On Sunday, October 14, Autre magazine hosted a mezcal bruncheon to celebrate our Fall/Winter 2018 issue and LA Eyeworks’ new collection at their iconic Neil Denari-designed flagship on Beverly Boulevard. Madre Mezcal provided cocktails and Tacos la Restirada provided brunch. Avant-garde percussionist and director of Monday Evening Concerts, Jonathan Hepfer, performed Iannis Xenakis 1975 composition, “Psappha.” photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Frieze London 2018 showcased the best of international contemporary art, with a discerning selection of around 160 galleries presenting their most forward-thinking artists and imaginative presentations. This year’s themed gallery section, Social Work featured women artists who challenged the status quo and explored the possibilities of political activism in their art making during the 1980s and ‘90s, from Nancy Spero in the US to Berni Searle in South Africa to Ipek Duben in Turkey and Helen Chadwick in the UK. Solo, group and curated presentations across the fair’s sections featured John Baldessari, Michaël Borremans, Zadie Xa, Lubaina Himid, Mary Kelly, Moshekwa Langa, Calvin Marcus, Jim Shaw, David Shrigley, Josh Sperling, Tatiana Trouvé, Hardeep Pandhal, Athena Papadopoulos, Faith Ringgold, Wong Ping and Cathy Wilkes, among many others. photographs by Flo Khol
Claire Colette’s Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by the Los Angeles based artist. Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is an investigation into darkness, light, time, and mysticism. A series of quiet, abstract landscapes consider concepts of interconnectedness relating to land, the cosmos, and the self. Like the Transcendentalist painters of the 20th century, Colette links external and internal realities, and infuses her paintings with influences from tantric symbolism and elements referencing nature.
As I Travel is the title of Nassim Hantezadeh’s exhibition. “Since I moved back to the United States from Iran, making daily works on paper where I draw my everyday emotions and sentiments is a way to deal with the isolation and the alienation that the situation initiated to my body. Sometimes the outcome of those drawings is abstract and may prevent a read based on the semiology of the visual system that our eyes are educated with. Other times it is direct enough to make links to familiar forms, such as objects, body organs, and figures.” The exhibitions are on view from September 15 to October 27 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock
“It has been through all the phases of decline and is now thoroughly blighted. Subversive racial elements predominate; dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in evidence. It is a slum area and one of the city's melting pots. There is a slum clearance project under consideration but no definite steps have as yet been taken. It is assigned the lowest of ‘low red’ grade.”
The following is an essay written by the artist, which serves as the only contextual reference for the show, since the pieces do not include didactics. For a copy of this essay with full footnotes, print copies are available at the entrance of the gallery
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Residential Security Map.
Location: Bunker Hill
Security Grade: 4th
Area No.: D37
Date: 2/27/39
Slaves were constructed as property. By withholding citizenship from people who were enslaved, slavery in the United States did not violate constitutional rights. As both persona and property, the slave functioned as a source of labor, chattel, and reproduction for the master as well as the greater economy. Saidiya Hartman describes the efficacy of this dual status:
The protection of property (defined narrowly by work capacity and the value of capital), the public good (the maintenance of black subordination), and the maintenance and reproduction of the institution of slavery determined the restricted scope of personhood and the terms of recognition…In the case of motherhood, the reproduction and conveyance of property in favor with the latter.
State governments considered slaves taxable property. Slave owners were taxed for each slave they owned. Every state which allowed slavery taxed the slaves. States relied on the salve economy to develop state government and infrastructure. These state tax codes formalized governmental involvement in the slave economy. In the United States between 1776 and 1865, the definition of public must be qualified to exclude the entirety of the salve population, and the definition of property must be understood to include the entirety of the slave population. Under antebellum tax codes, slaves were recognized and recorded as equivalent to cattle, pigs, clocks, carriages, and land. In 1860, slaves comprised 20% of all American wealth, including real estate.
Immediately following emancipation, the legal status of former slaves remained ambiguous. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to define their legal status. Section 1 reads:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the Unite States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, reputation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.
