Agnes? has made waves in London with her most recent exhibition, Transgenesis. Spending twenty-three consecutive days in the abandoned Belsize Park leisure centre, performing for eight hours straight, Agnes? has welcomed visitors to watch in awe as we see her transform into a larger-than-life, human-octopus creature, a form that symbolizes both life and death. Transgenesis, meaning one or more DNA sequences from another species being introduced by artificial means, is explored by Agnes? through her experience of transitioning from male to female. Since beginning her transition, Agnes? has explored the symbolic connotations behind water and its relationship to her experiences of ‘mutating’ from one being to another, using the liquid to wash down her hormone drugs, an action that is simultaneously transformative and destructive all in one swallow. Read more.
Read A Conversation Between Ferrari Sheppard & Michèle Lamy On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ UTA Artist Space →
Ferrari Sheppard is an enigmatic, multi-disciplinary artist whose practice defies classification, and lives firmly at the center of a three-dimensional venn diagram. Likewise, the work of Michèle Lamy is as fluid and instinctive as it is crystallized in her unmistakable and ever-expansive character. She is not just a maven of fashion, design, and art, or an innovator of music and former restaurateur. She is a cultivator of community and expression. Sheppard is not just a painter, writer, photographer and music producer. He is an activist who has worked to provide relief aid in Haiti, shape economic policy and development in South Africa, and shine light on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes perfect sense that the two of them would fortuitously meet at Mr. Chow’s while stepping outside for a cigarette. Sheppard’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, Positions of Power, at UTA Artist Space is a testament to the mistreatment of a generation for profit by the criminal justice system. They are love letters to those who carried the weight of the “war on drugs” and risked it all in pursuit of freedom in the United States. Their structural composition is the result of an almost unconscious, improvised dance. A process that the artist refers to as “walking while painting.” The figures are laid heavy with dark brown and black pigments that visibly absorb light, and are gilded with a reflective gold trim, creating a balance that feels harmonious and befitting. At the center of the gallery’s main space lies a brutalist, three-pronged elmwood bench of mythical giant proportions. A place to put everything down and spend some time with the work. A creation that could only come from the collective minds of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens. And the perfect place for these two chameleonic masters of material, sound, and ceremony to discuss their work. Read more.
The Parapsychic Sculptor: Read Our Interview Of Corin Johnson →
Artist Corin Johnson has spent over thirty years traversing the art world with his exceptional stonemasonry and wood carving craftsmanship. Corin has collaborated with some of the world's most renowned visual artists including Paul Noble, as well as focusing on his own practice (which includes drawing, modeling, and unique stone, marble, and wood carvings), the work is varied with a unique and colorful story behind each piece. Recently, he has found himself locked down in his studio with the musically-acclaimed Nick Cave. They met in the ‘90s when the musician reached out having seen a bust of himself created by Johnson; a commission by a Cave fanatic. During lockdown, the duo have formed a creative bond and partnership. Read more.
Read Our Interview Of Artist Jordan Eagles Who Is Battling Blood Inequality →
Click here to read the interview.
Honoring The Murkiness: Read Our Interview Of Estefania Puerta & Abbey Meaker On Curating The Ephemeral →
Brian Raymond
Tree Hollow Composition, 2021
Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork
Run time: 10:00
Is it in our nature to make art? Is art inherently ephemeral? Is there a boundary between art and nature? How can we look to nature as a blueprint for the art that we make? These are all questions that come up as I consider Land Chapters, the inaugural exhibition by Artist Field, a platform for projects that respond to and engage with natural environments. Curated by Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, this exploration of the boundary between nature and self is a deep dive into the works of 16 artists split into three chapters. The first chapter is comprised of installation works that can be found deep in the woods of Richmond, Vermont on the Beaver Pond Hill Property. The second chapter comes in the form of a tape with recordings from six different artists. And the third chapter is a print publication with text from seven additional artists. All together, these works serve as an attempt to embrace all of the hard-to-pinpoint expressions of art within nature that so often fall under the towering shadow of negated space left by the Land Art movement. Read more.
