print December 2019

Nayland Blake

“NO WRONG HOLES” is the apt title of Nayland Blake’s most comprehensive survey to date, on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—apt because it immediately opens onto the wit, optimism, and profundity that characterizes the artist’s work. Though ambitious in scope, this survey is not, strictly speaking, the artist’s first. That honor goes to Blake’s MFA thesis exhibition at CalArts, which was styled as a retrospective with the saccharine title “Nayland Blake, The Wonder Years: 1982–84.” Excoriating the growing cult of personality around contemporary artists, Blake opened

print December 2019

Lily Cox-Richard

Once ubiquitous in museums, plaster casts have largely been relegated to storage rooms (or, as was the case with the plaster-cast collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the auction-house floor). The two interrelated causes might be identified as a shift in values around originality and righteous challenges to the notion of a stable canon of Western art history. Some institutions, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, have kept their plaster-cast collections on display. Growing up, I often visited

print November 2019

Sturtevant

Gathering sixteen of Sturtevant’s video works, this exhibition sought to connect the artist’s strategies in televisual media to younger generations’ production, consumption, and distribution of memes on the internet. Recommending these particular videos for this kind of re-reading was the fact that nearly all are less than five minutes long, and thus handily consumable.

Most of the works played on a bay of wall-mounted monitors, with the exception of one projected work and a pair of 2006 videos shown on two CRT cube monitors installed in the middle of the gallery. Both featured a short sequence

picks October 18, 2019

Dona Nelson

A lesson in the ardors of making, Dona Nelson’s work thickens the experience of looking; paying attention means training oneself to revel in the little dramas erupting all over every surface as much as taking in a painting’s gestalt. Since 2003, the artist has been making double-sided paintings, often set in freestanding metal or wood frames. In their transformation from painted pictures to sculptural events (implicating the ambulatory viewer), Nelson’s canvases emphasize that presence is a prerequisite for perception. From the hundreds of decisions that inform each painting, and the works’

print October 2019

Patrick Angus

In Patrick Angus’s painting Flame Steaks, 1985, a dozen men sit apart from each other in a dark bar. Outside, it is still daytime, and two men lean invitingly on opposite sides of the street, cruising together yet apart. Inside the establishment, one man combs his hair back while another spreads his legs (he wears mauve jeans), letting his hands dangle around his crotch in an artfully unpracticed manner. The only other bits of color in this otherwise muted scene are in the lit cherry of a cigarette, a pair of red shoelaces, the wisp of a red hanky peeking out of a back pocket, and two large

previews September 2019

“LARI PITTMAN: DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE”

Curated by Connie Butler with Vanessa Arizmendi

When Lari Pittman adopted painting as a young queer artist in the 1970s, he saw the medium as a pleasurable opportunity to “fix something up.” With this can-do attitude—and its hints of an interior decorator’s fey obsessiveness—Pittman performed an energetic pirouette around the dour discussions of painting’s death. This career retrospective (the artist’s first) includes more than eighty works and proves that painting, for Pittman, has always been an occasion for conjecture (another one of his long-espoused bonnes idées), even when references to

print September 2019

Candice Lin

The first room of Candice Lin’s solo exhibition at François Ghebaly was organized around La Charada China (Tobacco Version), 2019, an altar-like assemblage featuring the prone silhouette of a humanoid figure made from dried, pressed tobacco leaves. As in previous installations, for this work Lin cleverly deployed a host of “natural” materials (the scare quotes are necessary, given Lin’s penchant for reframing the ideological categories that have historically structured our experience of the world) to signify global histories of exploitation and colonial violence. Clay from California and the

interviews August 27, 2019

Xandra Ibarra

Kill your darlings: This perennial piece of writerly advice—as dramatic and violent in its associative logic as it is lazy in its deployment by workaday writing instructors and superstar seminar leaders—points to the challenges of revision and, by implication, the supposed hazards of attachment. The idiom implies that you wouldn’t have to kill your darlings (a certain haughtiness creeps in here) if you hadn’t let them wheedle their way into your emotional core in the first place. So: Don’t get attached.

The work of Xandra Ibarra (AKA La Chica Boom) suggests that our darlings and s/heroes might

print Summer 2019

Haim Steinbach

A poet of the everyday, Haim Steinbach has been resituating consumer and handcrafted objects on individualized laminated-shelf constructions for some forty years. Akin to Gertrude Stein’s poetry (repetitive, surprising, full of precisely calibrated connotations), Steinbach’s sculptural syntax remains relevant in its capacities to filter and compress the sensory data of the contemporary world. In his most recent works, that syntax is literally vocalized: The artist has added voice-activated devices—Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s and Harman Kardon’s smart speakers—to the dog Kongs and thrift-store tchotchkes

print May 2019

Faith Wilding

The twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen (known colloquially as St. Hildegard or the Sibyl of the Rhine) was a scientist, healer, composer, religious philosopher, and visionary mystic. She is perhaps best known for the last of these roles, having written down (or at least dictated) dozens of religious visions over the course of her life. Some of these visions articulate a cosmology or rehearse key moments of biblical mythology with new emphasis on the interconnectivity between the divine, the soul, and the world, offering a hermeneutics of relation. One recurring concept and

print April 2019

Corita Kent and Matt Keegan

Amid the swelling civil unrest that would culminate in the international protest movements of 1968, a nun in Los Angeles was wavering in her faith. “I’m really frightened to say this,” Sister Corita Kent (1912–1986) wrote in a letter to a friend, “but everything appears different to me, even God, and I’m so afraid that I’m losing the foundation of my belief.” Soon thereafter, Kent took a sabbatical from her chairship of art at her order’s college and absconded to Cape Cod for the summer; by the end of her time there, she had decided to leave the order and renounce her vows. During this soul-searching

picks March 08, 2019

Rona Pondick

For the better part of the still-young twenty-first century, Rona Pondick’s primary material has been steel, out of which she has fashioned fantastical human-plant-animal hybrids that seduce and disturb in equal measure. This modest installation of recent work shows her creatively plumbing a new set of media—resin, acrylic, and modeling compound—and all their formal possibilities.

One of her first works in these materials,Yellow Blue Black White, 2013–18, is a vibrant yellow cast of Pondick’s face attached to a “body,” a variegated mass covered with blue and black indentations. In its strategic

Andy Campbell