Arshy Azizi

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  picks February 05, 2019

  Alexia Laferté-Coutu and Jessica Williams

  For artists Alexia Laferté-Coutu and Jessica Williams, the city is a medium. At Projet Pangée, Williams’s bright, dissonant oil paintings surround Laferté-Coutu’s relic-like glass sculptures, which are laid out on a table at the center of the gallery. These hypnotic and weighty objects could be the rubble of a crystalline statue, but they were made from clay impressions of Montreal’s monuments, cited in each of their titles: Statue de la Victoria, 2018, for example. Collectively, they craft an intimate portrait of the Québécois city as a still and rigid landscape.

  Laferté-Coutu's offerings stand

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  picks June 27, 2018

  “take care,”

  Los Angeles is one big pop-up. There’s Kim K. West’s beauty shop at Westfield Century City, Dean Baldwin’s restaurant One Top, and even a gallery or two—one of which, Gas, is housed in a truck. The space’s current exhibition examines another Angeleno preoccupation, self-care, by calling on nine artists to reassess a claim once made by Audre Lorde. Is self-care a radical, political act?

  Not quite, says Amanda Vincelli, whose REGIMEN, 2015–17, documents the drug routines of adult women chained to big pharma for their medical needs. Nor for Darya Diamond, whose emergency call buttons challenge the