By conferring legal protection “as is enjoyed by white citizens,” the Civil Rights Act of 1866 uses “white citizens” as its benchmark for legal protection. Harman writes, “[T]he rejection of an explicit antidiscrimination clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment in favor of the language of equal protection attests to the nebulous character of the equality conferred. The Civil Rights Act both permitted discrimination in certain arenas and narrowly defined the scope of civil rights.
In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson confirmed the constitutionality of racial segregation, maintaining that the doctrine of “separate but equal” did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. State laws stipulating the terms of segregation came to be known as Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were enforced by both police and white citizens. Lynching secured the racial order of segregation. This order secured control of governments that were designed to serve white citizens at the federal, state, and local levels and to protect property owned by white citizens. After emancipation, citizenship–as defined by the ability to make contracts and own property equal to that of white citizens–remained reserved for white citizens.
Land ownership in the United States is most commonly registered with a deed, which also indicates restrictions of encumbrances on an owner’s use of the land. In 1918, white landowners began to incorporate racially restrictive covenants into their deeds. By 1940, 80% of property in Chicago and Los Angeles carried racially restrictive covenants. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in 1973, the typical language of racially restrictive covenants stipulated:
…hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be…occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property…against the occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purpose by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.
Racially restrictive covenants were implemented on the basis of private contract, but they were utilized collectively among groups of white neighbors. By prohibiting nonwhite ownership, these covenants protected the value of individual homes and maintained neighborhood and regional property values. Because restrictive covenants “run with the land,” all subsequent owners of the property were required to abide by the terms of the covenant. Although Shelley v. Kraemer rendered these clauses unenforceable in 1948, the clauses remain as a part of the deeds they were written into.
The racial restrictions imposed through private contract interlocked with federal policy to maintain segregation by instituting racially restrictive financing guidelines. In 1933, a mortgage company operating as part of the federal government–called the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC)–was established to assist in the refinancing of homes in foreclosure. “According to the 1940 Housing Census, fewer than 25,000 of more than one million homes refinanced by HOLC went to nonwhites. Beginning in 1935, the HOLC surveyed the lending risks of all cities that had a population over 40,000. these surveys were consolidated into Residential Security Maps, which were to be used by lenders to rebuild the real estate market that had been destabilized by the Great Depression. These 239 maps were divided into distinct sections, and each section was given a rating: “Best” A (green), “Still desirable” B (blue), “Definitely Declining” C (yellow), and “Hazardous” D (red). Rae, class, and ethnicity were explicit criteria for the determination of these grades, as indicated in the rating reports. The maps directly influenced the mortgage lending of private banks, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration. Areas rated A were deemed worthy of mortgage financing. Areas rated D were described as “hazardous” and mortgage loans were restricted from them. the restriction of financing on the basis of race became known as redlining. the Federal Housing Administration used and continued to update the maps, continued the HOLC’s use of race and the criteria of “inharmonious racial groups” in their ratings, and recommended the use of racially restrictive covenants. Redlining codified the use of racial discrimination to enhance real estate markets and formalized segregation as federal policy. It also incepted redevelopment projects that resulted in widespread displacement, dislocation, and dispossession. Like sharecropping, redlining systematically maintained racial-economic subordination to white citizens, federally defining the terms of property ownership on the basis of race.
Law enforcement compounds racial definitions of property in its use of asset forfeiture to fund its operations. Asset forfeiture takes numerous forms. Criminal asset forfeiture describes the forfeiture of property from a person charged with a crime. Administrative asset forfeiture describes the forfeiture of property as a result of unpaid debt. Civil asset forfeiture describes the forfeiture of property involved with a crime for which no person has been charged.
