactites.

Dead center floats a peachypink decagonal U-shaped piece of joinery (or conceivably upswept limbs), echoed by three dead-white digits fluttering above out of the black, seemingly poised to intercept an indigo-blue shuttlecock (or stealth bomber) shape to the left (‘guided’ by interstitially floating blue rays or ‘wands’), all beneath a feathery palm frond shape top center.

Between ‘U’ and frond, a swag of seven pink "pebbles" float, echoed by a larger pebble shape at lower left and a torn-out rectangle in pink standing on the right, as if a cat had plunged through to the ‘floor’ beneath.

The title is Penning one’s insights (all works 2020), which may well constitute an advisory in recondite twin-speak. Kent, an identical twin, has alluded to a secret language/communication she shared with her twin, which I take the liberty here of interpreting as an advisory imperative not to make any assumptions about what lies beneath that black ‘non-space.’

Between the surface markings and less-than-uniform, occasionally interrupted matte-black ground, Kent gives some indication of her process. Some of it is a quasi-directional mapping, useful to the extent we read the paintings as visual poetry. The finality of the works seems tenuous, in that there are frequent superimpositions not simply of subsidiary patterns or textures, but shapes within shapes.

Some of these are directional, like the horseshoe gray arch with a sequence of linked orangey-red triangles in Musings on how to leave and re-enter (which not incidentally points in the direction of a gray ‘chrysallis-coffin’). Some of these oscillate between geometrics and organic, or even lexicographic, shapes.

Kent’s orchestration of her imagery encompasses its possible inversions—the pale aqua "V" against the putty-colored animal head; the beady textured serpent crawling across the pale sea-foam "R." The all-over quality of this kind of patterning is itself a check against a locked-in read of the imagery, notwithstanding the relative legibility of the more Matisse-like papier collé forms (e.g., compote and fruit, dog/chair, necklace, etc.) Claw-like fingers grasp a Duchampian bride shroud in A slow turning of events; but there is far more than an alchemical exorcism going on. The title alone reflects Kent’s insistence on her own willful play not simply with shape, color and composition, but with time itself.

Central Valley ceramicist David Hicks doesn’t have a big footprint in Los Angeles. To see his work, you have to drive out to a hospital in Sylmar: a sun-parched, semi-rustic neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Los Angeles. There, above the lobby welcome desk, once stretched a multitudinous terra cotta thicket (stubby branches and succulent buds, fiddleheads and pinecones), glazed in a blithe, eye-popping palette and configured on thin metal armatures. Imagined as a beacon for a sterile setting, Hicks’ Construction (Bloom Field) (2016) has since been moved to an adjacent building, crammed with desks and hospital gurneys. Visitors today can only glimpse it through a side window, a gesture, perhaps, to the existential anguish of the present moment.

Caroline Kent, Musings on how to leave and re-enter, 2020. Courtesy Kohn Gallery

“Seed,” Hicks’ exhibition of sculpture and drawings at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, is more inward-looking, probing the mimetic properties of organic forms we tend to overlook. Inspired by his drives through Visalia, California (the source of much of our food supply), Hicks turns his observations of large-scale mechanized agriculture into raw, personal reflections on time and sacrifice. This theme suffuses the sumptuous masses that Hicks labels “Offerings”: luxuriant heaps of shoots, tendrils, branches and blossoms piled up to four feet in height and lavished with syrupy glaze. While they are steeped in solemn presence, drawing resemblances to burial mounds, Hicks withholds an explanation. Offerings to whom? For what? Are they signs of thanksgiving or penance?

The Offerings’ commanding, maximalist presence throws smaller, sparer forms into relief––Hicks calls them “Clippings”––presented, altar-like, on self-hewn tables throughout the gallery. While each Clipping depicts what its title promises—a pine cone, a bulb, a coil of leaves—they are scaled, glazed and abstracted to a degree that they share morphological likenesses with organs. Clipping (Red Vine) (2017) represents a morass of scandent vegetation at the end of its flower, draped extravagantly over a fossilized branch. Doused in red glaze, which bleeds messily onto the bone-colored surfaces, the vines resemble tangled intestines.

