The Interview Issue

THE INTERVIEW ISSUE

NOV/DEC 2021

Monique Van Genderen Afterimages October 9 - November 20, 2021

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES 1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

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WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY 2525 Michigan Avenue E-1, Santa Monica CA 90404 www.williamturnergallery.com 310.453.0909

September 11 - December 4, 2021

Los Angeles

A School of Architectural Thinking

sciarc.edu

huntington.org

OCT 11 - DEC 4, 2021 A group exhibition exploring the inseparability of humans and nature Dean Abernathy* Cheryl Cotman Kelli Elliot* Rebecca Erbstoesser Joy Fire* Kim Garrison* Blade Gillissen Ed Gomez Will Hare Jr. Laurie Hassold John Hesketh Richard Kraft Leland Means* Chelsea Mosher Kevin Myers Matthew Newman Dakota Noot Steve Radosevich* Kerri Sabine-Wolf Kevin Scianni Katherine Sheehan Natasha Shoro Timothy Robert Smith Yuki Toyooka Smith Noah Thomas Holly Topping Cora Volkoff / Debbie Dunne Roger Whitridge Sam Yip *Mystery Ranch Project Image: Cheryl Cotman, Untitled (bonobo chair), 2012, colored pencil on paper

Gallery hours: Tues-Thurs 11-5, and First Saturdays 12-4 Free campus parking everyday Fall 2021 | (714) 432-5738 orangecoastcollege.edu/DoyleArts

Due to changing policies and procedures around covid-19, please check The Doyle website prior to your arrival. Masks are mandated on campus as of July 2021.

November 14, 2021 to January 9, 2022

Opening reception: Sunday, November 14, 1:00 to 5:00 pm Paul Williams Gallery, 119 West Transit St., Ontario, CA 91762 @thepaulwilliamsgallery (951) 880-7432

We All Exist Right Now is presented by:

2300 E Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90803 • lbma.org

BCM Foundation

Major support provided by Pasadena Art Alliance and Port of Long Beach. Additional support by TABC.

FREDRIK NILSEN STUDIO CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHING THE ARTS Established 1991 @fredriknilsenstudio www.nilsenstudio.com

Table of Contents VOLUME 16, ISSUE 2, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2021

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The Interview Issue F E AT U R E S Bennett Roberts - by tulsa kinney June Edmonds - by richard allen may iii Constance Mallinson - by david dimichele Ilona Szwarc - by julie schulte Trulee Hall - by emily babette

26 30 32 36 40

C O LU M N S ART BRIEF: MOCA Madness - by stephen j goldberg DECODER: What Art Should Do - by zak smith SIGHTS UNSCENE: Royale Projects - by lara jo regan CODE ORANGE: Cecilia Arana - curated by laura london BUNKER VISION: The Bechdel Test - by skot armstrong

C O N T I N U E D

20 22 24 44 56

»

ON THE COVER: Bennett Roberts at Roberts Projects with Amoako Boafo exhibiton, photo by Tyler Hubby, 2021.

ABOVE: June Edmonds, Alpina de las Aguas, 2021, (detail) acrylic on canvas, 96 x 120 in., courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, photo by Paul Salveson.

RIGHT: Pipilotti Rist, Ever is Over All, 1997, two-channel video installation with sound, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Pipilotti Rist—Sip My Ocean, Sydney, Australia, 2018, photo by Jessica Maurer, ©Pipilotti Rist, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.

NEXT PAGE, Top: Trulee Hall, Still from Ladies’ Lair Lake, Gossip and Goddess Plans, 2021(detail), photo by Davey Clarke. Bottom: Detail of comics by Susan Butcher and Carol Wood featuring “Future Features by Creative Creatures.”

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From the Editor Table of Contents continued

50 40 D E PA R T M E N T S 18 60 60 63

SHOPTALK: LA Art News by scarlet cheng ASK BABS: My Friend’s Art Sucks by babs rappleye POEMS by john tottenham; steve anwyll COMICS: Creative Creatures by butcher & wood

R E V I E W S Pipilotti Rist @ Geffen Contemporary Young Joon Kwak @ Commonwealth and Council Michael C. McMillen @ L.A. Louver Sean Raspet @ Various Small Fires YoYo Lander @ The Know Contemporary Serena Potter @ Lois Lambert Gallery Keith Walsh @ Rory Devine Fine Art Judy Baca @ Museum of Latin American Art

46 47 47 48 48 50 50 52

NY: Alison Elizabeth Taylor @ James Cohan SF: Jim Melchert @ Gallery 16

52 54

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63 14

Dear Reader, I had the unexpected pleasure of spending four hours at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum with my 93-yearold mother-in-law recently. Not that visiting the Fogg is unusual—we’ve done it for years, practically every summer. But this time we spent four hours looking at art!

As we sat in the café area, realizing we wouldn’t be enjoying our planned leisurely lunch—a COVID casualty—my mother-in-law stabbed her cane into the floor as she creaked up out of her chair, signaling let’s get started. One of the first paintings we lingered over was a Kerry James Marshall self-portrait of the artist holding a paint brush and jumbo-sized palette in the foreground. I leaned over to tell my mother-in-law a little about the artist and his importance in the art world. She listened intently, then responded, “Hmm.” We then walked away in different directions, on to the next piece—being mindful to give one another our own time with each work. I noticed how my mother-in-law stayed with every piece, much longer than most museumgoers (who apparently spend an average of three seconds with each painting). She would read the placard, study the piece, then refer to the placard again. If something was of particular interest, she would come over to me and comment on what she had just learned. We would then look at the piece together, with me often elaborating upon it.

We wandered through the museum’s impressive permanent collection, starting with Modernism, ending with contemporary art. We oohed and aahed at the Pollock, wondering if it was incorrectly hung, as it was atypically vertical.

When we got to a Louise Nevelson, my mother-in-law was blown away by the large black wall sculpture—she was not familiar with Nevelson’s work. We sat in silence on a bench positioned directly in front of the entire piece. I wondered

aloud if all of the black painted wooden shapes were found items. I walked toward the placard and announced that indeed they were. We started pointing out each form that we found particularly interesting or discovering something so obvious, like a leg of a chair. I related how Nevelson, one of the few women sculptors of her time, once stood up at a sculpture conference and proclaimed “I have balls too!” My mother-in-law smirked a little at that story.

We were approaching a curtained-off room at the end of the exhibition where a film was screening, and I asked ma-in-law if she wanted to watch it. We both liked the idea of sitting in a darkened room and resting our weary feet. The short film—Phat Free by David Hammons—was shot with a hand-held camera as it followed Hammons kicking a bucket down the streets of New York City at night. The only sound was the clanging of the bucket rolling on the pavement with peripheral city noises. We sat in silence; mesmerized.

When we got home, we both knew we had experienced something very special together. She told me how she appreciated going with me as my stories added so much more to the experience.

We hope this interview issue will do the same, provide a deeper understanding of how an artist works, how a gallery operates, and how one’s background determines one’s career choices. More knowledge of something is always a good thing, just ask my mother-in-law.

art world friends and strangers

Art Ladies, 30x24, 2019, Acrylic on GessoBoard (Three very accomplished artists of a certain age . . . )

november 17- december 11, 2021 opening: saturday november 20, 4-8pm TAG Gallery 5458 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles CA 90036 323-297-3061 Hours : Wed-Sun,1-7pm taggallery.net @taggellery betzistein.com @betzisteinartist

F E AT U R E D

C O N T R I B U TO R S Julie Schulte is an LA-based writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine where she teaches a course on the rhetoric of motherhood. She writes about art and culture and her nonfiction has appeared in publications like The Atlantic. Instagram: @julesvernova

S TA F F Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher

EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Max King Cap - senior editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - copy editor/proof Dave Shulman - graphic design Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS David DiMichele is a LA-based artist, writer and curator. His work has been shown in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Rotterdam, Netherlands. He is a recipient of the COLA Artist Fellowship,and was recently awarded the FOCA Curators Lab Award to produce the exhibition” Abstraction/ Not Abstraction” in Fall of 2022.

Emily Babette is a Canadian-born multidisciplinary artist and writer currently based in Los Angeles. She got her BFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2015 and is currently attending University of California, Irvine, where she is earning her MFA and teaching art.

Originally from Chicago, Richard Allen May III has taught at colleges throughout SoCal’s Inland Empire for over two decades. He wrote the foreword to AFRICOBRA: Experimental Art Toward a School of Thought, Duke Univ. Press, 2020.

May currently teaches writing at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Stephen Goldberg writes Artillery’s law column: Art Brief. He is currently in private practice in Los Angeles specializing in general business law, entertainment law and civil litigation. He represents fine artists, art galleries and collectors with regard to their business and legal needs.

He is a frequent denizen of the West Coast art scene.

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Tucker Neel, Kelly Rappleye, Laura London

COLUMNISTS Anthony Ausgang, Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Kelly Rappleye, C. Kaye Rawlings, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Emily Babette, Lane Barden, Ezrha Jean Black, Natasha Boyd, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Bianca Collins, Shana Nys Dambrot, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Alexia Lewis, Richard Allen May III, Christopher Michno, Yxta Maya Murray, Barbara Morris, John David O’Brien, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, Cole Sweetwood, Colin Westerbeck, Anne Wallentine, Eve Wood, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, Peter Brock, John Haber, Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

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YAEL BARTANA, WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD?, 2017. PERFORMANCE VIEW, FILMBY AARHUS, EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE AARHUS 2017, DENMARK. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. PHOTO: BRIGIT KAULFUSS.

S H O P TA L K

MOCA Madness

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

Good news, the art world is revving up! We have art fairs taking place In Real Life, galleries setting regular opening hours and museums flinging open their doors. Of course, we’re not completely out of the COVID woods—many venues require proof of vax upon arrival. To me that’s a minor inconvenience for gaining access to art and meeting with other people who care about art.

Lots of news on the museum front. First, Klaus Biesenbach has finally left MOCA LA, although not before welcoming someone who was to supposed be his co-director to the museum.

On September 2, MOCA announced that Johanna Burton of the Wexner Center for the Arts would step into the new job of executive director, basically to run operations and admin. It has been known since February that Biesenbach would have to share power at the top. He’d basically been demoted from director— the title he assumed when he arrived at the museum in 2018—to artistic director. Shortly after the Sept. 2 announcement, a week later news leaked that he was heading back to Germany to run the Neue Nationalgalerie and the future Museum of the 20th Century. The New York Times reported that Biesenbach got the offer the morning of Sept. 10, and immediately accepted—which sounds to me like he must have been working on that escape plan for awhile.

There’s been criticism over how poorly MOCA has handled the pandemic—there were the staff layoffs, of course, but also the lack of staff diversity and the lack of programming when other museums had regular offerings of virtual talks, tours and other forms of public engagement. Craft Contemporary has been offering artmaking workshops over Zoom. It’s ironic that Klaus is leaving right after the opening of one of the best shows to grace the museum in the past decade—Pipilotti Rist’s “Big Heartedness: Be My Neighbor.”

Burton will be the first woman to head MOCA LA since its founding in 1979—about time! Welcome, Johanna!

On September 30 the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures finally opened, after several years of delays (even before COVID) and millions in cost overruns. It’s in that Streamline Moderne delight on Wilshire Boulevard, the former May Company with its gold-tiled cylindrical tower. There are four floors, three include exhibitions: two are about films, filmmakers and aspects of filmmaking (cinematography, costuming, casting, etc.), and the top floor dedicated to a special exhibition on the great animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away). A Renzo Piano–designed sphere on the back contains a wonderful 1,000-seat theater. Yours Truly plans to spend many a future hour there, for there’s nothing like sitting in a darkened, comfortably appointed room watching a story unfold on the illuminated screen.