Love Letter to L.A.: New Works By Beverly Fishman @ GAVLAK Gallery In Los Angeles
Love Letter to L.A. is GAVLAK gallery’s first solo presentation of new work by Beverly Fishman. The exhibition’s declaration of affection signals a pivot to the personal in Fishman’s new body of work, for which she has developed a distinctive color palette for objects that occupy a liminal position between two and three dimensions, subtly acknowledging a debt to styles with California roots, including the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements. The enticing and deceptive optical effects the new works produce also expand upon Fishman’s long-standing investigations of how physical and mental states with no fixed visual forms of their own—namely, pain and wellness—are articulated in the marketing of pharmaceutical conglomerates to an increasingly medicated general public.
Love Letter to L.A. will be on view through June 5 at GAVLAK Los Angeles.
Global Fax Festival: A New Performance Film By David Hammons In Collaboration With Monday Evening Concerts
‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performance by David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021
Hauser & Wirth’s digital art magazine Ursula presents ‘Global Fax Festival’ – a new performance film by David Hammons dedicated to composer/conductor Lawrence D. ‘Butch’ Morris and created in collaboration with Los Angeles’ venerated Monday Evening Concerts and virtuoso pianist Myra Melford.
The film documents Hammons’ first-ever restaging of his noted 2000 project ‘Global Fax Festival’ here conducted in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard in early May 2021. After more than a year of isolation during the pandemic, Hammons conceived this event as a gesture toward the reawakening of Los Angeles, set within the space that two years ago hosted the largest survey of his work ever organized.
The new ‘Global Fax Festival’ performance film features a solo improvisational piano performance by Myra Melford. A former Butch Morris collaborator, Melford plays in dialogue with projected footage of Morris, who passed away in 2013, performing Conductions®, his trademarked technique that merges conducting and improvisation.
California Dreamin': Read Our Interview Of Cole Sternberg On The Free Republic Of California →
Michael Slenske interviews Cole Sternberg on making the dream of the Free Republic of California a reality.
Virtually Cool: Otis College Annual Fashion Show Features Designs Inspired By The Work Of Noah Davis
This Saturday, May 8, Otis College will be holding their annual fashion show for the classes of 2020 and 2021, broadcasting digitally in lieu of an in-person event. In support of their first-generation population, which comprises roughly 30% of the student body, the public will be invited at no cost for the first time and encouraged to contribute financially during the program. These students worked under the mentorship of industry heavyweights like Ruth Carter, David Meister, Jonathan Simkhai and B. Akerlund in addition to many other prominent costume and fashion designers who work with Universal, Vince and ALC.
Virtually Cool also features a collaboration with designers Arthur Thammavong and Deborah Sabet from Vince, who tasked students to make a line of clothing based off of the late American artist Noah Davis' paintings.
RSVP now to attend.
Repeat: Sculptures By Janet Levy, Choreography By Diane Gemsch @ SWB Experimenthaus In Zurich
As we navigate our lives in these times of a pandemic, the question about home and living becomes even more pronounced. Janet Levy questions what is home and what is the significance of home, collecting objects from her surroundings to create a site-specific sculptural installation. In kind, Diane Gemsch creates an emotional response by physically bringing this action to movement while engaging with the house and sculpture installation.
Repeat is on view by appointment through May @ SWB Experimenthaus Neubühl, Westbühlstrasse 59, 8038 Zurich-Wollishofen. photographs by Rudolf Moser
Ben Sakoguchi's Chinatown @ Bel Ami In Los Angeles
Ben Sakoguchi’s combinations of commercial signage, history painting, and Pop Art comment on the American Dream and its fraught entanglement with xenophobia and racism. With acrylic paint on canvas, Sakoguchi reassembles imagery from film posters, newspapers, comics, and internet searches to reveal subtexts of local discrimination, mass media exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence. A Japanese American who spent years of his childhood living in an internment camp during World War II, Sakoguchi comments on a century and a half of prejudice against diasporic Asians. Contending with overlapping histories that contribute to ideas of Asian American identity, Sakoguchi creates an ironic primer on capitalism’s treachery with an audacity that challenges and uplifts.
A publication with essays by Eli Diner (Critic, Curator, and Executive Editor of Cultured magazine), Steven Wong (Curator and the Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA), and Ana Iwataki (Writer, Curator, and PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) will be released in PDF and printed form during the course of this exhibition.
