Kristin Bedford; Andi Campognone; Eileen Cowin; Penda Diakité; Samantha Fields; Gala Porras-Kim

from Artillery, Nov-Dec 2022, The Women's Issue

ART BRIEF: AI Artists - by stephen j. goldberg, esq

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Gala Porras-Kim Eileen Cowin

The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical poetics used to describe Los Angeles are evoked in the work of Gala Porras-Kim, each bubbling with alternatives ripe for excavation. Porras-Kim rearranges and reframes cultural artifacts, objects and documents to unhinge and de-center the heterogeneous modernist subjects that have long dominated museum practices and shape the so-called “cultural mainstream.” While her work is not confined to subjects and institutions in Los Angeles, this city lends itself to the motivations underlying Porras-Kim’s practice that promote expansive representations of identity and cultural heritage. For most of the 12 million people of the greater LA area, it’s nearly impossible to avoid feeling the tensions of dayto-day life in a city segregated by design and oriented around shifting modes of capitalism in an increasingly globalized world. Porras-Kim prioritizes the many “other” lived experiences and embodied histories that have been marginalized or omitted from institutional discourse.

Porras-Kim’s practice serves as a vital reminder that this work will never end—nor should it—because as arbiters of knowledge and culture, museums must remain expansive and malleable to allow for new systems of care, representation and learning to occur. Her work emerges from the challenges embedded in LA’s cultural landscape and the city’s legacy of artists and alternative practices that continue to push art and institutions forward. —Lauren Guilford Throughout her 50-plus-year career, Eileen Cowin has created enigmatic and beautifully sequenced multi-panel photographs and single-channel, multi-channel video installation works, in addition to large-scale public art projects. Cowin’s emotionally charged imagery is narrative-based and often draws from literary or news sources, yet in Cowin’s worldview nothing can be taken for granted. She exults in the unexpected, be it a photograph of an urban deer caught in the headlights—a metaphor for lost innocence and hesitation—or a multi-panel narrative like her newly commissioned photo-narrative: “You are heading in the right direction,” installed in the Martin Luther King Jr. station of the Metro Crenshaw/LAX line, which invites viewers to imagine the lives of the people depicted in the pictures as they travel on the trains. Cowin’s dreamlike images are simultaneously fantasy, fact and fiction.

In her recent works, meaning comes from juxtaposition, as in the differing expressions of loss in recent large-scale images of flowers set against black backgrounds. Cowin has created an expansive and thoughtful sequence of images that poetically address increased anxieties over the current political climate.

An astute looker and reader, Cowin analyzes personal and universal moments in her work, presenting the everyday as something extraordinary.

—Jody Zellen

We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more.

Kristin Bedford Penda Diakité

If we’re talking about LA women artists who are blazing right now, we’ve got to talk about photographer Kristin Bedford. Bedford spent 2014–19 exploring lowrider culture in East LA, greater Southern California and Nevada. The resulting series, “Cruise Night,” consists of color photographs as exquisitely saturated as a custom paint job on a 1964 Chevy Impala. Bedford photographed not only the cars, but their driver/creators (including many women), their tattoos and family snapshots with former vehicles. She also recorded oral histories, giving her subjects voice within the project. Never a gawker and hardly a motorhead, Bedford was interested in the personal and collective creative expression of this culture.

Italian publisher Damiani released Cruise Night as a photobook in March 2021. A #1 bestselling photobook on Amazon, it has since sold out—the lowrider community being a big part of that. In October 2021, Just Memories Car Club organized a Cruise Night book signing and car show at the Autry Museum, attended by over 1,000 people and hundreds of lowrider vehicles. Meanwhile, Bedford’s photographs have enjoyed international exhibitions—a rare appreciation for authentic LA outside the home ground. “Cruise Night” is at Galerie Catherine et André Hug in Paris this November.

—Allison Strauss I am a long-time admirer of Malian-American artist Penda Diakité, whose work explores what it means to inhabit a body codified as both Black and woman.

So often, the bodies of Black women and femmes are relegated to categories that center only our productivity and usefulness: caretaker, laborer, birther. But in Diakité’s world, these reductive categories are deprived of their power. Through her mixed-media collages, Diakité reveals the many colors, textures, stories and memories that constitute Black womanhood. Her subjects are profoundly multidimensional, demanding the viewer’s earnest consideration, refusing monolithic classification. Viewing Diakité’s work, I feel my own complexities—my rough edges and tender vulnerabilities—avowed in mosaic splendor.

