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Installation view of Disruptive Reflexivity in the Flux of Becoming (2024) in the Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben’s show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery exhibition. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

interview by Mia Milosevic

Alexander Reben is a multidisciplinary artist and engineer whose work investigates the intersection of technology, humanity, and creativity. Known for his provocative explorations of artificial intelligence and automation, Reben challenges the boundaries between the artificial and the real, prompting philosophical inquiries into human identity and technological evolution. As the first artist in residence at OpenAI, he developed tools that expand artistic expression and explore AI’s potential in reshaping creative practices. His latest exhibition at Charlie James Gallery, Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben’s show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery, showcases a diverse range of work, from AI-generated musings to intricate sculptures created with robotics, each piece reflecting Reben's fascination with the dialogue between human ingenuity and machine autonomy. Reben’s latest artistic innovations, including some created during his residency at OpenAI, are on view until December 7 at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Read more.

The Post Human Urge: A Review of Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

 

Image courtesy of Pippa Garner and Jeffrey Deitch.

 

review by Mia Milosevic

IA anguille sous roche [A.I. eel under the rock] is a contemporary adaptation of the French idiom Il y a anguille sous roche [There’s a eel under the rock], which indirectly translates to something is simply not right here…. The transformation speaks to society’s fears surrounding technological advancement, where man-made innovation upends the traditional and replaces it with a futuristic permutation of what once was. The metamorphosis of this fixed expression speaks to the evolution of humanity, to the post human body, which is colloquially characterized by its unconventional additions and subtractions.

Thirty-two years ago, Jeffrey Deitch curated an exhibition called Post Human, which included the work of thirty-six artists. On September 12 of this year, Post Human made its second Earth-landing, opening at 925 N. Orange Drive in Los Angeles. The 1992 exhibition revolutionarily summoned new frontiers surrounding post humanism to the foreground, and entrenched the term into contemporary vernacular. The body became ostensible, and so did much of what is naturally embedded within it. 

The current showing of Post Human is a supersaturated, chaotic amalgamation of work, which revolves itself around the most up-to-date understanding of our corporeal tendencies. 

Paul McCarthy’s The Garden showcases a practice of ecosexuality, adopting a radical form of environmental activism rooted in the optimization of nature’s glory holes. What appears to be a forest oasis houses the mechanical effigies of nature’s erotic lovers. The applicable law on consent as it relates to this kind of sexual engagement has not yet been sorted out. Interestingly, Jana Euler’s The Judge is positioned some ways across from the greenery, staring up disapprovingly at the orgiastic jardin.

Josh Kline’s Aspirational Foreclosure (Matthew/Mortgage Loan Officer) and MAOI Inhibitors Can’t Fix This (Elizabeth/Administrative Assistant) are life-size 3D-printed plaster characters who are crouched in fetal position, laying on their sides, wrapped in an over-sized plastic bag which is politely knotted at the top. Matthew and Elizabeth have been presumably consumed by the microplastics we are thought to ingest on a daily basis. This inversion unfortunately lends an exceptional amount of perspective to the inextricable link between plastic and the 21st century body.

Charles Ray’s Family Romance is a mixed media installation and sculpture of four people holding hands. The piece absolutely levels traditional conceptions of the classic family dynamic, and does so quite literally. Ray makes the mom, dad, son, and daughter all the same height, removing the power dynamics generally associated with typical familial roles and further embracing the Freudian sexual awkwardness which invites any and all incestphobic viewers to reveal themselves. Ray says that you can find the meaning of the sculpture where the figures’ hands come together. 

In Post Human’s original catalogue, Jeffrey Deitch wrote about how people would one day be able to expunge their family histories and create an identity entirely devoid of family ethos and genetics. The idea is an intriguing one, especially in the context of Ray’s Family Romance.

Pierre Huyghe’s Idiom is a golden LED screen mask integrated with a real time voice generated by Artificial Intelligence. The anthropomorphization of metal by way of shape makes the facade recognizable, but it’s still not human. IA anguille sous masque?

