print December 2022

Steven Arnold

Theophany, a term that refers to the appearance of the divine in everyday human life, was at one point going to be the title for a monographic book of photographs by Steven Arnold (1943–1994). “Theophanies” was the name of Arnold’s exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery—apt for an artist who constantly saw gods and goddesses in the messy fabulous junk of the world. More should be unearthed about his role in the glittercrust innovations that drove the 1960s and ’70s counterculture of San Francisco, where he was based. Arnold was polymathic: a window decorator, a designer of psychedelic rock posters,

print March 2022

Blondell Cummings

“It’s the beauty in things that we sometimes lose track of,” wrote choreographer, dancer, and video artist Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) almost thirty years ago. “When I’m at my worst, I don’t see it. When I’m at my best I see it all around me.” Enchanted with the rituals, spaces, and stuff of everyday life, Cummings took an empathic and (auto)ethnographic approach to her craft that suffused every part of this welcome retrospective of her work, jointly produced by Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute—the first of what, one hopes, will be many exhibitions to come out of the latter

print November 2021

Soufiane Ababri

Queequeg is introduced early in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and is described, before the character ever utters a word, as a “dark complexioned chap” with a preference for rare steak. Ishmael, the novel’s famed narrator, encounters the harpooner while holing up at an inn whose proprietor has convinced him to share a large, uncomfortable bed with Queequeg, who is somewhere on the street attempting to sell his last “’balmed New Zealand head.” As night blackens, Queequeg returns to his room and there performs a quixotic ritual with a wooden statue before noticing that Ishmael is occupying

print Summer 2021

Mark McKnight

Sun pounds thirsty ground. Two guys—bearish, without inhibitions, brown—fuck across several photographs in “Hunger for the Absolute,” Mark McKnight’s solo show here. Surveying these and the equal number of uninhabited “straight” landscapes (turned pervy through sheer adjacency), a discerning ’mo might have paused to reflect upon a pair of visionary American photographers, certainly McKnight’s forebears: Laura Aguilar (who is no longer alive) and Jack Fritscher (who is still up and kicking). Both contributed to the cultural and communal sensibilities underlying the unrepentantly queer expressions

print March 2021

Peggy Ahwesh

The underscore in the title of Peggy Ahwesh’s exhibition “Heart_Land” subtly but unequivocally highlighted the ever-expanding rift between middle America and the rest of the United States, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s malignant leadership. Each of the four video installations in this concise and generative show at Joan examined the vagaries and possibilities of place via remarkable, if often unfairly overlooked, parts of the country: Atlantic City, New Jersey; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and Topeka, Kansas. Ahwesh and Linda Norden, the show’s curator, reframed this group of older pieces by placing

print October/November 2020

Carmen Argote

In Carmen Argote’s twelve-minute film Last Light (all works 2020)—a montage of still and moving images documenting the artist’s peregrinations throughout Los Angeles—she confides to us in a voice-over: “I feel like I’m not made to last. I’m not the one who’s gonna make it. I’m very aware of this organic body, and the city. . . . it’s like, touching. . . . I want to touch the city . . . want to touch the city.” The desire to commune with one’s environment is ever-present throughout this work. Of course, the feeling is at odds with all our current pandemic guidelines, which demand that we remain

print September 2020

Shagha Ariannia

On the cover of the first edition of Kathy Acker’s 1978 novel, Blood and Guts in High School, is an image by Sue Coe: a gleaming scene of nighttime danger wherein sentient, money-hungry tenements spit out ghostlike apparitions. They are in turn inhaled by the painting’s central figure, a lanky gang member whose chest tattoo indicates that he’s affiliated with the Scorpions. Sitting on his knee is a cat that opens its mouth in a furious and frightening yowl. Hard glints of light—like sparks struck off a dense flint—provide only the barest of illumination. It is not the kind of image one might

print July/August 2020

Alex Anderson

The “splashing sweat” emoji (????) was initially intended to denote physical exertion. Since its debut in 2015, though, it has been collectively wrangled in that semipublic semiotic rodeo known as texting to signify orgasmic pleasure and, more recently, hip-hop styling (i.e., drip). Because the emoji invites conversation about social media, sexuality, and racialized forms of cultural expression, it could serve as a virtual pendant to Alex Anderson’s archly titled exhibition “Little Black Boy Makes Imperial Porcelains,” the artist’s second solo outing at Gavlak.

The drip was literal: Nearly all

picks June 01, 2020

Catherine Opie

Although it opened before the coronavirus-related shutdowns in the United States, Catherine Opie’s exhibition at Regen Projects, “Rhetorical Landscapes,” seems perfectly attuned to the mixture of political rage and cabin fever that so many feel under quarantine. Nine photographs of swamps in the American South hang on the walls and serve as a counterpoint to the animated collages playing on a loop on a circle of Brobdingnagian iPhones (all works 2019). The photographs read as meditations on ecological otherness. Architectural historian Vittoria Di Palma reminds us in her study of early modern

picks May 14, 2020

Michael Rey

In a recent virtual talk with students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, artist Michael Rey spoke of his work ZOPTUN (Astrolopico) (all works 2020) as a personal breakthrough. Here he created a painting that is also an object (the four precisely punched holes in its corners call attention to its spatial facticity, which Donald Judd famously excoriated artists for ignoring), an image that is also an abstraction (the raised design of a spiderweb is purposefully shorn from any particular context), and a cipher that is still communicative (the upside-down, reversed text “ZOPTUN” is strictly

print May/June 2020

Raul Guerrero

In 1989, Raul Guerrero visited Canyon de Chelly, a site where Ancestral Puebloans built spectacular dwellings among sheer rock escarpments, and where, nearby, dozens of Diné families continue to live (the United States holds the land in trust for the Navajo Nation). It is a knee-buckling place. Guerrero encountered the striking rock formations and petroglyphs left by the canyon’s many inhabitants over thousands of years—Ancestral Puebloans, Hopi, then Diné. Canyon de Chelly’s natural and man-made features are instantly recognizable from commonly reproduced photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward

print March 2020

Postcommodity

For “Some Reach While Others Clap,” Postcommodity took LAX-ART’s structures, both physical and organizational, as its material. Near the entrance, two of the building’s load-bearing H beams had been painted (or, in the parlance of custom-car culture, “candied”) in glittering tones of interlocking shapes, one in teals and blues and the other in vibrant pinks and reds. To make this work, the collective (currently comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist) enlisted Edgar Hernandez, president of Starlite Rod & Kustom, an autobody shop in Los Angeles renowned in magazines such as the now-defunct

Andy Campbell