Civil asset forfeiture originated in the English Navigation Act of 1660. The Navigation Acts were established to maintain the English monopoly on the triangular trade between England, West Africa, and the English colonies. As Eric Williams writes, “Negroes, the most important export of Africa, and sugar, the most important export of the West Indies, were the principal commodities enumerated by the Navigation Laws. The Navigation Acts stipulated that only English ships were to dock in English ports in both England and the colonies. If this law was vilated, in lieu of pursuing a criminal proceeding, the ship and all property on board were subject to forfeiture.
The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 allowed police to seize drugs and any property used in their production or transportation. The 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act designated all forfeiture profits at the federal level to be used for law enforcement purposes. Forfeiture laws passed on the state level have created similar provisions. These laws effectively constitute a financial incentive to practice asset forfeiture.
A 1995 report by the Government Accountability Office expressed concern for law enforcement agencies “becoming overzealous in their use of the asset forfeiture laws or too dependent of the funds derived from such seizures.” Federal and state laws have consistently expanded the violations that can result in forfeiture. In a 2001 study of 1,400 municipal and county law enforcement agencies, 60% reported that forfeiture profits were a necessary part of their budget. Forty states have forfeiture statutes that allow law enforcement to keep 45% to 100% of forfeiture proceeds. Through the Department of the Treasury Equitable Sharing Program, local and state police departments can seize property under federal authority, transfer the property to the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, and receive up to 80% of the proceeds from its auction.
Civil asset forfeiture is treated as an in rem proceeding. Rather than charging the owner with a crime, the property itself is charged. As such, forfeiture is now simply based on “whether a law enforcement agency has probable cause to believe that the property is connected to illegal activity.” In many states, assets may be forfeited without a conviction. “[B]ecause the civil forfeiture is deemed an in rem action, the government conducts warrantless seizures baed on probably cause, and unless the forfeiture involves a residential home, claimants are not entitled to pre-deprivation notice or hearing.” Former owners of forfeited property are considered third parties to in rem proceedings and are not entitled to public defense.
In 2015 the average cash seizure in Philadelphia was $192. Low-value forfeitures are less likely to be contested, given that the costs of litigation would outweigh the value of the property in question, and low-income owners are less likely to contest the forfeiture of their property. This creates an incentive for police to target low-income people to seize low-value property, given that it has a higher likelihood of being retained.
In Philadelphia between 2011 and 2013, civil asset forfeiture disproportionately targeted black people, who made up 44% of the population, 63% of all forfeitures, and 71% of forfeitures without conviction. In California in 2013 and 2014, 18% and 85% of all payments, respectively, went to police agencies in majority and minority communities. A survey of forfeitures in Oklahoma between 2010 and 2015 found that nearly two-thirds of forfeitures from traffic stops came from black and Hispanic drivers.
Civil asset forfeiture is also a practice and source of funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 included the creation of three new agencies: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes applications for citizenship, residency, and asylum; Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which enforces law at the border and includes the Border Patrol agents formerly part of Immigration and Natural Services (INS); and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is charged with immigration and customs law enforcement within the border. ICE and CBP frequently overlap in their jurisdictions and functionality. Both can delegate powers to local law enforcement agents. CBP is the largest single law enforcement agency in the country, with approximately 60,000 employees. The Treasury Forfeiture Fund also receives assets from federal enforcement agencies through the Equitable Sharing Program and distributes up to 80% to the seizing agency. Between 2003 and 2013, DHS contributed 53% of the total revenues collected in the Treasure Forfeiture Fund. In 2013, ICE contributed $1 billion in seized property to the Treasure Forfeiture Fund, almost twice that of all non-DHS agencies.
No More Deaths describes the forfeiture practices of ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol as part of the “cycle of dispossession” of people who are undocumented, carried out by
private employers who engage in illegal and exploitative labor practices in the United States; local police and toting companies that seize private vehicles and charge exorbitant daily storage rates; detention bonds and related fees associated with the immigration court system; government officials in Mexico and the United States who solicit bribes or otherwise directly rob migrants of their belongings; private prison companies whose exploitative labor practices fail to follow basic standards established in the Fair Labor Standards Act; and phone, commissary and credit card companies that contract with prisons and extract exorbitant fees for the provision of basic services.