When speaking of her work, Diakité has said that she explores Black feminine identity as if “our soul’s experience was reflected in our appearance.” I am thankful for her willingness to tell the fuller richer truths of those souls, which are bursting at the seams with new stories to tell.

—Donasia Tillery

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Andi Campognone Samantha Fields

Andi Campognone began her professional career as an artist, creating photographs that compelled viewers to engage with—and participate in—her images. She transitioned into curatorial work, running two commercial galleries and serving as curator of the Riverside Art Museum. In 2011, Campognone became founding director of the Museum of Art and History (MOAH) in the City of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley region of California’s vast Mojave Desert.

While building innovative exhibitions at MOAH, Campognone has focused on collaboration and community building. She has partnered with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the LA County Department of Arts & Culture on projects intended to serve wider audiences. In 2014–15, for example, she worked with social-practice artist Suzanne Lacy and the LA Arts Commission on the “Antelope Valley Art Outpost.” The “placemaking” program used art and public practice as “tools to inspire development in the communities of the Antelope Valley.” Campognone remains a passionate advocate of connecting artists and government in problem-solving issues like the environment, sustainability and education.

In 2016, Campognone founded Kipaipai, an ongoing series of workshops and residencies for artists that supports career development and builds community. Kipaipai (“to inspire” in Hawaiian) has served artists throughout the US, sewing the threads of connection across the country.

—Betty Ann Brown Samantha Fields’ paintings unfold along a darkly fanciful and increasingly multifaceted continuum of disaster and perception in storm fronts, fires, abandoned dreams and other metaphors for societal decline, mediated by uncanny photographic intercessions. She’s currently painting storms—their violent clashing and cleansing suits the era, and opportunities to expand her jewel-toned naturalism are many. She started on them pre-lockdown, after photographing multi-tornadic phenomena in Texas. When everything changed—BLM, the lengthening pandemic, the insurrection, massive wildfires—she turned instead to the “American Dream” paintings: landscapes of winter’s discontent festooned in confetti and party balloons.

Recently, in Texas again, she photographed myriad storms which will be on view at Rory Devine Fine Arts in October. Her prismatic “Worlds Within Worlds,” based on dreamlike, anxiously shifting photos of her own backyard, were shown this summer at Berkeley’s Traywick Contemporary, and her affecting wildfire paintings are in two institutional shows this year. Along the way she became chair of the art department at California State University, Northridge—the first woman to hold the post—where she’s focusing on access, interdepartmental collaboration, and local and international exchanges. “When I came on board,” she says, “I kept asking, ‘Can I do this? Can I do that?’ and the answer was always, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ So, hell yeah, let’s do all the things!”

—Shana Nys Dambrot

Madeline Hollander, Sunrise/Sunset, 2021. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.

Madeline Hollander

Jeffrey Deitch

By Jody Zellen Dancer turned artist Madeline Hollander is best known for performance works that explore the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art. She has begun to show her pieces in galleries and museums, creating large-scale, technically sophisticated installations, two of which are now presented at Jeffrey Deitch. A neon work, Tomorrow Will Be Nothing Like Today Will Be Nothing Like Tomorrow (2022) forms an italic script circle five feet in diameter of the title words. Weights and chains from vintage cuckoo-clocks hang from and surround the neon sign, calling attention to the passage of time and the uniqueness of each day. The association with clocks and time is also key to Sunrise/ Sunset, the installation that fills the main space.

Originally commissioned by BMW and presented at Frieze London in 2021, Sunrise/Sunset builds on a previous installation shown at Bortolami Gallery in New York in 2020. In that piece, titled Heads / Tails: Walker and Broadway, Hollander collected headlights and taillights from junkyards and collision centers in Los Angeles and repurposed them for the site-specific installation where they were installed salon-style on opposing walls. The headlights were programmed to correspond to the sunrise and sunset of a given location, changing from their fog setting to bright depending on the time of day. In essence, they were always on. The taillights were synched to a traffic light on Walker Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Whenever the traffic light turned red, the taillights in the installation would go on. When the traffic light turned green, the taillights would go off. The installation became a visual representation of continually changing time and traffic flow.

