“Huh?”

I imagine that this was a common response to Liz Craft’s new sculptures, a gang of, as the press release put it, “hairy dudes” hitchhiking, gathering daffodils, and generally hanging around.

The figures look like the spawn of Cousin It and R. Crumb’s 1967 Keep on Truckin’ guy. In southern California, the word “dude” isn’t gender specific, and all that “hair” serves only to occlude somatic markers of gender. With their skinny, dingy pink arms and bulbous, flaccid schnozzes, Craft’s bronzes are puzzling, but she’s also taking on some issues that are weightier than it might appear at first

What if you crossed a nonlinear, multiscreen video installation with a hall of mirrors? An unlikely question, perhaps, but one to which Doug Aitken’s the moment, 2005, provides an answer. The centerpiece of Aitken’s first hometown solo show, the work also reflects his rewarding tendency to engage the formal and metaphorical possibilities of presentation and context as he does the particulars of sound, imagery, and editing. This broad-based curiosity dovetails with other questions: How might one make a work that appears simultaneously linear and nonlinear, imbued with feelings of being whole and

Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973–74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its

Native Californian Pae White’s exhibition “Periwinkles” opened in the fall, and it was tempting to imagine the seasonal gust of a Santa Ana bringing her work to life, a warm wind animating her delicate ornithological models and setting her translucent mobiles chiming. White invokes highmodernist sculpture, architecture, and design, but reinvests their characteristic forms with an oft-forgotten element of playfulness and wit. For example, among the new works presented at 1301PE were two large hanging sculptures that exist somewhere between Alexander Calder’s mobiles and sets of kitschy beaded