In Carmen Argote’s twelve-minute film Last Light (all works 2020)—a montage of still and moving images documenting the artist’s peregrinations throughout Los Angeles—she confides to us in a voice-over: “I feel like I’m not made to last. I’m not the one who’s gonna make it. I’m very aware of this organic body, and the city. . . . it’s like, touching. . . . I want to touch the city . . . want to touch the city.” The desire to commune with one’s environment is ever-present throughout this work. Of course, the feeling is at odds with all our current pandemic guidelines, which demand that we remain

For “Year of the Sphere,” J. Parker Valentine’s solo exhibition at Park View / Paul Soto, the artist presented five untitled paintings, all made this year, comprised of rounded forms—as the title unambiguously suggests. Each canvas was unprimed, unstretched, cut up, and then reassembled by hand with needle and thread; taken as a whole, the show felt like a singly authored exquisite corpse. The reattached panels—circular and rectangular, contiguous and overlapping—were adumbrated by washes of ink, graphite, water-soluble colored pencils, and liquid graphite, which give these objects a hazy,

In the months just prior to Covid-19 rearing its monstrous head in the United States, artist Jamison Carter lost both of his parents. Such a tragedy, combined with the horrors and isolation brought on by the pandemic, would crush even the most stalwart of souls. Yet Carter miraculously managed to find the wherewithal to produce “All Season Radials,” his majestic solo exhibition at Klowden Mann.

Carter’s new sculptures in this presentation—freestanding, wall-mounted, and floor-based—were rife with melancholy, mandalas, and cosmic mysteries. They were made primarily from dark urethane resin and