Each of these practices relies on the absence of protections for those rendered as noncitizens. This absence creates vested financial interests in both the labor exploitation of people who are undocumented as well as the enforcement of their “legal status.” These seemingly conflicting interests form a productive double bind that maintains the status of noncitizens. These methods of dispossession have developed to closely resemble the nexus of fines, fees, and forfeitures imposed on those who are incarcerated. Criminal charges eliminate basic protections and incept dispossession through cash bail; public defender fees; court fees; pay-to-stay jail and prison fees; overpriced and monopolized prison commissary, phone, and internet services; administrative forfeiture; criminal forfeiture; and private probation, among other means. Citizenship is explicitly withheld from people who are incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and undocumented; it is implicitly withheld from those who don’t meet the standard of white citizenship. The withholding of citizenship continues to structure the racial terms of dispossession.
42 USC § 1981, “Equal rights under the law,” last updated in 1991, maintains white citizenship as the standard for legal protection in current U.S. statute law:
(a) Statement of equal rights.
All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.
D37 will open on October 14 and will be on view through March 11, 2019 at The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
One Day At A Time is inspired by American painter and film critic Manny Farber and his legendary underground essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art features approximately thirty artists and more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition is conceived as a cross between a monographic exhibition and a group show—an experiment in exhibition-making in the spirit of Farber’s call for an art of “both observing and being in the world.” The exhibition will open on October 14 and is on view through March 11, 2019 at The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Soft Pretzel features works that investigate sculptural forms and perceived tactility. Evaluating our ability to anticipate sensory experiences as they are conveyed through visual cues, each work explores implied softness, rigidity, dimension, weight and movement. The exhibition includes works by Tanya Brodsky, Rives Granade, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Lilian Martinez, Daniel McKee, Erin Morrison, Claudia Parducci, Ben Sanders and James Seward. Soft Pretzel is on view through October 28 @ Vacation Gallery, 24A Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002. images courtesy of Ochi Projects
Informed by a background in sociology, Vienna-based painter Bernhard Buhmann’s hard-edged, abstracted works speak to larger issues concerning the figure in a modern-day environment and therefore, humanity, as it engages with a society that is technologically advancing at an accelerated rate. The exhibition title, My Automatic Me, suggests themes which belong to today’s world of cyborgian post-humanism, digital avatars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence but with a sense of friendliness that is either uncanny or intimate - or both. As the world advances, forcing our animal behaviors to evolve towards Buhmann’s Automatic Me, the artist examines what it means to be human in this newfangled, spectacular landscape.
Buhmann’s whole body of work eventually fits together to form an integrated aesthetic matrix, capturing performative remnants of a sociological body, the crux of human condition disguised as a computer game, even attempts to calculate consciousness – each work a colorful, geometric portrait of our quickly evolving selves. My Automatic Me is on view through November 17 @ Nino Mier Gallery Two, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
Charles White: A Retrospective is the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in over 30 years. The exhibition charts White’s full career—from the 1930s through his premature death in 1979—with over 100 works, including drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, illustrated books, record covers and archival materials.
The exhibition is organized chronologically, with groupings centered on the cities and creative communities in which White lived and worked. Each section is supported by relevant ephemera and supporting materials detailing White’s working process, political and social activities, and role as a teacher.
The exhibition includes representative work from the three artistic centers in which White lived, created, and taught throughout his life: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. It begins with early paintings and murals White made for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Depression-era Chicago, where he grew up. Shortly thereafter, between 1942 and 1956, White lived mainly in New York City, teaching drawing, exhibiting at the progressive ACA Gallery on 57th Street, and supporting the Committee for the Negro in the Arts in Harlem. A selection of White’s personal photographs, also on view in the exhibition, capture his life in New York, while the inclusion of his work for album covers, publications, film, and television emphasize his dedication to more accessible distribution outlets for his art. The presentation concludes with the inventive output from his last decades as an internationally established figure and influential teacher in Los Angeles during the 1960s and ’70s.