Sunrise/Sunset comprises 96 BMW automobile headlights installed on a curved wall in a grid that is four-lights-high by 24-lightsacross to correspond to the 24 time zones on Earth. The headlights are mapped to each of these different zones, metaphorically becoming a clock that tracks sunrises and sunsets across the globe— turning on when it becomes night and off when it becomes day. The rhythm of the specific lights that are illuminated undulates in synch with a score using the different sounds made by the various BMW turn signals, created by the artist’s sister, composer Celia Hollander.

As light and sound fill the space, viewers are drawn to the nuances of difference—the design and structure of each headlight and the relationship between the blinking orange and steady white LEDs. Through the day the sounds intensify and lull, based on the movement of the illumination as it makes its ways from left to right, from east to west. The work is a technological achievement, connecting the individual headlights so that they perform a dance of light, and although the installation is meant to reference “global connectedness” and “the body in motion,” it also can be seen as a wall of eyes; as the headlights resemble faces, they can also be seen as the people of the world. By Max King Cap Three movement artists—Maria Gillespie, Nguyên Nguyên and Kevin Williamson—are grandly projected on as many walls but revealed in divergent locations. The panoramic videos depicting the bodily trials of these artists in demanding landscapes envelop the 2800 square-foot gallery as the performers shift from wall to wall and location to location; climbing, crawling, rolling. Yet, like memory and expectation, they each take their unnamed yet recognizable landscape with them. They are far from home, evidenced by the three cubbies on the unprojected wall, where the performers are seen in a miniscule video reflection of their endurance travels.

Williamson tramps through snow and stumbles over bogland as location dictates his path ultimately toward the sea, a desired target that appears to relocate in response to his approach. There is a painful yet elegant endurance in his earnest trek aimed at an unknown terminus. His no doubt painful contortions are his chosen demands upon his elbows, knees and hips as he slides down hills, sometimes tumbling, often reaching for the few and small brittle shrubs around him that offer little purchase. Perhaps his journey is as much one of remembrance as rigor, for opposite the vast panoramic projections are a trio of small compartments, open closets of mementos. In one of the compartments, where fragments of broken crockery are strewn over shattered bark, viewers may watch miniature videos of the alternating performers, in and out of their exertions. Williams is first seen shaving away the ragged beard suggestive of his marshland trials, then coloring his lips a gleaming ruby red and blowing us a kiss.

Gillespie, hair gone white in search of her past, visits an abandoned home then turns away as if the past is no longer able to reveal its secret histories: a pity and a mercy. It is too weatherbeaten, too desiccated to speak. She moves on, rolling herself upward then downward over stone stairs, toward and away from the sun, climbs a shifting and indifferent sand dune, then digs in the swollen earthen muck, yet the vast emptiness withholds its secrets. Her corresponding cubicle is walled with abandoned shoes, tattered and unlaced, large, small and lost.

Between standing stones Nguyên slithers with eyes closed, his hands smoothly feeling his way over the wind-worn surfaces. He uses his outstretched arms, pliable not stiff, to navigate a sightless path between the menhirs. In another scene, this one distinctly manmade, the artist runs his fingers and tilted shoulder along a cement wall while his long shadow protrudes before him like a divining rod. Once more, this time in a location that suggests the border between city and wilderness, Nguyên comes to a barrier fence and follows along it, where it leads is unknown. The last cubicle—perhaps his, possibly all of theirs—is laced with disparate curtains, and a crudely layered shrine holding mysteries that continue to deepen. The projections then repeat their stories, as if the aching figures having clearly been given one lesson cannot help but ache and yearn for one more.

