BEYOND LA (May/June 2022)

Beyond LA MAY/JUNE 2022

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Mike Hernandez Akedah Altar May 21 - July 2, 2021 Greenhouse

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

KNOPP FERRO

LEVITATING LINES APRIL 30 – JUNE 18, 2022

LOUIS STERN FINE ARTS 9002 MELROSE AVENUE WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90069

310.276.0147 LOUISSTERNFINEARTS.COM

Construction 20:26, 2012 (detail), stainless steel and red pigment 45 x 49 x 31 inches , 114.3 x 124.5 x 78.7 centimeters

June 19– September 18, 2022

MUSEUM Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum TSUKIOKA YOSHITOSHI, USHIWAKA AND BENKEI DUELING ON GOJO BRIDGE OR GOJO BRIDGE, FROM THE LIFE OF YOSHITSUNE, 1881.

COLOR WOODCUT. SHEET: 14 × 27 15/16 IN. (35.6 × 71 CM). UCLA GRUNWALD CENTER FOR THE GRAPHIC ARTS, HAMMER MUSEUM. THE EUGENE L. AND DAVIDA R. TROPE COLLECTION

Free Admission

LOGO DESIGN ZHANG LIANMING /CHINA

THE USA EXHIBITION

HIROE ALEXANDER MARIONA BARKUS KEVIN BERNSTEIN LAURA CULLEN PAMELA MERORY DERNHAM NOOSHIN FARAHPOUR FATIMA FRANKS PAT GAINOR BROOKE HARKER PETER HIERS LINDSAY HIRSCH DIANE HOLLAND JULIENNE JOHNSON TAKESHI KANEMURA SUSAN KARHROODY JAN KESSEL LINDA KUNIK SUSAN LIZOTTE DENIS GEARY LOPEZ MELA M GABRIELLE MAR JOSEPH MAYERNIK CHRISTOPHER MERCIER DANIEL MONTEAVARO MAIDY MORHOUS WILL POTTER CARON G RAND VIKTORIA ROMANOVA ERIC SANDERS SERAPHINE ADRIAN WONG SHUE LAURIE YEHIA WENDY WOLFF TORIE ZALBEN LIANG ZHANG

CURATOR - PRODUCER, JULIENNE JOHNSON / USA julienne johnson is sponsored by IAA/USA in ooicial partnership with UNESCO

CHAIRMAN, KATSU SHIMMIN, JAPAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXCHANGE

Table of Contents VOLUME 16, ISSUE 5, MAY-JUNE 2022

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Beyond LA F E AT U R E S Fort Worth, TX: Hector A. Ramirez - by frances colpitt Chicago, IL: Paola Cabal - by steven carrelli Kansas City, MO: Linda Lighton - by elisabeth kirsch Richmond, VA: Diego Sanchez - by sarah sargent Lincoln, NE: Santiago Cal - by jonathan orozco

F E AT U R E D

N E W

28 32 36 40 44

C O LU M N

THE DIGITAL: NFTs Flood LA - by seth hawkins

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C O LU M N S ART BRIEF: Warhol Supreme - by stephen j. goldberg, esq DECODER: The Art of Cruelty - by zak smith OFF THE WALL: The Warhol Diaries - by anthony ausgang BUNKER VISION: Hungarian Rhapsodies - by skot armstrong SIGHTS UNSCENE: Frieze LA - by lara jo regan

C O N T I N U E D

20 22 24 42 56

»

ON THE COVER: Linda Lighton, 44 Magnum, 2011, mandala porcelain, glaze, metal, 28.5” x 19.5” x 4”, see page 36.

ABOVE: Hector A. Ramirez, Carpet Shoes, 2016; carpet, leather shoes, 12” x 9.”

RIGHT: Diego Sanchez, Composition #32, (detail) 2021, 9x12 in, mixed media on paper, 2021.

NEXT PAGE, Top: Deborah Roberts,The duty of disobedience, 2020 (detail), courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, image courtesy The Contemporary Austin, photo by Paul Bardagjy.

Bottom: From The Andy Warhol Diaries, courtesy of Netflix.

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13

From the Editor

Table of Contents continued

Dear Reader,

50 50 D E PA R T M E N T S SHOPTALK: LA Art News by scarlet cheng ASK BABS: Nonna’s No-No by babs rappleye POEMS by rhiannon mcgavin; john tottenham COMICS: Where the Wild Beasts Art by butcher & wood

18 58 58 60

R E V I E W S Deborah Roberts @ Art + Practice Arlene Shechet @ Vielmetter Los Angeles E.J. Hill @ Oxy Arts Bradford J. Salamon @ Hilbert Museum of California Art Anne Appleby @ Parrasch Heijnen Ulysses Jenkins @ Hammer Museum

50 51 51 52 52 53

JT: Dani Dodge @ Black Rock Art Gallery

53

NY: Troy Montes Michie @ Company Gallery

54

58

24 50 14

This issue is about art being made outside of Los Angeles and New York. If art is being made and shown at reputable galleries in those cities, it has the stamp of approval: Collectors can feel safe that their taste is superb and their investments are secure, and even more importantly, they can always flip the art and make loads of money.

I had a different approach to my editor’s letter before a PR email arrived from David Kordansky Gallery, a prominent LA gallery that recently added a space in New York. It’s one that I admire (even though they don’t advertise), with many good artists on their roster. The artist they were promoting at the Frieze New York art fair was Mai-Thu Perret. The image included was of a very large ceramic flower with a phallic emphasis. It caught my eye, not only because it was a gorgeous piece to behold, but because it also bore a distinct resemblance to a ceramic piece featured in this issue by Kansas City-based ceramic artist Linda Lighton (see page 37 and whose work also graces our cover). There’s certainly nothing wrong or unflattering about that.

Sometimes I will see a notable artist’s work here in LA, and it will remind me of another artist that works in the hinterlands. I will forward the image, telling them that they must be doing something right. This is the very reason I chose to expose what artists are doing outside of the major metropolitan art centers for our Beyond LA issue—because for purely geographical reasons their work often doesn’t receive the exposure it deserves.

When a friend and colleague, writer Frances Colpitt, reached out to ask me if I’d be interested in her writing about a Texan artist whose early career she’d been following, I was game, because anything Frances writes is gold to me. But then I got to thinking, why not do a whole issue on artists that work outside the big cities: We’re all thinking globally now, why can’t that include middle America?

Is the art being made in cosmopolitan centers better because it’s being represented by high-end galleries? We live in a hypercapitalist society where the rich just get richer and the poor stay poor. It’s quite simple really: rich people need things to buy with all their money.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to expose some hard-working artists living in all parts of the US. We’ve got artists from Fort Worth, Chicago, Kansas City, Richmond, Virginia and Lincoln, Nebraska. I was knocked out by all of them.

Of course their art is just as valid as Mai-Thu Perret’s. It’s just not being shown at David Kordansky Gallery.

Metro Art invites arts and cultural organizations to engage with transit.

Apply at metro.net/artsorgpool

F E AT U R E D

C O N T R I B U TO R S A specialist in American art since 1960s, Frances Colpitt holds the Deedie Rose Chair, an endowed professorship in contemporary art history, at TCU in Fort Worth. She is a corresponding editor for Art in America and the author of Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective and Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century.

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 Ezrha Jean Black, Laura London, Tucker Neel, John David O’Brien

Steven Carrelli is a Chicago-based artist and writer. He holds an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University and exhibits his work extensively. Carrelli’s writing has appeared in the New Art Examiner, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Crab Creek Review. He teaches at the School of Art at DePaul University.

Elisabeth Kirsch is an art historian, curator and writer who lives in Kansas City. She has curated over 100 exhibitions of contemporary art, American Indian art and photography locally and throughout the United States. She writes frequently for museums, and national and local arts publications.

Jonathan Orozco is a journalist and paper-based artist working in Omaha, Nebraska. He received his BA in Art History from the University of Nebraska Omaha. Orozco writes about art and culture, both online and in print, White Hot Magazine, NAD NOW, The Reader and Omaha Magazine, among others.

Catherine Yang is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn and LA. She serves as Artillery’s editor for social media and digital content. Since graduating from the USC, she has worked in arts administration and communications for museums, galleries, auction houses and artist studios. Instagram @cath_yang or catherineyang.me for more.

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COLUMNISTS Anthony Ausgang, Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Lauren Guilford, Seth Hawkins, 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, Eli Ståhl, Allison Strauss, Cole Sweetwood, Colin Westerbeck, Eve Wood, Catherine Yang, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, Peter Brock, John Haber, Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

ADMINISTRATION Anna Bagirov - sales Mitch Handsone - new media director Catherine Yang - associate communications editor Rocie Carrillo - production intern

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MASH Form Less ForM

Grand Opening w w w.mashgaller y.com info@mashgaller y.com

812 N La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90069

At Our New WeHo Location

Saturday May 14, 6-10PM Show runs through June 25

Featured Artists Frank Hyder Chase Langford Anthony Liggins Haleh Mashian Bruce MacDonald Kenny Nguyen Ian Rayer-Smith Bryan Ricci Alberto Sanchez Lisa Schulte Aman Shekarchi Lerone Wilson

GALLERY

S H O P TA L K

La Jolla Museum Redux

New York, New York!

The art market is back, and here in SoCal we’re seeing it with a slew of New York galleries moving in. Pace’s “mergence” with Kayne Griffin is official, and I hear the new signage now bears the Pace name. Sean Kelly gallery is occupying a 10,000-square-foot space on N. Highland— to open anytime now. Looking ahead, another New York mega, David Zwirner, is planning on a three-building complex at 606 N. Western, slated to open next January. Two pre-existing buildings will be renovated, with a completely new one built from ground up. They have already announced the opening exhibition—a solo by LA-based Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whom they started repping in 2018. All this will be a real game changer for LA, and maybe now collectors won’t feel the need to seasonally jet off to New York to get their art shopping in.

One gallery is actually jumping across the pond and the continent to get to us— the influential New York and London-based gallery, Lisson, is set to open in the fall in the Sycamore District of Los Angeles in a two-story building with over 8000 sq. ft., including outdoor patio, near a number of other existing galleries. Their opening show is Carmen Herrera’s “Days of the Week.”

Meanwhile our own homegrown David Kordansky Gallery is expanding east, with a New York space opening May 6, featuring an exhibition of new work by LA-based artist Lauren Halsey. “Opening David Kordansky Gallery in New York has always been part of the dream, for both me and our artists,” said Kordansky in his announcement. “I’m excited to provide a new platform for our growing program and to merge our sensibilities with the rich history and cultural trajectories of New York.” The new gallery will be located on W. 20th Street in Chelsea.

Top: Carmen Herrera, Angulo Blanco, 2017, Acrylic and aluminium, 84 x 120 7/8 x 19 inches, courtesy Lisson Gallery Middle: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mama, Mummy, and Mamma (Predecessors #2), 2014, Acrylic, color pencil, charcoal, and transfers on paper, 84 x 144 inches, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery Right: Post-renovation façade of MCASD, photo by Maha Bazzari

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Over the years I’ve enjoyed visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla, but always felt there was a problem with the choppy flow. The building was born as a private home in 1916, became an art center in 1941, and went through various remodels over the decades. This time they hired world-class architect Annabelle Selldorf, currently overseeing the expansion and renovation of The Frick Collection in New York, and acquired an adjoining building to quadruple exhibition space. The result, unveiled in early April, is glorious, a contemporary art museum that feels comfortable to stroll through, designed in a way you can see everything without getting lost.