The retrospective is on view through January 13, 2019 at MoMA 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York. Following its MoMA presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where it will be on view in Spring 2019. photographs courtesy of MoMA
Australian artist Madeleine Pfull’s inaugural exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery illustrates a stylized narrative of a complex suburban universe inspired by her youth. Littered with images and subjects that are familial, humorous and peculiar, the paintings center around the lives of these richly imagined characters. The subjects she paints exude a specific type, mostly middle-class women, likely from the 1980s. Her women wear big-box store clothing, live in homely domestic interiors, but with an earnestness and sense of pride that makes them all more intellectually interesting. Pfull explains that ‘they appear as the quotidian details of middle-class suburbs. They can appear fed up or bored but it is more of a sense of importance and stoicism.
The subjects could be one of many mothers, aunts and neighbors, with their familiar awkward sweaters, botched perms, floral aprons and old-fashioned curtains. Most of the works grow richly from these known phenotypes, and the artist enjoys when the viewer enhances the character’s narrative by implying extended storylines. Pfull explains further that her work articulates her fascination with taste and expressing one’s social status and personal pride through material things. For the women she portrays, she asserts that the ones who try the hardest to appear superior are the ones most uncomfortable with their lack of taste. This duality to their identity, of inferiority and superiority, is exaggerated through the medium of painting, where, like the current embracing of retro culture and fashion, time adds prestige to kitsch. Madeleine Pfull’s eponymous solo exhibition is on view through November 17th at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd. photographs by Summer Bowie
Over the course of her career Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has set out to create paintings interrogating the American experience, a subject that she began to believe could not be addressed without attending to the question of religion. The resulting body of work gathered for her exhibition The Chiefest of Ten Thousand offers a depiction of our moment through a series of portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes. Taken together these works present a view that is conflicted, terror-filled, absurd, and marked by a powerful tenderness. This show exposes dark palimpsests of our culture as well as warmth, pleasure, and humor.
This body of work is a record of the deeply felt task of trying to be, and be good, in the contradictions of this moment. The polyvocality the artist brings to each painting, through their images and gestures, make them purposefully hard to grasp, refusing to cohere even as they have a razor sharp affective import. They picture a self that cannot be reconciled as a manifestation of a society that refuses reconciliation. Dupuy-Spencer suggests that there are real and profound ways to save ourselves—finding grace in the mire is an unending and complicated process, but love and community might be an ongoing redemption. The Chiefest of Ten Thousand is on view through November 3 @ Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. text by Diana Nawi, photographs by Summer Bowie
Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 is the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). It is also the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound.
Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.
For this exhibition, the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to present Piper’s work What It’s Like, What It Is #3, a large-scale mixed-media installation addressing racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 in on view through January 6 at Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
The late 20th century was a transformational period for graphic design. Questioning the increasingly rigid rules of modernism, designers pressed for greater autonomy in their work. At the same time, dizzying advances in technology upended existing design and production processes. Far from the established New York design world, California became a haven for avant-garde designers, a hub of innovation in both discourse and practice.
This installation explores how the intense ideological debates and technological changes were manifest in posters and publications. It features the work of many influential designers including Emigre, Inc., Ed Fella, April Greiman, Rebeca Méndez, Deborah Sussman, and Lorraine Wild. West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 is on view through April 21, 2019 at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Cao / Humanity is a new exhibition by the acclaimed Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, which is in tandem with two other Los Angeles exhibitions. This marks an exciting milestone for both Ai and the city of Los Angeles, where he is exhibiting for the first time. Having designed the new UTA Artist Space location in Beverly Hills, Ai’s Cao / Humanity offers a one-of-a-kind experience for visitors—an expansive celebration of his artistic practice in a space he himself designed, the only architectural project he’s undertaken in the United States.
Central to the exhibition is a new collective performance project by Ai Weiwei: Humanity. This global campaign is a reaction to the tens of millions displaced by war, famine and climate crises, and gives a personal and group voice in support of the idea that humanity is one.