Pippa Garner’s Human Prototype is best described as a literal intersection of the modern body. A Barbie-esque character and a Black man sporting a fedora are forced into one corpus. The arm of an inscrutable third person serves as the head of the being, its hand clutching an iPhone. The creature is an eerie, cyborgian rendition of our technological reliance. In Human Prototype, the artificial implies plurality and multi-beingness; the extent to self-identity may not always know bounds. The culprit behind X says that he thinks we are already cyborgs. Jeffrey Deitch probably agreed with the statement a few decades before it was made.

Post Human is on view through January 18 @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, 925 N. Orange Drive

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Presents Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema and Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema delves into the essential role of color in cinema, featuring film clips, technological equipment, and objects, including the legendary ruby slippers designed by Gilbert Adrian from The Wizard of  Oz (1939), the green dress designed by Edith Head and worn by Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), a blue ensemble worn by Jamie Foxx as Django in Django Unchained (2012), and a Wonka chocolate bar from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) . Interactive installations invite visitors to engage with color in innovative ways. A comprehensive catalogue will accompany the exhibition, offering deeper insights into the legacy of color in film.

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema is curated by Senior Exhibitions Curator Jessica Niebel with Assistant Curator Sophia Serrano, Research Assistant Alexandra James Salichs, and former Curatorial Assistant Manouchka Kelly Labouba.

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema explores the global impact of the cyberpunk subgenre on film culture, showcasing iconic films like Blade Runner (1982), The Matrix (1999), and international titles such as Sleep Dealer (2008) and Akira (1988). At its core, an immersive installation will trace the genre's origins and its evolution into 21st-century themes like Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism. Visitors can also experience a mixed-reality (MR) installation, and the exhibition includes a catalogue with rare behind-the-scenes images and exclusive merchandise.

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema is curated by Vice President of Curatorial Affairs Doris Berger, with Assistant Curators Nicholas Barlow and Emily Rauber Rodriguez. 

 

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Photo by: Josh White, JWPictures ©Academy Museum Foundation

 

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema runs through July 13, 2025, and Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema runs through April 12, 2026.

The Academy Museum exhibition galleries and store are open six days a week from 10am to 6pm and are closed on Tuesdays.

In conjunction with the exhibition Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema, the Academy Museum proudly presents The Wonders of Technicolor, a screening series that celebrates the vibrant and indelible impact of Technicolor on Hollywood productions and audiences. From shaping narratives to evoking emotions, color transcends logic, resonating deeply with audiences. Introduced in the 1930s, Technicolor IV became the dominant color technology in Hollywood, defining the look of studio films with its crisp images and vibrant hues. This series highlights Technicolor's profound influence on filmmaking, showcasing its contributions to production design, costume, and cinematography, as seen in classics like Vertigo (1958) and Cabaret (1972).

Tickets to the Academy Museum are available only through advance online reservations via the Academy Museum’s website and mobile app.

Materiality is the Impetus of Perrotin's Pacific Abstractions in Los Angeles

text by Mia Milosevic

Materiality lays at the center of Perrotin’s Pacific Abstractions. The use of material fluctuates between artists, but the physicality of abstraction remains distinctly intact. 

Lee Bae uses five different forms of wood to construct his charcoal ink on paper. An ode to movement embodies the work, where motion is inextricable from risk. Each charcoal stroke is entirely reliant on the mobility of Lee’s artistic hand—no gray-hued ribbon is ever erased or redone. The movement of material is the final product. 

Naotaka Hiro’s corporeal paintings are imbued with a kind of where-the-wild-things-are sexual innuendo. The work’s technicalities deconstruct the body, and then reinstate it with a phallic abstraction that is just discernible enough to make the body knowable. Two perfect, symmetrical holes perforate the bottom of his Untitled (Uproar). These circular lesions mark the negative space the artist inserted his legs into as a processual requirement. The alteration of the canvas threatens prescribed limitations of material—Hiro’s anatomical segmenting shatters the fourth wall of space. 

