Beside Myself Group Show Opens @ JTT In New York

Through their very gothic and physical imagery of mutation, fragmentation, disintegration and masquerade, the works in Beside Myself position themselves as objects in opposition to the self-same body; by presenting themselves as its shadow. This show demonstrate the ways in which art maintains not just the historical but also the magical ability to conceive of expansive and malleable identities in the midst of all those that society and culture prescribe. Beside Me is on view through August 3rd at JTT Gallery 191 Chrystie Street New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Dennis Koch Solo Exhibition @ Luis de Jesus in Los Angeles

Beyond the Funny Farm! Crypto-K, Cutouts, Cut-ups, Copies, Mirrors, Membranes, and Temporal Algorithms marks Dennis Koch's third solo exhibition with Luis de Jesus. In this exhibition, Koch creates a mind-map of relationships that find, build, and amplify meaning in the form of sculptures and drawings. Wooden newsstand-like sculptures display 100 vintage copies of LIFE magazine, each carved page by page to reveal interior images. Known as the first all-photographic American news magazine, LIFE revitalized itself during the 1960s in response to the popularity of television media. Koch's interest in LIFE as a cultural artifact stems from a time-parallel between contemporary political upheaval and the equally tumultuous events of the 1960s. The exhibition is on view through July 28 at Luis de Jesus 2685 S La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie

Third Magazine Celebrates Launch With TRIO @ ICALA

TRIO showcases three modalities of performance in music, art, and dance that reflect the diversity of POC and queer voices championed by Third—a magazine and public programming initiative that fosters conversations and collaborations among experimental artists. TRIO is the inaugural event for Third Presents, a series of live events at various partner sites.

  • AKUA is a musician, singer, songwriter, and producer based in Los Angeles. Canada-born with Ghanaian roots, AKUA has moved beyond the experience as Solange’s former background singer to establish her own hypnotic sound. Her new record Them Spirits will be released this Fall.
  • Samantha Blake Goodman is an interdisciplinary choreographer and community organizer. She is the founder of MAPS (Movement Arts Performance Space) dedicated to cultivating the contemporary and traditional arts of the Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diaspora in Los Angeles.
  • Sebastian Hernandez is a multidisciplinary artist whose works range from drawings to video to performance. They cultivate an embedded connection to their indigenous Aztec/Mexica heritage and the history of the brown body in relation to the U.S.–Mexico borderland. Sebastian’s latest work Hypanthium will be featured in the upcoming NOW Festival at REDCAT.

photographs by Lani Trock

Drake Carr Presents "Gulp" @ The Hole In New York

Drake Carr presents Gulp, a new series of figurative sculptures composed in two parts. Like the composition of an album, Carr’s sculptural ensemble segues between genres, time signatures, and themes to populate a scene built of multiple tracks. Irregularities in scale and texture animate and describe the boundaries between each of the figures, casting kaleidoscopic patterning as the crux of the soiree’s representational and interpersonal logic. Stuffed and dressed, bodysuits and armatures shuffle and skip (like a scratched CD) in a warp of orientations. Gulp is on view through August 12th at The Hole 312 Bowery New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Aaron Fowler's "Donkey Nights" @ Salon 94 Bowery In New York

Donkey Nights is an exhibition of new work by St. Louis native, Aaron Fowler. His massive, theatrical assemblage-paintings, made from discarded objects and unconventional materials, are sourced from his local surroundings. Through a layering of castoff furniture, paint, and collaged elements including iridescent CDs, mirror shards, wigs, water bottles, LED lights and sneakers, Fowler meticulously constructs his altar-like tableaux.  Religious icon painting comes to mind as do the combines of Robert Rauschenberg. In each of his layered, embellished works, Fowler constructs a personal narrative, both real and imagined, which comes alive through the materials he so carefully chooses and the subjects he celebrates. Portraits of the recently deceased, depictions of incarcerated family members, memorials to friends lost in acts of violence populate his work, as do fantastical scenarios incorporating historical figures, role models, and current public figures. Donkey Nights is on view through August 10th at Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Opening Of Homestead @ OOF Books in los angeles

OOF Books presents "Homestead": a solo show featuring the work of artist and sculptor Chris Zickefoose. Zickefoose utilizes materials made readily available due to rapid development. In the Mojave desert there is a transformation occurring—old homestead cabins are being demolished or renovated in order to accommodate a growing desire to occupy the Joshua Tree area. Architectural debris piles up on these re-developed properties. Homestead encapsulates these fragments, paying homage to the past while also welcoming the future. Zickefoose removes the found materials from their context, allowing them to transcend themselves and take on a metaphysical utility. His sculptures challenge the ways in which we assign meaning and value to the physical world. Homestead is open through August 5th 2018 @ OOF Books, 912A Cypress Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90065, Photos by Lani Trock. 

