Kate Crawford & Trevor Paglen: Training Humans @ Osservatorio Fondazione Prada In Milan

Training Humans, conceived by Kate Crawford, AI researcher and professor, and Trevor Paglen, artist and researcher, is the first major photography exhibition devoted to training images: the collections of photos used by scientists to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems in how to “see” and categorize the world.

In this exhibition, Crawford and Paglen reveal the evolution of training image sets from the 1960s to today. As stated by Trevor Paglen, “when we first started conceptualizing this exhibition over two years ago, we wanted to tell a story about the history of images used to ‘recognize’ humans in computer vision and AI systems. We weren’t interested in either the hyped, marketing version of AI nor the tales of dystopian robot futures.” Kate Crawford observed, “We wanted to engage with the materiality of AI, and to take those everyday images seriously as a part of a rapidly evolving machinic visual culture. That required us to open up the black boxes and look at how these ‘engines of seeing’ currently operate”. Training Humans is on view through February 24 2020 at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 20121 Milano

Group Exhibition: Dark Fantasy @ UTA Artist Space In Beverly Hills

Based on the concept of Archeofuturism, which focuses on excavating forms of the past in order to shape future narratives of design, Dark Fantasy guides the viewer through a whimsical world of the fantastic and the obscure, questioning the constraints of reality and what it means to dream. By highlighting advanced techniques, traditional master craft, and new technology, Dark Fantasy brings to life organic and telluric forms that allude to bygone eras of production. The exhibition explores over a decade of functional art from 24 artists from Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s program, creating a dialogue between space, time and contemporary archeology.

The exhibition features over fifty pieces by Virgil Abloh, Atelier Van Lieshout, Maarten Baas, Aldo Bakker, Sebastian Brajkovic, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Nacho Carbonell, Wendell Castle, Vincenzo De Cotiis, Ingrid Donat, Vincent Dubourg, Najla El Zein, Kendell Geers, Steven Haulenbeek, Anton Hendrik Denys, Kostas Lambridis, Mathieu Lehanneur, Frederik Molenschot, Rick Owens, Random International, Robert Stadler, Studio Drift, Charles Trevelyan, and Verhoeven Twins. Dark Fantasy is on view through November 16 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, California

Tatsumi Hijikata & Eikoh Hosoe: Collaborations With Tatsumi Hijikata @ Nonaka-Hill In Los Angeles

As Japan urbanized in the economic boom period in the decades following WWII, Hosoe felt a growing sense of urgency to revisit the rural Tohoku region where he had been evacuated as a child to escape Tokyo air-raids.  The photographer enlisted dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who is from the same Tohoku region, to enact the "sickle-toothed weasel", a vicious god of local folklore and a threat that terrorized the young displaced Hosoe, who also associates his time in that region with an innocent happiness within an otherwise dark period.  Hosoe said:

“In the village, he played with children, was laughed at by farmers along the roadside, shat in the middle of a field, attacked a bride, kidnapped a baby, and ran through the rural landscape. Almost all the shooting was done guerrilla style in a flash. This was something that could only be achieved through photography. No other medium — film, television, painting, or novel — could have been used in its place. At that moment, I was certain of the superiority of photography.” - Eikoh Hosoe, “Foreword” in Kamaitachi 1. Eikoh Hosoe: Collaborations With Tatsumi Hijikata is on view through November 30 at Nonaka-Hill 720 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles

The Pleasure Ground: Matt Savitsky Presents Two Video Installations @ Cloaca Projects In San Francisco

Matt Savitsky’s new installation, ​The Pleasure Ground​, contains two video installations Savitsky conceived this year while on a self-created residency in his hometown (Lancaster, Pennsylvania). ​Crop Circles​ and ​Turn Bridge​ (2019) construct viewpoints by way of a fixed configuration between a sculptural element to a single camera. In both video images a disconcerting interplay of figure and ground is produced by the movement of each sculptural device relative to the camera’s position, which turns each in a continuous 360 degree rotation. Before becoming video objects, the images prompt a deconstruction of their viewpoint into a relationship defined by the coexistence of subject, object, and support.