Kazuo Kadonaga’s Wood No. 5 Cl is an intricately constructed log made from paper-thin slices of real wood. The veneer slicer he used to create these vellums pays homage to his upbringing in forestry. The trunk’s growth rings explicitly mimic the surreality of Earth’s extraordinary constructions, made with the caliber of precision and detail generally credited to the hands of the divine. Alas, we may come to question Kadonaga’s mortal statehood. The portrait of an axed tree excavates a visceral reaction: Should we mourn the losses wrought by Big Paper or must we instead celebrate post-natural invention? By virtue of materiality, reincarnation is imminent. 

Pacific Abstractions is on view through November 9 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W Pico Blvd

MSCHF Presents Art 2 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles

MSCHF presents Art 2, their latest exhibition and second solo show with Perrotin, which is being featured at their Los Angeles location. A compilation of some of their most prominent works, what stands most strikingly at the center of the gallery is the 2004 PT Cruiser which made its way across the United States. An understandable $19.99 could earn the average citizen rights to the car’s keys, prompting an all-american car chase which found its end in Truckee, California. MSCHF’s notorious, oversized shoes make a recurring appearance throughout the exhibition, which the product’s founders claim to “haunt the gallery.”

An Ikea-esque contraption stands assumingly amidst the chaos–it’s a sink made from standard hardware. One of the sink pieces was installed in the bathroom of the MET in New York City–so, MSCHF now has a permanent installation in one of the most renowned museums in the world. Lining one of the gallery walls are 249 copies of Picasso’s infamous La Poisson, which is a small wooden sculpture of a fish. The original stands among them, but the viewer may never know which one really laid in the hands of the great Spanish painter. Regardless, buyers receive an official bidding certificate which directly replicates the one MSCHF founders received when they successfully bid for the wooden object at a Christie’s auction. There’s no need to sue for copyright infringement. Near the entrance of the gallery is a Botero–once a portrait of a jarringly corpulent businessman has been visibly edited into a skinnier version. MSCHF retitled the work Ozempic (Botched Fumador de Cigarillos). 

Art 2 is on view through June 1 @ Perrotin, 5036 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles

John Valadez Extends the Chicano Arts Movement in Chaos Anime @ Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

ocean scene John Valadez chaos beach

John Valadez, Chaos, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

A trailblazer of the early Chicano Arts Movement in the 1970s and 80s, John Valadez’s work has come to define an iconography of Chicano experience in the city by catalyzing its changing dynamics and reconstructing a mythical allegory that speaks to an alternate vision. Through a multidisciplinary practice spanning 45 years, and encompassing documentary photography and portraiture, public murals, paintings, and pastel works, Valadez has cultivated a style that transcends genre designations. Never settling into one box, his work evokes a fluidity between multiple cultures and visual lexicons, effectively mirroring the unsettled experience of the Chicano identity. Valadez continues to pursue politically engaged work—a persistent voice championing generations of Chicano and Latinx communities.

John Valadez: Chaos Anime presents new paintings that address the shifting global dynamics and social climates facing new generations of Chicanos today, alongside recent works that revisit earlier themes. Together, the works exhibit the breadth of the artist’s social commentaries and further contextualize his lauded approach to painting. Drawing from current events, cultural histories, city life, and such experiences filtered through lucid dreaming, Valadez implements realism, mannerism, abstraction, and montage as a vehicle for allegory and satire to ignite a myriad of socio-political conversations. Themes of invisible borders, sublime skies, tempestuous seas, and juxtapositions between reality, dreams, and the natural world versus the consequences of human interferences, are but some of the constants throughout the trove of Valadez’s urban proverbs. A pivotal moment in Valadez’s new body of work is his extension of Chicano Movement principles, speaking to global matters of displacement, gentrification, economic disparities, famine, the environment, and geopolitics.