Fourth Annual MAK Games @ The John Lautner Designed Sheats-Goldstein Residence In Los Angeles

The MAK Games features semi-finals and final tennis tournament matches, followed by a Pro-Am match, followed by a dance party in the incomparable “Club James” hidden below the infinity tennis court. The players come from the worlds of art, design, architecture, and entertainment. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Liquid Dreams Group Show Opens @ Ghebaly Gallery, featuring Koak, Genesis Belanger, Dorian Gaudin, And More

Liquid Dreams is a group show featuring paintings and sculptures by Kelly Akashi, Farah Atassi, Davide Balula, Genesis Belanger, Neïl Beloufa, Lila de Magalhaes, Dorian Gaudin, Sayre Gomez, Patrick Jackson, Koak, Joel Kyack, Mike Kuchar, Candice Lin, Gina Osterloh, Philip Pearlstein, and Kathleen Ryan. Liquid Dreams is on view at Ghebaly Gallery through August 10th, 2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie

'Pussy, King of the Pirates' Group Show Opens @ Maccarone Gallery

Pussy, King of the Pirates unifies 20 non-male artists who engage in and question the physical and conceptual use of the body in form, medium, and identity politics. The works represent a contemporary reclamation of the female figure, the depiction of which has historically been from the heteronormative male perspective. While the latter has both defined and composed the canon of figuration and formalism heretofore, their compositions of female figures are now more vulnerable to criticisms of objectification. Those who do not self-identify with that status quo – whether female, non-binary, queer, or transgender – may be released from a stigmatic history of a specific oppression. The question remains whether or not they are absolved from the act of objectifying, should that be the ultimate desire at all. Pussy, King of the Pirates is on view through September 8th at Maccarone Gallery, 300 South Mission Road, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Jim Jocoy 'Order of Appearance' Opens @ These Days LA

Almost 20 years after the release of his first monograph, We’re Desperate, produced with the help of Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore and fashion designer Marc Jacobs and widely regarded as the definitive catalogue of early West Coast punk fashion, Jim Jocoy’s archive of previously unseen photographs has been re-examined and re-considered to compose Order of Appearance, a new body of work that humanizes his young subjects as they go through their daily lives sharing the tender moments of love and loss that came to encapsulate the late 70s and early 80s as the Summer of Love slowly eroded and gave way to punks’ disaffected view of the world. 

Unknowingly foreshadowing the AIDS epidemic that would grip underground communities throughout the country, Jocoy’s poignant photos share an intimacy not unlike that found in the work of Nan Goldin, combined with the underground compulsion and clout that permeates the photos of Katsumi Watanabe, and Karlheinz Weinberger.  Spanning three short years from 1977 to 1980, the collection of images expose vignettes from a one night affair where emotions range from delight to despair, sober to wasted, clear to blurry to half-way-clear-again by morning.  Jocoy’s ability to reveal these touching moments of restless youth allows us to feel empathetic towards a girl with bruised knees and then laugh at the comical horror of a sunburst-yellow clownish car turned violently upside down from an accident. As a photographer, Jocoy has an uncanny capacity to make even a car wreck look like the best time ever. Order of Appearance is on view through August 19th at These Days, 118 Winston Street, 2nd FL Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Leon Borensztein "It's So Fucking Lonely Here' @ Little Big Man Gallery

In his current show at Little Big Man Gallery, Oakland photographer Leon Borensztein presents a series of images that document life with his disabled daughter over 30 years. Sharon, Borensztein's daughter, is legally blind, prone to seizures, and diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia. By the time Sharon turned 15, her mother was unable to care for her due to drugs and alcohol, tasking Borensztein with raising their severely-disabled daughter by himself. The series investigates life with chronic illness from a familial perspective, as well as the harsh realities faced by disabled women today. It's So Fucking Lonely Here is on view at Little Big Man Gallery through August 25th. 1427 E 4th St #2, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Dan Graham's 'New Works By A Small-Town Boy' @ Regen Projects

For over fifty years, Graham’s expansive multidisciplinary practice has encompassed video, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and a prolific body of writing on religion, music, art, architecture, garden design, and popular culture. Forming a central theoretical thread throughout the course of his career, his work has examined the function and role of architecture in contemporary society, and how it frames and reflects public life. Since the 1970s he has produced what he refers to as pavilions, hybrid constructions that are part architecture and part sculpture. Inspired by ornamental buildings found in 17th and 18th century European pleasure gardens, Graham’s sculptural pavilions are comprised of simple geometric forms and constructed using materials associated with corporate architecture like metal, aluminum, transparent and/or two-way mirrored glass, and sometimes juxtaposed with natural elements like hedges. Functioning as built environments, the pavilions create unusual optical and physical experiences for the viewer – blurring the lines between public and private space – and making apparent that our material surroundings structure the very core of our societies by determining the form of our vision and sight.

A selection of photographs relating to his seminal magazine artwork, Homes for America(1966), and taken by Graham during a 2006 visit to his native suburban New Jersey, feature images of diverse architectural styles punctuated with lawns, topiaries, and shrubs. Displayed in a sequenced formation on the gallery walls, each image highlights Graham’s interest in serial structures, topology, and systems of information as evident in the peculiar color ranges, materials, and repetitive geometries of the suburban American landscape. A series of architectural models and video works provide further context for his ongoing exploration of the built world. New Works By A Small-Town Boy is on view at Regen Projects through August 18. 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs Oliver Kupper

Young Joo Lee @ Ochi Projects

Young Joo Lee combines inspiration from her dreams with personal and political histories to create drawings, sculptures and films. On view in the downstairs gallery, Paradise Limited is a three-channel animation based on Lee’s year-long project about the nature sanctuary at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Lee documented her research as a 25-meter scroll drawing, a reference to traditional Korean landscape painting, and created a sculptural scroll display to house the work, which provided the background for the film. In the upstairs gallery is Song from Sushi, an animated music video, written from the point of view of a sushi woman served on a sushi conveyor belt. She sings about the stereotypical depiction of Asian women as exotic sexual objects in media and cultural representations. Lee’s work is a glimpse into how our environments are not only outside of us, but how they truly alter our perception and inform our personal identities. Mine is on view at Ochi Projects through July 21st. 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock.