Annabel Osberg

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  picks April 08, 2019

  Tarrah Krajnak

  Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru, in 1979. That same year, she was orphaned, adopted by a Czech American family, and brought to the United States. The artist knows virtually nothing about her Peruvian parents, who may have gone missing during the burgeoning Shining Path uprising. Krajnak’s current exhibition, “1979: Contact Negatives,” serves as both a studio and a portal into her ongoing exploration of the roots she lost amid political turbulence.

  At the opening reception, she projected photos of Lima from a 1979 magazine on the walls and photographed herself interacting with the projections

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  picks March 13, 2019

  Beatriz Cortez

  If you were migrating to outer space, what would you bring with you? Beatriz Cortez raises this question in three interconnected installations at Craft Contemporary. Visitors first encounter Nomad 13, 2017/19, a portable garden in the form of a space capsule that Cortez created in collaboration with artist Rafa Esparza. Displayed in nearby niches are Burned, 2012, a charred tome from Cortez’s “Books of Memory” series, 2012, and seashells from a suitcase she packed in 1989 as she was fleeing the civil war in her native El Salvador for the US. Elsewhere, in Clandestine Garden, 2012/19, verdant

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  picks February 08, 2019

  Rema Ghuloum

  Simmering with psychic intensity, Rema Ghuloum's eight hazy abstractions in “Love Is a Feeling” conjure the geometric and mythical lexicons of Paul Klee and Hilma af Klint, viewed through Rothko-esque fields of transparent color. Each work yields varying effects depending on one's viewing angle and distance. Seen from across the room, their salient attribute is a lustrous, mottled palette. As one approaches, an atmospheric sense of depth unfolds.

  The artist's meditative process of building up and sanding down layers of diaphanous glazes, stains, and brushstrokes is palpable in these intricate

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  picks January 23, 2019

  Farrah Karapetian

  An unearthly red glow permeates the dim rooms of Farrah Karapetian’s haunting exhibition “Collective Memory.” Arranged with the impromptu panache of a dive bar, the installation seems as if it were part of a bizarre dream. On a chalkboard wall in the entryway, #WEWONTBEERASED is frenetically scrawled over and over in wobbly parallel lines. Here, the urgency of the hashtag for transgender solidarity is rendered materially.

  Karapetian based this show on her friend and gallerist Tarrah von Lintel’s fond personal anecdotes about Club Shine, a transgender nightclub at LA’s last lesbian bar, the Oxwood