Chaos Anime is on view through June 8 @ Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, 1110 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

 
women at the beach John Valadez

John Valadez, Piernas Anime, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

 

Alina Perkins Eternalizes the Ephemeral in La Fiaca @ Fernberger

Alina Perkins, La Fiaca, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Fernberger.

Fernberger is currently presenting La Fiaca, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and a new installation by the multidisciplinary artist Alina Perkins. In her native Argentina, la fiaca is a term used to describe a blissful, nourishing idleness—an introspective pace and productive space that she embraces to pursue intellectual meditation and creative invention. Her resulting artworks are portals into alternate, though familiar, realities—resisting the literal and functional, welcoming the surreal and sensorial.

She layers her canvases with blurred, chalky brushstrokes in verdant shades of red, orange, green, and yellow, and dusty tones of purple, blue, ivory, and slate. Each painting portrays an ambiguous object, scene, or vista: an egg seated on a plush cushion, a knife pierced into a lush field, a book open to a blank page.

La Fiaca is on view through May 11 @ Fernberger, 747 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029

At the Edge of the Sun Is A Beautiful Amalgamation of Los Angeles' Many Faces @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Photo by Charles White.
Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.

At the Edge of the Sun is organized by an intimate constellation of twelve artists who have connected over the past decade through artistic discourse and shared experiences of living in Los Angeles. The exhibit convenes works informed by underground economies, California landscapes, night life, local histories, systemic architecture, surveillance, youth culture, public transportation, backyard kickbacks and more. At the Edge of the Sun collectivizes a nod to personal contexts and the artists’ sense of time and place, turning away from familiar mainstream stereotypes of Los Angeles in favor of embracing their own landmarks, memories, communities and visions of their city.

At the Edge of the Sun is on view through May 4 @ Jeffrey Deitch, 925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles

Izumi Kato's Not-Quite-Human Figures Are Apparitions of Coexistence in Perrotin's Inaugural Los Angeles Show

#6
Untitled, 2023

Photo by Kei Okano
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin ©2023 Izumi Kato

Perrotin inaugurates their new Los Angeles location with an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Izumi Kato.

Imagine, for a moment, that Izumi Kato’s figurative subjects have a life of their own. From the artist’s studio in Tokyo, his subjects have traversed the ocean, crossing the Pacific to emerge in Los Angeles. Making their way to Pico Boulevard, they appear utterly at home in Southern California—a place where one can encounter the extremes of both prehistoric geology and urban modernity, where tar pits coexist with gleaming new buildings, where eternal ocean cliffs abut concrete highway. These binaries of ancient and modern, geological and man-made, are dualities that also coexist in Kato’s work, making his exhibition a fitting choice for Perrotin’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.

Izumi Kato’s exhibition is on view through March 23 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Boulevard

A'Driane Nieves Dismantles the Policing of Emotionality in self-evident truths @ VSF in Los Angeles

A'Driane Nieves, a new world is still possible (so hold onto your radical imagination), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles / Dallas / Seoul. Photo credit: Julia Gillard.

A’Driane Nieves’ debut exhibition at VSF, self-evident truths. Combining paintings on canvas and paper with new explorations in neon and audio installation, this ambitious exhibition is also Nieves’ first on the West Coast.

Nieves’ dynamic gestural abstractions extend from a writing practice and the therapeutic potential of movement, composition, and color. A self-taught painter of over a decade, Nieves began making work after a therapist suggested painting might be a somatic path through which the artist could move to overcome the impacts of childhood abuse, particularly emotional suppression. In spite of, or perhaps because of the weightiness of this genesis, Nieves’ paintings often carry an energy of joyful, empowered liberation.

self-evident truths is a wry play on the US Constitution’s famous refrain (“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...), she asks “whose truths?, self-evident to whom?”

self-evident truths is on view through April 6 @ VSF, 812 N Highland Ave. Los Angeles

The Incarnation of Desire is Brought to You by A Tender Limb @ Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles

 

Image courtesy of Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.

