Trinie Dalton

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  picks November 01, 2011

  Pearl Hsiung

  This exhibition showcases the metaphoric breadth Pearl Hsiung achieves through a spectacularly narrow visual vocabulary that is biomorphic, geological, and deliciously raunchy. Hsiung’s explosive lexicon in these roughly thirty-five paintings, videos, and sculptures—featuring caves, geodes, volcanic calderas, barrel cacti, eggs, holes, and eyes— continuously roils, like molten lava, into new motifs that riff on in-and-out movement connoting not only natural cycles of destruction and rebirth, but also sexual role reversals and subversions. Clues that Hsiung’s oeuvre is about more than sci-fi and

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  picks June 17, 2011

  Elliott Hundley

  “Semele,” Elliott Hundley’s latest exhibition and his second interpretation of the themes and interpersonal dramas in Euripedes’s The Bacchae, again showcases his characteristic conflation of collage with painting and sculpture, and his even more compelling blend of visual art with textual narrative, to wondrous, decadent effect. His assemblage materials—gold leaf, shredded tapestries, metal wires, pine cones, and lobster legs, to mention only a few—have a luxurious, fertile irony and drag sensibility as symbols of the debauched Greek tragedy’s focus on a spurned Dionysus’s return to his birthplace

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  picks April 24, 2011

  Henry Taylor

  While Henry Taylor’s works are packed with references to African-American pop culture, their bric-a-brac aesthetic and homage to the annals of art history conjure a peculiarly ancient feeling. In large part this is due to the so-called “totemic assemblage” that dominates the main gallery, surrounded by nine portrait paintings. This sculptural installation presented in the round, It’s like a Jungle (all works cited, 2011) combines the sacred and profane—through objects connoting urban and rural decay—with ferocious eloquence. Many elements—the Brancusi-like stacked beer box towers painted black

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  picks March 30, 2011

  Justin Lowe

  Given that Justin Lowe is well known for the grand-scale installations he’s made with Jonah Freeman, Lowe’s latest solo exhibition, “Hair of the Dog,” might be read as a microscopic glimpse into the duo’s source material; one leaves the show feeling a different but equally satisfying type of disorientation. Ten collages culled primarily from pulpy sci-fi, horror, and occult paperbacks serve unintentionally as a master key to Freeman and Lowe’s prior madcap dioramic landscapes, in which fictionalized narratives are constructed to serve as historical context and navigational maps for druggy,

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  diary March 01, 2011

  Road to the Oscars

  PRE-OSCAR WEEKEND and its attendant art events always amplifies rifts in the Los Angeles art community. There are those who think mixing art and Hollywood is a terrible idea, and there are those who find the whole procedure enticing. For the rest of the year, those of us who are indifferent to the entertainment industry here can ignore it, hibernating in our Eastside studios, while occasional brushes with celebrity glamour (mostly at parties for exhibitions coordinated to honor art and cinema’s connections—our unique version of Carnival) remind us that only a few boulevards separate our worlds.

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  picks February 06, 2011

  Eric Yahnker

  “Cracks of Dawn,” Angeleno Eric Yahnker’s first LA solo exhibition (he has shown in several other cities, recently Seattle and Paris), is the funniest show I’ve seen here in years, and not simply because its coup de grâce, Cheese Slice on Garland (all works cited, 2010), is a six-by-six-foot colored-pencil drawing, framed in diamond shape, of a pizza slice lounging on a bed of tulips. Its counterpoint on the opposite wall, also six by six feet, titled Watermelon Man/Persimmon Eyes, features Herbie Hancock’s face skewed downward and wearing persimmon sunglasses, as if Yahnker had set the fruit