Suzanne Hudson

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  print April 2015

  Betty Woodman

  “Illusions of Domesticity,” Betty Woodman’s first solo show at David Kordansky Gallery, was also her first one-person exhibition on the West Coast in a decade—the latter landmark made all the more remarkable by the recent visibility of ceramics in the area, with shows featuring the work of Peter Voulkos and Ken Price, among others. Yet while these efforts to showcase ceramics (and thus to retroactively rectify its omission from standard twentieth-century narratives, which privileged painting and sculpture) have primarily been retrospective in their purview, detailing the place of pottery

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  print March 2015

  Rachelle Sawatsky

  Last spring, Rachelle Sawatsky mounted five pastel-hued unglazed ceramics and one large, aqueous cerulean canvas to the walls of the Finley Gallery in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Glimpsed through the street-level windows, the wall sculptures gave an effect of unprepossessing smallness that nevertheless betrayed an abundance of care, perhaps disproportionate to their modest size. The afterimage of these humble objects lingered in “Stone Gloves,” Sawatsky’s first show at Harmony Murphy Gallery. Here, she framed sixteen twenty-one-by-twenty-seven-inch drawings between two larger

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  print February 2015

  Dwyer Kilcollin

  For three days in early November, on a hillside on the east side of Los Angeles, Dwyer Kilcollin erected a freestanding metal fence on which she mounted “algorithmically derived image-shapes” she had cast by hand from computer-generated 3-D models. Boundary, screen, and makeshift gallery wall, the armature further served as a viewfinder: Through the chain-link grid, the tree- and house-flecked expanses of the surrounding rises became conflated with their pictures. These “image-shapes” (as the show’s press release described them)—small, rectangular reliefs—translate and, in their

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  print December 2014

  Steven Baldi

  “Branded Light,” Steven Baldi’s second solo exhibition at Thomas Duncan Gallery, picked up the theme of the camera as simultaneously tool and institution previously broached in “Lens Reflex,” a group show the artist curated at the gallery earlier this year with pieces in various media by Zoë Ghertner, Jacob Kassay, Stephen Prina, Eileen Quinlan, H. Armstrong Roberts, and Torbjørn Rødland. A sort of second act, “Branded Light” furthered the photographer’s take on photographic prints as entities in dialogue with the machines that generate them. For Baldi, this claim is demonstrated by works that

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  print November 2014

  John Altoon

  Bare-chested on the dust jacket of The Holy Barbarians—Lawrence Lipton’s classic account of the Beat scene around Venice Beach, ca. 1959—John Altoon was cast as a ruffian, a role that stuck. His life was no doubt the stuff of legend, from his Hollywood marriages to his death from a heart attack at a party in 1969 at the age of forty-three—to say nothing of the mental hospitals or his antics in the company of Edward Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and other Ferus Gallery “Studs” in between. But to promulgate the glib cultural ethnography such details suggest is to

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  print October 2014

  OPENINGS: ALEX OLSON

  A METONYM OF SORTS for the modernist picture, the painterly mark has gotten a bad rap: too expressive, too authorial and therefore authoritarian, too sure of its inexhaustible plenitude. Every smudge of pigment at least potentially renews the old fantasy that the painter’s mark can escape the fate of being a sign at all—that it can embody a material immanence and immediacy alien to signification. But as an inchoate index, it also gives the lie to that fantasy, haplessly referring to itself, to the medium and its traditions, and especially to the painter. It is this last point that Los

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  print October 2014

  Lucas Ajemian

  Historically, aleatory procedures have yielded artworks that flaunt the removal of subjectivity, or at least posit as significant the marginalization of intention. Lucas Ajemian’s “Laundered Paintings,” 2010–, shown in bulk for the first time at Marlborough Broome Street, by contrast—and rather paradoxically, given the importance he grants to process—resupply the authorial presence that is undermined when composition cedes to chance. Further, the works insist on the social ground on which the making transpires.

  To create the series, Ajemian first obtained paintings made by his artist

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  print September 2014

  Julia Dault

  For her first solo show in Los Angeles, “Rhythm Nation 2014,” Julia Dault installed ten paintings around one sculpture, Untitled 34, 2:45 PM–7:45 PM, April 15, 2014; 11:30 AM–12:45 PM, April 16, 2014. A decidedly material proposition, Untitled 34 nonetheless foregrounds the artist’s bodily engagement in its prolix title (which records the time involved in the work’s production over the course of two sessions). As with other pieces she has recently exhibited at the New Museum in New York and White Cube Bermondsey in London, among others, Dault here coerced large panes of Formica and Plexiglas

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  picks June 02, 2014

  Wols and Charline von Heyl

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  print Summer 2014

  Math Bass

  For Math Bass’s first solo presentation in the city where she lives and works, the artist transformed Overduin & Co. into a kind of playground, its rooms crisscrossed by chutes and ladders. Twinned versions of a waxed-steel sculpture—a narrow vertical plane with a deep U-shape extracted from the top and a smaller, mirroring shape removed from the bottom—were propped side by side against a wall, while three similarly composed iterations of floor-bound metal sheets (each work titled And Its Shadow, 2014) arced as though performing spry gymnastic backbends. The press release for this