It’s fun to see Dorothy’s ruby slippers (The Wizard of Oz) and Rosebud the sled (Citizen Kane) and a roomful of historic Oscar statues, and I love how Hattie McDaniel’s story is highlighted.

She played Mammy in Gone with the Wind, but had to sit at a back table at the Oscars ceremony where she was nominated for best supporting actress. When she won—she was the first African American to win an Oscar—her peers applauded her warmly.

I appreciate the conscientiousness with which the curators recognized diversity and inclusiveness throughout the exhibitions—contributions by people of color and women. What I find lacking is a stronger curatorial direction and Cinema History 101, such how the movie industry came to Los Angeles, the development of the studio system, etc. Even the Miyazaki exhibition feels anemic—full of story boards, film stills and film clips, but short on insight into what makes his films so magical.

Installation view, Louisiana Museum, Pipilotti Rist Åbn min lysning (Open My Glade), Humlebæk, Denmark, 2019, photo by Poul Buchard, © Pipilotti Rist, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.

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BY

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

OCMA Rising The Orange County Museum of Art held its annual gala October 8, on the roof deck of the Thom Mayne-designed building rising next to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa.

The opening is still a year away—October 2022—but they’ve had important announcements, such as free admission for two years and the raising of $1 million at the gala. That’s three times what they’ve raised at any previous event.

Heidi Zuckerman is the energetic new director who arrived earlier this year, and she’s been deeply involved in reviewing the master plan. After touring the construction site with her (and other journalists) in early October, I was struck both by her command of details about the project and by her ability to articulate a vision for what the building, with its multi-purpose and interwoven spaces, could mean. They will have art, but also education and performances. For her, OCMA will be “not only a museum but a cultural anchor for Orange County.” Welcome, Heidi!

The Huntington Gets Hip Diversity and representation are the big words museums have been wrestling with these past few years—COVID made economic and social inequities so much more obvious, and the righting of inequities more urgent. One of SoCal’s largest and wealthiest museums has been a bastion of white privilege since its founding by very privileged white people, Henry and Arabella Huntington, in the early 1900s. Not surprisingly they put together a collection with an emphasis on European art, furnishings, and books.

To strike some balance, the museum commissioned Kehinde Wiley to create a portrait for the famous Thornton Portrait Gallery—usually populated by British portraits done in the Grand Manner (Gainsborough, Reynolds, etc.). The result was recently unveiled to great fanfare, and it’s gorgeous—A Portrait of a Young Gentleman features a young Senegalese man (Wiley has a studio in Dakar) dressed in a bright orange tie-dyed T-shirt and blue shorts, with a William Morris botanical background.

Currently, the painting hangs right across from you as you enter, and it faces The Blue Boy, the famous Gainsborough painting depicting an equally dapper young man of the 18th century (which will be on loan to London’s National Gallery in January). After reading about how Wiley was influenced

by Grand Manner paintings when he took art lessons at the museum as a boy, I saw that maybe the commission was more than a gimmick. I’m looking forward to the Huntington commissioning and buying more works by artists of color, and by women, in the years to come.

Heidi Zuckerman, photo Mark Hanauer

Installation view in the Thornton Portrait Gallery at The Huntington, photo by Joshua White, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

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More Fireworks for MOCA

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A R T

B R I E F

Above: Johanna Burton, photo by Erin Leland

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One of the most memorable events at MOCA occurred when Chinese-American artist Cai Guo-Qiang exploded gunpowder from an exterior wall of the Geffen Contemporary just after sunset, setting off blinding and spectacular explosions before a huge crowd unprepared for such fire and fury. Immediately after that, the startled guests staggered inside to view Cai’s exhibition of gunpowder residue artworks. Cai should reprise that 2012 show as a ritual demolition of a museum which has gone completely off the rails in the last 10 years with a shocking series of revolving-door hirings and firings of directors and curators.

The latest MOCA debacle started with the announcement this May that short-tenured museum director Klaus Biesenbach would be demoted to “artistic director” while a search was made for a new executive director. Biesenbach was a sub-par administrator who failed to implement the museum’s diversity initiatives, contributing to the departure of highly regarded senior curator Mia Locks and the resignation of the human resources chief. Biesenbach—a known talent as a curator—had a history of success in his hometown of Berlin and at MoMA PS1 in New York, but was ill-suited for the challenges faced by the arcane and sprawling world of art in California.

MOCA announced the hiring of the new museum director, Johanna Burton, in early September. Biesenbach got his revenge several days later by announcing a return to Germany as head of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Biesenbach was the wrong person at the wrong time for MOCA, and faced unforeseen challenges when the museum suffered a prolonged COVID shutdown and resulting staff cuts.

Burton is the former director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University and will be MOCA’s first female director. After Biesenbach’s departure, the museum announced that no artistic director would replace him and that Burton would be the sole executive in charge. Burton needs to re-invent MOCA, develop a clear, coherent vision for the museum’s core mission and bring in a strong curatorial team.

Arguably, the two most important exhibitions in MOCA’s history were 1992’s “Helter Skelter” and 2011’s “Under the Big Black Sun,” both of them revealing the rot beneath the perpetual sunshine of the Golden State. It’s no coincidence that those shows were organized by legendary MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, who was steeped in California art history.

MOCA’s longtime senior curator, Bennett Simpson, is known for a number of successful shows, including a Mike Kelley retrospective and a memorable “Blues for Smoke” exhibition, but MOCA needs additional curators who are experts in contemporary California art.

Most of MOCA’s problems stem from a lack of clarity on just what the museum’s core mission is. A brief “Mission Statement” appears on its website with such inanities as: “We are a museum; we are contemporary; we care.” Unfortunately, the mission for MOCA since 2008 has been focused on survival due to near insolvency.

It is only in the last few years that fiscal stability has been achieved with a large increase in MOCA’s endowment under the leadership of board chair Maria Seferian.

Since the 2015 opening of The Broad museum, directly across Grand Avenue from MOCA, the new kid on the block has presented a huge challenge. Endowed by a billionaire, the late Eli Broad, its blue-chip collection contains more marquee masterworks than MOCA’s. The Broad offered free admission, causing a surge in attendance that outpaced MOCA; in response, MOCA abolished its own admission charge.

MOCA needs to differentiate itself from The Broad, which has a solid foundation of works by contemporary New York and European artists. The Broad is noticeably weak in its holdings of California artists (with the exception of Ruscha and Baldessari). Fortunately, MOCA has an encyclopedic inventory of works by California artists. MOCA should focus its mission on being the primary museum for contemporary California art. Its exhibitions should be California-centric. Since The Broad leans to Europe, MOCA can counter-program with more shows of contemporary Asian art.

MOCA must also join the post-BLM initiative of artistic institutions seeking to re-balance collections with acquisitions from Black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ and female artists. It’s off to a good start—dozens of recent MOCA acquisitions have been made with diversity in mind, including works by Lauren Halsey and Rafa Esparza.

Exhibitions also need to focus on avant-garde artists and art movements.

The Broad has been attracting some solid shows, including “Soul of a Nation” and a Jasper Johns exhibition, although they have been primarily borrowed, not home-curated. It’s likely that The Broad will continue to rely on mounting conservative exhibitions. MOCA needs to be the un-Broad and provide some explosive shows once again.

Things Art Should Be Doing

BY ZAK SMITH

D E C O D E R

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Maggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird harmonies: bad-acid Disney-villain purples and magentas, alien and dreamy but it is all more precise than any dream should be. In a word: it works, this immersive video installation.

No part of it is an accident. “Eternal Garden” is not the kind of art where you lay out the canvas and make a move, then make another based on what you now see, then improvise the next and then the next. Maggie had to sit in her studio with plants, lights and cameras and know that eventually the pictures she was making would be on this particular screen in this specific big black room—it doesn’t work any other way: the piece relies on its precision—and seeing that precision at scale—for its effect. That’s what makes it more than decorative. The art would not only not work without the large and expensive machinery provided by the large company that owns it and the space, it could not even have been thought up without it: the piece is not itself otherwise. Before making the piece, Maggie made a deal.

She told the company she would make an installation and it would show off the quality of the technology. She’s good at this sort of thing—and not ashamed.

Simultaneously, on the other end of the country, the Instituto de Subcultura in San Juan, Puerto Rico is presenting “No Moral or Legal Authority,” woodcuts from John Mejias’ Puerto Rican War book. It is everything “Eternal Garden” is not: direct, low-tech, blatantly political, black and white, small. And wholly independently produced: the project began during the Obama administration, with no publisher, no gallery and no plan. Pieces of wood were going to get cut, over a span of years, into an intricate, jostling, chaotic and mutli-patterned re-telling of the story of an obscure conflict that even the visitors in San Juan weren’t taught about in school. And if nobody cared at the end? Oh well, John has been self-publishing for years. It turns out this time that they do care—post-colonial problems are on even collectors’ minds these days. But that is an accident. This piece didn’t expect the audience it got.

Both of these very different works deserve to exist and do things art should be doing: it is good to be reminded of the strangeness behind the beautiful growing world all around us, and it is good to find out about a real-but-failed revolution in our country from someone with noir-caper storytelling instincts and an eye for the off-beat—but they also both involve their artists in different gambles.

It is a gamble for John to sit down and make art unsure if anyone cares, and it is a gamble for Maggie to decide to make art that won’t exist unless you first make someone care. The first gamble is earnest, unassuming, self-sufficient, it doesn’t care what you think; the second gamble is clever, charming, sociable, shrewd—it will be loved or it will not exist. Neither artist is rich, and neither was sure that any of this would be worth it.

They are different in other ways: John’s piece is a book: something that sits quietly in private spaces and only is fully what it is meant to be when you pick it up in a quiet moment and decide, on a random day, to meet it more than halfway. Maggie’s piece makes a party: one night only, you could go see it without seeing all the people who want to see it, silhouetted also. You have to get into a car and out again, and then decide how long to linger, drinking, in the dark to make your trip worthwhile.

This art and these artists both knock on our door, but they’re applying for different jobs—they are different, but not competing. Everyone needs the truth, well told, and everyone loves dazzle with something worth dwelling on at the center.

There’s a lie in the middle of how we’re taught about art—that this or that captures the spirit of the age, and that the last thing is the throwback and the next thing is progress. Are we, any of us, a homogeny? We are not. Does any one of us need only one thing? No. Does art have something better to do than give us—humans—the various things we need? It doesn’t.

There’s a fear of scarcity somewhere at the bottom somewhere—that more of this means less of that. In reality, we all need everything.

WONZIMER GALLERY IS LAUNCHING COLLECT.WONZIMER A CURATED NFT PLATFORM FEATURING EXCLUSIVE PHYSICAL CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTISTS. COLLECTORS HAVE ACCESS TO A GROWING MARKET OF DIGITAL PIECES. COLLECT.WONZIMER.COM

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Artist Ewedrt Hilgemann’s Sculpture Implosion Event, Royale Projects, Los Angeles, 2017

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HOSTILE WITNESS 2021

LAD DECKER

LADDECKER.COM

LADDECKER

BENNETT ROBERTS It’s About Time

BY TULSA KINNEY

Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it to him—before he could read it in the latest edition of Artillery—that we had panned his Kehinde Wiley show.