The Pleasure Ground is on view through October 26 @ Cloaca Projects 1460 Davidson Avenue San Francisco. photographs by Andreas Tagger

Chris Hood Presents PARA @ Praz Delavallade in Los Angeles

Drawn from an archive of personal photographs, self-portraits, advertising imagery and anatomical studies, the figures that Hood paints seem to be in a trancelike state — dreaming, sleepwalking, or hypnotized — suggesting that the disparate images that make up the compositions may be organized by dream logic or governed by a series of undetermined associations. With “portal” vignettes of sunsets, caves, and mountains, the paintings create a telescopic sensation of simultaneous depth and flatness. These sly structural allusions to the devices of artificial perspective act in constant tension by disorienting interpenetrations of layered images and the flatness of the stained surface. Their chief interest is in the complication and the relinquishment of boundaries: between the individual and the archetypal; media and medium; the subjective and the collective; the front and the back of the canvas. What may appear as collage is revealed to be a collision, with the picture plane serving as an interface between the image and the imagined.

PARA is on view through November 9 at Praz Delavallade 6150 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90048. photographs by Marten Elder, courtesy of the gallery

Zoe Buckman: Heavy Rag @ Fort Gansevoort In New York

Zoe Buckman’s solo show is explicitly linked to women’s work. Culled from deeply personal experience, the exhibition embraces the domestic archetype by balancing an ambiguity between vulnerability and strength. Occupying the three floors of the gallery, the bodies of work are interconnected by the manifestation of the artist’s relationship to physical spaces—the home, her mother’s kitchen table, the boxing gym. After learning of her mother’s terminal diagnosis, Buckman began to employ a variety of techniques and materials traditionally adorned by women; embroidered tea towels, quilting and pottery. The works which take form as misshapen tea cups, clusters of boxing gloves, and framed flatworks are intrinsically referential to the bodily form; all at once unveiling a complex dichotomy of trauma and pleasure and the slippage in between. Heavy Rag is on view through October 12 at Fort Gansevoort 5 Ninth Avenue, New York. photographs courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York

Naudline Pierre: For I Am With You Until the End of Time @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

I Am With You Until the End of Time is an exhibition of works that range in scale from the intimate to the monumental by Brooklyn-based Naudline Pierre. Her paintings and works on paper serve as portals into a mysterious world. Informed by her religious upbringing, Pierre’s works conflate the aesthetics of centuries-old traditions found in Western art history with the artist’s personal narrative. I Am With You Until the End of Time is on view through October 26 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Stephen Prina: English For Foreigners (Abridged) @ Petzel In New York

English for Foreigners (abridged) isolates two sections of a project—a portfolio of lithographs and the listening station with soundtrack—for its New York première. The lithographs feature all of the illustrations from Second Book in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools by Frederick Houghton (American Book Company, 1917), a book passed down to the artist from his father. The soundtrack is comprised of covers of preexisting compositions, arranged and performed by the artist for vocal and guitar, with the assistance from a clarinetist, including an instrumental version of “Giovinezza,” or “Youth,” the anthem of the Italian Fascist Party, with the clarinet—the father’s instrument in the village band—as solo instrument; “Bella Ciao,” the Italian Resistance anthem, and “Sabato Sera,” a then-current, hit single by Bruno Filippini that was gifted to the artist by his parents in 1964 upon their return from their first trip to Italy together and the first his father made since his emigration in 1923. In addition, the artist has composed a song, the lyrics of which are guided by notes and annotations his father inscribed in his copy of Second Book in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools. English for Foreigners (abridged) is on view through October 26 at Petzel 35 E 67th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Rebecca Morgan: Town And Country @ Asya Geisberg Gallery In New York

Rebecca Morgan: "Town and Country" shows the extent of Morgan's achievement in painting, with forays into printmaking and brass sculpture, new endeavors for the artist. With archly symbolic portraits and complex scenes, Morgan weaves a grand narrative of gendered subversion buttressed by broader societal scale. Morgan's characters straddle both the timelessness of morality tales, and the specific moment that we find ourselves in - redefining gender relations and reviewing historical representations in works from John Hughes movies, to stylized exemplars like Rubens and Fragonard, to Norman Rockwell's foundational Americana lore. While always emanating from a contemporary socio-political yet diaristic lens, Morgan's works now chart a wider continuum of referents. Archetypal characters strain against their roles, undermine fabricated notions of romance, and confront the hollowness and fear behind current masculinity, with both levity and tension. Town and Country is on view though November 2 at Asya Geisberg Gallery 537b West 23rd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Raven Halfmoon: The New Native @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Halfmoon creates powerful, often large-scale ceramic sculptures that speak to the artist’s identity as both a citizen of the Caddo Nation and as a woman. The Caddo people are renowned for ancient ceramics, with this in mind, Halfmoon utilizes the medium as a way to represent Caddo people in today’s society. Continuing a legacy of craft and clay, Halfmoon also secures her place within that tradition and cultural history. By excavating her past, as well as the history of her tribe, Halfmoon addresses the ever-relevant, but often forgotten, story of “the other,” but also the provocative questions of cultural appropriation that haunt contemporary society. Raven Halfmoon is on view through October 26 at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lenz Geerk: Mixed Blessings @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Lenz Geerk is a figurative painter whose subjects of portraits, landscapes and still-lifes are portrayed in exceptional intensity and luminosity.He manipulates traditional techniques to bring distinct render to every figure through soft acrylic color. The nearly monochromatic palettes, only occasionally warmed by other colors, add an aura of heightened emotional tension. Geerk’s new series is an insightful examination into the undercurrent of the threat, uncertainty, and fear of the current day. Unlike “The Table Portraits”, Geerk’s first solo show with the gallery, there is no formal link between the individual works of this show. What ultimately connects the works on view is an underlying feeling of domestic suspense, fueled by an unsettling lack of faith in larger institutions. Mixed Blessings is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Celeste Rapone: Future Amateur @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Through her paintings, Celeste Rapone invokes the willing suspension of disbelief and the engagement of suspicion aligned along particular interests or ideas communicated to us by the characters she portrays. Initially conceived as coping mechanisms for a future as a failed painter, Rapone’s portraits now tap into consequences of exposure: humiliation, vulnerability, self-doubt and self-deprivation. Her autobiographical characters –most often women–are proxies to her discomfort felt at new ideas and approaches, the doubt in her own representation and object-making, her inability to mediate attention once exposed to it, and the abstract possibilities opened up and emphasized by these failures. Future Amateur is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Richard Serra: Forged Rounds @ Gagosian In New York

Photo: Silke von Berswordt. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

Four new works from Richard Serra’s Rounds series fills the entire West 24th Street gallery. Each forged steel sculpture is composed of multiple -ton elements of differing diameters and heights. Bisecting the West st Street gallery space will be Reverse Curve, a sculpture measuring feet long and feet high. Originally conceived in for a public project in Reggio Emilia, Italy, Reverse Curve is finally being realized for the first time. In conjunction with these exhibitions, Gagosian and Anthology Film Archives will present a three day retrospective of Serra’s films and videos from October 17 through 19, drawn from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Joan Jonas, and Stiftung Situation Kunst. This is the first time that all of the artist’s film and video work will be shown together. The screening on October will be followed by a panel discussion between curators Søren Grammel, Chrissie Iles, and Jeffrey Weiss, moderated by art historian Benjamin Buchloh. Additional screenings of the full program will take place on October 20 and 23. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Julian Rose. Forged Rounds is on view through December 17 at Gagosian 555 West 24th Street, New York.

Hannah Greely: Busy Box @ Parker Gallery In Los Angeles

Hannah Greely is known for her imaginative sculptures of commonplace objects that teeter on the edge of the absurd, the artist’s works are simultaneously imbued with a sense of ambiguity and humor, fantasy and reality. At turns uncanny and surreal, Greely’s subjects are both of and outside of this world. For this exhibition, the artist has created a colorful environment in which distinct works can be read in a loose narrative. Among the works on view are a standalone door, whose knobs, hinges, nails, and accessories are inlaid into the surface, denying the structure its traditional functionality. Elsewhere, suggestions of the home and built environment are echoed in a tabletop vase with flowers and wilted tools. Here, the vase becomes a domestic toolbox in which all elements playfully conform to the logic of plant life. Parker Gallery is open Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm and by appointment. photographs courtesy of Parker Gallery

