Kavior Moon

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  print February 2020

  lauren woods

  For the past several years, lauren woods has been investigating public space, historical memory, and social consciousness through what she calls “inter-media monuments.” Unlike traditional monuments, towering and seemingly permanent, woods’s are interactive and scaled to the human body. Take, for example, her Drinking Fountain #1, 2013, located beneath a worn WHITE ONLY sign in the Dallas County Records Building. The Jim Crow–era sign had reappeared some years earlier when the metal plate covering it fell off. Instead of repressing the city’s history of segregation by erasing the words, woods

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  print October 2019

  The Harrisons

  A United Nations report on global biodiversity and ecosystems confirmed this past May what many in the science community had long claimed: Not only is the earth’s biosphere deteriorating at a rate unpre-cedented in human history, but humans are the main drivers of this rapid decline. Approximately one million animal and plant species are expected to face extinction over the next several decades, at a speed tens to hundreds of times faster than that of the past ten million years. The Harrisons, as the artist duo Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are called, addressed this existential crisis

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  picks August 16, 2019

  “Economies”

  An economy can be defined as the “efficient use of material resources.” The works in “Economies” probe how social inequities are embedded in seemingly innocuous market forces and social exchanges: What are the human costs? Whose lives matter?

  Justin Serulneck analyzes the economies and landscapes of three areas in Southern California—sites in Ventura County devastated by the 2017 Thomas Fire, planned housing tracts in arid Tejon Ranch, and proposed luxury developments in Los Angeles—to challenge the motives behind large-scale suburban development in a fire-prone region and to emphasize the

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  picks May 02, 2019

  “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s”

  “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s” offers an intriguing, wide-ranging survey of artistic themes and approaches in Japan between Mono-ha’s heyday in the 1970s and the rise of neo-pop by the century’s end. In contrast to the elegant restraint of the artworks in the first part of the show (on view earlier this spring), the pieces in part two revel in simulacral fantasy and serious play. Mariko Mori’s photographic panorama Empty Dream, 1995, depicts pleasure-seeking bathers at the Seagaia Ocean Dome, the world’s largest indoor beach (which was demolished in 2017). Mori herself oneirically

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  print May 2018

  Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza

  A spirit of colorful vitality and heterogeneous collectivity infused “Pasado mañana” (The Day After Tomorrow), Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza’s recent exhibition at Commonwealth and Council. Over the past year, the two Los Angeles–based artists have collaborated on sculptural installations that address the migration of bodies, symbols, forms, and building techniques in and around the Americas. For Nomad 13, 2017, Cortez and Esparza constructed an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall “space capsule” made of steel and adobe bricks that sheltered an array of plant species (such as corn, cactus, quinoa,

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  print March 2018

  Henry Flynt

  A philosopher, musician, and artist, Henry Flynt has been making interdisciplinary work since dropping out of college and moving to New York in 1960. Once there, he befriended and collaborated with other protean figures such as La Monte Young, George Maciunas, and Walter De Maria. Well-versed in mathematics, analytic philosophy, and music theory, Flynt drew from those fields to create the genre of “concept art” in 1961. Unlike text-based works of Conceptual art, Flynt’s concept art was intended to be an “object critique of logic or mathematics or objective structure.” On the one hand, Flynt’s

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  print December 2017

  Pablo Rasgado

  Walls have been a recurring motif in the works of Mexico City–based artist Pablo Rasgado. In his ongoing “Extractions” series, 2006–, Rasgado produces found paintings by lifting off sections of splattered, graffitied, or scuffed walls in outdoor urban spaces using a centuries-old fresco restoration technique called strappo. Unlike other artists who have also taken surfaces found in the streets as subject matter—for example, Brassaï, who made uncanny photographs of scratched drawings and pockmarked surfaces in the streets of midcentury Paris—Rasgado extracts physical segments of facades,

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  print November 2017

  Rey Akdogan

  New York–based artist Rey Akdogan recently described her practice as motivated by a fundamental interest in “motion, our everyday lives, and how we move through space.” Although these concerns were not immediately evident in her latest solo show at Hannah Hoffman, the more time one spent immersed in the exhibition, the more conscious one became of the dynamic relationships between one’s own moving body, the installed objects, and the surrounding architecture of the rooms. The experience was an intensely phenomenological one, as mundane objects that would have normally remained hidden in plain

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  print Summer 2017

  Tony Oursler

  The fringe world of alien believers and self-proclaimed “contactees” was the subject of “Unidentified,” Tony Oursler’s recent exhibition at Redling Fine Art, his first show in Los Angeles in more than a decade. Oursler’s investigation into the emergence of ufo culture could be viewed as an offshoot of his “Imponderable Archive,” a historical collection of more than twenty-five hundred photographs, drawings, publications, documents, and other objects from the eighteenth century to the present related to a variety of occult practices and accounts of paranormal phenomena. (Amassed by the artist

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  print April 2017

  Allan Sekula

  For more than forty years, Allan Sekula worked intently to uncover the ways in which forces of production shape social relations—to reveal what Marx called “the contradictions of material life”—in a world structured by the increasingly globalized markets of advanced capitalism. Photography held a particular attraction for Sekula, whose eloquent writings on the medium’s history are as notable as his photo-based works. With characteristic clarity, Sekula outlined some of the appealing yet problematic features intrinsic to photography, including “its unavoidable social referentiality,

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  print January 2017

  Betye Saar

  Institutional interest in Betye Saar’s work, particularly her groundbreaking assemblages from the late 1960s and ’70s, has never been greater: Within the past year and a half, the Black Arts Movement veteran has had retrospectives at the De Domijnen in the Netherlands and the Fondazione Prada in Milan, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York, as well as at the newly inaugurated Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Saar has noted

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  print December 2016

  Mira Schor

  The problems of painting, language, and gendered power relations have long animated the work of New York–based artist and writer Mira Schor, who graduated from CalArts in 1973 and participated in its Feminist Art Program. In a preface to her 1997 book of essays titled Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Schor noted that her goal has been to make political paintings in the “full sense of both terms”—artworks whose political content is enhanced by their seductive medium. “Painting not as ‘eye candy,’” she wrote, “but as a synergetic honey-trap for contemporary discourse.” This