Roberts, unflinching, seemed to be suppressing a grin. Was it because a review in Artillery had no significance to him, or was it his absolute confidence that Wiley was already untouchable? I chose to believe the latter. He graciously invited me in to linger at the show and told me not to hesitate to raise any questions.

That made quite an impression on me as a journalist; I really respected his very adult manner.

Fifteen years later, a lone Kehinde Wiley painting hangs on an empty white gallery wall, surrounded by brown-paper–wrapped canvases awaiting installation at Roberts Projects. I assumed

the unopened art was Wiley’s; Roberts informed me otherwise, stating it was Amoako Boafo’s next show—the Wiley was there for a client-viewing later in the day.

The irony did not escape me as we sat down in the main gallery for the second meeting of our interview. The first time was at the Los Feliz home that Roberts shares with his wife and business partner, Julie Roberts. That was nearly a year ago (that pesky pandemic kept delaying things), and it was now September, the start of the new fall art season. Julie, a full and equal partner in the gallery, was in New York at The Armory Show while hubby stayed behind to attend to their upcoming exhibition—there’s a long waiting list for Boafo’s work—“hundreds.” The African artist who has been showing with Roberts Projects since 2018 is super-hot right now; Roberts could not afford to be away that opening weekend.

Business is going well for the gallery. Many of its artists are in high demand, and artists that have stuck by Roberts over the years are now getting their due—current art star Betye Saar for one. Roberts is in high spirits and ready to begin the interview before I even get the recorder going. He kicks off by singing high praises for LA’s current recognition as an important art center—finally. “It’s always been a great center for artists.”He pauses before acknowledging—for galleries and collectors—“not always so great.”

In the past, Los Angeles was notorious for its inferior collector-base compared to New York. Roberts recounts the LA collectors of only a few decades ago; “If they’re going to spend 30 to 50 thousand dollars or a million dollars, they’re going to buy from New York. It gave them more confidence.” That is no longer the case.

Roberts emerged in the LA art scene amidst the ’80s artworld explosion, after returning home from college in Santa Barbara. He grew up in Brentwood, a wealthy neighborhood on LA’s west side, with a producer-writer father in the film and television industry. Roberts attended Windward, “a well-known private school,” he points out, where his best friend was Richard Heller—of the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. In the summer of 1986, Roberts and Heller picked up where they left off and started a gallery in Heller’s father’s garage. They called it Richard/Bennett Gallery.

Within a year, they were confident enough to move into a “real” space on La Cienega Boulevard near some of LA’s hottest galleries, like Rosamund Felsen, who was debuting the likes of Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman. Richard/Bennett proved to be no slouch either: they were the first to show Raymond Pettibon, and were responsible for introducing his work to Chief Curator Paul Schimmel—who in turn put Pettibon in the famed 1992 Geffen/MOCA show, “Helter Skelter.” Running the gallery was a struggle, Roberts admits, but somehow just when they didn’t Left: Bennett Roberts, 2021, photo by Tyler Hubby. Opposite page: Kehinde Wiley, Yachinboaz Ben Yisrael II, 2021, oil on linen, 106.5 x 74.25 x 4.25 in. framed; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California, photo by Joshua White

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think they could cover their rent, a miracle sale would happen, or a collector would buy a few Pettibons for $250 apiece to help them out. With measured success over five years, Roberts and Heller parted ways, both continuing their own successful careers as art dealers.

RETAIN & MAINTAIN According to Roberts, a central challenge in running a successful gallery is retaining your artists. Yes, Pettibon eventually moved on; his career skyrocketed after “Helter Skelter” and today he is represented by Regen Projects in LA and David Zwirner in New York—there’s always a bigger gallery, a better offer. Roberts concedes there’s a long list of artists who got snatched up after he invested in them. But that’s typical and expected. “It’s unavoidable,” he maintains.

Take Roberts Projects’ biggest artist, Kehinde Wiley—it is by no means the only gallery representing him. Things have changed drastically since the 1980s era, when galleries had exclusive partnerships with their artists. Roberts says he prefers

the new system—a more polyamorous relationship, if you will.

He concurs, “I like Kehinde showing with someone different in London, someone different in New York. I make less money and get less pieces, but those people have different collectors, different curators that are interested in that program. Artists are seen differently, depending on the program they are in.” Roberts thinks that artists showing with other galleries is not necessarily a bad thing. Another newer trend is for a gallery to have multiple spaces. Galleries don’t often want to surrender their artists to another gallery and take lower percentages (like Roberts did with Wiley). He notes, “It may actually be cheaper in the long run to have another space in New York to show that artist rather than giving the artist to another gallery.”

Roberts emphatically stresses that it’s all about retaining the talent you’ve developed. “The longer you retain it, it is perceived as important…,” he interrupts himself, “I use ‘perceive’ because everything is about time. Everything in the art world is about time. Everyone thinks it’s about popularity, success, money; it isn’t. It’s about how much time you can keep that person in play.”

Above: Amoako Boafo, Monstera Leaf Sleeves, 2021; oil and paper transfer on canvas, 77 x 76.5 in.; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Opposite page: Betye Saar, The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude, 2010, mixed media assemblage, 54 x 43 x 20.5 in., Baltimore Museum of Art; purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

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Roberts believes that for an artist to have historical staying power, a cultural discussion needs to revolve around that artist and their work. Until that dialogue expands outside the art world it remains “an inside discussion.” In other words, that work will not make a wider impact, nor make it into the history books.

Kehinde Wiley’s oeuvre has crossed over to become part of a cultural discussion. Two factors play a part: his commissioned presidential portrait of President Obama and, most recently, his version of the famous Blue Boy portrait hanging at The Huntington (The Blue Boy is on loan to London’s National Gallery). Roberts Projects had a huge part in making that transaction happen. Those projects propelled Wiley into a wider cultural sphere, surpassing just the art world. Most likely, he will go down in history.

BLACK ARTISTS MATTER The Black Lives Matter movement filtered into the art world quickly; in fact, most would say much earlier than the mainstream cultural embrace. Today, if your gallery doesn’t represent Black and POC artists, or include much diversity, you might as well be showing cave paintings. Roberts had been representing Black artists long before most galleries caught up to speed. His gallery didn’t seem to get much credit for it, but he wasn’t looking for it either.

The artist roster has always been inclusive, starting with Kehinde Wiley in 2002, Noah Davis in 2006, Betye Saar in 2010 and recent additions of African artists Boafo, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Wangari Mathenge.

The Black artist movement is thriving right now and Roberts Projects is right on target. Alongside Wiley, Noah Davis was a big hit for them. Davis, too, is engaged in that bigger historical discussion, as co-founder of The Underground Museum, an institution created to show museum-quality work in a Latino and Black LA neighborhood that was underserved in art exposure. Davis died of cancer in 2015, at the tragically early age of 32, but had left the Roberts & Tilton gallery in 2012 (Roberts’ former gallery with partners Julie, and Jack Tilton, who passed in 2017). All ties between Davis and Roberts & Tilton were severed by then, and David Zwirner obtained Davis’ estate in 2020. (Zwirner needs to hurry and check all those boxes).

Roberts isn’t upset about that, but more dismayed about the erasure of Roberts’ involvement in developing Davis from the beginning. “I helped sell pieces to fund The Underground Museum.” Roberts pauses with quiet exasperation. Zwirner produced a huge monograph on Davis with nary a mention of Roberts. “It was unbelievable to me how the art world loves to rewrite history and make it seem like only the winners write it. Not the ones that are up-and-coming, or the also-rans.” Roberts was key in putting Davis on the map circa 2007. Roberts & Tilton were participatining in an art fair when Don and Mera Rubell (serious art collectors and clients) stopped by their booth and inquired about a painting. Roberts recalls Mera demanding: Who is this great artist on the wall? “I said, ‘It’s a brand-new discovery of mine. I think it’s terrific, I think you should get something.’ They said, ‘You know what? We’re doing [a show called] ‘30 Americans.’ And he will be the final and youngest artist we include in the show.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”(Let that go down in history—you read it here first!)

ONE PERCENTERS Let’s face it, the art world is a rich man’s game now, and with the world’s wealth concentrated among the one percent, it’s a small playing field. “It is the game you play after all the other games you’ve played,” Roberts explains, “It is the final frontier.” He goes on, “It is the place that once you’ve made whatever fortune you’ve made and you have what everyone else has... you can differentiate yourself from all the other billionaires by collecting

things that are not only great but are truly something that will enhance how you see your own position in things.” Pausing, Roberts surmises, “It’s a game of fortune.”

One-percenters have needs too. “When you’re that big, the richest people want to buy from you, because they feel secure buying from you,” Roberts says. That’s why mega-galleries like Gagosian can and do exist. At last count Gagosian had 16 galleries worldwide. In today’s global market, having art galleries around the world seems more shrewd than extravagant. Another factor, Roberts explains, “All of those businesses have a very, very vibrant secondary market—that’s truly where all the money is.”

At that level, the competition is with the auction houses; they don’t care about other galleries at that point. Roberts acknowledges he’s not in that league—and is relieved not to be.

Roberts refers to what’s happening right now in the art world as a “sea change.” His and Julie’s gallery is rolling with the new system, and in fact thriving. “I don’t think that I even sell things anymore—I think people buy things from me,” Roberts says reflectively. “Zero pressure. I want the experience to be as clean and as enjoyable as possible.”

I’ve watched Roberts’ gallery remain fresh, relevant, edgy— top-notch for over 30 years. With Betye Saar’s soaring career, the recent Wiley accomplishments, and rising star Amoako Boafo on board, it is undeniably riding the wave.

Unsurprisingly, Roberts announced at the end of our interview that they will be moving from their space to La Brea Avenue.

The new gallery will be three times larger than their Culver City venue. And no, Roberts Projects will not be adding another gallery; they just need a bigger space for displaying larger works and a nice showing room for their clients—where they can have an enjoyable experience considering the lone Kehinde Wiley spotlighted on the wall.

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JUNE EDMONDS Freedom in Abstraction

BY RICHARD ALLEN MAY III

The post-pandemic era can offer rewarding challenges, as I found out when engaging in my first Zoom interview. I spoke with painter and educator June Edmonds on the occasion of her current 40-year retrospective at the Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, and a simultaneous solo show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Edmonds appeared on screen with a welcoming smile and friendly brown eyes that peered through rectangular glasses. A pair of circular sepia earrings complemented her double-crescent semi-Afro hairstyle with its curled strands.

When asked about her early years, she fondly recalled, “My mom was a teacher and she loved to draw. She would sit by the phone and draw profiles of people, and I enjoyed collecting those little sketches.” Her mother also took Edmonds on formative trips to the Huntington and LACMA.“When I was teenager,” said Edmonds, “she brought me to see the ‘Two Centuries of Black American Art’ show (LACMA, 1978). These works by African American artists had a profound formative impact upon Edmonds, as did a 1989 trip to Washington DC, where she viewed a Post-Impressionist exhibition.

Edmonds related that in her undergrad education in art at San Diego State, “Joy Shipman was super-supportive, and so was Patrick Cauley. I attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

Graduate school was very challenging because color was not in—especially for a student who wanted use color in the way that I did, but Stan Whitney was very helpful.”