By Ezrha Jean Black I’ve always imagined Angela Dufresne as an essentially cinematic artist whose high-concept films end up expressed as series of painted works on canvas. It’s as if she went directly from film school to a major film production in trouble, where the executives have planted her in the guise of an art director to save the picture and bring it in at a number that won’t bankrupt the studio. Picture and studio go down in flames anyway, but in the meantime, Dufresne’s series of concept/ composite shot sketches for the director and DP have essentially become their own fantastical movie. Once upon a time I would have thought Dufresne might actually team up in such a fashion with a director like, say, Robert Altman or Angela Dufresne, Magdalena Pumping the Gas That Isn’t There, 2022. Image courtesy of Werner Herzog; and to my astonishment her current show is actually the artist and M+B. informed and inspired in part by another film-making Werner—Werner Schroeter, a German film (also opera) director, active in the 1970s and 1980s, who influenced filmmakers including Herzog himself. The exhibition title is drawn from a line uttered by the iconic Magdalena Montezuma (who appeared in most of Schroeter’s films) in Eika Katappa (Scattered Pictures, 1969), and it speaks to the desperation all around us at this tipping point moment. Dufresne is in fact a painter of “composite shots”—except that she usually adds more than subtracts from what becomes the finished painting. The title work, Life is very precious, even right now (all works 2022), exemplifies Dufresne’s approach and technical range. She’s simultaneously operatic and Altman-esque here in a scene focused on human figures begging, imploring or invoking some presumably cosmic force, while other figures variously look on with anger, concern or curiosity, walk away, or converse amongst themselves. The background elements—like green islands floating in an amorphous glacial sea churned out of something between Nolde, abstract (or German) expressionism, and Italian trecento painting—seem both suspended and in motion, a scrim to dissolve within moments. Even a supporting actor’s dog seems to be looking for another picture to sign onto. It’s a Sondheim moment in an Altman—I mean Schroeter—I mean Dufresne film—I mean painting. “Stop worrying …just move on.” Which might just be a theme of the show. Past a master shot (e.g., Willow Springs Odyssey, or How Circe Is What the West Needs—luminous with topaz yellows and amethyst purples), the scenes get rewritten, and the shots recomposed seemingly continuously; she’s not afraid to “tear up the script”—and the set with it, or simply turn her movie into an opera. Complex underpainting may be interrupted or obliterated by a bold swath of lavender, pink, red or umber; e.g., Werner and Circe Turn Some Mediocre Assholes (to make room for a “Supervixen” or two). A complex chromatic scheme frequently evolves into something more monochromatic—which doesn’t remotely dampen the drama. Consider the pretzel-logic choreography of Magdalena Pumping the Gas That Isn’t There floating above its complicated underpainting. (Is there such a thing as apocalypse-realism?) Our relationships to places are fickle at both ends, and we look to our seers and sorcerers to navigate our way through them. Dufresne explodes the mythography of that fraught transit with this devastating and luminous show. By John David O’Brien The lighting is low. The furniture and wallpaper appear disheveled. It soon becomes clear that everything is dilapidated; floor cushions are deformed, lumpy and discolored. The couch is disproportionate. It faces a scarred wall where instead of a fireplace there is a pile of disparate furniture legs. To the left is a large cone that sags like a battered wizard’s cap and from behind the wall voices emerge from a film: a woman or women talking to themselves about a place described in detail that reveals it as equally rundown.

In one room there are very large drawings on irregular paper surfaces that appear to have been both drawn and written on from every imaginable position so that the vortex literally spins a viewer’s head. The fragments of writing range from descriptions of art processes and theory to more mundane or cryptic phrases that might derive from the everyday. The most urgent message is how these stream-of-consciousness patterns are layered and built up on one another, crisscrossing in an irreconcilable jumble of thoughts.

On the wall leading up the stairs, there are a group of works that probably best fit the definition of painting although they are explicitly about layering with significant low relief build ups. In the series, Portrait (Vain German) 2020-21, the color palette is a mix between bright acidic colors and very murky overlays, as if the different strata were battling with one another to be seen through a muddied yet semitransparent surface. There is a mix of micro-textural glittering and colored elements that float within the buildup along with larger swaths of paint or resin. It would be extremely difficult to see the complexity of this inter-relationship other than in person.

Upstairs there are paintings which have an equal urgency but are not as heavily layered. The rush in which they communicate the various intersections and superimpositions of images and patterns may not necessarily be traced to the artist’s mode of physically working but certainly add up in a viewer’s perception. Patterns do emerge in which there are fragments of clothing and facial features, hands and feet. They are not in a comfortable relationship, either with themselves or with the other marks that careen across those surfaces. There appears to be a kind of ongoing and unresolvable conflict being enacted.

