Christopher Miles

• previews May 2005

  Richard Pettibone

  Even if you’ve had your fill of the ’80s Levine/Bidlo art-quoting-art buffet, you may want to loosen your belt for this retrospective of over two hundred paintings and sculptures by Richard Pettibone. Along with Elaine Sturtevant, Pettibone expanded on Duchamp’s precedent before appropriation and quotation became buzzwords. This show, co-organized by the Tang (Berry) and the Laguna Art Museum (Duncan), spans six decades and includes early miniaturized copies of Warhol, Stella, and others—which, perhaps more than any appropriationist gesture, needled at the

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  print April 2005

  Pauline Stella Sanchez

  There’s a moment in every thriller when the protagonists realize they’ve entered a bad situation, having stumbled on an illicit drug factory, a mad dictator’s WMD program, or a mother alien’s nest full of eggs. In this exhibition, Pauline Stella Sanchez conjured the anxiety of such moments with all the craft of Martha Stewart.

  The center of Sanchez’s show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery was a series of seven small wood-and-vinyl structures that resembled a display of architectural models. Each was drenched in sky blue paint, mounted on a turntable, and perched atop a pedestal. Collectively titled Gone

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  picks March 24, 2005

  Patricia Faure

  Patricia Faure is well known as an art dealer—she was Nicholas Wilder’s assistant through the ‘70s, half of the Asher/Faure partnership for fifteen years, the principal of Patricia Faure Gallery for ten years, and is now half of Faure & Light—but she has also enjoyed multiple lives as a mother, fashion model, and photographer. This show of photos, recently editioned from negatives shot between the ‘50s and ‘70s, samples Faure’s fashion work, portraiture, and goofy art/fashion/conceptual fusions. Among the twenty-four black-and-white images, one finds a classic shot of Peggy Moffitt and Bill

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  print March 2005

  Andrea Zittel

  This exhibition paired a prototype for a sculpture or design project by Andrea Zittel with Sufficient Self, 2004, a PowerPoint presentation of images accompanied by the artist’s casually written comments chronicling her life and work at A-Z West, her expanded cabin and surrounding property on the edge of the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree. Over the past few years, Zittel has transformed this site into a base for ongoing experimentation with the development and alteration of products for living, including transportation, shelter, clothing, furniture, storage, food, and utensils. Alongside this

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  print March 2005

  Anton Henning

  Aptly, if dramatically, titled “Tragedy, Sunburns & Still-lives,” Anton Henning’s second exhibit of paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery meditated on the materiality and intensity of life. And while these images offer hints of vanitas, one often also finds in them a sense of indulgence in the present moment. Henning positions himself as an heir to all those whose work has displayed a flair for the lush and the strange, from the painters of the Baroque to Courbet, Manet, the post-Impressionists, Matisse, and more recently, the likes of Sigmar Polke, Eric Fischl, and David Salle. Borrowing

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  print February 2005

  Richard Hawkins

  “It is doubtless an excellent thing to study the old masters in order to learn how to paint,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, “but it can be no more than a waste of labor if your aim is to understand the special nature of present-day beauty.” Baudelaire wanted the best of both worlds: a painter able to apply the skills of the past but dedicated to capturing the contemporary world’s “pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences.” Baudelaire, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s coffeehouse observations of modern humanity, from “steady old fellows” to “the race of swell pick-pockets,”

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  print February 2005

  Peter Plagens

  The earliest of this exhibition’s thirty years of paintings and collages share the motif of a circle within an irregular field filling most of the canvas or paper support. Often alone, seldom sharing space with other circles or curvilinear elements, and sometimes cohabiting with rectilinear and triangular shapes, each hand-painted but compass-accurate circle is in some way incomplete. When painted as disks of solid color, they lack a wedge like a pie with a piece removed, or have a flat portion that Peter Plagens compares to a “round of gouda sliced on one side.” Elsewhere, they are rings broken

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  print January 2005

  Tomory Dodge

  Mostly land- and cityscapes, and unabashedly gestural, the oil paintings (all works 2004) in Tomory Dodge’s Los Angeles debut are among the most convincing of current arguments for the vitality of painterly painting, revealing a sensitivity to the medium impressive in such a young artist. Dodge’s stylistic nods are varied, including David Park, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Frank Auerbach, Peter Doig, and even Gerhard Richter, as well as other painters who have explored the use of gesture in the service of representation. His work does not seem caught up in neo-expressionist tendencies nor in

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  print December 2004

  Anne Collier

  The first work in Anne Collier’s third show of photographs at Marc Foxx, a color print entitled I Am Not Ashamed (all works 2004), perfectly encapsulates the artist’s oeuvre. Record albums are stacked against a wall, their tops aligned save one that has been pulled up and is pinned against the wall by the compression of its neighbors. This bears an illustration of a wall graffitied with the slogan that is the title of both Collier’s photo and the inspirational album it co-opts. The strange visible invisibility of On Kawara—offering a small utterance but little other direct expression or

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  print November 2004

  Mungo Thomson

  In his third solo show at Margo Leavin Gallery, Mungo Thomson extended a practice based on the double-take. He encouraged us to look again at familiar types and styles of images and their intertwined manifestations in mainstream and alternative culture; fine and folk art; artisanal and industrial production; consumerism, politics and faith.

  In the gallery’s entryway were a number of seemingly simple yet actually complex and diffuse works: Freak Flag (USA), 2004, an inverted stars and stripes stitched from used denim that reduces the original to a faded blue monochrome; Black Chimes, 2004, a

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  print November 2004

  Jacci Den Hartog

  Jacci Den Hartog has made a career of exploring rocks and water both as substance and subject. She investigates materials, processes, and stylistic devices for modeling them and examining the shapes they impose on one another. Isolated from broader land- or seascape contexts, and supported by wall mounts and stands, her boulder-spotted pools and torrents, cast in polyurethane and, in one instance, Hydrocal (a high-density plaster) over steel armatures, seem to hover in space as if time had stopped and the rest of the world had fallen away.

  Den Hartog’s most recent sculptures represent a departure

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  print September 2004

  Julie Mehretu

  Julie Mehretu’s intertwined compositions in ink and acrylic on canvas, which range from easel size to monumental, are, to use a word that is particularly charged at the moment, explosive. Though shape and color punctuate her paintings, line dominates, defining swirls and sprays that seem to result from a sudden, massive force. Mehretu builds the paintings from misty transparent and translucent layers, each with its own set of marks and imagery—something like handpainted versions of the collapsed strata utilized in graphics and imaging software. They suggest both an endless void and a tangle of