Edmonds described two significant events that inspired her to become a public artist—first a trip to Mexico City: “We arrived late at the Museum of Anthropology and we could not get in, so this taxi driver offered to give us a tour and showed us all the important murals that we learned about in art history, and other works that I was unfamiliar with. It was those works made in Venetian glass mosaic and the mural by Jose Chavez Morado that most moved me.”

The second such event was an exhibition of public art for MTA created by artists of color that Edmonds attended in downtown Los Angeles. This was an opportunity to see proposals (public art models) by Willie Middlebrook, Sandra Rowe (the first Black woman to be awarded an MTA grant), Richard Wyatt Jr., John Outterbridge and Charles Dickson—and to meet those artists.

Edmonds remembers, “I was just working, trying to pay off my student loans. I didn’t know where to find such a community.”

However, Edmonds began to attend artists’ talks and describes one given by Willie Middlebrook: “I was blown away by his work, blown away to see this Black artist with so much talent, so much confidence to be able to express what he was doing.”

In 1995, Edmonds was selected to create a Venetian glass mosaic for the Metro Blue Line, Long Beach Pacific Station, making Edmonds the second Black woman to be awarded an MTA grant.

In 2010, when Edmonds was beginning to focus on abstrac-

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Top, L-R: June Edmonds in her studio, San Pedro CA, August 2021; Joy of Other Suns, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 88 x 128 in. ©June Edmonds, photo by Paul Salveson; courtesy Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Below: Metro Blue Line, Long Beach Pacific Station, (detail) public art by June Edmonds, venetian glass mosaic,1995

tion, she was invited by Kathy Gallegos, director and founder of Avenue 50 Studio, to have a solo show. This was a turning point in her journey as an abstract painter. “I love the freedom that it gives, how an artist can create their own language, and how abstraction can even communicate on a spiritual level,” said Edmonds, emphasizing the importance of abstraction to her practice.

In 2017, during an artist’s residency in Paducah, Kentucky, Edmonds began working in acrylic paint rather than her usual oils. She explained, “[The residency] was only for a month, so I needed a medium that would dry quickly.”

She showed me her sketchbooks and described how she uses colored pencils to work out the composition and its various hues.

Her process involves using overlapping circles to intensify negative and positive space and create other shapes that possess spiritual and feminine connotations: “the shape of a seed, the shape of a leaf implying growth, the shape of a vulva symbolizing life, and also the shape of a shield.”

Edmonds stated that she had a dream of four Black draping flags that inspired the “Allegiances and Convictions” flag paintings that were unveiled at the Luis De Jesus gallery in 2019.

“The symbolism was too strong to let go of, and I wanted to use neutral browns with various values that represented skin tones.”

“Black people… ” Edmonds concluded, “No matter what is said to us, no matter what attitudes are brought to us, we have this amazing sense of ownership of where we are.”

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CONSTANCE MALLINSON Talking Trash: Figuratively and Abstractly

BY DAVID DiMICHELE

Constance Mallinson’s career has spanned the many vicissitudes of the art world, from Minimalism to Pattern and Decoration, through to postmodern conceptual strategies. More recently, she has created a form of realistic painting that draws from Modernist Abstraction rather than the figurative tradition, and which offers an original alternative to the currently popular trend of pictorial and illustrative painting.

DAVID DiMICHELE: I’d like to start by discussing your current and most recent large scale, highly representational oil paintings based on plastic detritus you collect on walks in your neighborhood. The plastic fragments are often combined with natural forms, such as leaves, roots and branches.

These works interest me partly because of their dichotomy. On the one hand, they seem to be in the tradition of social realism in the way they use techniques of representation to draw attention to sociopolitical ideas. Conversely, their formal aesthetic seems to be rooted in the Greenbergian notion of the “all over” painting that really coalesced in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, and became a hallmark of Color Field painting and what Greenberg called post-painterly abstraction. What interests me is that you are combining two traditions that usually are thought to be polar opposites, representing both the most radical (Abstract Expressionism) and the most reactionary and anti-modernist (American Social Realism) styles of painting in mid-20th-century art. Are both of these traditions important to you?

CONSTANCE MALLINSON: A little history to address your question: Fifty years ago when I made my first paintings, Minimalism and Greenbergian theory held tremendous sway. Painters had embraced the shallow space and a reductivism to all but the essentials of the medium. Of importance in painting was its flatness or “all-overness” and the literal paint on the surface—no narrative, no personal gestures, just a purified phenomenological experience. Re-read Ad Reinhardt’s rules to understand the limited aesthetic choices of the era. But the feminist art movement led to patterned paintings

and drawings that made overt references to abstractions from non-Western cultures including woven textiles and abstraction that became aligned with a very different ideology about what abstractions can convey.

In the mid-1980s when mass media references infiltrated painting, my large-scale collage-like panoramic landscape paintings were figurative but also avoided the allusions to deep space of traditional landscape painting, remaining faithful to traditional abstractions in their flatness and compositional method. This was a pivotal point, where I realized that there really is no such thing as a purely abstract or purely representational painting. Despite its supposed adherence to nonobjectivity, abstraction for the most part has always had a subject (if only the self), and figuration has always been abstract. Every subsequent painting for me is not simply about “combining two traditions that have usually been thought to be polar opposites” but rather having another look at how these traditions are far more alike than we have previously acknowledged.

There are Renaissance and Baroque paintings that are really quite abstract, as art historian Norman Bryson has laid out in his arguments about the mutualities of abstraction and figuration throughout art history. Of course in these artists’ times there was no terminology in place to discuss that, and because we have fetishized, compartmentalized and mythologized abstraction through Modernity in order to drive progressivist narratives, it became impossible to look at historical figuration abstractly. There was a kind of artificial opposition between abstraction as radical and new and figuration, which was consigned to the reactionary. This allowed the maintenance of the idea of Modernity for over a hundred years. What is needed now are new definitions and understandings of abstraction and figuration that transcend the older archetypes. Even in the Modernist era abstraction is not defined by work that doesn’t have an allusion to reality— the Russian Supremacists and Constructivists being the most obvious examples.

Contemporary artists are perhaps more honest about the commonalities and less

Opposite: Farewell Andy, 2019, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in.

Next Page: Constance Mallinson, photo by Lara Jo Regan, 2021

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of the distinctions of approaches: Vija Celmins’ oceanic fields and star-filled skies absorb us into the infinite abstract. Valerie Jaudon’s abstract intertwining linear forms are as much indebted to Celtic manuscripts as to women’s crafts. Glenn Brown and Cecily Brown merge figuration with vigorous gestural brushwork.

Chakaia Booker’s massive accumulations of panel-mounted rubber fragments are muscular abstractions as much as powerful stories of the Black body. Julie Mehretu’s epic “abstractions” suggest impending destruction and apocalypse while they delight us with their calligraphic traceries. They could be seen as “radical” in their refusal to categorize what they do. Art historian Pepe Karmel’s recent book, Abstract Art: A Global History, lays out a cogent argument for the historic connections between abstraction and figurative referents.

For me the traditions of abstraction and figuration are extremely important in helping me compose a picture, but so is a reappraisal of how partnered and not antagonistic these approaches really are. In that way painters have a lot more freedom to explore and investigate both subjects that are relevant to our times as well as the language of paint as a signifier of subjectivity and a source of visual pleasure. In the recent trash paintings, all these elements work in tandem to provoke questions about beauty, individual and collective hyper-consumption, and even the role of art and design in how we got to our present environmental crisis.

I agree that the distinctions that used to exist between abstract and representational art have eroded considerably since the 1960s and ’70s. Even in the era of Abstract Expressionism, critics like Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg liked to think that the abstract work being made in the 1940s and ’50s was more completely nonrepresentational than it ever really was.

In fact, many of the key artists—Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston—were both abstract and figurative artists throughout their careers. Looking back over the history of abstraction, it seems to me that some of the most enduring work never completely lost its connection to the world. As an artist who began her career in the era of Minimalism doing completely nonobjective work, and who has evolved to a kind of painting that is extremely representational, would you agree with philosopher/art critic Arthur Danto (in his collected essays Beyond the Brillo Box (1992) when he states, “My sense is that the history of art for which the Greenbergian paradigm has application has come to an end.

Its emblem is the black purity of a single form by Ellsworth Kelly, the heart and soul of an end having been reached. The open window is an effort to reconnect art with real life full of marvelous meanings….”

I agree with Danto that the Greenbergian insistence on the purity of the medium with no references outside of the properties of painting shifted to an open window full of marvelous meanings. A painting of a black square now could represent so many things that it didn’t in Greenberg’s day because of his prohibitions against any narrative that didn’t define the medium.

Today, a painting of a black square on a white ground could be interpreted as nihilistic statements about existence or good and evil, a powerful summation of race or global relations, or a perceptual visual game with all kinds of implications. Danto expresses the ending of certain orthodoxies in art which manifested earlier in Jasper Johns’ flag paintings from the late ’50s and early ’60s. They were instrumental in seamlessly merging abstraction and figuration and predate and influenced what my generation is currently involved in, so I don’t think we can say what we are doing is especially new or innovative. The flag paintings demonstrated that a painting can represent but also aspire to many of

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the aesthetic choices and strategies of abstraction (all-overness, non-hierarchical compositions, an emphasis on color and form above natural appearances, etc.). Because of Johns’ ingenuity, painters could embrace multiple picture-making strategies or hybridity within the same painting. He demonstrated that narratives—such as American-bred Modernism—were always present in abstract painting.

I address this back-and-forth conversation between figuration and abstraction in Modernism in paintings like Modern Trash (2017)—a Rothko-like setting with a pile of boldly patterned trash—and I’m Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue (2019) which directly references Barnett Newman’s iconic work. The painting could bring us back full circle to Danto’s end of Greenberg’s powerful influences, in that the sections of color are now filled with red, yellow and blue trash. Both paintings signify the end of the optimism of the progressive era in Modernism to an era of terrifying dimensions in terms of climate change caused by hyper-consumption—here represented by discarded objects.

Of course the internet with its infinite and vast data and imagery has dissolved so many boundaries and promoted enormous opportunities to mix and match and hybridize—to create those “marvelous meanings.” Keeping painting front and center in the dialogues about contemporary art means engaging its long rich and revered traditions—both figurative and abstract. One can be literal and abstract simultaneously—we’re going to need shared ideas to understand the incredibly complex situations the globe is confronting. As Leger once wrote, “We need to have our eyes remade.”

ILONA SZWARC Reclaiming the History of Breasts

BY JULIE SCHULTE

Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist based in Los Angeles.

Her latest show, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, introduces sculpture alongside her photography, documenting herself casting a model’s torso in silicone and plaster. Other recent LA exhibitions include the group show “PAPA RAGAZZE!” curated by Olivia Neutron Bomb at Nicodim Gallery in 2020; and the solo show “Unsex Me Here” at Make Room in 2019. I met with Szwarc at her Boyle Heights studio to discuss her new body of work and the delicate balance her process strikes between documentation and fantasy, exposé and private revelation. What struck me most was Szwarc’s exuberance and eloquence, the attention to minutiae necessary to fabricate and inhabit hyper-real worlds beating with the terrifying pulse of an Eastern European fairy tale. As we chatted about breasts, doppelgängers and reclaiming the male gaze, it became clear in “Virgin Soap” Szwarc both measures with and holds the strings; her artist’s hands exuding the power of a puppeteer’s, the delicacy of a surgeon’s stitch, and—like The Fates at their wheel—weaves another world where a woman can regard and be regarded in all her animal mystery.

JULIE SCHULTE: Talk to me about the establishing shot in a series like this.