 

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting A Tender Limb, a group exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based artists Ibuki Kuramochi, Marley White, and Allison Arkush. The exhibition includes prints and a sculptural video installation by Kuramochi; mixed-technique and metal sculptures by White; and, mixed-media and ceramic pieces by Arkush.

Recontextualizing ‘everyday' interactions with items, furnitures, images, screens, trinkets, skins, figments, tangles, tools, morsels and other abeyant entities that congeal or contract as soon as someone looks (away), the exhibition asks how bodies make-room for objects through desire and affection—through taste. But it also asks how conditioned desires, affections, and tastes for objects make-room for (specific types of) bodies.

A Tender Limb is on view through February 24 @ Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, 2680 South La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034

 
 

Time is Stretched Through Muted Tones in Happy Phantom @ Lowell Ryan Projects in Los Angeles

 

Erin Trefry, Causeway across the sea, 2024. Images by Charles White at JWPictures.com, courtesy of the artist and Lowell Ryan Projects.

 

Lowell Ryan Projects presents Happy Phantom, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Erin Trefry. Comprised of a series of eleven figurative paintings in muted tones, Trefry continues her exploration of sentiment, time, and figuration particularly in relation to familial narratives and relationships.

In this exhibition, Trefry presents her great-grandmother’s paintings, which were originally created in the late 19th century, and depict figurative scenes of romantic settings, exotic locales, and fantastical narratives. These works were passed down through the generations eventually landing in Trefry’s possession. In Happy Phantom Trefry subverts the imagery of her late relative, the paintings are presented stretched in reverse so that the viewer is only able to see the backside of the works where the paint has bled through the fabric. Behind the paintings, a layer of muslin conceals the surfaces of the original paintings.

Happy Phantom is on view through March 2 @ Lowell Ryan Projects, 4619 W Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90016

Feel the Out-of-Body in Disembodied @ Nicodim in Los Angeles

Installation view of DISEMBODIED. Image courtesy of Nicodim.

Isabelle Albuquerque / Liang Fu / Shana Hoehn / Rae Klein / Agnieszka Nienartowicz / James Owens / Daniel Pitín / Qian Qian / Nicola Samorì

Curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

DISEMBODIED builds and continues conversations around the violence, ecstasy, and epiphany within out-out-body experiences as-seen from the perspective of those on the ground—the leaps of faith we take to believe those who say their souls depart while their bodies remain. The works in the exhibition cover a wide swath of allegorical and tangible disembodied states, including the spiritual, the telegraphic, the psychedelic, the dissociative-induced, artificial intelligences, and alien encounters.

DISEMBODIED is on view through February 17 @ Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

The Human Body and the Corpus of Los Angeles Intertwine in Catherine Opie's harmony is fraught @ Regen Projects

105 Freeway in harmony is fraught by Catherine Opie in Los Angeles

Catherine Opie, 105 Freeway, 1994, 1994/2024 © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie’s eleventh exhibition with Regen Projects, harmony is fraught presents over sixty photographs never shown publicly before, drawn from over thirty years of making pictures in and of Los Angeles. We see a deeply singular diary of Opie’s world—especially her early years as an emerging artist in the 1990s—intertwined with the complex public life of the city she made her home, from its signature freeways and landmarks, like the Hollywood sign, to scenes of activism and surfers at the beach. Together, they collectively trace a profoundly personal story, as well as the evolving drama and common grandeur of Los Angeles itself, a singular assembly of constructions, conflicts, and communities.