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  print April 2014

  Sarah Crowner

  For her first exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene, held in 2009, Sarah Crowner juxtaposed two bodies of work: a series of unglazed ceramic vessels and a group of “paintings” sewn together from remnants of discarded fabric. Both revealed a distinctive handmade quality. The former featured mottled surfaces, gently misshapen necks, and generally uneven forms, while the latter betray imperfections of alignment that open up pockets of space, holes amid the just-mismatched seams. Those paintings, with their insistent tactility and crisp, high-keyed geometric designs—they broadly referenced the fabric

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  print March 2014

  Clare Grill

  Imagine a gracious Craftsman house, turn-of-the-century floral wallpaper and wainscoting proudly intact. Now imagine a ramshackle shed in the backyard, a weathered lean-to musty from years of neglect. This is Reserve Ames, a new gallery that occupies several first-floor interior spaces as well as the outbuilding, where its inaugural show took place. Inside the house, the projecting lip of that wainscoting supported hand-size, ceramic disk reliefs made by Benjamin Echeverria, the home’s artist resident as well as the gallery’s curator. Nearby, the laundry room was hung with monochromes that

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  print January 2014

  OPENINGS: ELISE ADIBI

  AMONG ITS CONNOTATIONS, the grid suggests pure geometry, with none of the anomalies endemic to nature. Agnes Martin, one of the grid’s most distinguished adepts, famously sought to manifest this perfection in her art, and her paintings record her Sisyphean quest to iterate an ideal system. Martin remade the same compositions over and again, laying waste to trials that did not approach faultlessness. Morphology aside, Martin’s paintings thus afford a telling contrast with the square-format grids of New York–based artist Elise Adibi. If Martin pursued a grid unadulterated by somatic reality—by

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  print January 2014

  Lesley Vance

  Still life has long occupied a lowly position relative to more noble pursuits of, above all, painting historical subjects, though even the portrayal of someone’s face would do. To depict flowers, foods, and tabletops is to look at the overlooked, as Norman Bryson puts it in his brilliant revisionist account, or to redress a historical inequity predicated on the format’s modesty and domesticity. Though the genre is often belittled, many scholars have explored the strangeness of the still life’s equal and opposite claims for symbolic meaning as well as for a resolutely material representational

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  diary December 20, 2013

  Last Call

  I AM NOT SURE what I expected to find in Venice the weekend the Biennale closed. The prospect of the city subsiding into its lagoon, and tilting ever eastward into the Adriatic Sea, is real, if occurring on a scale asynchronous to that of a six-month exhibition. Still, other postdiluvian scenarios were in ready supply: abandoned gardens and art left for mulch. In moments of undue hilarity, I imagined said gardens beset by feral dogs. Such was my conditioning by an economy of instant obsolescence in which shows open only to be met with a headlong rush to consensus and forgetting, often before

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  print December 2013

  Robert Ryman

  Since the beginning of his career, in the 1950s, Robert Ryman has pragmatically tested the means of painting, deploying a variety of supports and an equally catholic range of utensils and paints. He has applied pigment directly onto gallery architecture, moved canvas fasteners from the rear of a painting to the front, and installed his works so they project outward at right angles from the wall. In all of these experiments, Ryman checks action and consequence—which is to say, what one material will do to another: what force it exerts, what response it elicits, what value it suggests, and

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  print December 2013

  Sean Kennedy

  Sean Kennedy Thomas Duncan Gallery For his second show at Thomas Duncan Gallery, Sean Kennedy abandoned the hanging wood-and-Plexiglas boxes that dominated his first solo presentation in the same space. Those 2012 pieces—dangling platforms that reveal, from below, tableaux of everyday objects arranged by the artist—addressed themselves to the ceiling and the floor, rather than projecting out from the wall or standing on a pedestal. These works maintain irresolution, hovering between image and object, and they occupy space uncertainly, always one jostle away from disarray or total

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  print November 2013

  Sergej Jensen

  In the decade since his star turn in Yilmaz Dziewior’s “Formalismus: Moderne Kunst, heute” (Formalism: Modern Art, Today) at the Kunstverein Hamburg in 2004, Sergej Jensen has only consolidated his claim on post-Conceptual painting. The “paintings without paint” that first garnered attention—compositions found and nominated as much as made (from fabrics dyed, stitched, or repurposed)—are asubjective, if startlingly aesthetic, pictorial manifestations that embrace all manner of supports as incidental images and substrates. With these works, Jensen has occupied various spaces within the

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  print October 2013

  Brion Nuda Rosch

  For an artist who recently shipped, to Toves Galleri in Copenhagen, not finished pieces but studio documentation of his sculptures together with instructions for their re-creation, Brion Nuda Rosch’s show at ACME settled surprisingly close to its source. In this first solo outing in Los Angeles for the San Francisco–based artist, such a return to the authorial fount was a matter not only of facture (Rosch handled these works himself this time) but also of content, since the assemblages made from layered book pages and various objects are reportedly stand-ins for the artist’s body parts. According

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  print September 2013

  Juan Uslé

  Juan Uslé’s recent outing at L.A. Louver—his first at the gallery since 2008—set his small-scale abstractions under the dreamy and evocative title “Entre Dos Lunas” (Between Two Moons). It was named for a dark blue painting (not included here) that the artist made shortly after moving from Spain to New York in 1987, when he would walk the Williamsburg Bridge at night, sky-gazing, habituating himself to the city. In a text printed for the occasion, Uslé describes his feeling of displacement when watching the lunar reflection on the East River: “I felt good there, between the two moons,