The latter is partly accomplished by a number of windows opening to the local landscapes. From the lobby you can see Prospect Street and other parts of town, from side windows you can see old bungalows, and in the rear there are many views of the seaside walk and the churning Pacific. “We decided to embrace our spectacular location on the edge of the Pacific Ocean,” said museum Director Kathryn Kanjo during the preview. “We were thrilled to take it all in,” said Selldorf. “We don’t think the windows are a distraction. It’s good to look out and be oriented.” Petite and soft-spoken, Selldorf is constantly thanking her collaborators, a refreshing departure from the egoism of many starchitects.

The elegantly spare design helps you appreciate the art, and for the first time I see what a really superb collection

MCASD has. That includes the multicolor polka-dotted Kusama Yayoi pumpkin in the entrance, John Baldessari’s deadpan painting Terms Most Useful In Describing Creative Works Of Art, and Charles Gaines’ Airplanecrash Clock.

The special exhibition is “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s” (through July 17), and it was a revelation. I knew of her early “shooting paintings” and of her colorful “Nana” sculptures—one of which is dancing in the center of a lower gallery. However, I was unaware of her assemblage and multi-media paintings of this period which often showed grim skyscrapers, sometimes being attacked by fighter jets and Godzilla-like creatures, and often on fire. Also included are several results of the “shooting paintings.” This is a show you may never see again, since much has been borrowed from European collections and some works are very fragile.

Major kudos to the curators—Michelle White, senior curator at The Menil Collection, and Jill Dawson, curator of MCASD.

BY

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

Desert News You know how I love an excuse to drive through the desert, and High Desert Test Sites (HDTS) has finally returned. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this latest iteration, “The Searchers” (through May 22), features nine art installations dotting the high desert region around Joshua Tree and Coachella Valley. The curator is Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, who brought six artists from the East Coast and abroad, to add to the three regional artists in the mix.

Here are a few highlights, and the fact that they have stuck in my mind a week later is testament to the smart thinking that has gone into curating HDTS 2022.

A work that injects some black humor into its commentary is Jack Pierson’s The End of the World, gigantic all-cap letters that loom large in the desert behind The Palms Restaurant in Twentynine Palms. They’re constructed of chipboard and painted silver, and make a great Insta grab. I have always thought that deliberately divey bar had an end-of-the-world feeling, a great place to grab a few drinks and have a few laughs before The Bomb goes off.

The two videos are really really good ones, by the way, and worth driving down some uneven dusty roads. In Harese, Erkan Özgen worked with Marine vets from the Corps’ nearby training base for a film short in which they slap their bodies, ready rifles, and flick bullet shells to a hypnotic beat. In Other Dessert Landscapes, Dana Sherwood worked with Joey’s Home Animal Rescue in Yucca Valley to provide horses for her dreamlike video, in which they nibble on lavish desserts set on outdoor tables, with a shot of humans thrown in now and then. It was captured with an infrared camera and it’s surreal—I’m still thinking about it.

Stop by Kate Lee Short’s Respite, a small building partly sunken into the ground. If you go on a day when the wind is blowing, you’ll hear a little concert, because there are pipes built into the roofline. This, like Rachel Whiteread’s cement-cast Shack I and Shack II, are pre-existing structures, but generally aren’t open to the public outside of HDTS. Other artists in the event are Dineo Seshee Bopape, Alice Channer, Gerald Clarke Jr and Paloma Varga Weisz.

Top: Erkan Özgen, film still of Harese, 2020, courtesy Zilberman Gallery.

Jack Pierson, The End of the World,Twentynine Palms, High Desert Test Sites.

Warhol Case Goes to the Supreme Court

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A R T

B R I E F

Top: Andy Warhol, Prince, 1984, courtesy The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Bottom: Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph of Prince, 1981

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Andy Warhol is having another “Moment.” He continues to remain a huge part of the social and artistic zeitgeist decades after his death. His Warhol Diaries are currently dramatized in a multi-part documentary on Netflix (narrated by a spooky robotic-voice AI “Andy”) and several Warhol theatrical dramas will be on the boards in coming years.

Less foreseen, one of Warhol enduring legacies may be on copyright law.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced in March that it was taking up a case that has been wending its way through the federal courts for years. This copyright infringement litigation concerns the claim of art photographer Lynn Goldsmith that Warhol infringed her 1981 photo portrait of the super-star recording artist known as Prince. The original photo appeared in black and white while Warhol’s version was cropped and colorized in purple for a 1984 article, “Purple Fame” in Vanity Fair in conjunction with Prince’s release of his Purple Rain album (Warhol subsequently made a series of 15 alterations of the photo).

The Warhol Foundation successfully defended against Goldsmith’s claim in federal district court, but the decision was reversed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (N.Y.) which is known for its copyright expertise. The March 2021 Second Circuit decision in Goldsmith’s favor was a virtual treatise on the fair use defense to infringement, leaving the matter to the Supreme Court for what could be a landmark decision in its next term.

The assertion of the defense of fair use by artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, practitioners of the art of appropriation, has been the subject of several Art Brief columns over the years. The issue usually comes down to whether the alleged infringing artist has “transformed” the original work sufficiently. The complex analysis for the courts ultimately requires a subjective decision by judges, all too often turning them into art critics—a role they are woefully unsuited for. As Justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That standard may work for obscenity cases, but it fails when it comes to judicial artistic critique.

The copyright act sets out four factors courts must examine in fair use cases: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The Second Circuit court found that the first factor should explore whether the secondary work is “transformative,” as well as being commercial. In examining this first factor, the court held that the lower court made an “error” in finding that the Warhol works are transformative because they “can reasonably be perceived to have transformed Prince from a vulnerable, uncomfortable person to an iconic, larger-than-life figure.”

“Though it may well have been Goldsmith’s subjective intent to portray Prince as a ‘vulnerable human being’ and Warhol’s to strip Prince of that humanity and instead display him as a popular icon, whether a work is transformative cannot turn merely on the stated or perceived intent of the artist or the meaning or impression that a critic—or for that matter, a judge—draws from the work. Were it otherwise, the law may well recognize any alteration as transformative.”

“Instead, the judge must examine whether the secondary work’s use of its source material is in service of a ‘fundamentally different and new’ artistic purpose and character, such that the secondary work stands apart from the ‘raw material’ used to create it ...The secondary work’s transformative purpose and character must, at a bare minimum, comprise something more than the imposition of another artist’s style on the primary work such that the secondary work remains both recognizably deriving from, and retaining the essential elements of, its source material.” Therefore, the court concluded that the Warhol Prince series is not transformative. The court also found that commercial use was present since the Warhol work was used to illustrate the Vanity Fair article.

The third factor was also examined—the courts must “consider not only the quantity of the materials used but also their quality and importance.” The court held that the “Warhol borrows significantly from the Goldsmith photo both quantitatively and qualitatively.”

Finally, the fourth factor—harm to Goldsmith’s derivative market was “substantial,” something the lower court “overlooked.”

With the loss of the Supreme Court’s two copyright experts, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, I would not be surprised if the Supreme Court affirms the Second Circuit’s decision against the Warhol Foundation, in deference to that court’s history of important copyright rulings.

Luna Anaïs Gallery presents

RADICAL DAWN

curated by Alicia Piller

May 22 - July 10

Image: Kayla Tange. Vessels of memory. Emotional bodies. Moments of loss transcend.

2022, 47” x 48” x 48”, clay, wood, plexiglass

Presented at D2 Art 1205 N. La Brea Ave. Inglewood, CA 90302 www.D2art.com

www.lunaanaisgallery.com @lunaanaisgallery 323-474-9319

A lot has changed since 2011, when Maggie Nelson first published The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, her critically acclaimed collection of essays addressing violence and transgression in avant-garde art.

One thing that’s changed is the word “trigger”—now much more widely used to indicate a word or image that a traumatized individual might find so upsetting that it threatens their mental health. This seven-letter word’s second life is a surprisingly useful piece of linguistic technology, as it cleanly separates (and assumes a separation between) the possibility of inadvertently causing pain to an individual from social harm. I know someone triggered by spiders, I know someone triggered by buses, neither see a need to excoriate the continued existence of public transport or class Arachnida.

Nelson writes too early to rely on “trigger,” but she might’ve saved herself a few paragraphs if she could have: The strength of her book is that it frames the “reckoning” in the title as personal—she frames the confrontations of confrontational art as with individuals, she frames her reactions as her own. Like David Hockney’s book, That’s The Way I See It; it doesn’t demand you agree with it for it to be interesting.

Nelson starts from neither end of the nihilist-libertine-to-moral-scold spectrum; she’s a person who once called someone to register her outrage about a billboard advertising a horror movie and a person who read and enjoyed the Marquis De Sade and then did the only interesting thing someone like that can do: ask why?

Artist-by-artist, piece-by-piece, movement-by-movement, Nelson bangs her head against her own reactions. She does what so many critics fail to: she feels, but then does something else afterward. This requires acknowledging that the difference she sees begins in her own history and nervous system, rather than in a measurable world of cultural certainties. She takes the pre-eminent activist-critic John Berger to task for his attack on Francis Bacon’s blood-soaked pessimism as the work of a “conformist” trying to “persuade the viewer to accept what is”:

BY ZAK SMITH

D E C O D E R

This decade-old observation about a painter 30 years gone hits today with such force because of another thing that’s happened since Nelson published this study of a handful of works she rubricked together under the Art of Cruelty umbrella: All art is cruel now. Or rather examining art for its cruelty-quotient is the pre-eminent critical tool. There are a great many advantages to this approach—if a piece you never liked anyway can be proven to be cruel, the more difficult, nuanced and queasily subjective work of arguing why you never liked it can be skipped. It’s hurting people get rid of it. Conversely, if a work you like can be pronounced (as if it were lip-gloss) cruelty-free then anyone arguing merely that it might not be enjoyable or interesting can be consigned to the pale Hell of the cruelty-apologist. The languid vagaries of aesthetic judgments can be abandoned for the undeniable urgency of moral ones.

Nelson refuses to take that bait, acknowledging the difficulty of disentangling the two in, for example, her take on avant-horror author Brian Evenson: …his writing doesn’t just evoke the precision of slicing or cutting; his characters actually perform the deeds. When this literalness works, the work carries both visceral punch and intellectual heft. When it falls short, either the violence or the concept behind it seems suddenly naked, paltry, wrong.

It is, in short, a gamble.

Granting the artist the right to gamble is a powerful act of critical humility, saying: you can try, you can fail, and if you do, you’ve failed only Maggie Nelson, not the whole of humanity. We need a world less willing to hide behind a crowd.