 
 

Installed in carefully considered constellations, photographs of freeways and bridges connect and encircle images of more private destinations, portraits of intimates, and telling interiors. Opie likens the literal, tender, resilient human body to the great corpus of the mutable city, always growing, aging, breaking, standing firm—another body with its own queer logic. Curiously, despite the quarter of a century or more that separates us from the moment of their making, many of these images seem to proffer the same city we know now. Likewise, we see subjects yearning for many of the same suspended desires or imperiled freedoms we seek today, evidencing a constancy (or stasis) that can be both touching and deeply unsettling.

harmony is fraught is on view through March 3 @ Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles

Nike Women Celebrates Style, Self-Expression and Movement for Her in Los Angeles

Nike Women’s Stud Country Event. Image by Simone Niamani Thompson.

Nike Women hosted a weekend imbued with innovative movement and style as an homage to the power that can be derived from community-focused experiences.

On Friday, December 8, Nike Women hosted an intimate dance class with Stud Country at The Paramour Estate. Guests were encouraged to hit the dance floor wearing pieces from Nike’s holiday 2023 collection, selected by stylist Keyla Marquez, paired with favorite pieces from their closet. Stud Country was born from the legacy of queer dance spaces and honors the rich history of LGBTQ cowboy culture.

The next day, on Saturday, December 9, Nike hosted a day-long immersive experience called Nike Style Studios Neuehouse West Hollywood. Hosted by world renowned talent such as Honey Balenciaga, Sienna Lalau, Storm DeBarge and Courtni Poe, guests participated in a range of unique workshops that inspire different forms of self-expression through style, dance, creativity, and community. 

Nike Women celebrated the power of community in Los Angeles with this special weekend of programming that honors a new era of democratized fashion, prioritizing style, self-expression and movement.

 

Stud Country Portraits by Carlos Eric Lopez.

 

Caitlin Cherry Centers Black Femininity as Her Muse in Womanizer @ The Hole in Los Angeles

Caitlin Cherry, Lilphantoms (A Hot Summer Night at Crypto.com Arena), 2023. Image courtesy of The Hole.

Caitlin Cherry’sWomanizer is the artist’s second solo exhibition with The Hole. Through painting, sculpture and installation, Cherry creates a personal archive of Black popular culture on the internet by centering femme entertainers as her muses. Composed of celebrities from online image banks like Getty Images as well as sex workers, drag queens and social media influencers, these eight paintings depict popular radical aesthetics within the global Black diaspora. Through a simulated moiré pattern system, Cherry is able to recreate the phenomena of the viewing Black women through a computer screen in order to express how contemporary Black femininity is co-produced by technology.

Womanizer is on view through December 30 @ The Hole, 844 N La Brea Ave Los Angeles CA 90038

Hugh Hayden Examines the Prosthetics of Power in Hughman @ Lisson Gallery

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

Upon entering Hugh Hayden’s Hughman exhibition at Lisson Los Angeles, you’re confronted by three interconnected rows of metallic stall doors, the same as you might find in a public restroom. The doors simultaneously invite you toward entry and expel you, intriguing as they are impersonal and ominous. Before you glimpse an object resembling art, you’re implicated in the hidden meaning, an active participant in its revelation. You’re immediately made aware of the physicality of your body, your relationship to the space, and the identity you present to the unknown system of order. Questions arise: Is this a gendered bathroom? Do I belong here? Who am I sharing the space with? The interactive element of opening and closing each door, maneuvering in, out, and between the confined, private spaces, renders engaging from a disembodied perspective nearly impossible. As the exhibition's title implies, there’s no leaving one’s hughmanity at the door.  

My initial impression of imposition and interest follows me into the first stall, where a carved commode sprouts a bramble of thorny fir tree branches. The protrusion of sharp limbs obstructs further inspection; the effect is claustrophobic and disconcerting, and I back out cautiously. Behind the next door, a baby’s crib constructed from barbed wire and chain link fencing; behind another, interlocking wedding rings with Descovy pills [HIV antiviral] where the solitaire would be; and behind yet another, a classroom desk consumed entirely by abrasive white nylon bristles. Each object offers participation in a facet of contemporary American life under conditions as unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and caustic as the specular toilet seat. 