Nearby are two small cast figures of a homunculus who is dressed in jeans and a gingham pattern shirt. The use of gingham becomes clear in its multiple deployment of crosshatching and as a kind of autobiographical impulse, like a uniform. This creature is either flattened face-first against a column or lying face-down on a table. Small liquor bottles sprout out of the spine. The sense of things being done in a kind of controlled disarray is omnipresent and overall, and there is an overall acute sense of melancholy. The combination of urgency and poignancy make Kaari Upson’s posthumous survey “never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never” both difficult to absorb yet very compelling to experience.

Kaari Upson, Untitled, 2020. © The Trust created under Kaari Upson Trust. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Photo: Ed Mumford.

By Genie Davis Kristine Schomaker began “Perceive Me” as a personal project, a collection of unique works in disparate mediums, each piece revealing Schomaker herself. Her vision of the exhibition, however, has changed since she began the project in 2018. What began as a personal journey focused on self-esteem and learning to love herself has turned into a “universal statement about acceptance, humanity and truth,” according to the artist, one that has empowered her after seeing herself through others’ eyes. “The exhibition has become a jumping off point to continue to explore notions of identity, love, honesty and courage in my art and life,” she says. Originally opened at the Ronald Silverman Gallery at CSULA, this version is at Coastline Art Gallery in Newport Beach, having passed through Ventura and Lancaster’s MOAH Cedar en route, with an upcoming show in San Diego. The collaborative project features an abundantly fresh curation, offering a wide range of techniques and intimate revelations about the artist, who posed nude for the 60-some contributing artists. The exhibition is a full-on tribute to the human form, and the indomitable spirit that form contains. This is clearly seen in a lush oil painting of the subject, Private and Public by Nurit Avesar. It is reminiscent of Mary Cassatt, awash in soft light and powerful with quiet purpose. Shelli Silvero’s joyous, large-scale cutout watercolor gives us Schomaker smiling into a cell phone in Kristine, Perceive Me, Selfie. The sensuous yet discreet black-and-white photography of L. Aviva Diamond aches with longing. Serena Potter’s gloriously innocent image shows the subject in a flowered bathing cap by a sunlit swimming pool, reaching for golden orbs of light. Monica Mark’s evocative image of Schomaker reading a book, shows off a vibrant red tattoo to match a vivid red wig. Tony Pinto’s acrylic cut-out panel is a ready-to-leapoff-the-wall dimensional paper doll, standing nearly eight-feet tall and revealing its subject in a determined “superwoman” pose.

Jesse Standlea’s diminutive multi-colored plastic sculptures Stretch, Weight, Relaxed, Proud, Twisted, make a loving, contrasting counterpart in motion to the jubilant, fairy winged Schomaker in Debbie Korbel’s Good as Hell, a mixed-media sculpture suspended from the ceiling. That piece interacts beautifully with Lexie Lanxinger’s 42” x 38” charcoal-on-paper Courage, in which the model is partially clad in a feathered cape, astride a heart-shaped shield with a lion’s face. Emily Wiseman’s shrink-wrapped custom rolls of gift wrap—featuring multiple Kristines in or standing in, inflatable floats, symbolically covers and reveals her subject making a lighthearted contrast to Tanya Ragir’s Divine Inner Being, a ceramic sculptural work depicting the subject as both a Thinker and Buddha figure.

The multi-room gallery has open walls that allow visitors to view the exhibition as a whole or shift easily from piece to piece. Beautifully and conversationally curated, Perceive Me is truly an exhibition to see and savor. It is a genuinely brave and graceful show, notable not only for its exceptionally fine images, but for its originator’s willingness to share—and bare—her soul.

Nurit Avesar, Private and Public (2019). Oil on canvas, 21 x 31 in. Courtesy of Coastline Art.

David John Attyah

Los Angeles LGBT Center

By Richard Allen May III Box office superhero origin stories and their sequels—from Sam Rami’s Spider-man (2002), Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) to Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008)—have grossed millions of dollars from the repeat viewings of fans who hunger to know the real story: how it all began, and how it will end. Digging deeper (though with an unknown future and a miniscule budget) are the interrogating notions of early man in David John Attyah’s masterful multi-media installation that mirrors a natural history museum, and its artifacts of fanciful excavation. In this museum the artist deconstructs the prehistoric hetero-normal myth-truth-lies lens through which queerness is understood or misconstrued. In an exhibition that includes installation, works on paper, and hand-weaving, there is much to be deciphered.