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Illustration by Zak Smith

The Art of Cruelty — 10 Years Later

The problem here, it seems to me, lies in Berger’s willingness to give Bacon’s proposition such overarching power. For while the paintings may indeed propose that there is nothing else, their proposition remains just that—a momentary proffering. As one beholds them (at, say, Bacon’s 2009 centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), there is wall space between each canvas, there is space to walk around the room. One can come and go, look closely, then look away, stay for a long time or simply walk on by, en route to the bathroom or gift shop. Their depiction of belatedness or mindlessness—however claustrophobic—does not necessitate our acquiescence. They are paintings; our job is to behold them. There is no need, or even invitation, to submit to their terms.

presents

CODE ORANGE A Curatorial Photography Project

By Laura London

June 11 - July 9, 2022 Opening reception Saturday, June 11, 5-7pm ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY • Bergamot Station Arts Center 2525 Michigan Ave. A-5 • Santa Monica, CA 90404 www.robertbermangallery.com

The Andy Warhol Diaries, 2022 Netflix Limited Series

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

—Andy Warhol

A Look into Warhol’s Love Life

BY ANTHONY AUSGANG

O F F

T H E

From The Andy Warhol Diaries, courtesy of Netflix

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WA L L

In his 1987 LA Times obituary of Andy Warhol, William Wilson called the artist “the deadpan Peter Pan of Pop Art,” mostly due to Warhol’s habit of answering both serious and absurd inquiries with monotone aphorisms. When asked what turned him on, Warhol’s po-faced quips and sly disinformation made his professed asexuality acceptable; consequently, it was easy to believe he was being sincere when he asserted that, “If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.”

From 1976 until his death in 1987, Warhol kept a diary by telephoning Factory associate Pat Hackett each morning to transcribe a recap of his previous 24 hours’ scandals and peregrinations. When Hackett’s selection of the entries was published in book form as The Andy Warhol Diaries in 1989, initial reactions revolved around who was mentioned and who was left out. But more importantly, as the Philadelphia Inquirer affirmed, “The diaries provide the definitive answer to the oft-asked question, ’What was Andy Warhol really like?’” Over 30 years later, it is a re-examination of this question and its many answers that drive the new six-episode Netflix series, The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Directed by Andrew Rossi and produced by Ryan Murphy, The Andy Warhol Diaries opens with a biographical recap and explanation of how Warhol affected the zeitgeist of the time.

There’s plenty of previously unseen archival footage, but it’s essentially a standard biography of the artist up to the point Warhol was shot in 1968. In the second episode, the series moves away from Warhol’s public guise, concentrating instead on his recovery and life with lover and partner, Jed Johnson. It is this revelation that truly sets the series’ direction. Through his diary entries, and the occasional footnote by Hackett, it’s confirmed that Warhol was not only gay, but also sensitive enough to have his heart broken when Johnson left him. Nevertheless, emboldened by the realization that among friends he could now be whoever and whatever he wanted to be, Warhol quickly rebounded and began dating Jon Gould, an executive at Paramount Pictures.

This ill-fated relationship is the subject of the third episode, which ends with the advent of AIDS and the death of Gould. The remaining episodes explore Warhol’s late career and final role as a sort of parasitic mentor to Graf legend Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Since Netflix drops little new science about his work, the content is fluffed somewhat by an unseen AI construct reading the diary in Warhol’s voice. However, it’s the specifics of his romantic affairs that makes the series interesting; as other reviews note, The Andy Warhol Diaries is essentially a love story. But Warhol crafted his public persona so thoroughly that exposing his private life for contemporary prurient interest does him a disservice.

In fact, so do the talking heads that work way too hard to make Warhol an AIDS activist. When photographer Christopher Makos is pressed to concur that a graphic in Warhol’s 1986 Last Supper references “gay cancer,” he vehemently disagrees, insisting that Warhol was first and foremost an artist. At that time, after all, being successful, respected, and gay was activism enough.

@inkedbyskut

May 11 – June 4 TAG Gallery 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.297.3061 • taggallery.net • @taggallery

@justinproughart

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FO R T

WO R T H ,

T E X A S

SENSE AND NONSENSE

Hector A. Ramirez alienates objects from their everyday life

BY FRANCES COLPITT

I was thoroughly bewildered when I first saw Hector A. Ramirez’ work as a member of his MFA committee at Texas Christian University in 2017. He handed me Carpet Shoes, a worn pair of men’s brown leather shoes with rectangles of yellowish carpet glued to their soles such that their footprints would be made by the carpet’s fibers. This simple juxtaposition of two familiar objects creates an irreconcilable absurdity.

Art-historically, the distinction between Dada and surrealist assemblage is illuminating; Duchamp’s bicycle wheel attached to the seat of a wooden stool resists narrative closure and remains absurd while Man Ray’s Cadeau (1921), with large tacks attached to the pressing surface of an iron, evokes an image of clothing torn by the iron’s thorny sole. As in Bicycle Wheel (1913), the juxtaposition of everyday materials is also seen in Italian Arte Povera, which Ramirez acknowledges as an important influence. Giovanni Anselmo’s 1968 Untitled (Sculpture that Eats Itself), for example, consists of a rectangular pillar of polished granite wrapped with a copper wire that binds a leaf of fresh green lettuce to one side of the pillar.

Carpet Shoes straddles the borderline between sense and nonsense; one imagines the shoes’ wearer abjectly polishing a hardwood floor as he traverses it.

Yet Ramirez’ own inspiration for the work was a documentary report on identically outfitted shoes handcrafted by migrants and drug traffickers to conceal their footprints from the authorities while crossing the desert. None of these explanations, however, fully account for the comic absurdity of Carpet Shoes on a pedestal in an art gallery.

Like Carpet Shoes, Ramirez’ found-object sculptures incorporate minimally altered and shrewdly juxtaposed objects from our everyday world, which are in conjunction conceptually and socially meaningful.

Ramirez’ works recall Duchamp’s defense of the readymade urinal Fountain (1917) by “R. Mutt,” who “created a new thought for that object.”

Focused on Mexican-American culture, Ramirez’ work is often drawn from memories of his childhood and family life in El Paso, Texas. A cast concrete Madonna and niche—designed to decorate his neighCarpet Shoes, 2016; carpet, leather shoes, 12 x 9 inches

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bors’ gardens—sit atop a base covered with printed vinyl tiles, common in middle and working-class homes. With her robe painted an appropriate blue by Ramirez, the Madonna faces the interior of her unpainted niche in which a rearview mirror is mounted at her head height. Titled with an aphorism of his mother’s, Toma Agua, Ve a la Misa (“Drink Water, Go to Mass”), the altar-like configuration is undone by the blasphemous suggestion of the Virgin’s vanity. The rearview mirror also evokes the car culture enjoyed by Latino youths.

A large floor-bound assemblage with sound, Ramirez’ Playing the Smiths Out of It (2020) includes an oversized homemade speaker cabinet, destined for the trunk of a car where it would emit the booming music favored by young men. The upright cabinet, however, is wrapped with thick sheets of mattress foam tied with wire. The configuration is reminiscent of nothing so much as Anselmo’s Untitled (Sculpture that Eats Itself), with the foam rubber replacing the lettuce leaf. The Smiths’ music, which is overwhelmingly popular with young Latinos, appears to be suppressed by the sound-muffling mattress foam. Ironically, their music is amplified by a small stereo component placed a few feet away on the floor.

Dócil (2019) includes only two major readymade elements.

Ramirez painted the sides of a small plastic doghouse a bright yellow and the roof a purplish blue, intending to recall the saturated hues often seen on the exteriors of Mexican-American homes. Inside the doghouse is a small toy dog, manufactured as a soothing “therapy dog” for elderly and Alzheimer’s patients.

The fur-covered mechanized dog makes subtle movements and sounds. Upon bending down to view the work on the floor, the viewer’s presumption of a static assemblage—a dog in a doghouse—is shattered by the haunting, nearly imperceptible movements of the toy dog.

Ramirez painted the interior walls of the doghouse with a generic domestic hue mixed with texture additives familiar to

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any home- or apartment-renter (from sandy walls to popcorn ceilings). Because Ramirez’ father is a professional house painter, he has long been familiar with texture paint additives and in 2018 began to explore the critical possibilities of the material’s cultural implications. Adding various textures to beige and off-white paint, Ramirez sprayed large, neatly taped-off rectangles directly on gallery walls, at once recalling the high modernism of Robert Ryman’s white monochromes, the political implications of Diego Rivera’s proletarian murals, and the non-aesthetic production of hired house painters. His recent paintings on canvas are sprayed with textured layers of blues, pinks and yellows derived from snapshots of El Paso sunsets. They range from purplish gray to sienna monochromes. On close inspection, the various sprayed colors are visible on the sides of the small nodules projecting from the impasto surface.

In addition to sculptures and tableaux, Ramirez produces lowtech videos. In Blue Waltz (2018), the intertwined, blue-jean clad lower legs and cowboy boots of two male dancers engage in the graceful steps and twirls of a country-music waltz. Although the dancers’ uniforms stereotype them as straight southwestern men, their physical intimacy exposes the macho superficialities of American and Mexican-American fashion and proposes another kind of cultural fraternity.

Ramirez’ work hones in on the subject of identity coursing through contemporary art since the 1990s. Like most identity art, his work is narrative and illustrative, based on personal and cultural memories. It is not however autobiographical, transcending the particular through its mundane humor and the tactile, anti-illusionistic presence of plastic, concrete and foam rubber. The real components of every assemblage speak the language of the industrialized world, from a culturally informed point of view.

Top, Left to Right:Toma Agua, Ve a la Misa (Drink Water, Go to Mass), 2020; vinyl tile, cast concrete, glass mirror, 3 x 2 x 3 feet; Docil, 2019, Construction materials 31 x 30 x 36 inches.

Paola Cabal, Analemma, 2013, interior latex and spray paint on wall, site-specific installation at the HairPin Art Center, Chicago. Photo by Tom Van Eynde.

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33

C H I CAG O

THE WORK OF ATTENTION Light falls into place for Paola Cabal

BY STEVEN CARRELLI

Above, What Means Light, 2020–21, site-specific installation at the Arts Club or Chicago. Photo by the artist; Opposite page, Cabal at work.

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It is 3:02 p.m. on February 26, and we are looking intently at the north wall of Paola Cabal’s studio while the Midwestern afternoon light streams in through her unobstructed west windows.

Cabal is rapidly leafing through a Benjamin Moore paint-chip book, holding the color chips up to a patch of sunlight on her wall to identify the color she might use to replicate the light.

“There it is: 212570.”

Cabal is describing the process by which she creates installations that document the light in a space. Her process is exacting in the extreme. She “maps” the effects of the light within the given space at a specific time on a particular day and then painstakingly re-paints the walls—and sometimes the floor—to recreate the lights and shadows from a past moment. The effect is at once subtle and transformative.

“You could miss it,” Cabal acknowledges, and people sometimes do overlook her interventions. The subtlety and familiarity of sunlight striking a wall is easily taken for granted. But once you’ve observed the discrepancy—say it’s 7 p.m. and the light on the wall is from 3 p.m.—something magical happens. You’re experiencing two moments in time at once. It’s disarmingly simple, but it startles one into paying closer attention to every detail of a space, as if it might reveal something new, something that was missed earlier.

As we talk over the course of several hours, the light moves across Cabal’s studio wall. Leaning against it are eight panels, each 15 1/2 inches wide by 9’4 inches tall, on which Cabal has painted the running bond pattern of a brick wall. These were part of her recent installation, “What Means Light,” at the Arts Club of Chicago, and they reference the venue’s western exterior wall.

The panels are made of gray retro-reflective fabric, and the lines indicating the mortar are coyly painted in matching gray paint.