The visceral materiality of the various textures, though not physically touched, commandeer the senses as the bristles scrape, the barbs prick, and the branches snag against your skin. Prongs, spurs, and skewers disrupt movement and threaten physical confrontation while also poking metaphorical holes in expectations and illusions. Here, the most fundamental promises of the American dream, like the right to an education, are rendered onerous, animating the question: for whom were these institutions made? If the skin you’re in determines your experience, and the object's surface or skin reflects the relative ease or distress of the encounter, then certainly not for the artist, a Black queer man, and by association, those like him. 

Hugh Hayden
Cleanse, 2023
High density polyethylene bristles, cast resin
66 x 38.1 x 35.6 cm
26 x 15 x 14 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Start 'Em Young, 2023
Chain link fencing and hardware
142.9 x 141 x 81.3 cm
56 1/4 x 55 1/2 x 32 in

© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Brainwash, 2023
PVC and nylon bristles
83.8 x 66 x 73.7 cm
33 x 26 x 29 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 
 

As I continued around the room, the stalls began to feel more like dressing rooms with various identities available for perusal inside. Within one, a suit jacket and pants sewn from the rough and rigid bark of a cherry tree hang from a clothing rack. Elsewhere: a football helmet encompassed by boar hair, and still elsewhere: a bronze strap-on harness with a gun protruding from the crotch. The striking contrast between organic materials and those that are artificial and mass-produced recalls the antagonistic relationship between what’s natural and instinctual and what’s a consequence of sociopolitical structures. For whom are these spaces made? 

Those capable of comfortably wearing the prosthetics of power appear as idealized, neoclassical male torsos carved from white silicone. They wear their means for control where their sex would be; for two, cocked pistols; for another, an abject skyscraper. A fourth iteration sees the male body replaced by a miniature basswood model church whose phallic steeple hangs limply across the shingled roof. In a nod to the dominant enterprise in Los Angeles, a director’s chair projects tapered wood penises in every direction. The appendages appear to both protect the seat of power and stage an assault on the unendowed who come too close. Their audacious vulgarity tempers the violence of the cultural implications and satirizes familiar tropes like toxic masculinity and the male impulse to think with an organ south of the brain.  

When that door closes with a bang—emphasized by the acoustics of the room and made ominous by the presence of so many firearms—another door opens onto a bronze and acrylic sculpture of the waist and thighs of a man in navy uniform pants sporting a flashy leather belt, holstered gun, and handcuffs posed atop his white pedestal. Only when you move around the sculpture or are so moved by it do you see where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me. The man is twinned by another sculpture in the exhibition of a tree trunk spliced open to expose the biological contents of a womb carrying a luminous carved baby. 

Hugh Hayden
Real Tree, 2023
Cherry bark on Zegna Suit
Suit: 99.1 x 91.4 x 17.8 cm
Suit: 39 x 36 x 7 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Eve, 2023
Cherry Bark and acrylic on resin, Black Walnut
63.5 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
25 x 15 x 10 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Their combined effect illuminates how stripped of societal status, we are of the same nature and origin and made from the same stuff. As intricately connected to one another as we are to the trees, the earth from which the trees grow, and the animals, like the stuffed buffalo in another stall, roam. Hanging together in a red-flocked closet, two raceless, genderless, crimson rib cages tenderly embrace—as the only forms made from material gentle enough to hold and be held. The fellow feeling carries me out of the closet, the stall, the gallery, and I re-enter the world a little more human than I was only an hour before.

Hughman is on view through January 13 @ Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, Los Angeles

 

Hugh Hayden
The Audition, 2023
Bald cypress, steel hardware and canvas
149.9 x 188 x 154.9 cm
59 x 74 x 61 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 

Ewa Juszkiewicz Subverts Historical Conventions through Pictorial Invention for In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water @ Gagosian

Ewa Juszkiewicz's In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

Installation view © Ewa Juszkiewicz. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

Gagosian presents In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water, an exhibition of new paintings by Ewa Juszkiewicz in Beverly Hills. This is Juszkiewicz’s first solo exhibition in California and her second with the gallery, following In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow in New York (2020–21).

