picks May 18, 2023

Myrlande Constant

Myrlande Constant’s sumptuously detailed textile works elaborate mystical realms where mermaids, serpentine beings, angels with axolotl-like heads, and tentacled half-human deities interact with each other and, occasionally, mortals. Evoking tapestries and mosaics, the artist’s compositions scintillate with thousands of punctiliously stitched glass beads and sequins that change color and reflect light when viewed from different angles. But these tableaux are not intended to merely titillate: the Haitian artist is a manbo makout, a priestess by blood; her objects take the form of drapo, ritual

picks March 16, 2023

Ánima Correa

The bottom of the sea, once viewed as an impenetrable mystery, has become what many now describe as the final frontier of an overpopulated world increasingly reliant on electronics. Even as hundreds of thousands of miles of privately owned submarine internet cables snake unseen across the globe, the seabed is being mapped and apportioned for countries and companies to mine rare minerals, despite the environmental impact, for powering electric cars. Taking such themes as points of departure, Ánima Correa’s solo show here considers the relationships between marine animals, factitious infrastructure,

print March 2023

“Ink, Paper, Stone: Six Women Artists and the Language of Lithography”

June Wayne (1918–2011), the founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, was primarily a self-taught artist with strong convictions and lofty ideals. In 1959, frustrated by a dearth of technical knowledge and available resources to support the large-scale production of fine-art lithography in the United States, she designed a detailed proposal for a print manufactory and fellowship program, complete with plans for the recruitment and training of expert lithographers. After overcoming numerous obstacles, including the Ford Foundation’s initial reluctance to provide funding, Wayne opened her

print February 2023

Helen Lundeberg

As a student, Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999) thought she might become a “minor poet,” as she put it. Fortunately, fate had other plans. By the time she graduated with a major in English from California’s Pasadena Junior College in 1930, the Great Depression had set in, leaving no extant funds for young Lundeberg to continue her education at a four-year university. Instead, a sympathetic family friend, noting her talent for drawing, offered to send her to art school. Yet the surreal paintings in Lundeberg’s exhibition “Enigma of Reality” made clear that her literary inclinations never went away, as

print December 2022

Lian Zhang

“Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water; but, for attacking the hard and strong, there is nothing like it!” Lao Tzu exclaimed in the Tao Te Ching. Impelled by this passage, painter Lian Zhang aspires to achieve a form of soft power via delicate fluid brushstrokes that interweave disparate elements across the surface of each canvas. To activate the chi, or life force, “I always imagine that my hands become water; they travel freely when moving here to there in a painting,” the artist says. At first glance, the compositions in her show here, “Fast Dreams, Slow Days,” seemed innocuous,

print November 2022

Autumn Ramsey

Myriad specimens grow within the confines of Autumn Ramsey’s pictures, forming tangled networks that coalesce in strange harmony. Among the painter’s cultivars are bizarre blooms of rippling chevrons, foliage of striped ribbons, and vagrant curlicues in lurid colors. She also propagates hybrids of light, transparency, hue, and texture, often allowing such elements to cascade into abstraction. See, for instance, in End Paper, 2022, how the rainbow-haloed starburst of light toward the painting’s upper left corner glints through a hole of pure white, illuminating a nearby twig and making the hazy

print September 2022

Linda Besemer

Abstract painter Linda Besemer’s monumental lozenge-shaped panel Big Corner Bulge, 2008, ensnares the eye from yards away with its precisely delineated mesh web, culminating in a central convexity appearing physically protuberant, as though enlarged by some invisible lens. Yielding varying effects depending on one’s distance and angle, the work performs its optical magic even for those standing just inches away from its flat surface. When the painting is viewed head on, its titular intumescence shudders, momentarily receding only to balloon once again, inducing mirages of chromatic waves. Indeed,

picks July 22, 2022

Samantha Roth

Rendered in colored pencil on black-gessoed paper, Samantha Roth’s drawings exude the dim luminance and irrational spatiality of X-rays and somniferous visions, evoking the eerie, unmoored feeling of days and places melting together during Covid-19 lockdowns. In the seven semiautobiographical pieces here, the artist meanders through her pandemic reflections, frequently veering into personal quirks in order to unpack the obsessive, voyeuristic, and paranoiac tendencies that surfaced for so many of us during more than two years of isolation. Her show’s title, “Duplex,” not only refers to the type

picks May 10, 2022

Joeun Kim Aatchim

Joeun Kim Aatchim’s solo show here, titled “사자굴 [Sajagul] — Then, out of the Den,” is based on the artist’s mythicized memories of the apartment in which she grew up in Seoul during the 1990s. Her haunting paintings, made on semitransparent silk, fill a void left by the fact that she and her family have virtually no photographs from that time, which was grievous for them all, paralleling wider unrest in South Korea. Among their tribulations was her father’s bankruptcy, a scenario immortalized in Doubt the Hands (The Debt Collector Seeks the Father Through a Milk Delivery Hole), 2022, in which

Page from Criss Cross Double Cross, Issue 1, 1976. Nancy Buchanan, WOLFWOMAN.

picks April 15, 2022

“how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith”

In 1969, Nancy Buchanan (b. 1946), Marcia Hafif (1929–2018), and Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931), met as students in the inaugural class of the University of California, Irvine’s MFA studio art program. The three artists, all divorced mothers, quickly found kinship in their mutual penchant for experimental genres and feminist issues. After graduating in 1971, Smith and Buchanan became involved with the Southern California feminist art movement, while Hafif moved to New York to pursue her career as an abstract painter. Despite their diverging paths, the trio remained lifelong friends. Curated by

picks December 06, 2021

Liz Nielsen

The twenty monumental photograms comprising Liz Nielsen’s show here, “I’d Like to Imagine You’re in a Place Like This,” are like mosaics of liquefied jewels. The artist refers to them as “light paintings,” and her early training in painting and printmaking certainly shines through. Evoking Helen Frankenthaler’s blocky fields of poured color, the saturated hues of her photographs seem to simultaneously protrude and recede into space, yielding surprisingly tactile visual sensations. Nielsen achieves these effects via her own systematically ordered methodology of layering transparent and opaque

picks October 25, 2021

Greg Ito

Greg Ito’s solo show here, “Apparition,” assumes the form of an immersive installation and is suffused with yearning—for a deeper connection to the past or, perhaps, a better today. Augmenting the eerie, wistful atmosphere are symbols of growth and metamorphosis interspersed with allegories of destruction and climate change. Recurring motifs—burning homes, California poppies, falling gingko leaves—obliquely reference aspects of the artist’s personal history as a fourth-generation Angeleno of Japanese heritage.

A one-chamber walk-in structure, Home Sweet Home (all works 2021), glows invitingly

Annabel Osberg