As my angle of vision shifts, the figure/ground relationship switches from dark-on-light to light-on-dark, and in some places the bricks vanish altogether, reappearing when I move my head.

It’s mesmerizing, like looking into a trick mirror, and the disappearing is as suggestive as the appearing. In the actual installation, each panel was one side of a four-sided tower, and the eight towers stood within the fenced garden of The Arts Club.

When I visited the installation in situ in November 2020 (it remained on view until late May 2021), I was unable to see these panels, because they faced toward The Arts Club and were visible only from the inside of the building, which was closed during much of the pandemic. The panels I saw from the street, looking through the wrought-iron fence at the corner of St. Clair and Ontario Street, were alternately composed of illuminated lightbox photos of views across the avenue (as seen from inside the club’s members-only drawing room) and painted images of the brick wall as seen from the sidewalk. Each panel reproduced the light at a different time of day on the spring equinox, and there was an uncanny sense that I was being admitted to a view that was simultaneously accessible and out of my reach. From one point of view, the painted sides depicting the wall would line up with my view of the wall itself and nearly disappear. But when I turned around to compare the view across the street with the view depicted in the light boxes, I couldn’t see both at the same time and had to rely on memory: appearing and disappearing were built into the body’s relationship to the space.

Back in the studio, Cabal takes out a spectacular drawing depicting coffee cups, napkins and silverware on a table in what looks like a diner. It is a proposal-drawing for an as-yet-unrealized project called “The Everland Café,” an immersive installation in a functioning coffee shop where everything—the cups, the tablecloths, the chairs—carries and casts shadows as if illuminated by sunlight entering the windows at 10:30 a.m. It is, perhaps, as impossible a project as it is understated: a place where forks, chairs

and saucers move but their shadows stay put. This, Cabal admits, is one piece that she would like to create as a permanent installation, and she laughs as she imagines setting magnets in the tables to rotate the cups into their “proper” orientation relative to their shadows as soon as customers set them down after a sip.

Although Cabal initially studied figurative painting (and she makes exquisite drawings), her work is typically ephemeral and doesn’t usually result in a permanent art object. I note that in her studio we are looking at proposals for future projects and artifacts of past ones, but the works of art themselves are not there. “Non-portable experiences” is Cabal’s description of her work. This emphasis on the impermanence of experience is at the core of her practice. If the standard modus operandi of representational painting and drawing is to make that which we value appear permanent, Cabal’s practice is a kind of reversal in which the ephemeral is arrested temporarily but always about to vanish. As she says: “It forces you to pay attention to the present in a way that a legacy object doesn’t.”

However, there is also a way in which her work is entirely made possible by drawing. There is a slow, deliberate quality of attention in her work—a disciplined practice of observation—that one finds in great drawings, and she uses this to give physical form to the act of paying attention. But Cabal is quick to note that she uses drawing as a means to an end, as a kind of primary research.

Rather than depicting something known and stable, it is a way to find out something that she didn’t already know when she started. “These are the dividends of slow,” she tells me. “That’s the work of attention.”

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K A N S A S

C I T Y,

M O

PYSCHO CERAMICS Linda Lighton doesn’t care if you’re uncomfortable

BY ELISABETH KIRSCH

Above: Pinky, the Tubacious Tubeworm, 2003; clay, glaze, china paint, lustres, 8 x 16 x 8.5 inches.

Opposite page: The Kiss, 2004; clay, glaze, china paint, lustres, 12 x 9.5 x 9.25 inches

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With their blend of surreal retro glamor, sociopolitical and personal commentary, Linda Lighton’s ceramic sculptures command a double take. This veteran artist can make clay do just about anything, and her art has unabashed palpable appeal. But Lighton is also fearless when combining the sensuousness of her materials with controversial subject matter, whether she’s taking aim at environmental pollution, gun violence or sexism. She’s also quite comfortable creating fantastical creatures that exemplify gender fluidity.

There’s a reason one of her first solo shows at L’Omega Gallery in Kansas City in the 1980s was titled “Psycho-Ceramics.”

“My art might make some people uncomfortable,” Lighton says, “but I don’t care.” Her consummate artistry, along with her sharp wit, is what makes the medicine easy to swallow.

Lighton was an activist even in her teens. She grew up in the mansion featured in the movie Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and was expected to make her debut at the prestigious Jewel Ball held yearly at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

(The ball was begun by her grandmother to ensure that Jews in Kansas City would gain greater acceptance into society.) She refused to go. Instead, she left home at age 19 to move to Lawrence, Kansas, got married and published a left-leaning newspaper called The Screw: A Twisting Device for Holding Things Together.

This caused her father, a successful department store owner and horse breeder, to have her committed to a mental institution. After taking legal action to obtain her release, Lighton moved with her husband to San Francisco, then to Seattle, to Arroyo Seco, then back to Seattle. She had a child in 1969 and was divorced in 1971. Before her divorce she moved to a private section of the Colville Reservation of the Indigenous Nez Percé people in eastern Washington state where she built an eight-sided tree house and lived with her young daughter and a friend.

“I decided I would live my life like a work of art. We had sheep, horses, I made my own soap. We were hungry a lot, and it was cold,” Lighton recalls. She took her daughter to the bus stop on a horse. “I just didn’t want my father to find me.”

Lighton met her second and current husband in Idaho, and together they built the ultimate country home that was featured in Shelter magazines. But eventually, with her husband and daughter, she moved back to Kansas City so her daughter could attend a good school.

Throughout her peripatetic early days, Lighton always found a way to study and make ceramics. “I wanted to make good art; not dishes,” she said. And after years of being restrained by her family, she remarked,“I also wanted to reveal myself. I had been brought up to be understated, to not talk and not to show myself. But I believe it’s an artist’s job to reflect what’s going in the

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Chandelier, 2020; porcelain, silk cord; 66 x 54 x 48 inches

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world—and it’s also how we learn about ourselves.”

Lighton attended the Factory of Visual Arts in Seattle from 1971–74, where she studied ceramics with such greats as Patty Warashina, Ann Currier and David Furman. She also studied painting and ceramics at the University of Idaho from ‘76–’78, and when back in Missouri, received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1989. By then she had already exhibited her art extensively.

The theme of metamorphosis, one of Surrealism’s most prevalent topics, is often present in Lighton’s art. In the early ’80s she created a series of sculptures composed of houses with people’s heads and other body parts attached. Over the years, in various series she calls “Trash,” Lighton created groupings of objects which at first glance resemble precious objects, but actually were anything but. In 1983 she fabricated “White Trash,” a clustering of gorgeous white porcelain ceramics formed, on closer viewing, to resemble discarded plastic dishes, egg cartons, etc.—her commentary on first-world littering. In 2018, her “Trump Trash” series consisted of porcelain water bottles, guns, bullets and broken gas nozzles covered in gold metal leaf, neatly illustration right-wing cultural motifs.

Her “Divas,” from the 1990s and 2000s, celebrated women of accomplishment in the form of blossoming, flamboyant clusters of vibrantly colored flower bulbs and leaves.

They are somewhat egg-shaped, in the process of morphing into something unknown, and undeniably dynamic. The “Divas” were an outgrowth of Lighton’s ongoing series of fantastical over-scaled flowers that both dazzle and intimidate. As Lighton states, “They mean to say: Choose me!”

This relates to one of Lighton’s most deeply felt themes, that of desire (in 2015 she curated an international exhibition of ceramics titled “Desire,” and published a major catalog of the show). “I believe that what keeps us going is desire,” she says. “Much of what is beautiful in nature is also ostentatious,” Lighton notes, “and exists to attract others of its kind. Without sex, obviously, everything would cease to exist.”

When it comes to weaponry Lighton is a knowledgeable, statistic-laden anti-gun lobbyist. For more than 10 years her ceramics, such as I don’t want a bullet to cross your heart from 2012, not only deal with gun violence in America; they force the viewer to take a hard look at the dark side of desire in this country. Her pristine, off-white copies of every kind of gun available in America—made from casts of real pistols and rifles, precariously stacked in mountainous peaks— underscore the availability of weaponry here while simultaneously stressing the fragility of life itself.

An outspoken feminist, Lighton also pulls no punches about women using sex as a form of ammunition. In “Love and War” from 2011, lipstick tubes and bullets are virtually inseparable from one another, both forms of powerful artillery. The same concept is beautifully articulated in Thoughts and Prayers, which also includes guns. Lighton is known for her refined use of lustre paint, and nowhere is this more apparent than in her siren-like lipsticks and bullets.

Lighton increasingly collaborates with other artists, musicians and poets. In her 2010 installation “Luminous” she created a site-specific environment with ambient sound and light effects, encouraging viewers to deal with “the fragility of life, the beginning of the last chapter.” She wanted participants to “be transported to a contemplative and dreamy place to escape the mundane and consider the ethereal and ephemeral.” The Kansas City Museum just added a chandelier from this series to its newly refurbished building.

Lighton is currently working on a large-scale ceramic wall for the new Kansas City airport, still under construction. On it she is painting dozens of branches with indigenous birds perched throughout. It is a different kind of tree house, one in which all the inhabitants are free to come and go.

“Nothing I do can be made in less than three months,” Lighton says. “So I really have to decide I want to make it before I start.”

“Devastatingly intimate” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

by ANTON CHEKHOV Directed by MICHAEL MICHETTI Translated by RICHARD NELSON, RICHARD PEVEAR, and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

JUN 1 - JUN 26

Composition #76, 2018, mixed media on panel; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund, 2018.333; photo by Travis Fullerton, © 2018 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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R I C H M O N D,

VA

VISUAL INFORMATION The soul stirrings of Diego Sanchez

BY SARAH SARGENT

“One of the things I teach my kids is to be playful in their approach,” says painter and teacher Diego Sanchez. This freedom to experiment takes the pressure off and opens up the work in unexpected directions. It’s an attitude that has served Sanchez well in his own practice.

Sanchez lives and works around Richmond, Virginia, a city with a vibrant art scene. His story is not just about becoming a successful artist, it’s also an inspiring account of an immigrant starting with nothing and rising up through the ranks of his profession. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Sanchez came to the US in 1980 at the age of 15. His father, a judge, had refused to cave to pressure from drug cartels. Fleeing for their lives, the family ended up in Northern Virginia. Sanchez, who had opted to study French at school in Colombia, spoke no English. It was an art class that changed everything, providing a means of communication. “I realized with art, you didn’t need English or French, anyone could get it,” he says.

rials—coffee to stain and soap mixed with pigment to create bubbles of paint that burst and leave behind nebulous rings of color. He likes playing with visual information. Sometimes he starts by creating realistic space and then paints something flat on it or adds patterns or text. “To me, a painting is a record of whatever is happening at the time. For instance, sometimes when I’m working in my studio, my wife will say, “Hey, can you pick up some milk?” So, I’ll jot down, pick up milk, on the work.

I may cover it up later, but little glimpses of my life remain, becoming part of the painting.”

To center and relax during the stressful months of the pandemic, Sanchez started putting lines on paper. “I used this wonderful walnut ink. I love the earthy color, the opacity, the way it handles. I first created a simple structure of lines and then came back with the grid. I did a whole bunch of them, combining some with cold wax. It was like making a structure out of chaos.”