Juszkiewicz’s oil paintings of women begin with historical portraits, appropriating their style while subverting their conventions through fantastical and discomforting pictorial interventions. Emulating representations of women painted in the Grand Manner style popular in Western art from the eighteenth through the early nineteenth century, she re-creates the poses, fashion, and settings of her sources while transforming their scales and palettes and adding details that point to the artifice of femininity’s stereotypical markers.

In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water is on view through December 22 @ Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills

 
 

Ken Gun Min Fuses a Cosmopolitan Personal History with Lush, Floral Landscapes in Sweet Discipline from Koreatown @ Shulamit Nazarian

Ken Gun Min presents Sweet Discipline from Koreatown at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles

Images courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian

Shulamit Nazarian presents Sweet Discipline from Koreatown, an exhibition of new works by Ken Gun Min. In the artist’s newest paintings, lush, floral landscapes and sensitively rendered, imaginative portraits are adorned with beads and embroidery. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Min has led a global existence, moving from Zurich and Berlin to San Francisco before eventually settling in Los Angeles's Koreatown. This cosmopolitan personal history informs the social and political narratives of Min's work, which explores emotion, otherness, and an intimate connection to place.

The paintings in this exhibition exemplify Min's intersectional engagement with the nuances of queer experience as an Asian man and his deeply personal approach to often unexplored social spaces and histories. Yet even as he mines his own feelings and experiences, Min pulls a wide range of references and associations into the work to consider the ways that power, race, and sexuality play into both local and global geopolitics. Certain works reference the history of conflict between Asia and Europe, the dynamic history of relations between different minority groups in urban conflicts, and the intersection of sexual and racial prejudice. By exploring stories that span contemporary reality and earlier historical moments, the paintings expand outward from Min's personal journey through Los Angeles to address the sublime encounter of splendor and darkness in the human experience.

Sweet Discipline from Koreatown is on view through December 20 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N. La Brea Avenue Los Angeles CA

Allison Katz Creates a Cosmos of Disparate Images in Westward Ho! @ Hauser & Wirth

 

Allison Katz, Truth, 2023.

 

In ‘Westward Ho!’ Allison Katz creates a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, her own past, and the coincidences that gather around her. The title firmly locates us, with tongue-in-cheek undertones, inside Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, California. It was Katz’s specific request to exhibit here, in a desire to engage with its associated cultural mythologies: ‘Hollywood is a big picture and I should like to know what it means to walk the walk, or drive the drive, of the Pacific coast, with its last–resort, up to the edge, atomized light...if this is the birthplace of the silver screen, then it’s a chance to test out painting’s irrefutable material and impure surface, its porous consciousness...’ The title blends historical and literary allusions, tracing back originally to the calls made by Elizabethan ferryman as they navigated the River Thames in search of passengers. As Katz writes: ‘I’m using Westward Ho! as a call out, a whoop of exuberance, a question hollered across time and tradition to see who and what answers, as if to test the idea that painting is a conversation.’

 

Allison Katz, Sheepish, 2023.

 

Throughout the exhibition Katz deploys a constantly evolving set of techniques and source materials. Echoes, rhymes and serendipities erupt; meaning is reordered and unexpected genealogies converge. ‘West’ is the neighborhood in which the gallery is located, the direction Katz’s apartment faces in London, a catch-all term for a geopolitical system in the midst of being challenged, and an alias for the pastoral patch of English countryside where she worked in residence (the West Country). While preparing for the exhibition she also visited the ruins of Pompeii (in the context of the institutional program Pompeii Commitment), where the discovery of wall paintings buried under ash continues to play a central role in the origin story of Western figuration.

Allison Katz, Sleeping and Weeping in the Fourth Style, 2023.

Westward Ho! is on view through January 5 @ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood CA 90069