Three Queens with Single Foot and Double Twins with Single Heart (both 2022) skillfully demonstrate that Attyah embraces what many artists have abandoned for more contemporary practices: human figures interpreted in stylistic accuracy. Akin to figurative masters like Charles White, Philip Pearlstein, Paul Cadmus, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Egon Schiele, his contoured line reflects unflinching chiaroscuro confidence. The apprehension in the eyes, the intense sadness in facial expressions, and the minimized personal space suggests a symbiotic if standoffish connection. These wrestling males are nearly conjoined, with one reaching for the ragged floating heart, suggesting a hostile world where profit is gained through human marginalization. The magnificent Rock Painting (2021) is a richly textured faux Jurassic Rorschach artifact fused by hide glue, plywood, plaster rocks, spackle and wax drawings, and it is completely convincing. Attyah assaults the notion of symbolic strength found in mineral matter. Rock Painting is exactly what muDavid John Attyah, Three queens with single foot, seums exist to collect, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist. preserve, reinforce and maintain for society’s conditioned noncritical understanding of value, civilization and aesthetic purity. Unsurprisingly, these organizations are connected to foundations that fund projects connected to the myopic interests of gatekeepers. This understood, Attyah’s Reclining Curio (2021) all wobbling legs and lamb bones, is an absolute Whistler’s Mother.

The artist’s Wunderkammer is a separate room where walls are shape-shifted to thaw frozen paradigms. For example, Skull Cabinet (2021) consists of ornamental lamp of wax, hair, bone, wands of wood and gold leaf, teeth of glazed porcelain, plaster, oil, and reclaimed legs. Hearkening to the anthropology of culture, excavation and preservation, this work implicitly asks how would society look if it was realized that Queerness has always existed, that such human experience was not just a recently discovered UFO to be misunderstood, feared, stereotyped, and judged? Attyah’s space

is truly reimagined. This cabinet of curiosities is completed by Wall curio featuring various codpieces and hearth doilies (2021). The eight lacy items are stacked and illumined in a white framed hearth that suggests a tender, private but unabashedly romantic highboy. Ultimately, The Museum of Selective Homo Amnesia does more than simply challenge assumptions of history and culture, this exhibition demands that society replace its memory card with a fresh one.

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Shulamit Nazarin

By Shana Nys Dambrot Like his multifaceted painting, drawing and storytelling universe, Trenton Doyle Hancock is many things—but he’s no vegan. The autobiographical, fantastical, art historical, comic-book world of his invention — the Moundverse — is inhabited by a variety of characters from the ambiguously heroic to the problematic, paradoxical and outright villainous. Among his eponymous artist alter-ego Hancock, (the mostly good Torpedo Boy who is also individuated from him), are unsavory coppers, Guston-derived klansmen, and other shapeshifting, above-and below-ground dwellers; however, it’s still the elitist, tofu-bogarting Vegans that are the biggest problem. Obviously.

Across vibrantly textured, colorful, surreally distorted paintings, and elaborate, finely detailed and vertiginously vast drawing and collage scenes, to storyboard-style pages from his Moundverse illustrated novel, Hancock is equally dexterous in labor-intensive long-term visions and gestural emotion and momentum. He is concerned with excavating his own life and consciousness, as well as the exegesis of his aesthetic and cultural influences and the excoriation of America’s litany of disgusting failures regarding equality, race, class and justice—but Hancock’s gift is not only for invention, but for synthesis. In any given work, his concerns and inflections and even realms of reality interplay and overlap, as in Step and Screw, in which the character of Torpedo Boy crosses timelines to meet a member of Guston’s KKK.

In assertive compositions like Let’s Try the Yellow Triangle Angle or The Return of Piss Christ (2022) and Metes and Bounds (2022) the brightness of primary yellow and the chalkboard-like black-andwhite schematics distort nesting picture planes and the anatomy of muscular figures, but their metaphysical meanings are clear. Throughout the exhibition, examples like these of Torpedo Boy (who, remember, is one of the artist’s own alter egos) gradually morphing into a klansman recur, reinforcing the idea that personal and creative evolution is not linear, and that good and evil are more fungible and coexistent than we admit. Except in the Vegan city of Gumit, where everything is straightforwardly labyrinthian and terrible. Damn Vegans.