Memento mori come to mind, but not in a traditional sense. Firing clay triggers transformations––it desiccates, it hardens, it becomes impervious to the elements––that mirror the aging process. So too does firing glaze, which often becomes the subject matter. The thick white treacle pooling and dribbling off of a red terracotta dish transforms Clipping (White Bloom) (2020), a simple branch, into a well-worn anointing spoon steeped in ambrosial substance.

The crusted pigment on Clipping (Blue Green Clusters) (2020), the result of thick application and multiple firings, armors a vegetal form with calloused rhinoceros skin. These colors and textures are timestamps: diaristic records of hours logged alone in the studio at the expense of other activites. They are reminders of the sacrifices made in exchange for shots at uncovering the essential.

David Hicks, Clipping (Red Vine), 2017. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy Diane Rosenstein Gallery

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Tristan Espinoza Los Angeles Municipal Gallery

Jessie Makinson François Ghebaly

Poetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a fascinating combination of media that also includes augmented reality.

Surreal and delicate, perennial (2020), the work within “Index, Interiors,” takes the experience of surveillance and renders it into a lace-like latticework of diaphanous beauty. Paired with elliptical

These new paintings by Jessie Makinson are absolutely wild. From large-scale soiree tableaux to small-gathering social vignettes and intimate, symbolism-rich character portraits, her singular swirl of posh post-male society is both feral and fancy, cheeky and courtly, surreal and sophisticated. It’s tempting to get lost in their narratives; in fact, it’s impossible not to be seduced by the sinuous self-possession and lightly animalistic personalities of the women, the mannerism of their bodies, the weight of the atmosphere, the eccentricity of the architecture, and the unexplained ubiquity of seeded pretzels.

But once you’re done solving these and other puzzles, there is also the matter of Makinson’s very fine and wide range of techniques —from convincing pointillism to whispers of translucent layering, to painterly, visibly worked quasi-impasto and patient, over-the-top passages of pattern and decoration.

The eponymous centerpiece of the exhibition is Something Vexes Thee? (all works 2020), a diptych, six-and-a-half by nearly 11 feet, which opens like a window onto an entire world. The pictorial space is neatly divided into interior, exterior and distant landscape components, with lawn and gravel pathways tipped toward the viewer like an invitation. She uses ingenious visual devices to slide the eye around the image—filigrees of robes, outstretched legs, curling tails (oh, yes, some of the women have long tails), stabs of sunlight, or hands offering snacks. The variation between settings gives Makinson a chance to flex all her painting muscles, so that the grounds, structures, furnishings, lavish textiles, sunlit far-off vistas, and most importantly the cliques and cohorts of the remarkable minglers is

By Genie Davis

poetic phrases, the exhibition offers a site-specific web-based artwork, that serves as a personal and eternal history, one that shifts in patterns of white drifts like snow. The images move across and through a rich blue background, reminding the viewer of blueprints, only in this case they are blueprints to the soul.

There is a sense of both grace and unease in the images, which fits with how the artist describes them, as created while under self-imposed pandemic quarantine, seeing the world essentially through screens, viewing “place... as synthetic observation.” By identifying visuals as “a view of a mountain range in the water” and “a black and white photo of a giraffe,” Espinoza encourages the viewer to see each as linked, rather than disparate; connected as the body is to the earth, as the earth is to space, as the eye is to the camera.

Beyond that, the artist works to stimulate a conversation about what we as viewers are actually seeing. What are the relationships of one thing to another, one being, one observational tool? he asks.

How are immediate images connected to memory? Along with an embedded, absorbing two-minute video, Espinoza’s cyanoptypes draw us to participate in these images, despite a physically closed gallery space.

The works are created from patterns of orange tree leaves, but by combining their intense and intimate detail with descriptive phrases, the artist indicates they represent something “other,” something that leads us to different or deeper layers of understanding along a journey through space and time. Espinoza references the way in which the citrus genus moved through the world until it came, via agricultural and labor-based migration, to California.

Just as the fruit trees themselves were dispersed here in 1493, and put down literal and metaphorical roots within California culture, so too did its growers, pickers and packers. The journey that the artist takes us on, through a wondrous and minute visual labyrinth that resembles many things beyond the empirical truth of the images, is richly representative of the journey of migrating humans, flora and fauna. We are all together in this world, the artist appears to say, a collective sum of its strange and closely observed parts, growing in experience.