Irving Marcus: Works from the 1980s @ Parker Gallery In Los Angeles

Works from the 1980s includes large-scale paintings from the early 1980s, together with graphite and oil pastel drawings. This body of work represents a crucial development in Marcus’s practice. In these works, the artist combined photographs from multiple newspapers to create a composite image, oftentimes flipping the images upside down to construct vertiginous and enigmatic compositions. Parker Gallery is open Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm and by appointment. photographs courtesy of Parker Gallery

COS and Margaret Qualley celebrate L.A. Dance Project's L.A. Dances

Over the weekend, COS partnered with LA Dance Project on the launch of their Fall festival “L.A. Dances”, celebrating the future of dance in LA. The evening started with a showcase of three performances from the festival at the LADP Theater in Downtown LA. One of these pieces – “Adagio in B Minor” - was choreographed by LADP principal dancer Janie Taylor, and featured costumes by COS. The performances were followed by an after party “L’After”, hosted by LADP’s Creative Director/Founder Benjamin Millepied and actress Margaret Qualley. Photos by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for COS

Gus Van Sant: Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard @ Vito Schnabel Projects In New York

Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard is Van Sant’s first solo painting exhibition in New York. On view is a series of large-scale watercolors on stretched linen that collapse dreamlike impressions of urban Los Angeles with specific narratives inspired by the people and events Van Sant has observed since establishing his home in the city in the 1970s. Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard is on view through November 1 at Vito Schnabel Projects 43 Clarkson Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Vito Schnabel Projects

Charles Gaines : ‘Palm Trees and Other Works’ @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

Charles Gaines : ‘Palm Trees and Other Works’ debuts new works from his signature Gridworks series. Employing native trees from Palm Canyon near Palm Springs, these luminous works have evolved from Gaines’s rigorous application of his numbered systems – a process central to an esteemed, decades-long practice that interrogates the relationship between the object and its subjective realms. Gaines will also present a new series of watercolors based on assorted trees as well as ‘Manifestos 3’ (2018), the latest contribution to a series from which earlier examples reside in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Palm Trees and Other Works is on view through 5 January 2020 at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Theaster Gates : Line Drawing For Shirt And Cloak @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Line Drawing for Shirt and Cloak presents a complex reflection on desire, consumption and surrender using contemporary activations of the storefront as a vehicle for expressing both emotional and aesthetic intent. With a highly honed metal strategy and the artist’s entire wardrobe, this multi-faceted installation represents a conscious movement toward the freedom found when one’s appetite and the world’s insistence asks for everything, and a moment of clearing when emotive freedom is found. Line Drawing for Shirt and Cloak is on view through November 2 at Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Regen Projects

Daniel Boccato & Loup Sarion: Cannibal Valley @ M+B In Los Angeles

Cannibal Valley brings together the sculptural objects of Loup Sarion and Daniel Boccato, united by the artists’ collaborative friendship and interest in abstract figurative forms.

On view in the first room are Sarion’s oversized wall-mounted tongues, made of fiberglass and coated with a mixture of resin and pigment. The tongues protrude from a fence of plywood boards that line the walls, which give a skin, an epidermis to the space. Sarion gives careful consideration to material surface and color for each tongue, offering a painterly topography of abstract patches and spots. Each one exclaims its ties to the visceral body as well as to the intimacy of language; a tongue is the thing that determines fundamental differences in taste and is the organ with which we speak, love, kiss and experience sensuality.


Also on view are new works from Daniel Boccato’s faceworks series—wall-mounted, monochromatic sculptures of caricatured expressions. The resulting shapes are made from molds using commonplace materials such as cardboard, sticky tape and tarp, and then cast in epoxy, fiberglass and resin. Their contours and lines suggest cartoon-like faces, with the surfaces bearing wrinkles and protrusions. These works appeal and call attention to one’s tendency to anthropomorphize objects and patterns, and to the dissonance that occurs when trying to register fragmented facial parts. Exploring the relationship between abstraction and figuration, they challenge the spectator's impulses to label, declare, categorize and differentiate.Cannibal Valley is on view through November 9 at M+B 612 North Almont Drive Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of M+B