Cao presents a wide range of his work, from the iconic middle finger motif wallpapered through the space and the glass sculpture Up Yours(2018), to the massive Iron Tree Trunk (2015), a collection of individual pieces welded together into a deceptively life-like form, weighs nearly two tons. CAO/Humanity is on view through December 1, 2018 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Holy Holy Holy is an exhibition of new work by Morgan Mandalay. Using the “Book of Tobit” (a Catholic story centering around the exorcising of demons) as a starting point, Mandalay generates a visual narrative about class, populism, and agency through the lens of 18th century painting. The walls of the gallery are painted a pale pink, meant to reference the Timken Museum of Art, a small museum in San Diego Mandalay used to frequent because of its free entry for the public and prominent collection of Rococo paintings. Here he uses the sentimentality of the setting to help conjure the anarchistic energy latent in painting’s history.
Catbox Contemporary is an appointment-only art gallery housed in the Ridgemont apartment of artist/founder, Philip Hinge. Occupying two catboxes within Hinge’s cat tree, the space allows artists to display full solo exhibitions at miniature scale and sell small works at affordable prices. Holy Holy Holy is on view through October 14, make your appointment now by DMing @CatboxContemporary. photographs courtesy of Catbox Contemporary
Chris Engman’s Containment (2018) is a site-specific installation created as a part of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018, which starts today. The piece is part of a larger exhibition, titled Chris Engman: Prospect and Refuge at Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery. This is the largest biennial for photography and lens-based art in the country. This edition counts over 400 artists, galleries, museums, and cultural partners across Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. As part of the Biennial, LA artist, Chris Engman creates a new site-specific installation for the Biennial, accompanied by a selection of his mind-bending photographic constructions of landscapes. Curated by Carissa Barnard, FotoFocus Deputy Director, Containment is on view through November 18 at Weston Art Gallery 650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. photographs by Tony Walsh
A lithe group of dancers, acrobats and contortionists graced the stage for the high-voltage presentation of Yazbukey Fitness Club – surrealist designer, Yazbukey’s full-throttle spring/summer 2019 collection. Her latest works inspired by the current obsessions with fit culture, fitspo, and the like are a welcome alternative to the dominating athleisure forces as of late. photographs by Flo Kohl
ISLAND is the second solo exhibition that James Herman has presented with Ibid Gallery. Using sculpture, painting, and printmaking alongside his homesteading practice, Herman’s work straddles alternative off-the-grid building methods with the legacy of Postwar American painting in his psychedelic, referential-laden forms and their social function. Herman’s painted plywood panels and architectural dwellings act as reflectors and spatial activators for his ultimate conceptual practice: a radical domesticity based in sustainability, self-reliance, subsistence, and repetitive labor. ISLAND is on view through October 27 at Ibid Gallery 670 S Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock
Don’t turn off the light is the second solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery for Brazilian artist, Nino Cais. It presents the artist’s take on male and female forms through installation, assemblages, and film. The artist utilizes his unique syntax, juxtaposing the banal and the fetishized, to create dreamlike unions of household objects and found photography. To read our 2014 interview of the artist, click here. Don’t turn off the light opens tonight @ 6pm and is on view through November 3 at Fridman Gallery 287 Spring Street New York. images courtesy of Nino Cais and Fridman Gallery
Rubbish and Dreams: the Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, is an exhibition focusing on a performance artist who became iconic in 1970s New York for his disruptive interventions into galleries, public spaces, and financial institutions. Varble would engage in unauthorized and impromptu performance wearing elaborate drag costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects. His work was decidedly anti-institutional and he disrupted the business of art in the 1970s. For these reasons, he was soon written out of history, and no substantive piece of writing on his practice has been published for 40 years. This exhibition draws on a number of private archives in telling Varble’s story for the first time. RUBBISH AND DREAMS: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble is on view through January 6, 2019 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York.