ILONA SZWARC: I am interested in makeup tutorials and the aesthetics of instructional imagery. Those always begin with a “before” shot. The establishing photograph in “Virgin Soap” shows the model lying prone on the table—we feel the suspense, but nothing has happened yet. The perverse tutorial hasn’t begun.

I shot the series here in my LA studio and I knew from the get go that I wanted all the studio elements in the frame. I made the

wallpaper, which I sourced from another work I had previously shown at Make Room LA. “Unsex Me Here” was entirely produced at a Palm Springs house that was decorated in Hollywood Regency style. The wallpaper pattern is borrowed from the couch upholstery. My intention was to juxtapose analog and digital photographic gestures. I wanted to make digital brushstrokes while sourcing the analog photograph to accentuate the tension between the two. Also, I really love connecting the different bodies of work, so I also decided to bring the glassware from the Palm Springs house. Although the distinct series look so different, there’s still some element of world building.

The way I staged my studio for the “Virgin Soap” shoot came from looking extensively at Matisse’s documentation of his studio. In the images of his studio, formally, there are predictable elements; there is always a pattern, always a room divider, always a still life, and always a naked woman. So, of course, it’s a bit cheeky on my part, but also my opportunity to take on this persona of the male, the heroic artist.

This shade of green is so distinct. Could you speak more about how you decided on green?

“Virgin Soap” originated from me thinking about color. I made several photographs with a lot of green in the previous series and for this I knew I wanted to work with neon green. In photography and painting, green is a challenging choice; I wanted a chance to tackle it and to see where it took me. Then I brought in the blue. Of course, there are connotations of green screen and blue screen, so there is also that self-referential element to film, sfx and photography. Then, I just brought in all the different shades of greens and let them clash. The inclusion of the tennis balls was

Installation view, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, photo by Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy Diane Rosenstein Gallery

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a formal choice. If I were a painter I would just be able to make a mark in this color and poof!—that’s all that the picture needed.

Looking at these photographs there is a sense of progression and sequence that also gives the impression of erosion and escape. Talk to me about the order of these shots.

Although the show is installed in a nonlinear way when I was making the work, I had a narrative in mind. One gallery houses a sequence of seven photographs—almost a filmstrip—in which I hadn’t moved the camera and I am showing my process step by step.

“Virgin Soap” originated from my research in YouTube videos on how to use this type of silicone. I realized that in many of the videos middle-aged men would choose young models and the tutorial would be performed on their breasts—why not a hand or a foot?—but there’s an interesting thing happening in this exchange. The women are getting something too. There’s excitement and the tension of being uncomfortable; there’s also narcissism—the models get thrilled to see their breasts afterwards and have their youth saved for posterity. Another thing that popped up when I was viewing these videos was plastic surgeons performing the shoelace technique. Sometimes breast implants get misaligned and this technique is used to pop them back in place. Again, it seemed like—why are there so many of these videos? It’s an awkward thing and the lines are blurred in these dynamics. What kind of touch is it? Technical? Medical?

Instructional? Erotic?

My first encounter with silicone was a pair of bra “enhancers” I tried out in high school. Describe working with this material.

My interest in working with silicone sculpture is because of how it relates to photography. It is a direct representation of reality, just like a photograph. It’s an image that can be reproduced, and it is produced in a two-step process—there is a negative (the mold) and a positive (the final sculpture). I anchor the sculpture in photography conceptually, and I also anchored it in the installation with a photograph that is placed on the platform. The more abstracted images in the series were taken during the process of making an edition of three identical sculptures that involved what’s called the mother mould.

What a title! I love that name.

Me too! I considered it for this show actually. One side of the

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Ilona Szwarc, Photo by Carlos Jaramillo

I read this is the first time you chose not to cast an American model and instead someone closer to your own heritage. Tell me about her and how you found her.

Talia Shvedova is a Russian immigrant living in Los Angeles. I met her through a friend who posed for me for another project.

In the past I did casting calls for American women who look like me, but this time I wanted to depart from this idea and work with someone who shares much of my experience having moved from an adjacent culture and place in the world. She and I look so much alike to outsiders.

sculpture is hyper-realistic, pristine and perfect, and the other side is overflowing, perhaps one could think of something visceral and messy.

Let’s talk more about the title. Soap can cleanse, it can disinfect, but of course soap too recalls ablutions and spiritual purification. I read “Virgin Soap” is in dialogue with Charles Simic’s poem “Breasts.” While reading I landed on Simic’s metaphor that breasts “are the foam in which our hands are cleansed;” I thought, from his devotional position, of course he means men’s hands are cleansed by our bodies. There’s such a fine line between devotion and objectification. In your working with this doppelgänger, I see you reclaiming a process with your own body. It feels a feminist act—this opportunity for self-regard and self-revelation. Another line from Simic’s poem: “I insist that a girl stripped to the waist is the first and last miracle.” Can you speak to me about your own confrontation and experience with this “miracle”?

“Virgin Soap” tackles questions of objectification head on.

It is all about me: I am in the photographs, I am pouring the silicone and making the sculpture. The person on whom I am performing those gestures is my proxy. I am also the beholder of the gaze so I can be as free as I want. Am I reliving some of my personal traumas and experiences? Sure. I feel like there are always two simultaneous stories about an artwork: one that is deeply personal, and another one that is more intellectual and derived from research. My experience since I was very young was about the feeling of the male gaze on me; a gaze that was intense and perhaps difficult to comprehend. I always wanted to make a piece about breasts as they have been a source of pleasure but also discomfort in my life depending on the circumstances. And I am thinking of the history of breasts in sculpture and painting too; only now—I am in charge.

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TRULEE HALL Femininity in Phantasmagoria

BY EMILY BABETTE

On a blessedly moderate summer Sunday, I am driving over to Trulee Hall’s studio in the industrial backside of LA to participate in the filming of her newest project, Ladies’ Lair Lake, by getting nude and air-brushed green from head to toe. This project will be the latest of Hall’s phantasmagoric videos that combine live action, claymation and CGI to create a provocative world in which Hall’s imaginative take on female archetypes and unabashed sexuality reigns supreme. Ladies’ Lair Lake is a surreal musical piece that distorts the myth of Adam and Eve, devising a feminist take on creationism and subverting the male-centric art historical perspective.

This is the second time in July that I’m making the trip to Hall’s studio. The first time was earlier in the month for a face-to-face interview, when Hall was gracious enough to indulge me with answers to all my questions. As a multi-media artist, Hall starts by making her large-scale paintings which serve as the visual inspiration for the later video and installation works. Her wildly colorful and expressive paintings are populated with playful female figures, hints of domestic decor, and suggestive shapes and symbols. As she says, “Why limit yourself to what’s realistic when the imagination is ripe with craziness?”

In her sculptural and video pieces, the figures and shapes from the paintings come to life. Akin to an act of God (or Goddess in Hall’s case), she breathes life into her ideas, animating what started as an idea or a vision. Hall tries to not overly edit herself. “My work doesn’t have to be logical or make sense,” she explains.

While hanging out in her studio with her cats, Rufus and Leroy, and her dog Willee, Hall shows me the work on display and describes her process for each piece.

Hall refers to her artistic abilities as her “superpowers.” She tackles issues of binary thinking and our society’s obsession with perfection head-on, offering alternative spaces of inclusion and acceptance. Her finished bodies of work—with titles such as “The Pleasure Principle” and “The Other and Otherwise”—combine painting, sculpture and video to create distinct and insular dreamlike worlds. She explains that with claymation and CGI “you can make anything happen. So I just push the limits of what I can do visually.”

In contrast to the highly saturated colors in the work, the studio walls are painted black and Hall herself is dressed fully in black. Hall has a few visible tattoos and looks like she could play in a rock band, although the paint on her pants give her away as a painter. In the early 2000s Hall moved from Georgia to LA to attend CalArts and got her MFA there in 2006. Since then she has shown her work both nationally and internationally, and is represented by Maccarone Gallery in Los Angeles.

“I think it’s better for me to not conform to any label specifically, although I do consider myself a feminist,” says Hall, who is now in her mid-40’s. When she was younger she used to reject her femininity and, as a tomboy growing up in the ’80s, always found herself in the middle of the gender spectrum: “I didn’t want to be identified as a ‘female artist.’ I just wanted to be an artist. I was really anti-label.”

Hall often felt uncomfortable about attracting too much unwanted attention from her large breasts and thought about cutting them off. “Now I’m really happy for people that the trans movement is so huge,” she says. “I probably would have transitioned if that had been available to me at the time. I didn’t identify as a female.”

Femininity has historically been represented in deeply problematic ways (i.e., madonna or whore). “I used to make fun of different female archetypes,” said Hall.

“I would dress up as a princess or country girl, for instance, and I would make fun of that.” Hall uses humor in her work as a way to toy with the absurdities of how women are represented. “I got into the idea of femininity as an abstract concept while researching art history and the way women were portrayed, as well as how gender is represented in religions from other cultures. I started getting into that as a way to explore my own sexuality.”

Opposite page: Still from Ladies’ Lair Lake, Gossip and Goddess Plans, 2021, photo by Davey Clarke

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Now I’m back at Hall’s studio, ready for my turn to be airbrushed green. Quite a few performers were already painted when I arrived and were strutting around like otherworldly humanoid creatures, waiting to be filmed by Hall’s camera crew. Apart from a wig and merkin (pubic hair wig), all my collaborators were nude and painted blue or green; these elements seem to enable the performers, myself included, to prance around the immersive hand-painted set of Ladies’ Lair Lake in an almost altered state of being, lip-syncing to the music Hall had us memorize beforehand.

As researcher Brené Brown has written, feelings towards body image continue to be universal shame triggers; thus, we find ourselves living in something akin to a Twilight Zone episode where parallel universes exist. On the one hand, there are grassroots campaigns for the acceptance of “real beauty” (i.e., #bodypositive, #HAES), while on the other hand, mass media and the next fad diet continue to pervert beauty expectations.

Thankfully, we also live in the time of Trulee Hall, who uses her visionary imagination to build new worlds where feminine sexuality can come out to play in a phantasmagoric space of safety and acceptance. With LACMA’s recent purchase of Ladies’ Lair Lake, Hall optimistically notes, “I feel like women are really coming into a new realm of potentiality in society. I’m very excited and proud.”

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Top to bottom: Still from Ladies’ Lair Lake, Bathers Meet Singing Fish, 2021; photo by Davey Clarke; Trulee Hall, photo by Emily Babette.

PACHAPPA CAMP The First Koreatown in the United States 10.16.21–01.09.22 LYNNE MARSH Who Raised It Up So Many Times?

09.25.21–01.09.22 BRANDON LATTU Empirical, Textual, Contextual 10.02.21–02.06.22 ANNA WITTENBERG The Ruminant 08.21.21–02.06.22

Photograph taken by Mateo Garcia / Belle & Company Franz Ackermann, About Sand, 2018, City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places

3824 Main Street Riverside, CA 92501 ucrarts.ucr.edu

December 2 – 4, 2021

CODEORANGE CURATED BY LAURA LONDON

THE WINNER: Cecilia Arana, On A Saturday Night, 2018, 35mm film photograph.

View finalists on our website, along with info on how to submit your photo for next issue’s contest: www.artillerymag.com/code-orange.