The Skint Alterpiece: Vegans Make Deposits at the Tofu Bank is a Boschian riddle of greed and gluttony built of thousands of fine tiny drawings, meticulously made and/or repurposed from Hancock’s archives over the course of almost a year. Its wit and humor, unfathomably finessed flourishes of hand-drawn detail, visual puns, architectural and civil engineering, and buzzing urban energy is impossible to overstate. Ultimately, Hancock weaponizes humor and beauty against encroaching injustice—and the story he’s been working on for decades has never felt timelier.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Let’s Try the Yellow Triangle Angle or The Return of Piss Christ, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.

Sharon Ellis

Kohn Gallery

By David S. Rubin Although raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, Sharon Ellis mistrusts organized religion. Rather than participate in church observances, she expresses her spiritual self by painting visionary psychedelic landscapes, a now common genre that she helped legitimize in the 1990s. A nature lover, Ellis lived for many years in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles before moving to Yucca Valley where, in recent years, she has spent much of her time communing with the expansive land and skies of the desert. Working with the discipline and patience of the monks who painstakingly created medieval manuscript illuminations, Ellis continues her time-consuming practice of building each composition by applying up to 60 layers of alkyd paint, which produces smooth, pristine surfaces that lend a magical quality to her imagery. In her new exhibition of works on paper, she takes on a timely topic by contrasting weather temperaments. Not unsurprisingly, most of the recent paintings call attention to the aberrant and incongruous atmospheric conditions that plague our current times.

The artist addresses the perils of climate change by focusing on environmental phenomena that can be ei- Sharon Ellis, Desert Willow Evening, 2022. Courtesy ther life sustaining or threat- of Kohn Gallery. ening, such as flash flooding and extreme heat. In Messenger (2016), a tree formation constructed of raindrops and embellished with pearlescent strands of electric lights appears under a rainbow shaped like a protective dome, conveying the idea that water is a precious and scarce resource in the desert, especially with droughts having becoming more frequent. A preponderance of raindrops, accompanied by charged lightning bolts, also fills the composition of Dark Summer Day (2022), where the rain drenches and gives life to a coniferous tree. The nurturing potential of the mostly white droplets is compromised in the foreground by a streaming downpour of black, presumably polluted drops.

Severe cold is at play in the predominantly blue Mojave Night (2022), while extreme heat is the subject of the mostly orange and yellow Summer Heat (2022). In both, artificial looking rocky terrains sprout black barren trees. Yet, while these scenes acknowledge the desolation caused by climate abnormalities, Ellis infuses them with spiritual connotations and a hopeful optimism by filling the skies with miraculous occurrences. A gust of sparkling stars rises up like a swarm of fireflies in Mojave Night, while a spectacular vista of blazing suns spinning like disks brings an aesthetically healing energy to Summer Heat.

Ellis goes a step further in bringing spiritual meaning to her imagery in Desert Willow Evening (2022). With its altar-like configuration of trees and a celestial body at the helm, the painting replicates the structure of a calendar page from a medieval book of hours.

By Sarah Sargent Chucking traditional curatorial norms out the window, Wolfgang Tillmans presents a show like it’s a site-specific installation, clustering images together—some wondrous, others just plain blah—hanging framed photographs alongside unframed prints, with the occasional magazine spread or page of scrawled text thrown in. The result is a democratic visual lineup of varying sizes and quality that’s unfettered and provocative.

The work itself, which even though 30 years old and evoking a certain era, remains immediate and fresh. Lutz & Alex Sitting in the Trees (1992) has lost none of its edgy allure after all these years. The same can be said about The Cock (Kiss) (2002), which became a potent symbol of undaunted LGBTQ Pride following the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.

Anders in Kitchen (2011) is at once so ordinary, yet so compelling. Seated in front of a window in yellow T-shirt and shorts, Anders holds the ashy end of a burning cigarette in his hand. Above him blue smoke hangs in the air. The image is large-scale and the figure is somewhat backlit. These are aesthetic choices that grab our attention. But it is the sweet, relaxed face brimming with humanity that really draws us in. When it comes to capturing himself, Tillmans can be more obscure or playful. His first self-portrait, Lacanau (Self) (1986), features an undulating area of textural white flesh color against a pink washed parabola. Positioned where the two passages meet (the gap of the title) is a black Adidas logo—a prized symbol for a 1980s German kid. Lüneburg (Self), a lush color print of a smartphone propped against a plastic water bottle, cheekily presents the artist in the self-view window of a video call, as one would so often be in 2020, the year the photograph was made.