Tristan Espinoza, perennial (detail), 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

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By Shana Nys Dambrot

each rendered in a unique visual style. It’s amazing that the forces of gravity and light hold together across such a panoply, but in this and in each of the works, the scene possesses a sort of internal logic, a dream logic, in which it all makes perfect sense at the time.

In the context of the optical overstimulation, the proliferation of techniques helps mitigate the surrealism, giving another set of entry points into the works—form, style, surface and matter. In works like Better Days and Kinder Seas, Your Leafish Light, and Don’t Bite Anybody Else, smaller groups of women get more privacy. Whether clothed in fabrics, tattoos, or just the auras of their own adorned flesh, these women are comfortable in their skin, including the long tails, the pattern of wildcat fur, the feathers and flowers, the peaked elf ears. Their languid posture is not, or not always, sexual; it’s more that a rich sensuality defines the ambience, appropriate to the otherworldliness of the figures. Partly private and partly performative, the entirety of each room and story is exquisitely designed to arouse curiosity and desire—right down to the juicy peaches and the ostrich feather motif of the velvety drapes.

Jessie Makinson. Something Vexes Thee?, 2020, photo by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the Artist, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, and Lyles and King.

Jonathan Hepfer is a percussionist, conductor, and the artistic director of Monday Evening Concerts, the longest-running classical, avant-garde and experimental music concert series in LA.

Jonathan Hepfer INTERVIEWED BY EMILY WELLS

R E C O N N O I T E R

Photo by Kacie Tomita

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What has it been like reimagining your programming during the pandemic?

Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure of interviewing Éliane Radigue and conducting Yves Klein’s Monotone Symphony. The work of these artists taught me about the nature of purity of forms, reduction and absence. Radigue’s music is rooted in the tactility of masterfully sculpted sound, which of course, is itself immaterial. Klein’s work convinced me that painting, with all of its historical baggage, can be reduced: a) to single colors (monochromes); b) to a single color (blue); and c) to empty space (the void) while still completely retaining its "sensibilité," or artistic/spiritual potency.

James Baldwin said that the artist should be like a lover: If you love somebody, you help them see things they are incapable of seeing themselves. A friend and mentor of mine, Hamza Walker always manages to do this for me. When I first visited him, I looked at Sol LeWitt’s work. But after discussing it with Hamza, I saw it.

These realizations led me to the conclusion that even if I can’t give concerts while physically sharing the space with other human beings, I want to use my curatorial faculties to help myself and others learn to see in this fashion. My resulting blog, Islands from the Archipelago, (http://www. mondayeveningconcerts.org/) is a sort of public chronicle of my research interests. I’m trying to use this involuntary sabbatical to learn about new artists, and to find lesser-known works by well-known artists.

The blog is about unpredictable synapses firing, both for me and whoever might encounter these posts. When your synapses fire, looking becomes seeing. New ideas emerge in the process. Whether I am giving concerts or not, this has always been my objective.

One of the things I love about attending MEC is the seamless melding of mediums—music and language being the most potent. How do you think about this relationship?

Of course, our focus is indeed classical music. But there is something about the atmosphere, or attitude of the world of the visual arts that feels more conducive to the direction I’d like to see MEC go over the next few years. Éliane Radigue is more interesting when you understand her relationship to artists like Arman and Yves Klein. The same is true of Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett, Butch Morris and David Hammons, Iannis Xenakis, and Le Corbusier. Art is more compelling when it speaks across disciplines.

What are you most looking forward to when the world reopens for in-person programming?

Three things come to mind: seeing friends and loved ones in the lobby, intermission (my favorite part of concerts) and that indescribable haunting daze that sometimes comes after a special performance ends, and you don’t want to applaud or talk to anybody for a few hours—you only want to be alone with your thoughts. That would be my ideal response to every concert we give.

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Our Lady of the Iguanas, Juchitán, Oaxaca (detail), negative 1979; print mid-1990s, Graciela Iturbide. Gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Susan Steinhauser and Daniel Greenberg. © Graciela Iturbide Text and design: © J. Paul Getty Trust