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Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA Berggruen Gallery / Alexander Berggruen, San Francisco, CA Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA Crown Point Press, San Francisco, CA CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA David Gill Gallery, London, UK David Zwirner, New York, NY Demisch Danant, New York, NY Fergus McCaffrey, New York, NY Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco, CA Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France Gallery FUMI, London, UK Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA Hostler Burrows, New York, NY James Cohan, New York, NY Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA KARMA, New York, NY Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico Lebreton, San Francisco, CA Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY Magen H Gallery, New York, NY Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, NY Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY Nina Johnson, Miami, FL Pace Gallery, New York, NY Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York, NY pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA R & Company, New York, NY Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA Reform and the Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA RYAN LEE, New York, NY Sarah Myerscough Gallery, London, UK Talwar Gallery, New York, NY Tina Kim Gallery, New York, NY White Cube, London, UK

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F E AT U R E D

R E V I E W

Pipilotti Rist, Ever is Over All (video still), 1997, audio video installation. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.

Pipilotti Rist Geffen Contemporary

By Scarlet Cheng

Wild, wonderful and wistful—this survey of Pipilotti Rist at the Geffen Contemporary is long overdue in this town, where she has rarely been shown. “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is a trippy series of multimedia installations with videos and immersive projections that both delight and alarm. Rist is pushing boundaries, though in a gentle sort of way.

The smallest video in the show is on a tiny monitor embedded in the floor when you step from the Geffen’s lobby into the cavernous first gallery of the exhibition. Selfless in the Bath of Lava (1995) shows a naked woman swimming in lava, as in the fiery pits of hell.

She looks up plaintively and calls out in various languages, “Help me!” Like much of Rist’s work, it elicits laughter and unease at the same time. It’s funny to find a small woman shouting out from the floor, it’s also unsettling to imagine a human being is trapped down there, in eternal damnation.

The first gallery is like a movie set—familiar yet surreal. It’s twilight in dreamtime Los Angeles, the facade of a mid-century home with a backyard BBQ on the left, a two-story clapboard house on the right. In between are seating areas where you can contemplate the floating images projected about you—close-ups of plants and of skin. Interspersed are fixed monitors with more streaming images, and a hypnotic electronic score plays in the background.

Other installations are accessed from this point, and the first you will want to go into is the “house” on the left, with its areas for bedroom, dining room, living room. Perhaps the most fun will be to take off your shoes and get atop the bed where a vertiginous video of shifting clouds/ocean is projected, and a figure appears—this time clothed and effortlessly floating. You can also sit on chairs and sofas, or rest on beanbags to watch the two-channel video in the corner.

Quirky little objects, books and pictures line shelves and walls.

Probably Pipilotti’s best-known work is in a room of its own where the rather hilarious video Ever is Over All (1997) is projected on two adjoining walls. A young woman in a blue dress and red shoes strolls blithely down a Zurich street, swinging a flower on a long stem (made of metal). She’s deliriously happy—as in a shampoo or deodorant commercial—and every so often she stops at a parked car, swings her flower, and smashes the side window. Then she laughs

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wildly and moves on. A policewoman passing her gives a salute.

Is this a feminist anthem? It’s certainly cathartic to see a woman joyously act out in public, and get away with it. The artist states that it was all carefully planned, and because they were on such a tight budget they could only break a side window—all the cars were on loan, and Rist had them fixed for the owner afterwards.

The show’s title riffs off Mr. Rogers’ song in the long-running kid’s TV show, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” It’s familiar, but now shifted into another state of consciousness. There’s a sweet soul beneath the surface of irony and black humor that permeates the show. Take the various cards scattered throughout—a reference to Yoko Ono’s “instructions”—which tell us not to touch the art, but to slow down, be kind, do wacky gentle things. For example, one says, “Please do not touch/ HEAR COLORS, SEE SOUNDS.”

Pipilotti Rist, Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless In The Bath Of Lava) (video still), 1994, audio video installation. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.

R E V I E W S

Young Joon Kwak Commonwealth and Council

By Ezrha Jean Black

Hand in Helmet gives way to a less abstracted Spartan Booty, its undulant cheeks confessing vulnerability (and conceivably, pollutions); and—its reversal—the Hand on Groin with the oversized hand resting close to the covered genitals. Yet Kwak’s cast gives more emphasis to the hand, amplifying both its vulnerability and transformative capability. Similarly, Kwak’s casting of the Spartan’s Torso, detached and reclining on its armature, transforms Jungwirth’s six-piston machined abdomen into something slightly more naturalistic. And this is just the start—as Kwak’s bejeweled Buxom Sparty Breastplate makes plain, shrinking Sparty’s already trim waist, paring his pectorals and swelling his breasts.

Spartan Ruin is really a celebration of both ruination, excavation and transformation. Out of Spartan ruins (the title of one of the monoprints) emerge fresh perspectives (e.g., Pillar with Helmet, or Sun On the Horizon), from which transformational vision can emerge (a foot or similar extension transformed into a Mermaid Booty). That includes the artist themself, transforming the fragmented Spartan impression and mask into a cast of the artist’s own face with bejeweled mask on its convex side suspended upside down above the gallery floor (Divine Ruin) , already prepared to celebrate its own obliteration.

Michael C. McMillen L.A. Louver

By India Mandelkern

Young Joon Kwak, Buxom Sparty Breastplate, 2021. Courtesy Commonwealth and Council

The show’s original incarnation was the culmination of the artist’s residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University’s Lansing campus from August 2020 through May 2021. Fastening onto the campus’s most prominent landmark—the statue of Michigan State’s mascot, the “Spartan,” originally cast in terra cotta by its commissioned sculptor, Leonard Jungwirth in 1943, and replaced by a bronze replica in 2005—Kwak set upon unraveling the underside of this aspirational icon.

The first work I walked up to in the gallery was a mask (in cold-cast nickel, pigmented resin, wax and acrylic) in the most literal sense, the articulation of the human features (setting to one side their already suppressed expression) beaten down within the layers of the original negative casting—giving further emphasis to Jungwirth’s cliff-like forehead—rendering the superstructure of the ‘Spartan’ mask as much as the mask itself. Jungwirth’s explicitly schematized Spartan hews closely to what is essentially a proto-fascist model (e.g., Arno Breker); and Kwak’s sculptures and monoprints implicitly unpack and deconstruct its cultural architecture and foundations.

The extensions become pivot points for excavation and regeneration. Both casts and monoprints—what appear to be rubbings from the castings elaborated into variously configured black-and-white and pigmented impressions—give some emphasis to hands, feet, muscular joints from torso to arms or legs, and their instrumentality. ‘Prayer’ figures in the titles of more than one piece here. In the ash-gray reverse of one such Spartan Skin cast (Prayer to Leonard Jungwirth, all works 2021), and the figure’s left foot (Left Foot with Pennies), we see the impressions of pennies left by fans and players for luck—the rust-bronze-pigmented Foot draped over its armature as if both saddle and springboard for its aspirations. In Prayers, such collective ‘impressions’ are recomposed into a mottled turquoise green monoprint, as if projecting such a porous, ‘pennied’ skin into the sky itself.

Michael C. McMillen, Furnace Cove, 2010. Courtesy L.A. Louver.

LA-based multimedia artist Michael C. McMillen is known for his immersive, meticulous, set-like installations that make you feel like you’re trespassing on all-too-familiar scenes from the recent past.

Life-like props and details, some fabricated and some found––a barrel, a faucet, a septic tank, a ladder to nowhere––prompt you to question who inhabited these spaces, what transpired inside them, and what they tell us about the here-and-now. “A Theory of Smoke” draws upon McMillen’s decades-long interest in architecture and industry to cast light on the provisional nature of permanence so characteristic of Southern California.

It makes sense, then, that the exhibition’s title takes up the metaphor of smoke: ephemeral, ominous, intertwined with disaster.

Dangerous but potentially sacred; suffocating but ritually cleansing. Half of a show of illusion intended to embellish, seduce, and deceive. McMillen is onto this: the first work you see upon entering

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R E V I E W S the gallery is a worn, neoclassical-style facade of a 1920s movie palace––Cinema Futura (1990–2021)––shrunk down to the size of a dollhouse. The lone movie poster for Tider Skola Komma (1936), a Swedish translation of H.G. Wells’ dystopian aeronautical future history, Things to Come, essentially speaks for itself. Peer inside and you’ll see footage of a glassy body of water shot with no beginning or end, save for an occasional surfer paddling out on his stomach.

Is this the escapist fantasy that lured us out West or a statement about our frailty against the rhythms of time? It’s hard to say, really.

The miniaturized scale of Cinema Futura balloons outwards in Observatory (2021), an immersive video installation occupying one of the gallery’s side chambers. Availing himself of all the tropes of early surrealist film (dream logic, free association, objects that travel and transmogrify from one scene to the next), McMillen presents a convulsive reel of docks, biplanes, beakers and propellers that recall Southern California’s not-so-distant turns as an oilman’s paradise, a manufacturing powerhouse, an industrial port, and the heart of a booming aerospace industry. Large or small, voyeuristic or immersive, the song remains the same, however: both installations remind us that our desire to imagine Los Angeles as the city of tomorrow has outshined the physical debris.

The show concludes in a small room upstairs, where McMillen’s sculptures, some now decades old, reiterate his long standing interest in the structural remains of progressive human ambition. Objects like Cistern (2010) and Furnace Cove (2010) betray a puzzling sense of humor; there’s something darkly comic about crafting miniature ruins out of bronze. Others, like Outpost (2015), a miniaturized assemblage of an abandoned factory scaled to the seat of an old wooden chair, recall the expressionist maximalism of Ed Kienholz, albeit with an exacting, declinist twist.

Many of these works have been shown before; that’s kind of the point. “A Theory of Smoke” is as much a statement about our own aging process as those of the material dreams we’ve projected onto the surroundings. Like our most intimate diary entries, the timbre of these works shifts as we see them in new contexts, even as the hands that made them age, weaken and eventually disappear.

Sean Raspet Various Small Fires-LA

By Christopher Michno

Sean Raspet’s debut at VSF-LA is both an invitation to critically examine anthropogenic climate change—and how we are all implicated—and a series of proposed bio- and geo-engineering solutions for ameliorating the effects of the escalating climate crisis.

Raspet’s practice is as much a record of the workings of technological systems and their linked legal and financial instruments—and as such, a cataloguing of late Anthropocene systems—as it is a making visible how petroleum dominates contemporary life. An accounting of past projects yields works on synthetic flavors that infuse food products, chemical signatures of consumer goods, and a gallery slathered with a transparent synthetic DNA gel normally used in corporate anti-theft schemas. In pulling back the curtain, Raspet points to the proliferation of synthetic (petroleum-based) molecular compounds, and how they are consumed, thus becoming substances we “metabolize.”

A visually lush installation of more than 50 genetically modified plants (∂ (various species), 2019 and ongoing) emerging from planter boxes outside and small wall-mounted containers inside, appears not as scientific display or archival catalogue, but as if each plant were a small jewel. Yet these experimental subjects have been irradiated or exposed to chemical mutagens in an effort to accelerate the occurrence of genetic mutations—the goal being to increase adaptability to a rapidly warming environment.

Another plant-based work gestures to natural processes supplanted by synthetic ones—and conversely, the possibility for bi-

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Sean Raspet, Moss Panel, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul. Photo by Marten Elder.

ological processes to re-emerge. A patch of moss in a Plexiglas box with small apertures (Filter (Physcomitrium patens: patchoulol synthase-(+), linalool synthase-(+)), 2015–21) is described as a self-fabricating biological air-filtration system—a reference to the exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen. In a nod to human/plant co-evolution, the moss is genetically engineered to emit the scent of patchouli, which the artist describes as reminiscent of a forest floor.

