print February 2011

Terry Chatkupt

How about “A guy walks into a diner . . .” or “A guy gets a phone call . . .”? Either mundane opener—which in a joke would set up a punch line, which would achieve humor by creating an unexpected turn in the narrative course—could have articulated an action in the script for Terry Chatkupt’s new video short Transferase, 2010. Part psychodrama, part nail-biting suspense flick, the nine-minute digital video is also a comedy, deriving its dramatic tension from the split perception of its lone, anonymous protagonist and the degree to which he alters the experiences of the people around

print September 2010

Pierre Picot

By the early 1990s Pierre Picot had largely left the exhibition circuit. A Frenchman who immigrated to the US in his adolescence, studying at UCLA and then CalArts in the ’70s, he surfaced in the ’80s amid waves of New Image painting, neo-expressionism, and appropriationist practice, making a place in this environment with new-imagery mash-ups.

Recently, Picot returned to his French roots during a teaching stint at the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, where, shaded by the trees of Gauguin’s Bois d’Amour, he began the series of landscapes shown at Jancar (all Untitled, five in

print Summer 2010

Liz Craft

Liz Craft derives inspiration from any manner of cultural fodder: from high to low, from mundane to fantastic. Often, the spark seems to come when she mashes multiple aesthetics together, as in the sculptures featured in “Death of a Clown,” an exhibition of work from 2010. Several pieces see her combining the most debased of cultural forms (pictures of clowns and flowers, living-room furniture) with the loftiest (geometric abstraction, Minimalism) and some in between (Pop art, assemblage, hyperrealism).

A group of wall-hung pieces incorporate the grid—as much a standard of modernism and Minimalism

print April 2010

David Korty

An adroit stylist, David Korty continued to pursue the washed-out, streamlined neo-Fauvism that defined his last show at Michael Kohn Gallery. The results, all produced in the past year and based on photographs the artist takes himself, are lovely enough—unmistakably of an able hand, a keen sense for color and design, and an eye for isolating images from the fray of the world—laid out in gouache and collage on paper, or in pencil and oil on canvas, sometimes with additions of wax and more collage.

Throughout the exhibition, Korty dealt up witty play between abstraction and representation. Women

print January 2010

Adam Ross

Adam Ross is an artist devoted to exploring the broad range of possibilities in abstract painting. Having come of age aesthetically amid the clashing art-historical narratives of the 1980s—which either tracked painting’s so-called endgame, generating a pronounced interest in the semiotics of abstraction, or, to the contrary, trumpeted the resurgence of representation as the rebirth of the medium—he has made a practice of reconciling tendencies.

In the ’90s, Ross produced not quite thoroughly abstract paintings characterized by heavily worked surfaces and saturated yet diffuse pockets of color.

print November 2009

Olga Koumoundouros

Los Angeles–based artist Olga Koumoundouros converts two-dimensional graphics and typography into sculptural, at times quasi-architectural, forms. A recent example is her 2003 work Town Meeting: After Acconci—a wood-framed and sheathed buttelike structure. Only after climbing atop the plateau could one see that it comprised massive, three-dimensional letters spelling out the word terror, with the hollow of the o providing a makeshift safe room.

The artist employed a similar method at REDCAT for her installation Demand Management, 2009. Within the conventionally cubic gallery stood a high, curving

print September 2009

Ben Jackel

Ben Jackel’s first solo exhibition made a fine mixture out of the imagery and accoutrements of warfare, its attendant memorialization and glorification, and the putting out of fires. An artist with a background in ceramics, Jackel has studied with Charles Ray (for whom he now works) and ceramicist Adrian Saxe, and the influence of both artists is evident in his work. The sculptures here strike a balance between faithful mimesis and a tendency toward caricature, while revealing Jackel’s predilection for ornamentation and plays on scale, as well as his keen sensitivity to matters of display.

The

print Summer 2009

Dave Muller

Dave Muller’s sixth solo outing at Blum & Poe was the latest chapter of the artist’s ongoing project of chronicling the contents of his bookshelves and record collection. Winding its way free-associatively through Muller’s youth and early fascination with music, the show was, perhaps aptly, titled “iamthewalrus,” unabashedly echoing the 1967 Beatles song written by a purportedly acid-tripping John Lennon and released on the group’s Magical Mystery Tour film sound track when Muller was a mere tot.

Some of the several works on paper in the exhibition fall well short of the surprise that Lennon’s

print April 2009

Christian Jankowski

In his 1940 essay “The Fall of Paris,” Harold Rosenberg lamented that geopolitical maneuvers, rising nationalism, and fascist aggression had brought about the decline of an almost-levitating capital of modernist culture—once an international “No-Place” of multiple perspectives—and wondered where modernism’s new centers would be and what forms they would take. Surely he did not have in mind an after-party at the Art Basel Miami Beach 2008 fair or an army of Hula-hoopers, marshaled by a German conceptualist, taking up rooftop positions in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Chinatown districts. But

print March 2009

Krysten Cunningham

Perhaps it takes an artist who grew up on a commune and went to college during the (pre-impeachment) heyday of the Clinton years to make work as fundamentally optimistic as Krysten Cunningham’s. In their forms, allusions, and artistic precedents, her sculptures seem unlikely as the products of anyone who didn’t enjoy a certain amount of shielding and hope and all the other benefits of a (slightly) more enlightened era.

When Cunningham revisits past concerns in art and design, she does so without apology or irony. In this exhibition—titled, appropriately, “Time Machines”—the artist dealt in the

print February 2009

Kirsten Everberg

Surely LeRoy Neiman’s sin—committed in the early 1950s, at the apex of Abstract Expressionism, and ensuring him a career of scorn—was to convert the hallmarks of painters like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock (the splash, slash, dribble, and daub) into a signature for spasmodic expressionist/impressionist pictures of everything from Playboy bunnies to sporting events to presidents. To use Greenbergian language, Neiman pandered to the masses by reducing the avant-garde to kitsch.

Kirsten Everberg’s paintings of White House interiors, modernist buildings, and ancien régime décor and monuments, made

print January 2009

Christopher Pate

So apropos was this show’s centerpiece to a state of affairs that has only just come into focus—the too-shallow foundation of recent skyrocketing global economic growth—that it suggested an artist adept at reading and translating the culture around him in ways that seem almost prophetic. Completed earlier last year, the work, titled Bricks, comprises six roughly square panels of the same size, hung on the wall in pyramid formation. Pate has covered each panel first with burlap and then with fabric silk-screened with a blue sky and puffy white clouds, and, over that, with white mortar patterns:

Christopher Miles