His work was changing, and with an upcoming show on the

Sometimes when I’m working in my studio, my wife will say, “Hey, can you pick up some milk?” So, I’ll jot down “pick up milk” on the work. I may cover it up later, but little glimpses of my life remain, becoming part of the painting.

After graduating from high school, with no money for college, Sanchez enlisted in the army. On completion of his military service and college degree, he attended Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts, one of the best art schools in the country, where he received his MFA. In the years following, Sanchez cobbled together a career with teaching gigs at various places around Richmond. His first full-time position was at Virginia Union University (one of the oldest historically Black institutions in Virginia), where he taught for five years. Eventually, he was offered a position at St. Catherine’s School (a distinguished private girls’ school), where he has been teaching for over 20 years. During the summer, he leads art classes at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA) and at Richmond’s Visual Art Center.

One of the first things you notice about Sanchez’ work is the surfaces. He uses a water base to develop them, coming back with layers of oil and cold wax. He also uses unorthodox mate-

horizon, he set himself the challenge of doing 100 small pieces on paper. These gave him ideas on how to move forward, shifting from the handsome arrangements of geometric shapes to looser compositions that incorporate amorphous forms and interesting color pairings. In these works, texture and pattern possess an enhanced earthiness that imparts soul.

According to Dr. Michael R. Taylor, chief curator and deputy director for art and education of the VMFA, “Diego Sanchez is one of the most exciting and respected artists working in Richmond today, the museum loves his work, and we were proud to acquire Composition #76 for the collection in 2018.” Certainly, the measure of success is the acquisition of your work by a major museum, but Sanchez, like many famous artists before him, has the added coup of having his own merch available in the museum shop, which carries a puzzle and socks based on the acquired painting. Not bad for a kid who, at 15, had to start all over again from square one.

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Hungarian Rhapsodies

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

B U N K E R

Electra, My Love (1974)

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V I S I O N

Early success in any of the arts comes with a certain peril. This is especially true for artists whose art is rebelling against something like an authoritarian government.

Filmmakers tend to require a lot of resources, so they are especially prone to censorship by whoever holds the purse strings. Some filmmakers have done their best work under this sort of duress. Miklós Jancsó was one of the most famous filmmakers in Europe in the 1970s. He made gorgeous historical spectacles that drew on the resources that the Soviet Union could muster, thinking that they’d get a propaganda film. Sometimes they thought that they did, and sometimes his work got banned. His work won awards at European film festivals and influenced a whole new generation of filmmakers.

(He made Béla Tarr’s favorite film). Jancsó eventually moved to Italy and fell out of favor.

Metrograph cinema in New York City recently showcased six films from what is considered his peak era. All but one of them are period films. The sixth film takes a historical event (the 1947 takeover of Hungary by the Communist Party) and attires the cast in ‘60s fashions.

This one was slated to play Cannes Film Festival the year it was canceled by the events of 1968, and the cast looks and sounds a lot like the Paris demonstrators.

A feature of all of the films is how fluid power dynamics can be. Like Game of Thrones, no character is important enough to escape a bullet or sword when the dynamics shift. This was often a thorn in the side of the censors when a character who had been spouting the party line gets corrupted into power for its own sake. Much of the storytelling is achieved through song, and even songs that toe the party line can throw ironic shade. Any time you hear music in these films, you see the people who are performing. These films employed scores of musicians, folk dancers, horses and experts with synchronized bullwhips.

The best place to start is Electra, My Love (1974) It consists of 12 carefully choreographed long shots in which the camera seems to move at will through the action. It feels like watching a magician trying to figure out how some of these shots were made before the advent of steady-cams. The choreography that creates the illusion of camera movement (as well as a constant sense that everything onscreen is moving) is frequently compared to Busby Berkeley. Because this one is officially fictional, he pulls out the stops and ends up with a lot of visuals that might bring Alejandro Jodorowsky to mind. Some of the folk dancers bust moves that might look like an at-home hip-hop video.

The overall effect can be downright hypnotic. Seeing these films, it is jaw-dropping to realize that he isn’t better known. The prints shown at Metrograph were recent restorations that appear to belong to Kino. That bodes well for wider availability of these titles. They feel more relevant by the day.

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POLITICS ON PAPER Santiago Cal’s shock of subtlety

BY JONATHAN OROZCO

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Santiago Cal is a humble man with a demeanor that challenges traditional Western conceptions of artistic genius. His subtlety and humility are visible in his works, which are usually small or medium-sized carvings of fragile children. His visual narratives don’t hit you over the head.

Cal lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, a long way—culturally and geographically—from his country of origin, Belize. Like millions of other people in this hemisphere, Cal has mixed ancestry; his father’s side is of Yucatán Maya heritage. During the Caste Wars—a series of battles led by the Maya against Spanish colonizers—his family fled to Belize to avoid enslavement. But the process of colonization continued. His grandparents were ashamed to speak Yucatec Maya, and Cal’s father never learned the language. However, as Cal says, “Belize is a spot of political stability in the region, a place where people can go and escape.”

On the other side, Cal is of European descent, his mother a former Pennsylvanian.

One series of Cal’s titled “Marks of Longevity’’ provides an entry point to his personal and political history. Cal crafted machetes from steel in the shape of such Latin American countries as Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Brazil. The machete’s handles are carved from Honduran mahogany, a tropical wood harvested for export. They are mounted on walls in groups, but surprisingly, not in a way that respects the “real” geographical layout of the world.

An unspoken hierarchy is implied in the mounting, based on size, uniqueness and a country’s cultural proximity to Europe. For most viewers, it’s easy to recognize Mexico or Argentina, but unless you’re a Latin American specialist, it’s probably a challenge to find Guatemala, Ecuador or Belize. In this way, it’s also about a viewer’s lack of knowledge of this region.

Cal first used machetes in the early 2000s. After painting three machetes white, he displayed them on sheets of zinc roofing and poured red paint onto the artwork’s surface. “I grew up with this tool,” he says. “Being a kid and having a small version of one for [cutting away] vegetation or snakes.” It was a utilitarian tool, but of course, like a hammer used to build a house or smash someone’s skull, it could be used for other purposes. “Thinking about this tool,” says Cal, “it’s an anxious object. You don’t know if it’s going to sit there passively or be used for harm.”

Using this object for an art installation can be read in a number of ways. Take the machete shaped like Mexico—a country that has a contentious history with America. If we take the machete as a tool that can be useful or harmful, we can see that the inhabitants of Mexico live with these conditions and are often in a state of anxiety and fear of an attack.

An essentialist interpretation would be that Mexicans are wild cards that can be useful or dangerous. Indeed, Mexicans in the US are biasedly perceived as both model minorities and as

Sweat, 2019; rice paper and graphite; courtesy of the artist.

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dangerous immigrants.

On a road trip from Belize to the US, these subtle dichotomies became palpable for Cal. Crossing the Belize-Mexico border was a pretty casual affair, unlike crossing from Mexico into the US.“When I reached the [latter] border, the bus was dead silent,” says Cal. Border guards treated people with suspicion. Some [passengers] were detained.” After crossing, Cal vividly remembers an “eruption of joy.”

To Cal, these tribulations can sometimes be seen as humorous; he calls them “razor-edge thin lines marked by rivers or arbitrariness,” and mentions a soccer field that exists in both Belize and Guatemala, stretching across their border.

Cal also makes hand-carved wooden children.

These figures often exist in dreamlike situations that exude vulnerability. When growing up in Belize, he thought that art consisted of “making replications of flora for tourists.” He adds that “the toil of the hand, the value of labor is important to me. I remember at an early age thinking of laborers as heroes and romanticizing that. I value the labor of caring.”

Growing up in Central America in the ’70s and ’80s, I didn’t experience violence, but was impacted by the residual experiences from all the refugees coming from Honduras,” Cal says. “That shaped how I see people, and it struck emotions that were so deep and profound to me.”

After considering the practice of Claudia Alvarez, a proud Mexican-American New York–based artist who paints and sculpts children, Cal took some time to reflect on what he was doing and how he could change: “At that point, I started to make figures of adults that were doll-sized.”

These figures are highly diverse in setting and composition: some are nude, others lie in bed, another holds a dead chicken. Radio Tower depicts a male figure in an orange suit with a head covering kneels down with his hands on his back, referencing the horrors of internment. “My sculpture is small and isolated, but I wanted the orange to scream,” says Cal. Cal’s work can be very literal, as in Sweat: a pair of paper shirts on wire hangers. Styled after a guayabera, a shirt worn primarily by men in Latin America and the Caribbean, Cal used rice paper for this piece because rice and beans are staples of the Belizean diet. “I have always responded to these shirts because people wear them with pride as the anti-dress suit and it is a shirt that’s accessible to all socio-economic levels,” Cal told me. Images from the real world are drawn on the shirt’s surface with graphite: netted telephone lines emerge from shirt pockets, while circling vultures suggest death.

In other recent works, Cal reflects on fatherhood using his son as a muse. He uses the growth of his child as a source to marvel and wonder at the shaping and development of someone’s identity. This is what makes Cal’s practice unique: it can touch upon subjects as serious as murder but he can also remind us of our inherent humanity.

Thin Air, 2018; wood and watercolor; courtesy of the artist.

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NFTs are here, ushering in a new Golden Age in art. The flood of fiscal support into the NFT market has changed everything. This world has become very real and very serious, extremely fast. Investment firms are buying Degenerate Apes to flip! There’s a need to understand a new vocabulary, a new system of provenance, a new sales structure and the elimination of the historic gallery model.

My new column,“The Digital,” will be a place for elucidating the morphing digital art space, exploring crypto and NFT trends, understanding new verbiage, reviewing existing/upcoming collections, speaking with artists/developers, and shouting out my ridiculous advice in this space. —Seth Hawkins

NFTs Flood LA

BY SETH HAWKINS

T H E

D I G I TA L

Six original NFT’s by Sir Mix-A-Lot for his project Bit Butts, 2022

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As the rain poured down and invaded Los Angeles on a recent Monday, so did the selfproclaimed NFT degenerates. There were representatives from both big NFT blockchains: mutant apes, nuked apes, boogles, money boys, cets on creck, and—did I mention that Sir-Mix-Alot was performing at the Magic Eden kickoff party shilling his own “Bit Butts” NFTs. What a night it was—I like “Bit Butts” and cannot lie!

The attendees for NFT|LA, one of the first major IRL NFT events, was a mixed bag to say the least. Furries and crypto investors in their early 20s had on thousand-dollar shades, nerdy unkempt dev teams were huddled around laptops while gray-bearded old-timers tried to not miss the boat.

The current state of affairs began to come into focus as I watched the Magic Eden keynote panel opening night. It included founders of some blue-chip Solana collections; Best Buds, Thug Birdz, Degods and for fun why not throw rapper Waka Flocka Flame into the mix. These are some of the heaviest traded collections on Solana—all in business for less than a year. To put this into perspective, the Degods is just about to pass the $25 mil in secondary market sales and they are only just hitting the six-month mark. What does that mean?

It exemplifies the fact that this space is so new and so rapidly changing that by the time this column has published, one of these collections may be out of favor. Even the whole Solana blockchain that these exist on is still said to be in beta. With much of the discourse at the conference being about NFT collections establishing and connecting communities, even noted musician and NFT enthusiast Steve Aoki was on stage vigorously yelling about how much comes from his online discord interactions.

