picks January 26, 2018

“Future Feminine”

Photography is not a fine art, John Berger wrote, “unless we include those absurd studio works in which the photographer arranges every detail of his [sic] subject before he [sic] takes the picture.” While only one of the five photographers featured in “Future Feminine,” Amanda Charchian, happens to work in commercial fashion photography—where detailed tableaux of objects and people are de rigueur—Remy Holwick and the duo of Prue Stent and Honey Long shoot portraiture whose audacious arrangements and costume would not be out of place in the pages of Vogue.

Charchian’s series “7 Types Of Love,”

picks October 09, 2017

Ariana Papademetropoulos

Los Angeles–based artist Ariana Papademetropoulos recasts the cult of domesticity as hallucinatory fantasy: Watermarks tear Lynchian portals into her oil-on-canvas re-creations of photos depicting retro-kitsch interiors. A bedroom suffocated with royal-purple floral fabric appears in psychedelic relief in Best thing about not dating a scientologist is that I can do acid again (all works 2017). A bile-green aperture is superimposed over a bathroom with gaudy wallpaper, golden drapery, and a porcelain throne—rather unlike the one Presley died in—for ‘spirit of Elvis be my sugar daddy.’ In this

picks April 14, 2017

“Signifying Form”

Any cursory interpretations of the deeply sophisticated sculptures in this exhibition (curated by jill moniz—formerly of the California African American Museum), which hail from as far back as the 1930s and were made by black women from and/or working in Los Angeles, would be an egregious error. The show addresses race and feminism in America by correcting the repression of the former by the latter, and stakes a claim for recognition of these artists in the art-historical canon. Many of these works have never been formally shown in LA; only one of the artists, Beulah Woodard, has ever had a solo

Natasha Young