Tillmans’ still lifes seem like casual accumulations of ordinary things. And yet, thanks to his eye for color, texture and composition, these images of tomatoes, Pomodoro (1993), clothing, Faltenwurf Bourne Estate (2002), sausages, Still Life, New York (2001), and lobster and crab shells visited by a fly, Astro Crusto (2012) are jewel-like, sensual discourses on accidental beauty. Tillmans’ stunning abstract works are made without a camera, using photosensitive paper and many unorthodox approaches, like developing prints in dirty water, or scratching the prints’ surfaces. The transcendent I Don’t Want to Get Over You (2000) with its expanse of turquoise framed by green tendrils, created in the darkroom, suggests a dreamy tropical landscape. Here, Tillmans uses the flaws and imperfections of the print to create a sense of aching nostalgia.

With his show’s title, Tillmans asks us to look unflinchingly at the world he presents and the world in general: the titillating, the hard truths, the ordinariness. Tillmans may be a rule breaker, but his is not a nihilistic act. Rather, it’s a gloriously generative one, pushing the boundaries of photography and challenging us to see differently, or as Tillmans himself puts it, “To look without fear.”

Wolfgang Tillmans, The Cock (kiss), 2002. © Wolfgang Tillmans, Courtesy Regen Projects Diego Rivera, The Flower Carrier, 1935; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, gift of Albert M. Bender in memory of Caroline Walter; © 2022 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

By Liz Goldner Diego Rivera’s artistic oeuvre is so connected to our collective unconscious that touring this exhibition of 150 paintings, frescoes and drawings, feels like a homecoming. The show also includes film projections of murals that the artist created in Mexico and the US and comprises the most in-depth examination of his work in over two decades. This exhibition is an artistic compendium of what Rivera referred to as life in all the Americas, as he believed that the US and Mexico had complementary histories and creative proclivities. He stated in 1931: “I mean by America, the territory included between the two ice barriers of the two poles. A fig for your barriers of wire and frontier guards.”

This magnanimous show includes romanticized depictions of indigenous people going about their daily lives, laboring, marketing, caring for children and relaxing, with many figures illustrated with rounded forms, for simplicity and accessibility. Other influences include the neutral poses and mask-like faces of pre-Hispanic Aztec art. As exhibition guest curator James Oles remarks in the catalog about the politically active artist, “Rivera would wield his art as an essential weapon—sometimes blunt, sometimes subtle or seductive—in the utopian struggle for greater racial and social equality, security, and justice.”

One of the most dramatic paintings in the show, Dance in Tehuantepec (1928) features three young women wearing traditional, colorful Mexican flowing dresses and exotic jewelry, and their three male companions wearing cream-colored garb and broad sombreros. All dancers are engaged in precise choreographed steps, displaying deep concentration and the cultural importance of the dance—a testament to Rivera’s keen powers of observation. The more intimate The Flower Carrier (1935) features a man on all fours, his back burdened by an enormous basket of brightly colored flowers. A large woman behind him, presumably his wife, is helping him stand. This domestic scene conveys Rivera’s empathy for the common laborer as hero. The picturesque Still Life and Blossoming Almond Trees (1931) was originally a fresco created for a private home. The piece contrasts hard-working field hands cultivating crops in an almond grove, with smiling young children enjoying the fruits of the worker’s efforts. “A lot of Rivera’s work was about reminding the viewer, who was usually elite, of the essential importance of the working class in creating society,” Oles said. “We need to be reminded again and again of the fact that prosperity rests on the backs of others, most of whom don’t enjoy that same level of fortune.”

The exhibition concludes with Rivera’s final mural, The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on the Continent, 22-feet-high by 74-feet-wide, painted in front of audiences at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. Known as Pan American Unity, it is comprised of ten panels, seamlessly joined together, now installed on floor one of SFMOMA. With the Bay Area as background, people depicted include indigenous inhabitants in the U.S. and Mexico, our founding fathers, laborers, artists, architects, inventors, and even Olympic style swimmers, all celebrating our adventurous, creative spirit.