I question what we are creating. Are these communities or investments? Do we ride the rocket to the moon and hop off with fiscal liquidity, or do we diamond hand for the community, as gravity inevitably pulls prices back to Earth?

Of the 20 blue-chip art collections that currently exist on Solana, will five still be around in a year’s time? How will this ecosystem change in the next two months as the world’s largest website for NFT secondary market sales—Open Sea—onboards the hottest new blockchain—Solana. We are days or weeks away from something big with this merger, but I am no financial advisor, just an enthusiastic onlooker.

When do you dip your toe in the pool? If you have taken the time to read this far, then you can invest $20 in crypto and feel like you vested in the community also. Invest a sushi dinner’s worth in an NFT if you are feeling adventurous. Get in the Game. Invest yourself. Show people the picture on your phone just like you would your firstborn.

The Question is: How do you even buy an NFT and what the hell is a phantom wallet?

Keep reading “The Digital.”

Susan Spector

STICKS/STONES

Crowdsourced Text-based Artwork May 11 - June 3, 2022 Reception May 14 • 5-10pm susanspectorart.com @susanspectorart susanspectorart@gmail.com

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

Gathering of Angels

40th Anniversary Exhibition

Featuring Past and Present Studio Artists

Image: Susan Davis

June 25 – July 30

IN IN COLOR COLOR Fundraiser & Art Auction June 25, 6-9pm

for tickets: www.bidpal.net/agccawake

Image: Marie Thibeault, Capture 2021

TH ANNIVERSARY

1982 - 2022

3601 S. Gaffey Street San Pedro, CA 90731 310.519.0936 angelsgateart.org

R E V I E W S

Deborah Roberts, The duty of disobedience, 2020. Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles;and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin.

Photo by Paul Bardagjy.

Deborah Roberts Art + Practice

By Jody Zellen

Deborah Roberts’ mixed-media works propose new ways to depict Black children. Her figures dominate an otherwise blank canvas (sometimes white, sometimes black) either filling most of the frame or resonating against the negative space. Rather than contextualize them in a recognizable setting, she alludes to their history through collage. Each figure’s face is composed from several different photographs, cut apart and recombined, juxtaposed with painted, as well as collaged fabrics with clashing colorful patterns. While the works have a Cubist aura, they also pay homage to Romare Bearden who explored the fracturing of spaces and faces in his collages from the 1960s. Roberts’ figures display both a childlike innocence and an awareness of the world beyond their years.

In The duty of disobedience (2020), Roberts presents three girls with collaged faces, patterned clothing and flatly painted skin augmented with pastel. One girl wears a tan tank top with three identical cartoony monkeys holding red balloons. She looks out at the viewer, as well as across the canvas. Her right hand flashes a horizontal peace sign. The T-shirt of another girl has a monkey and a weasel on it with the slogan “pop! goes the weasel.” The third girl is dressed in colorful geometric patterns—circles on her top and concentric squares on her skirt. The thin young boy in Cock-adoodle-do (2019) flexes his muscles and stares hard at the viewer. He wears striped shorts and a sleeveless gray shirt with a large decal of

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a red rooster in its center. The drawn and painted arms, socks and shoes contrast with the photographic face that is a composite of an unidentified boy and the actor Sidney Poitier. The Unseen (2020) depicts two girls with bright patterned jumpers and misaligned collaged faces. Looking out at the viewer from eyes culled from multiple sources, Roberts has once again constructed an image of innocence and knowing. That one of the girls holds a red Tootsie Pop in an oversized hand can be seen as an art historical reference to Pop Art and pop culture, as well as a nod to the sound made by a gun.

While Roberts’ quintessential mixed-media works against white backgrounds are situated in the front gallery, the back space offers works on paper, a video and sound installation, as well as images from Portraits: When they look back (2020), Roberts’ first series, where the figures are surrounded by black rather than a white background. This alludes, as Roberts’ states, to how “Black girls disappear into the background of life.” In What if? (2021), a mixed-media installation based on the two rooms of a Catholic confessional, Roberts memorializes the names of 400 Black women who have gone missing. Here she creates a haunting video and sound-work that poses the question, “What if she was not Black?”

As an installation, I’m is about empowerment. The works cry out: Look at me. I’m a person. I’m here. I’m important. In this exhibition, Roberts blends faces of children and grownups to suggest the trajectory toward adulthood and the fact that in today’s violent and racist world, they grow up too fast, if they get to grow up at all.

R E V I E W S

Arlene Shechet

Vielmetter Los Angele

By John David O’Brien

Colorful, peculiar and static, Arlene Shechet’s freestanding sculptures possess an animation. They cant and list in space, tilting precariously as if ready to tumble. On a plinth or platform, they are eccentrically placed, rarely centered. The spatial lilting is seen as the viewer walks around the sculptures, and as an unexpected transformation of forms and spatial lilting is accentuated, a sort of humorous chord is struck. The oddly anthropomorphic gestures of leaning, bending or turning seem wholly palpable yet all the works are obdurately abstract.

isting artworks (summoning vestiges of Lynda Benglis or Anthony Caro) but while traces of other works appear embedded in the collective whole, it is hardly the first thing a viewer perceives.

Just inside the entrance, the visitor is greeted by Bright Sun Cloud (2021) offset on a large floor plinth. Rising in piled chunks of wood and ceramic, these forms seem to spread out in a big yellow/ green embrace. Revealing itself only after a 360° perusal, the forms are masked from one side to the next and shifts in color provide new readings from one view to the next. The soft surface is replete with both cracks and textures and the only element less heated in the ensemble is the steel plate below which strikes a more plaintive, almost whimsical note. Along with the scalar shifts, it’s impossible to survey the entirety of the work, making viewing a literal discovery.

The viewer is treated to a joyful exploration of space while perusing the sculptures, further echoed in the wryly individual titles.

Shechet is opting for subtle humor and invites us to explore the truly complex visual gyrations that colorful shapes in 3D can accomplish.

E.J. Hill Oxy Arts

By Shana Nys Dambrot Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May in a beguiling, gestural and chromatically complicated suite of blossom paintings

by E.J. Hill. They were undertaken during a recent residency that coincided with the interruption of life as we knew it, shaped by both the promise and threat of that life’s return, as well as an imperative reconsideration of the artist’s own priorities. These paintings represent Hill’s quest for peace of mind in the absence of peace in the world—or rather, their making embodies it.

The paintings themselves are beautiful but not pretty, troubled but not troubling. In the turmoil of their painterly color field foundations—tonalities of firestick, moss and dry grass, stormy lavender, luminous queasy pink, goldenrod and black—lies the physical evidence of the artist’s process of thinking things through with his hands. In the array of field and fancy flowers that inhabit these

Arlene Shechet, Bright Sun Cloud, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo by Meredith Heuer.

The orange-red drooping shape of Punch Line (2021) is hard to categorize. This curvilinear ceramic form has a hint of the functional about it and has been glazed so the surface appears as irregular foam. This alternately convex and concave figure wraps itself around the top of a spindly metal stand that has been spray-painted to match the sculpture above and grows darker until it reaches the ground. It delivers quite a punch without the literal qualities those usually carry.

The combination of glazed ceramic, painted hardwoods, and metals of various colors create a series of conundrums for the viewer.

Should they be considered something like an externalized organ or are they discards from a melted and demolded industrial source?

Surfaces are smooth or scored, fragments are cracked or carefully split open; there is a careful treatment of surfaces that the viewer can’t help but peer into. These aggregations appear to echo ex-

EJ Hill, Even the clouds are losing sleep, 2022. Courtesy Oxy Arts. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber.

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R E V I E W S grounds there is organic charm and uneasy lines, and a certain compelling dissonance between the bright expectations for a floral painting and the reality of persistent melancholy.

The explosive petals of the tiger orange bloom in Even the clouds are losing sleep (2022, acrylic and neon on wood panel, 60 x 50 ¾ in) and its entourage of puffy white clouds of which one is ringed in a neon halo, is made with darker tones and sharp, jagged lines that are gestural in the way of draftsman’s violence; while in Wherever we will to root (2022, acrylic and neon on wood panel, 61 x 50 ¾ in) the gentle aubergine folds of the velvety lily anchor the picture against the buffeting expressionistic tempest of the lavender sky. The rest of this garden of paintings carries on containing such multitudes; at the center of the room is a white baby grand piano titled Garden, that any who enter may freely play. Where the music should be there are photographs of people; because all of this is a metaphor for us, and how we’re coping.

Among the buzzwords associated with this time is self-care, expressed as the right and duty to treat oneself with kindness and respect, to commit to rest and nourishment of the body and soul. This is undertaken in pursuit of a more joyful life, which ultimately means more fully engaged and effective membership in society. Easier said than done, when everything from anxiety and disease to climate and capitalism works against us. But in that context, Hill’s self-assigned period of avoiding the rigorous durational performance works he’s known for—in favor of a year spent painting nothing but flowers—makes all the sense in the world.

strate Salamon’s intuitive approach with Couwenberg and DeLap in intense poses but Bachardy relaxing. His empathetic portrait, Clare #11 (2015) portrays Clare Dowling, daughter of artist Tom Dowling, on the cusp of her teenage years. His domestic scenes bring viewers to intimate worlds of friends and family. Expectations (2009) also features art colleagues, a pregnant Julie Perlin Lee standing proudly in her living room, while her husband David Michael Lee looks on admiringly and a bit quizzically. An art history Easter egg is revealed in the title of the book the husband is reading combined with the vessels on the sideboard behind and between the couple.

In another domestic scene, Sinisi Family Holiday (2017), the artist and his friends, the three Sinisi boys, stand with their mother alongside a camper scheduled for a cross-country trip. Salamon enjoyed hearing stories of their adventures when they returned home. White Rabbit (2016) illustrates the artist’s wife Kathy, his mother-in-law, and daughters Lauren, Sarah, and Monet, with the smiling Lauren spanning a doorway, while several feet above the floor. The painting (including a rabbit referencing procreation) expresses the artist’s penchant to see artistry in amusing situations. Similarly witty is one of Salamon’s most important paintings, Dude Descending a Staircase (2019), depicting a disheveled Jeff Bridges walking down a staircase.

Yet another painting suggests Salamon’s devotion to his Southern California roots, his Monday Night at the Crab Cooker (2016).

This illustration of Salamon, Mark Hilbert, co-founder of the Hilbert Museum, and Gordon McClelland who curated “Forging Ahead,” enjoying a meal, is resonant with Orange County associations, as the Crab Cooker is a long favored eatery. The painting also depicts an important aspect of Salamon’s life, as the trio often meets for dinner at the storied, demolished, and resurrected Newport Beach eatery.

Anne Appleby Parrasch Heijnen

By Ezrha Jean Black

Bradford J. Salamon, Monday at the Crab Cooker, 2016, Oil on canvas,The Hilbert Collection

Bradford J. Salamon

Hilbert Museum of California Art

By Liz Goldner

The artist Bradford Salamon embraces his entire life in his artwork, from his childhood and teenage years—watching cartoons and films, surfing in SoCal, playing in bands, and engaging with friends— to the present. These experiences and influences are recollected and rendered in his current exhibition at the Hilbert Museum, a collection of 47 paintings and illustrations from the past four decades that include the artist’s friends, scenes from his life, and favored images from his childhood. These incorporate actual and fictional characters from the artist’s memory catalogue: R2-D2 from Star Wars, David Bowie, Gidget, Bob Dylan, Betty Boop, Andy Warhol, Alfred E. Neuman, and Walt Disney.

