Around 2008, when David Hockney began making work on iPhones, the artist opined, “Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?” It was a glib statement for a painter who clearly relishes the opportunity to remind audiences of his engagement with new technology. After all, in hindsight (several years and countless Apple hard- and software updates later), Hockney’s remark would seem to reveal a strikingly limited understanding of the smartphone. Even as far back as 2009, the majority of its users only sporadically accessed the device’s application for making direct calls.

Michaela Eichwald’s first solo show in Los Angeles bore a gnomic title—“quo vadis gnothi sauton and cui bono”—that was the result of three phrases in Greek and Latin jammed together: “Where are you going?,” “Know thyself,” and “To whose benefit?” The last phrase is perhaps most familiar, its forensic application so ubiquitous on crime shows, but one might still query its present usage with regard to nine large-scale paintings. While each work’s composition appears to be the product of specific and maybe unrepeatable material alchemies (one was laid outside to dry just as the weather

Drawing has a directness and immediacy capable of revealing an artist’s thought process and, over time, formal development. It can document aesthetic mutability and demonstrate technical acumen, all the while circumventing the baggage of painting or sculpture. Kate Costello’s recent exhibition—simply titled “Drawing”—which included nine fabric appliqué works; a sculpture in paper, cement, and steel; and an artist’s book, was less concerned with draftsmanship than with the conceptual, linguistic, and symbolic possibilities of drawing. And for an artist well versed in sculpture, video,

As might have been expected, much of the talk around this group exhibition—and it did generate a great deal of talk—blithely skimmed over the art on view. Comprising works by the class of MFA students who dropped out en masse from the USC Roski School of Art and Design this past May to protest the dramatic restructuring of their program by its new dean, “Recesses” was a contextually loaded event, and one in which at least two intersecting spheres of influence must be taken into consideration. The first is academic, institutional, and in some sense public, although USC is, of course,