Emily Ferguson Puts Her Spin on Andersen's Red Shoes @ Half Gallery In Los Angeles

top: Cecile Tulkens
skirt: Mugler couture


photography by Maddy Rotman
styling by Grace Dougherty
hair and makeup by Lilly Pollan


Figures swathed in ribbons as though wrapped in a breeze or a melody, Emily Ferguson borrows from music, cinema, art history and her own biography for this latest exhibition in Los Angeles. The title track of the show is a heavily chiarascuro-ed underpainting capturing an adolescent moment of exuberance, a feeling echoed in “Dancer” albeit a more specified form of activation. The painter had recently rewatched the 1948 movie Red Shoes based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and decided to put her pirouette on this ballet narrative. In real life, Emily considers herself more of a tomboy and likes that her femininity finds a release in these compositions. “Adorned” explores this tension with a young woman sporting a decidedly butch flight cap in the style of Amelia Earhart, but specked with tiny colorful bows, a direct reference to the artists late grandmother who was a seamstress. Perhaps the North Star of the exhibition is a self-portrait done in the style of Alice Neel’s famous nude: a repose of empowerment and vulnerability. 

 
 

dress: Norma Kamali
tights: Falke
shoes: St. John

Eleanor Antin Presents "Time's Arrow" @ LACMA In Los Angeles

Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) is one of the most important artists of her generation and a pioneer of performance and conceptual art in Southern California. In 1972, she challenged definitions of sculpture, self-portraiture, photographic documentation, and performance with CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture. Consisting of 148 black-and-white photographs, CARVING shows the transformation of Antin’s body as she lost 10 pounds over 37 days. Eleanor Antin: Time's Arrow brings together both CARVING series, a new self-portrait, and a related serial work from the 1970s, provoking reflection on discipline, vulnerability, and the passage of time. Time's Arrow is on view through July 28 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

New Museum Presents "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel" The First American Survey Of The Artist's Oeuvre

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, she has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into disorienting, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. This presentation, which takes place across the three main floors of the New Museum, brings together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of Surrealism—from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the absurd.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period, which reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never before been shown together in the US. Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car’s back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete.

Au Naturel is on view through January 20, 2019 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, 10002. photographs by Adam Lehrer