Yet his painterly subjects are often his colleagues as well. A series of portraits include California artists Don Bachardy (2007), Alex Couwenberg (2012), Tony DeLap (2015), and Mark Ryden (2015) demon-

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Anne Appleby, The Pond, 2021. Courtesy Parrasch Heijnen.

There was an almost respirational pacing to this show—taken from a slightly more expansive exhibition of the Montana-based artist’s work at the Missoula Art Museum—between variously light or darkness-drenched works on canvas (and/or panel) and the chromatically saturated luminosity of work rendered by photographic means.

The Pond (2021), with a shimmer of silvery foliage whispering through the deeper grisaille of its depicted embankment and dark depths curving deep into the picture space around it, drew the view-

R E V I E W S er into the subtleties of its rendering. Even the most determinedly monochromatic of Appleby’s canvases reveals abundant chromatic variation and considerable under-painting, however aggressively scraped or flattened. Here, however, the palette veered toward charcoal, slate grays and silvery whites. Foreground foliage, executed in quasi-pointillist style, turned its leaves in a late afternoon or early twilight, rendering the movement of leaves and branches as a kind of effervescence.

As if to answer that whispering pond and its wooded embankment, the sound of water reverberated from across the gallery in a digital video loop with sound, Water Voice (2019–21), fading in from a black-and-white filtered gradient of grays and blacks to color, with the already vividly blue water deepening to sapphire. As the blue deepens, lapping waves are broken by children’s voices, splashing and diving, improvising water sports, and calling their dogs into the water to play fetch. Voices recede, dogs and children fade from view, and blue fades to gray, and finally to white, before fading in again.

The forest takes us further into the woods—a sloping view tumbling towards the viewer and into the right-most section of the (144 inches across) diptych, with pale light piercing the forest canopy to patches of the ground and the darkness falling towards us. Here the painting’s surface grisaille more readily discloses its complex underpainting, with hints of burnt umber or verdigris beneath charcoal black timber and pale gray foliage, and the palest blues where the sky peaks through the most distant trees.

Directly across, Appleby’s triptych (215 in. across) The River (2013) flows not so much into our view as beneath and past us, with the turquoise of its surface scarcely suppressing its complex underpainting of both sunken riverbed debris and reflected woods and sky looming over it.

Mounted on the rear wall of the gallery were four perfect squares (26 x 26 in.) from Appleby’s 2021 “First Light/Last Light” series. Their pleasures multiply on approach, both in the canvases individually and the transitions between them. Close up, the “light” of palest yellows and ambers seemed to seep from the edges while deeper amethysts and blues pooled into midsections.

Directly opposite the First Light/Last Light canvases was a small kneeling figure in fired clay, Untitled (2021)—feminine in contour, but with articulation suppressed; conceivably reverential, but expressing acceptance and resistance in equal measure. Informed and inspired by the natural world, Appleby’s work is also suffused with latency, variation, potentiality—evoking a sinking world that may nevertheless rise and push back.

Ulysses Jenkins Hammer Museum

By Richard Allen May III Ever had your memory moonwalk? Such a notion is possible after experiencing Without Your Interpretation, the Ulysses Jenkins multiverse at the Hammer Museum, a retrospective comprised primarily of video and performance art covering five decades. Putting soul in conceptualism, Jenkins interrogates the myopic paradigms and mass-media influenced understandings, reconfiguring prior knowledge related to Blackness and ultimately, humanness.

In his video, “Remnants of the Watts Festival (1972–73)” Jenkins interviews the late Cecil Fergerson, whose iconic arts activism led him to co-found the Black Arts Council (BAC) in the ‘60s while employed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Later promoted to assistant curator, he became the first African American in the history of Los Angeles to attain that position. The BAC exerted pressure on the museum to include programing that reflected and reached out to African American taxpayers. So, to watch Fergerson critically comment on how the control of the Watts Summer Festival was removed from community hands through the power of corporate funding revealed his visceral approach; he exposed how police presence at Black community events is rationalized by the state. Yet,

to see footage of Black and Brown folk together at such a significant event echoed cultural solidarity. Its title, Remnants, signifies the relevance of knowledge of the past for informing the future.

Other video documentaries included King David (1978), a visit to the studio of artist, David Hammons, with LaMonte Westmoreland as commentator; and Momentous Occasions: The Spirit of Charles White (1977/1982, 19:41), a recording of his retrospective at the Los

Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation rehearsal documentation, 1984. Color print. Courtesy of the artist

Angeles Art Gallery and his role as professor at Otis Art Institute. To see the work of these master artists was revelatory but to hear them discuss their objects and imagery is a recommended master class.

Further expanding videographic boundaries were the “Dream City (1983)” performances (1983, 5.19 min) that re-imagines a metaphoric ritual in time and Without Your Interpretation (1984, 13:53), a rite of social crisis and survival. Like the central Key Maker character in the Matrix Reloaded (2003), in both works Jenkins welcomes all to open the door to his imaginative art-making process.

Of additional significance are Bequest (2002, 9:32) and Planet X (2006, 6:19). While the former addresses the purging of negative imagery aimed at Arabic diaspora by the United States and global community, the latter juxtaposes Planet X mythology with the horrific disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Both video works demonstrate Jenkins’ ability to assault and deconstruct dehumanizing mass-media narratives. To be sure, Without Your Interpretation, with its unapologetic and intentional intersectionality, inspires belief in the parallel universe of ideas. Ultimately, Jenkins’ unflinching experimentation with video and performance makes this exhibition an enveloping experience, like playing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” (1971) over and over, and over again.

Dani Dodge

Black Rock Art Gallery, Joshua Tree National Park

By Genie Davis

Suggesting both the afternoon desert sunlight just before it fades into dusk and the night black sky that makes Joshua Tree National Park such a stellar stargazing site, these images are as fragile and tough as the Joshua tree itself.

In “Embracing the Incarnate,” Dani Dodge’s artwork from her artist-in-residency period at Mojave National Preserve—a time extended both for personal family reasons, and the pandemic—is a long-form poem both sorrowful and triumphant, yet firmly rooted in the earth from which Joshua trees grow. The luminous mixed-media works reveal the resilience of the Joshua trees, their preciousness, and the need for their preservation. Stretching between 2018 and 2021, the works record the strength and longevity of the trees, the devastation that overcame them from the 2020 Dome Fire, and the hope rising from the recovery and restoration ongoing at the park.

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R E V I E W S The artist has called the trees “souls… Gods… nature incarnate,” and she expresses both her awe for them and an identification with their survival struggle. Beginning with her own photographs, and from a great trove of images, she selected those that best represented each period in the life of the majestic trees, and her own. The exhibited works are layered, giving them a shining, yet translucent depth, as if viewed through a camera lens, or through a clear prism of water. In a glowing golden sky punctuated by shadowed trees; the image of a young woman clad in a golden dress is seen running among them, hair flying. Figures populate additional

Troy Montes Michie, Versatility, 2022. Courtesy Company Gallery..

Dani Dodge, Two-Thousand-Eighteen_4, 2018. Courtesy Black Rock Art Gallery.

pieces; in Two-Thousand-Eighteen_3, a nude woman bends like a flower in a dance.

In 2019, when the artist was experiencing personal loss, there was a sense of quiet but sorrowful acceptance and perseverance in images like Two-Thousand-Nineteen_2, where gold and white clouds float ephemerally across a wide desert sky, the Joshua trees small but bold silhouettes along a ridge beneath it. In Two-Thousand-Nineteen_1 the sun, a paler gold circle slowly sinks down a golden sky, disappearing into the black hills below; trees stand sentinel, watching the coming dark. Images from 2020 are immersed in that same darkness; fallen trees, ashy ground, and fallen or bent trees appear to be weeping in Two-Thousand-Twenty_4. But in 2021, the work again grows more hopeful, as with the gilded trees beginning new growth in Two-Thousand-Twenty-One_1. Hanging from the ceiling of the exhibition space are several translucent pieces of clear plastic, painted with images of young golden plants, aching with hope. Each work here is infused with a sense of wonder and light, an all-encompassing light, ever more powerful for its ability to conquer darkness, glowing through it all.

Troy Montes Michie

Company Gallery, New York City

By Catherine Yang

Mining tensions between the hyper-feminine and the fragile masculine, Troy Montes Michie continues his interventionist textile and collage practice with a body of work centered on the reappropriation of the Chicano countercultural figure La Pachuca. Dishwater Holds No Images, his second solo show at Company Gallery, investigates the commodification of the zoot suit, a once-radical fashion statement adopted in the 1940s by bicultural immigrants that resonated well beyond the wartime period.

Montes Michie employs the image of the zoot suit as a sartorial manifestation of marginalized communities’ desires to conform to America’s white middle class. His space-consuming work presents

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parallels between the acts of tailoring in fashion and collaging in art.

Whether on bodies or on canvasses, both practices are defined by aesthetic interventions that express racial, gender or cultural identities. The collaged textile elements in Montes Michie’s canvas works are held together by paint and needlework and point to his efforts to create new meaning from a fragmented assortment of relics.

Beautifully expressing the intersection of tailoring and collaging in Was the Beautiful Woman in the Mirror of the Water You or Me? (2022), the artist’s 40-foot-long patchwork comprises garment bags, wire hangers, catalog pages, clothing scraps, belts, and zippers hand-stitched together. Hung Out To Dry, his 2021 sculpture series of resin-treated garments hung on steel drying racks is also interspersed throughout the gallery, culminating in Amanecer o Atardecer (all other works 2022) which features monochromatic shirt sculptures hanging overhead on crisscrossing wires.

The subversive quality of zoot suits is rooted in their blatant betrayal of gender norms, a fact to which Montes Michie fittingly pays homage. Most depictions of “Latinx” women are manipulated images of white models from 1970s magazine ads—their skin tone and lipsticks have been darkened, their formidable pinstriped suits and coiffed hair rendered in paint and graphite. The aptly titled Versatility, measuring 11 x 8 inches, perfectly captures the gender rebellion of the zoot suit with snapshots of a model whose drawn-on pantsuit becomes the basis for a visual pattern that Montes Michie liberally inserts into new contexts throughout the series.

Beyond provoking fear of female sexuality, the works also point to the destabilization of traditional class structures that the Pachucos represented. To see women of color donning the uniform of white men and flaunting their affluence in the face of the white majority implied the permeability of class categories and consequently stirred significant public anxiety. By projecting the politically wrought zoot suit, which functions as both costume and symbol, onto white female subjects, Montes Michie tactically inverts longstanding notions of beauty and femininity, and of what it means to look and feel American.

His tangible portrayal of the interrelationship between consumer materiality and cultural identity is not only incisive, but also unforgettable. In Montes Michie’s idealized version of the middle-class American Dream, women of color are, at long last, approaching the fore of the narrative. Yet his demonstration of how far we have come reveals how much more work is yet to be done.

See Troy Michie solo show in Los Angeles at CAMM through September 2022.