The third work (Atmospheric Reformulation (CO2 Direct Air Capture), 2019–21), created in collaboration with Swiss company Climeworks, is ephemeral but consequential: one metric ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Originating in Raspet’s “Atmospheric Reformulations” series, which investigated the creation of synthetic atmospheres and reformulating Earth’s atmosphere, it is an exemplar of planetary engineering; the captured carbon will be sequestered in volcanic rock.

Each of these works resides squarely within the realm of the anthropogenic, reflecting the contradictions of the Anthropocene; while they reveal optimism on the part of the artist, how they land is a more nuanced affair.

Whether humans are capable of doing enough to ameliorate the worst of climate change—and whether those efforts won’t be fraught with deeply problematic ethical considerations—is a trickier question. Humans’ ethical obligations to the millions of other species, plant and animal, that reside on the planet with us, and the ethical obligations of the global north, which produces the majority of carbon emissions, are quite clear. Yet will our efforts, whether in the realm of bioengineering or planetary-engineering—if we can muster the will and determination to actually make change—initiate a cascade of unforeseen consequences that are just as troubling as the issues at hand?

YoYo Lander The Know Contemporary

By Shana Nys Dambrot

While technically strictly paintings, a new suite of large-scale portraits by YoYo Lander involve extensive collage—crucially, collage executed not from spliced photographs or culled ephemera, but from an endless trove of her own watercolor washes on paper. While in a sense likeness is not the goal of these almost lifesize standing

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R E V I E W S figures (the model’s back is turned in each pose, and we never see her face), a kind of conjured naturalism gives the works the presence of the real person who stood for them.

Without access to the model’s facial expressions, the viewer has only recourse to her body language to interpret the stories of the depicted emotional moments. Satisfyingly, Lander’s gift for rendering and the embodied physicality of her technique imbue the figures with the solidity and gravitas to carry those stories.

From near-ivory beige to warm ebony and hundreds of gorgeous, rich palette points along the way; from coffee to earth, wood, gems and stone; from reddish to bluish and pink-tinged, lavender, deep olive, cream and amber, Lander engineers a literal symphony of shades YoYo Lander, FULL Bloom, 2021. of brown and organic textures within Courtesy The Know Contemporary. the individual washes she prepares before she composes. This mise en place is cut into a panoply of slivers, slices and crescents, which Lander then assembles as though leaves or scales, petals or bark, into the fleshy contours and glowing skin of her subjects. This process not only gives an affecting dimensionality to the figures, but also creates a lively glimmer of reflection and shadow that heightens the realism even as it amplifies the elements of abstract expressionism that comprise it.

Simple anatomical moments like wrinkled elbows and trimmed nails draw empathetic attention within the painterly surfaces of the images, while a combination of titles and poses assert specifics of persona. It has been said that if you want to understand the action in a painting, enact the protagonist’s pose with your own body and let your sense memory inform what might be the mood the pose expresses. That strategy definitely works here for interpreting the slopes and angles of the spine and the limbs, the shifting of curved centers of gravity, the variations in stance like the steps of a dance, the relatable motions of walking or being planted firmly in place, the arms and hands that encircle, stretch, protect, invite, and refuse.

All the paintings are possessed of the same deceptive simplicity and relaxed elegance, but in works with more complex actions like the arms clasped behind the head in FULL Bloom (all works: stained, washed and collaged watercolor on paper, 2021, 42 x 66 inches), the empowered akimbo of Thank You For Your Time, the vulnerability of the self-hug in A Room with No Doors, and the you-deserve-it sashay of Been There, Done That, the audience is drawn even further into the story of this mood cycle which in its totality, as well as in its physicality, speaks directly to the nuances of life’s experiences.

Serena Potter Lois Lambert Gallery

By Natasha Boyd

A full moon hangs demurely in the upper left of Serena Potter’s painting Nighttiming (2019) like a wheel of Babybel cheese. Beneath it, on the crest of a forested hill, a scene of lunar revelry: a man and woman in office attire, and another woman in striped pajamas and hair curlers, giddily playing on a swing set. A small search party emerges with lanterns from the dark shrubbery, looking bewildered, while Downtown glows in the valley below. This is a modern world, but one in the sway of older and stranger powers. Nighttiming and 21 other paintings by Potter are on view at the Lois Lambert Gallery

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for “Fables of Rhyme and Reason,” a dual exhibition with painter Cynthia Sitton.

The carnal and the uncanny dominate Potter’s paintings in a nostalgic Americana-style depicting masked human figures—from horse heads to bull faces to plague doctor-style black beaks—amidst cozy domestic interiors. There’s a particularly Californian spookiness to her paintings, which take inspiration from Potter’s Culver City upbringing. Magic and menace swirl through the large Southern California home she’s summoned, reminding us that Los Angeles gave us American fables like The Wizard of Oz, King Kong and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as well as the breeding ground for some of the world’s most infamous and fantastical cults. After all, Southern California was historically the nation’s sanitorium, home to “remarkable numbers of sick and doomed people” per historian Mike Davis.

Herb Caen, the 1970s newspaper columnist, commented on its status as America’s “kook capital” thusly: “We who have lived here a long time resist that description [...] What others call kooks we look upon as characters in a charade we smile at.”

There is a great Serena Potter, Nighttiming, 2019. Courtesy Lois Lambert Gallery. deal of smiling in these paintings, but what is captured so well by Potter’s brush is the moment that fear pervades a room. That it is daytime, with gentle yellow sunlight painted like butter in the window, does not lessen the unease of confronting a disguised face; Potter’s paintings are choked with the kind of invisible malevolence that seems to emanate from certain hallways or rooms in childhood. Entrenched in Potter’s scenes are the sense of pretend-play that’s just about to go too far, or the pulse of fear that will grip a child who suddenly finds themself alone. The adrenalized gaze locks down the scene of the painting, as the dilated, roving pupil of one frozen in place takes in all the details of a particular scene that, for whatever unutterable reason, has created a sense of mortal threat. This particularly frozen quality of her paintings, despite their warm tones and dynamic compositions, likely comes from Potter’s predilection for photo references—on average she will use 12 to 15 per painting. If we assent to Roland Barthes’s idea that photography kills the subject, the ones gazing out from Potter’s paintings are already “really, most sincerely dead.”

Keith Walsh Rory Devine Fine Art

By Jody Zellen

Historically, art and politics have often been intertwined. In Dada, Futurism and Russian Constructivism, as well as in some Conceptual art practices and works by individual artists such as Sister Corita Kent, text and image have emblazoned artworks with calls to action or commentary on current politics. Diagrams and mapping trajectories, either personal or more universal, have also been explored by artists such as Mark Lombardi and Danica Phelps.

Keith Walsh is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist whose work maps the transformation of political attitudes and relationships of activism in the US and Los Angeles.

His labor-intensive drawings incorporate flow charts, timelines, bold graphics, geometric shapes, and hand lettering to trace po-

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R E V I E W S litical movements and causes over time. For example, LA Socialist Network 1950–2019 (2020) is a rhizomatic diagram connecting different politically leftist organizations and people working in various socialist or communist groups. A series of overlapping red and pink vertical and horizontal lines intersected by black texts and occasional hand-drawn images culls together a history that might otherwise disappear. Radical Power and Uncertainty 1917–1937 (2019) similarly chronicles communism in the Soviet Union, the USA and Mexico, and includes membership numbers and African American contributions. Walsh’s drawings are thoroughly researched, and the viKeith Walsh, 2020 Remember 2045, sual and textual information is often 2020. Courtesy Rory Devine Fine Art. organized to correspond with the political leanings of the various organizations. As Walsh states, “If an organization trends toward a more politically conservative ideology, its line will move to the right of the visual field.”

Many of Walsh’s works could function as political posters and calls for action. Some speak to the present: 2020 Remember 2045 (2020) celebrates the Peace and Freedom Party and Black Lives Matter, whereas Comrades for Comrades (2020) links the historical to the now. To fully understand and appreciate many of Walsh’s explorations requires a patient and thorough reading of the texts within each work. However, Walsh also includes pieces with minimal text as in HUAC/California Legislature, September 1965/OP Version (2019) where black-and-white concentric rectangles block out any identificatory or incriminating information. This formally elegant work recalls Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings.

Walsh’s most recent drawings are a series of colored pencil and graphite works on paper. Here, rows of thin concentric rectangles in specific families of color surround individual words or phrases.

Arguments (Black and Blue) (2020), states in capital letters: “as time marches onward // the people will find the arguments // voiced by // Ronald Reagan // to be less and less // persuasive.” In Belief (Malcolm X) (2020), drawn in oranges and blues, one reads “it’s impossible // for a // white person to // believe // in capitalism // and not // believe // in racism.”

Walsh’s exhibition explores the graphical power of words and images and how they can work together as both art and political calls to action. He is invested, historically and contemporaneously, in the struggles for liberation and equality, and able to communicate through his art the urgency of these messages, both past and present.

Judy Baca Museum of Latin American Art

The Womanist Gallery contains female-centric drawings, paintings, sculpture, performance and photography. The Public Art Survey gallery includes murals and digital works that Baca pioneered through her Social and Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC), founded in 1976. The Great Wall of Los Angeles gallery features a floor-to-ceiling moving display of her half-mile long wall in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel, San Fernando Valley. Executed by more than 400 artists of all ages from 1974 to 1984, it depicts the history of California through the lens of women and minorities.

Begun in 1980, relegated to storage, but completed for this exhibition is Matriarchal Mural: When God Was A Woman (1980–2021), a triptych in the first gallery. Featuring 13 nude women defying a volcanic eruption, they convey the intense power of women to heal our planet, especially when bonded to each other and to the earth.

The life-size Las Tres Marias (1976) contains a photo of a Mexican American woman, another of a Pachuca, a flashy woman portrayed by Baca, but the central panel is a mirror—inviting viewers to become the third Maria.

Originally installed in LA’s Woman’s Building, it was part of an early Chicana exhibition. The compassionate Tres Generaciones (1973) is a depiction of Baca’s grandmother who raised her, her mother who supported the family, and herself—all s t ro n g , re s o u rc e f u l women.

Artworks in the second gallery pay homage to Chicano pioneers in- Judy Baca, Tres Generaciones,1973. Courtesy Museum of cluding César Chavez. Latin American Art. Also displayed is Raspados Mojados (1994), a repurposed street vendor cart addressing immigration, misrepresentation, and discrimination against street vendors through photography and other media. Baca’s painted sculptural Panchos are transformed kitsch objects, originally created for tourists. The artist has instead painted each Pancho with detailed scenes of the tragedies, struggles and victories of immigrants.

The exhibition closes with Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1984), the world’s longest mural, affirming the interconnectedness of us all. Scenes include the roles of Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and Jewish Americans in creating California. Themes explore immigration, exploitation of people and land, women’s rights, racism and gay rights. Scenes also include important 20th century European groups and individuals, including Albert Einstein. A compelling aspect of this installation is the opportunity to experience the entire wall’s interwoven stories within an hour, in a museum setting.

By Liz Goldner

Considering the breadth of the work of Judy Baca—a muralist, painter, sculptor and art activist—a comprehensive installation of her work is long past due. The current exhibition contains approximately 120 pieces from the 40-plus-year oeuvre of the LA Chicana artist.

