Simone Krug

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  picks October 15, 2018

  David Lynch

  In 1906, the art critic, writer, and anarchist Félix Fénéon published a series of witty, epigrammatic three-line news stories in the Parisian newspaper Le Matin. These abbreviated reports, later published in English as Novels in Three Lines (2007), are striking in their capacity to convey vast, intricate plots with economy. The eleven mixed-media paintings in David Lynch’s exhibition achieve a similar effect in their chimerical yet aesthetically reduced nature. Lynch pares down the outlandish sensationalism of his best-known work in film and television, presenting lone characters and strange

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  picks April 20, 2018

  Fay Ray

  Fay Ray invokes the planetary in her crisply constructed black-and-white photomontage prints, an odd solar system of surfaces. Her exhibition “I AM THE HOUSE” also incorporates hanging metal structures in which fragments of aluminum cacti, desiccated corn, and marble slabs appear affixed to chain link, hooks, and fasteners. The resulting forms resemble oversize dream catchers or intricate earrings. One such sculpture, Calipatria, 2017, incorporates queen conch shells joined to metal rods, a chic take on Poseidon’s trident.

  A similar air of the ethereal permeates Ray’s two-dimensional work. Egg

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  picks February 22, 2018

  Paul Pescador

  The traffic light has flashed to green, but Paul Pescador lingers at the intersection. It’s no wonder, when there’s a slobbering beagle pawing at the steering wheel, a newly sprouted commercial strip mall out the window, or an unread message chirping in his phone’s Grindr inbox. For this thoughtful, site-specific installation, the artist has piled heaps of postcards in the gallery, a champagne-colored Ford Crown Victoria that drives visitors around Los Angeles. This accumulated paper clutter, a series titled “Ajar,” 2018, recounts six divergent fictional episodes staged by the artist that take

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  picks December 04, 2017

  Gary Simmons

  Gary Simmons depicts sites of movement as static objects, fixating on the hard truths and memories that emerge in moments of pause. Smudged white chalky titles of early silent picture shows, talkies, and names of yesteryear’s famous African American film stars appear on black canvases, rolling credits emblazoned and blurry like the projection of a stuck celluloid film strip. The name of actress Hattie McDaniel, best known for her controversial, Oscar-winning role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939), graces a canvas titled Law of the Jungle (all works 2017), alongside one of Bill Robinson,

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  picks September 13, 2017

  Julia Feyrer

  Body contorted and crouched, one marvels at Julia Feyrer’s vivid dioramic sculptures, low-lying stacks of quotidian odds and ends sandwiched between mirror and bright glass. Viewed from above, the series of works that comprise her installation “New Pedestrians,” 2017, is a curious study in reflective surfaces and rippled textures, the bulges and contours of her footprints impressed into the kaleidoscopic material. She juxtaposes the abstract, undulatory shapes of the glass sheets with familiar found forms hidden underneath. Dripping candles, open scissors, plastic pill organizers (turned vertical

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  picks July 28, 2017

  Milano Chow, Ann Greene Kelly, Daniel Rios Rodriguez

  Slumped over a table, a mysterious figure hidden behind a wide architectural facade peers out from an arched window. Milano Chow’s painstakingly rendered graphite drawings are meticulous studies of friezes, cornices, balustrades, and striated slats. The perspective the artist offers in Horizontal Exterior II (all works cited, 2017) is reminiscent of a voyeuristic glimpse into a neighbor’s apartment as one straightens the shades. When a character is suspended in an ornate frame—as with Mirror (Checkerboard), where a woman with a checkered umbrella descends a magically hovering staircase and

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  picks June 14, 2017

  Rosha Yaghmai

  This calls for rose-tinted glasses. Rosha Yaghmai’s enchanting exhibition consists of a collection of objects that radiate mauve, periwinkle, and lilac. The assembled furniture—benches, curtains, lamp-like structures—appear still, a carefully arranged tableau. The artist envisions the gallery space as a threshold, a site of transition from interior to exterior, oscillating between public and private. On each wall, heavy silicone curtains affixed to brick resemble doors, portals into—or, perhaps, escape routes out of—her oneiric world.

  Infused with pigment and bits of fabric that range from tulle

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  picks January 23, 2017

  Sam Durant

  For this exhibition, Sam Durant reveals the palimpsests in America’s painful racial history. Walden Pond, made famous by Henry David Thoreau, and the surrounding area of Concord, Massachusetts, are here repopulated with ghosts of the colonial and antebellum eras through contemporary poetry by African Americans––their verses are inscribed on wood boards in a true-to-scale structure mimicking the houses built by newly emancipated slaves in the northern state. Their voices, ruminations on New England’s debt to slave labor, and a eulogy to Trayvon Martin converge in this imposing architectural work,

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  picks November 04, 2016

  Lisa Williamson

  Lisa Williamson’s huge aluminum canvases loom, droop, fold, and swell. Initially flat sheets affixed to the wall, they bulge at the corners or flop over at the top. Shy and reclusive as they retract toward the wall, they still extend a limb into space, a foot beckoning out. The five canvases cling to the contours of the gallery’s surfaces. As part of the aptly named “Body Boards” series (all works 2016), they level the corporeal. Anatomical references are both overt and sly. Nerves is a pine-green slat pocked with pink round shapes, a sea of erogenous parts. Another piece, Sunbather is a bright

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  picks September 21, 2016

  Jonas Lund

  Coach always said to keep your eye on the ball. But how can you when the fans are cheering, the spotlights are glaring—all those sensory diversions gyrating before you? As a site of spectacle, the sports arena is not unlike the gallery. Jonas Lund conflates the structures of performance and competition that define each space, re-creating a fantastical ping-pong arena replete with faux corporate-sponsored sidelines, banners, and jerseys for the installation Your Logo Here, 2016. A robotic ping-pong machine in its center whirs and thwacks as viewers are invited to clasp a paddle and hone their

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  picks May 31, 2016

  Julie Beaufils

  Julie Beaufils’s paintings and ink drawings inject levity into the seriousness of art viewing. Blurring her subjects with paint smudges and wryness, the Paris-born, Los Angeles–based artist toys with distortion, twisting her images into haphazard portraits that imbue imagemaking and consumption with a sense of doubt. Paintings hang next to wooden boxes containing black-and-white drawings in plastic sleeves that viewers can rifle through, each commanding different modes of visual and tactile engagement.

  Most compelling are the speech bubbles that float in and out of those pieces, both blank and