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Umar Rashid Transformative Arts

By Ezrha Jean Black

YO R K

where,” is anb.exploration of the moods, tones and colors that the Jorge Albertella (Argentina, 1946) Ars Metálica 15 A, 2006 night brings. The paintings in the exhibition form a cohesive colMixed media on woodand tell the story of a solitary artist living in an old wooden lection 24 x 16 x 2 ½ in.

For an artist who has deliberately cultivated a naïve style, Umar Rashid (who also occasionally calls himself Frohawk Two Feathers) appears to have calculated the exhibition’s title, “Per Capita” with almost labyrinthine deliberation—an amalgam of the coyly matterof-fact, ceremonious and slyly deceptive. Alternate readings might suggest for the head as much as the more commonplace, by the head.

An impressive, blue painted ceremonial arch, titled 8th Wonder: Portal to Los Angeles Past, Present and Future (2021), greeted visitors to the gallery; yet the transfer prints that covered the structure—white cougar and bird-like silhouettes collectively titled, “All Power to the Women” (2017)—seemed slightly disconnected from both the triumphal aspect of the arch and the “Per Capita” drawings hanging at the rear of the gallery. But disconnection and detour seemed to be subsidiary themes of the show. Ostensibly the centerpiece of the show, the eponymous “Per Capita” pieces (2021)—one an acrylic-on-cowhide with rampaging toy-like horses and masked soldiers slashing at each others’ heads; the other, a suite of 12 acrylic-on-paper drawings (of women’s faces—subtitled “Hortense through Candy,” each captioned “PER CAPITA”)—could not by themselves encapsulate either the artist’s stylistic range or the exhibition’s scope which, in addition to serving as a mini-retrospective of the artist’s work (from 2013), amounted to an exorcism of colonialism past and present.

Rashid achieves his exorcism not merely through stylistic means (though he is a practiced hand at this, borrowing from Japanese graphic work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian and Persian miniatures, Native American art dating from various periods of US colonial expansion, and Anglo-American folk art from the same period), but by revisiting—and aggressively messing with— the usual historical narratives. One example of this is a 2017 suite of unique zero graphic transfer prints (with ink and acrylic) on birch panels: an 18th-century “Shock Doctrine” scenography of colonial invasion, occupation, suppression and revolt. Women are depicted artlounge.co in full contention with their male counterparts, ready to take on Umar Rashid, Trappers/sharpshooters or historical origin of Kool cigarettes, 2019. Courtesy leadership roles.

Transformative Arts.

Rashid has continued developing these interventions by historical reinvention, composing (in 2019) what is effectively a graphic mytho-satirical epic of colonialism in 40 panels (including a frontispiece), Views of Colonial Fabric Softener or, The Sidney and St. Marc Expedition to the Pacific, 1795. (e.g., panel 8, “Trappers/Sharpshooters or historical origin of Kool cigarettes”). It was perplexing that this ambitious series was not featured more prominently, but the gallery’s spatial limitations clearly impeded the show’s organization and installation. That said, not all of the work exhibited served Rashid’s overarching themes. Not to dismiss the totemic aspects of Rashid’s mythographic exorcism, but the “Yves Klein” garden totems could have easily been culled from the show.

In addition to a surprisingly authentic-looking drum, Rebel (2013), Rashid showed an embroidered and appliquéd cape, Trickster (2019) bearing such insignia as a snake curling around an octagonal spider’s web (with Afro combs taking the place of classical Greek key and scroll-work for the decorative trim). Rashid also plays a trickster here, which is half the point. If colonialism’s legacies are still with us (on a “per capita” basis or otherwise), we continue to re-enact their ceremonies and traumas, even as we lampoon and subvert them.

house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by apple trees and rolling hills with only the stars and flowers to keep him company. The focal painting, Portrait of an artist in the penumbra of the moon, in hopes for a brighter future (all works 2021), gives insight into who the main character in this story is—a Black cowboy with a toothy grin gazing out the window, painting the midnight sky.

In many ways this “artist character” gives the collection a meta quality. Although the paintings were created by Harrison, one could suspend their disbelief and instead infer that the paintings were in fact painted by this mysterious cowboy. The still life paintings of watermelons, apples and flowers are what he would paint after a long day, and show snapshots from his life, giving the impression that this cowboy could have simply looked around his environment and painted what he saw in his surroundings. The consistent color palette is effective: the deep blues and purples give the impression of moonlight spreading over each scene. It’s easy to visualize the quiet, secluded cabin in which all of this introspection and recording took place, and to fill in the blanks of who this artist is (the one in the painting, not Harrison The cohesive story is echoed by May 2022 himself).

- December 2022 repeating themes in the paintings, such as checkerboard cloth, or watermelon seeds from a windowsill in Midnight Picnic, which also make an appearance in The Moon.

All of this storytelling elevates the show to a metaphysical level, and changes the context of the figurative paintings that contain subject matter that could be seen as art students 628elementary—how Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach,many California 90802 paint fruit for their first assignment? This does have its downfall, however, as the pieces are stronger as a collection and some may not hold up as well as solo efforts. This is a show that is greater than Smithsonian Affiliate the sum of its parts.

Harrison’s interest in storytelling goes beyond the paintings’ content, and into his painting techniques as well. Many of the paintings have a trompe-l’œil effect, in which Harrison has painted frames around the composition. This strategy suggests a vantage point from within the painting, further immersing the viewer in the world he has created. The windows also tell another story, as sweeping landscapes and a sense of stillness are juxtaposed by imagery of one being trapped. In Counting Sheep, a face peers out of a tiny opening, and in Why’d I have to Go n’ Dream so Big? the windowpane suggests a jail cell. This obvious longing that the artist in the paintings has is palpable, and from the solitary Light of Mine in the room of its own, it appears that the fire is still burning.

molaa.org

Alexander Harrison Various Small Fires

By Leanna Robinson

in the Magic

Alexander Harrison’s aptly named exhibition “Midnight Every-

Helen Chung Rio Hondo College

By Eve Wood

All good art has at its core an essential moment of transmutation, a point at which the object and the idea which informs it fully coalesce. The essence of the object—whether it’s a painting or a bag sculpture—versus the impulse to create it in the first place are the central questions that inform Helen Chung’s artistic process, and her recent solo exhibition at Rio Hondo College attests to these strange and often magical correlations.

Working across disciplines is rarely easy, and we as viewers are constantly seeking visual threads that might lead us to some essential meaning. Neither Chung’s paintings nor sculptures correlate directly to her source material—shopping bags from high-end retailers that initially transfer expensive baubles, then are almost immediately downgraded to toting one’s dry-cleaning, then eventually to their Now showing artist Justin Prough sad end as rubbish themselves. The artist has exhumed what were essentially statusMondrian chits designed to signalAngeles consumer spending Box at the Los Hotelability and given these former upmarket signifiers a new life as art objects, as paintings and sculpture elevated to the gallery, a sic transit gloria mundi of market self-indulgence. The artist’s subjects are revived as

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L A R A

J O

R E G A N ’ S

S I G H T S

U N S C E N E

Fashion at Frieze Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, 2022

HOSTILE WITNESS LAD DECKER

LADDECKER.COM

LADDECKER

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P O E M S

A S K

B A B S

NONNA’S NO-NO

Silicon Valley A cloud is the earth displaced for tracks of cable underground, underwater A stream is the friction between content and a beckoning hand To kindle is to adjust the climate dial in a server farm An antenna is the arc of pesticide as it is sprayed from a plane A bug is the noise emitted by neon signs A web is the section of sky covered by a billboard A nest is the time elapsed between waking and sensing an advertisement An echo is the decomposition rate of postconsumer technological products An amazon is the unprocessed pulp for one holiday’s supply of shipping boxes An apple is the leaked transcript of a board meeting A seed is one black redaction mark To phish is when a red tree blooms in the warmest recorded January A story is what disappears after 24 hours underground, underwater Memory is less expensive each year Memory is the sound a forest makes as it is felled Memory is the thing that waits for room to grow —RHIANNON McGAVIN

Vanity in Vain To give up or give in, to cease to take solace in the things that I take solace in, and give in to wanting what everybody else wants.

That way lies ruin.

As vain, in vain, and unrewarding as it’s been, the losing battle I’ve chosen still beats the alternatives.

There’s no way out now, no return to the collective dream.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

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Dear Babs, I recently acquired an old painting of mine from grad school. It looks fabulous in the kitchen. It’s from a series of feminist art, large paintings of nude women in pin-up “cheesecake” positions taken from ’60s playing cards. I now have two grandchildren that are too young to really notice, but should I start to think about censoring my art around them?

—Considering Censorship in LA Dear Considering Censorship, Those kids have one cool grandma! I say hang your painting with pride. It’s your house, and you decide what goes on your walls. Using this situation to give the little tykes an age-appropriate lesson in feminist art and critical thinking is actually being a responsible grandparent.

Kids are smarter than we think; they pick up on our slightest reactions, especially when it comes to what is and is not “acceptable.” If you don’t make the painting a big deal they won’t either. Sure, when the kiddos get older they might giggle or ask questions, but that’s to be expected. You have many years to consider how you will respond to their reactions to your work.

Obviously, you need to prepare for these discussions in collaboration with the kids’ parent(s), and I assume they are smart enough to want to raise kids who aren’t afraid or ashamed of sex and sexuality. As long as you’re all willing to talk to the kids in a matter-of-fact way that doesn’t make the painting taboo, they won’t fixate on it as an “off limits” object to obsess on; it’ll be “art,” just like everything else on your walls. If you need help steering the conversation in the right direction check out The Art Institute of Chicago’s Body Language: How To Talk To Students About Nudity In Art and the indispensable Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (which you probably already own).

Growing up surrounded by challenging art never made someone a troubled adult; growing up surrounded by adults obsessed with censoring challenging art does. Keep the painting on your wall and make your grandkids want to inherit it someday.

10 CELEBRATING

YEARS

Featured Solo Exhibitions: Debra Scacco: Water Gold Soil Land and Image: Chris Engman 2002-2022 Sam Comen: The Longest Shift Super A: The Other Way Around

MAY 14 - AUGUST 21, 2022 @LANCASTERMOAH

@MOAHLANCASTER

Lancastermoah.org | 661-723-6250 | 665 W. Lancaster BLVD, Lancaster, CA 93534

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Call for Artists Deadline June 10, 2022 Your art in a national competition + contemporary art exhibit. $2500 grand prize.

2023 membership prize with solo show + annual privileges ($3500 value).

3 Featured Artist prizes with multiple works in the exhibit.

Photo by LA Open 2021 artist participant Taz Essa @tazcatphoto

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

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April Bey, Working 5–9 in the Middle of a Global Panoramic

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Bryan Ida, Devon

Sam Pace, The Poet

Portraits of Metro Riders by Local Artists celebrates Metro’s community of transit riders. > Experience over 40 rider portraits on buses and trains and in stations, all over LA County and at metro.net/weare. > Tag a selfie #SomosWeAreLA to join in Metro’s portrait exhibition and share your journey. > Learn about Metro Art opportunities at metro.net/art.

Carolyn Castaño, Traveler

Christen Austin, Visionary

Sheila Karbassian, Beautiful Santa Monica

#MetroArtLA @Metro.Art.LA

Flesh and Bones The Art of Anatomy

Through July 10, 2022 Getty Center

Plan your visit

Love & Hate (detail), 2012, OG Abel. Graphite on paper. Getty Research Institute. © OG Abel.

Text and design © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust

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