Common threads are Baca’s expressions, through her artwork, of the stories of the disenfranchised, minorities and immigrants, their strengths and long legacies, a profound connection to the earth, and especially her belief in the healing power of art.

The exhibition—curated by MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga and Alessandra Moctezuma, Professor of Fine Art and Museum Studies, San Diego Mesa College—is installed in three sections.

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Alison Elizabeth Taylor James Cohan / New York

By Annabel Keenan

Known for her works made of laser-cut marquetry, Alison Elizabeth Taylor captivates viewers with her skill and close consideration of minute details. Combining the medium more commonly seen in decorative arts with painted wood and photographic prints, Taylor has modernized the technique and created what she calls “hybrid marquetry.” Her aptly named exhibition Future Promise presented works made during the months when the city, along with the rest

R E V I E W S of the world, abruptly shut down and our understanding of normal life was redefined.

Taylor’s lockdown paintings tell familiar stories of interiority and allude to some of the new, confounding norms. In one work, two figures kiss from behind their facem a s k s . I n a n o t h e r, someone has written “CDC” on a wall of graffiti along with the words “protect yourself and others.” Nearby, a painting of a blooming houseplant is ironically titled Here’s the Zoom Link (2021).

Taylor pairs these universal signs of the Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Here’s the Zoom Link, 2021.

Covid era with experiCourtesy James Cohan. ences specific to New York, and reveals some of the deeper socioeconomic issues that came to light. Limited to our tiny spaces, the pandemic forced New Yorkers to creatively use the city as an extension of their homes. In Anthony Cuts under the Wburg Bridge, Sunset (2021), a hairdresser has taken his business to the street to style his patron’s hair en plein air. The viewer sees Anthony and his sitter from behind, their masked faces reflected in a golden mirror hung from a chain-link fence. Taylor enlivened the scene with meticulous details, from delicate hair clippings on the ground to the muscles in Anthony’s legs. The work is a testament to the perseverance of everyday people.

Opposite this empowering scene is Midwinter (2021), an image of four women luxuriating poolside, surrounded by palm trees and opulent draperies. The painting references wealthy snowbirds who annually flock to Florida to avoid northern winters. Considered normal in years prior, the departure from the city took on a different meaning during the pandemic. In part a reflection of the unequal way in which Covid impacted people—the divide between those who stayed and those who left—it is also seen as an indication of loyalty to New York.

Near this poolside scene was a monumental painting of a forest with sharp, gnarled branches projecting in all directions. Titled Meet You There (2021), the painting is unsettling, yet the title also suggests an invitation, as if the forest is a retreat; while threatening as an isolated, unknown space, nature is also something that protects us. Much like the pool painting, Meet You There, hints at another group who fled the city, those with second homes or family in the exurbs who spent their quarantine months protected in nature.

Poignant, skillful and laden with hidden meaning, the works in the show told a disparate story of the pandemic and held a revealing mirror to some of the deeply rooted inequities that defined our lives over the last year.

Jim Melchert Gallery 16 / San Francisco

by Barbara Morris

The centuries old practice of Kintsugi, a Japanese technique of mending broken pottery with gold, honors the flaws in the ceramic piece. The artist Jim Melchert, who taught English in Japan for four

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years, has long appreciated and employed that aesthetic. For more than 30 years he has worked with prefabricated ceramic floor tiles, which he breaks, reassembles, then marks with glaze. His meditative attention to the cracks elicits a careful and deft response, hinging on an element of randomness and chance, reflecting in his work the important influence of John Cage.

The recent survey of his conceptually driven work, “Rethink, Revisit, Reassess, Reenter,” includes pieces dating from the 1970s onward.

An iconic figure on the Bay Area scene since the 1960s, the artist studied at UC Berkeley with ceramic firebrand Peter Voulkos, earning a second MFA in ceramics in 1961—he already held an MFA in painting from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Art History from Princeton. Energized by meeting Bay Area artists William Wiley and Bruce Nauman, Melchert soon expanded his practice.

The exhibition primarily features wall-mounted ceramic tile works, but also drawings, sculptures and films. Two of the films included in the exhibition are of particular interest. In Changes, Amsterdam (1972), Melchert and a group of plucky participants dunk their heads in a washtub of clay slip, then sit quietly on a bench as the muck drips and congeals on their faces. The large-scale projection of Untitled (The Water Film) (1973), directed by Melchert and filmed by Peter Ogilvie, features nude performers frolicking before a white drop cloth, flinging buckets of water at each other in a playful homage to Muybridge’s motion studies.

Jim Melchert, Untitled (The Water Film), 1973. Courtesy of Gallery 16.

The right side of the large gallery is filled with a grouping of materially and thematically related tile works. North Atlantic (2005) is an immersive work at 90”x72”, a five by four grid of 18” tiles that employs wavering bands of deep blue glaze suggestive of the sea and conjures hypnotic rhythms on the gray tiles. The feeling is meditative, conveying a serene effect. Melchert’s most recent works are smaller in scale, brilliantly hued, and joyous, such as Shards Speaking for the Group (2021).

In 1977, Melchert was invited to direct the Visual Arts Program at the NEA in Washington, DC, where he remained for four years.

After a few years back in the Bay Area, he headed to Italy where he directed the American Academy in Rome from 1984 to 1988.

These posts clearly speak to Melchert’s prodigious gifts as a teacher, mentor and facilitator. At 91, Jim Melchert remains passionate about art—his own, and that of others. His continuing ability to shape and mold the contours of our art world remains fully as much an expression of his creativity as his diverse and remarkable art practice.

A.M. ROUSSEAU

Fire and Ice III, 2021, quadriptych, colored pencil and ink on rag paper, 40 x 80”

2859 E. COAST HIGHWAY, CORONA DEL MAR, CA 92625 INFO@SCAPESITE.COM SCAPESITE.COM 949-723-3406 ROUSSEAUFINEART.COM

Before Bechdel

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

B U N K E R

Delphine Seyrig interviews Maria Schneider

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V I S I O N

If you are interviewing somebody who gets interviewed a lot, and they compliment you on the quality of your questions, you are probably doing something right. This happened on multiple occasions to Delphine Seyrig during her 1981 documentary Be Pretty and Shut Up! Seyrig is one of those actresses whose resume can astonish. Although she is best known in the United States for Daughters of Darkness, a 1970s lesbian vampire film, her resume includes such iconic films as Rober Frank’s Pull My Daisy (written and narrated by Jack Kerouac), Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, and Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Seyrig was fluent in German, English and French, and she made movies in all three languages. As her international fame grew, she became a leading proponent of feminist causes. In 1975 she co-founded a feminist video collective. That same year, she began filming interviews for a project called Be Pretty and Shut Up. The Bechdel Test was first introduced to the public in a 1985 comic strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For” by Alison Bechdel. The test is usually applied to fiction, and posits the question: Do women in this oeuvre have conversations with each other that aren’t about men? When Seyrig asked actresses in 1975 if they had ever been in such a film project, most of them seemed surprised by the question. It is not a question that many of the actresses working in 1975 had even pondered. But as they do consider it, the results are revelatory. The film itself is spare. All of the opening credits are spoken.

Seyrig also provides real-time translations of all the Hollywood actresses as they speak. If you are watching this film in French, the first time that words appear on the screen are in the closing credits, which are spray-painted.

This spareness creates a sort of intimacy. Of the 22 actresses interviewed, all but Shirley MacLaine are interviewed by Seyrig herself. MacLaine’s inclusion (in a clip from French television) is useful for an important point that she makes. Before the Hays Code, women fared much better in cinema.

The Hollywood actresses were interviewed in 1975, and the French actresses in 1976. Some of the interviews are downright chilling. Such is the case with Marie Schneider, whose experiences with Last Tango in Paris were still a fresh wound at the time. The first round of questions asks the actresses if they would have chosen their profession if they had been men. A surprisingly large number say NO. Jane Fonda details (in French) the many physical changes that the studio demanded of her appearance.

A common motif is when actresses want to give their characters depth, and find themselves shot down for not conforming to the male gaze. There is much discussion of ageism, and the fact that young actresses were expected to couple with older male stars. Although the film was released 40 years ago, many of the issues that women faced then are still relevant. It’s way too easy to imagine actresses born after this film was released being just as surprised by the same questions.

Telling the Artists’ Story Since 1993.

TAG Gallery 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.297.3061 • taggallery.net • @taggallery

FIELDEN HARPER www.fieldenharperart.net

November 17 - December 11, 2021 Reception: November 20, 4-8PM

TAG Gallery 5458 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.297.3061 taggallery.net • @taggallery Cha Cha, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 20” Dancing Wires, acrylic on canvas , 40” x 20”

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P O E M S

A S K

B A B S

FRIEND’S ART SUCKS

March 2nd, 2021 I step off but don’t move. The bus pulls away in a roar. I remove my mask. The air I breathe feels like bliss. I stand on the muddy sidewalk looking up at the sky. If I were a man of faith now would be the time to start speaking in tongues.

April 23rd, 2021 Stripped of my jeans and T-shirt I lie back on a bed that’s only a mattress as I stare at the ceiling letting my skin catch a chill. No matter what the hands of the clock have to say it’s the right time to give up. Sunlight makes patterns on the wall as I fall asleep.

The Great Wall If you did something with your life, it would make you one of those people.

So you stay true to yourself: honest and un-judged, keeping the doubters and self-doubts at bay. You shouldn’t have to be subjected to the scrutiny of the unworthy: you’re better than that; you exist in a more rarefied sphere.

No one else can enter there.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

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Dear White Liar, It’s easy for new artists like your friend to get discouraged by negative criticism, so it’s best to give them as much encouragement as possible. But this doesn’t mean you have to lie.

Start by getting to know your friend’s art on their terms. Ask them to talk about what they want their viewers to see in their paintings. How do they want their viewers to interpret what they see? You want to understand your friend’s intentions with their art. If they have trouble articulating their intentions, this is an excellent opportunity to help them figure that out. Ask them what questions they are searching to answer.

Then feed them a praise sandwich. Begin by telling them where their paintings succeed. I don’t care how much you hate their art; you can find things in it that successfully align with their intentions. You don’t have to “like” what you’re seeing; you just have to assure your friend that you see it. If they wanted to paint puppies playing basketball and you see just that, then that’s a success. Then give some productive criticism, pointing out where you think the art doesn’t communicate in the way your friend wants. Then complete the sandwich with another observation about where the art succeeds. You can repeat this process for as long as necessary. If you do this enough, you’ll both come to an understanding of their art that transcends knee-jerk tastes and biases. Who knows, maybe you might learn to love the art along the way. If you don’t, that’s okay too. Unless they are making paintings specifically for you, it shouldn’t matter anyway.

Illustration by Dave Shulman

—STEVE ANWYLL

Dear Babs, My longtime friend recently started painting and selling his art online. We live in different cities, and it’s been hard to meet because of the pandemic, but he’s having me over soon, and I know he’s going to want my thoughts about his art. The problem is I think his paintings are just awful. I don’t want to offend him, but I also don’t want to lie. What do I do?

—White Liar in La La Land

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August 22, 2021 - January 2022

July 2021 - January 2022

Guest Curator Alessandra Moctezuma and MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga

November 13, 2021 2021 MOLAA Gala 25th anniversary and honoring: Judy Baca, Jaime Jarrín, and The Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Judy Baca Exhibition at MOLAA is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Additional support was provided by Bank of America, the Pasadena Art Alliance, and the Employee Community Fund of Boeing. In-kind support has been provided by the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).

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