Chinatown is on view through April 24 @ Bel Ami 709 N Hill St. #105, Los Angeles
Ben Sakoguchi
Chinatown, 2014
Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)
Randolpho Lamonier Presents My Kind Of Dirty @ Fort Gansevoort
My Kind Of Dirty is Brazilian artist Randolpho Lamonier’s first exhibition with Fort Gansevoort. This online presentation brings together recent textile works in which Lamonier responds to his upbringing in Contagem, an industrial city in southeastern Brazil, drawing upon observations of hardship and inequality to create powerful expressions in vivid colors, word combinations, and raw images. The artist locates his inspiration in an environment where joy grows proportionally to misfortune and likens his work to diaristic entries. Rendered in deceptively humble handwork and fabrics, the scintillating psychedelic landscapes on view in My Kind Of Dirty celebrate “the exuberance of life that resists against the necropolitical agenda guided by the current Brazilian government,” the artist has said. In this way, Lamonier’s approach to representation acts as personal revolution, whereby the aura of possibility defines his blueprint for the future.
My Kind Of Dirty is available for online viewing through May 15
an exit from this room and others like it: New Paintings & Ceramics By Hana Ward @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles
Hana Ward’s newest oil paintings and ceramic works offer a visual narrative for what the artist describes as “a liberation in the mind.” With so much time spent trapped in divergent states this past year, reading and reflecting, watching the news – vacillating between feelings of hopelessness and anticipation – Ward found herself thinking about the experience of transformation, of coming into one’s power – specifically about how this experience might unfold for Black women.
Taken individually and as a whole, Ward’s most recent paintings and ceramic works invite viewers to create more loving space within themselves, allowing for the potential to thrive during an otherwise unforgiving and isolating time. Each portrait relays a deeply personal inner metamorphosis that also manifests outwardly, through an individual’s outlook and approach to life, and even possibly, optimistically, as a society at large.
an exit from this room and others like it is on view through May 8 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles
A Strange Encounter: New Paintings & Watercolors By Harold Ancart @ C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills
A Strange Encounter is on view through May 8 @ C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills. DM the Gallery for appointments
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Window To The Clouds @ Salon Berlin, Museum Frieder Burda
Presented at Salon Berlin, the Berlin-based project and exhibition space of the internationally renowned Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Window to The Clouds is Paris-based artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s first institutional solo presentation in Germany. Mirroring Salon Berlin’s engagement for diverse potentialities in contemporary artistic creation, Lutz-Kinoy embraces the full dimensionality of the exhibition space as he conceives an immersive and sensorial environment for visitors that sheds light on his deeply spatial approach to painting, rooted in the body and performance. Comprised of recent paintings, ceramics and a site-specific sculpture, the exhibition imagines a series of contemporary landscapes as painterly reflections that look at — and through — various architectures, historical paintings and current events. These environments act as stages for worlds of shared experience, human presence and touch.
Window to The Clouds is on view through June 5 @ Salon Berlin Auguststr. 11–13, 10117 Berlin
Watch L.A. Dance Project’s David Adrian Freeland Jr. Perform ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me'
After a year of dormancy brought on by the pandemic, Hauser & Wirth’s dynamic, multi-use space in Downtown Los Angeles was revived with a special collaborative performance featuring L.A. Dance Project's David Adrian Freeland Jr. His powerful choreographic work, ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me,’ was performed throughout the gallery’s outdoor spaces and within ‘The Great American Fact,’ Amy Sherald’s first West Coast exhibition. The performance, captured by Trevor Tweeten, can be viewed here. Debuting online as part of Ursula Magazine, the performance was created during the uprisings against police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans.
Choreography & performance: David Adrian
Videography: Trevor Tweeten
Music: Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed’.
Audio recording by Michigan State University Men’s Glee Club, 2016. Conducted by Eugene Rogers
Watch Ron Athey In Conversation With Hans Ulrich Obrist For Autre's Spring 21 Issue
Let's begin with the beginning...discover the electrifying, sacrificial practice of Ron Athey. Presenting a short film by Mat+Kat to accompany artist Ron Athey's cover story and 8,000+ word interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist for Autre's Spring 21 Doppelgänger issue. Obrist explore's Athey's 40-year boundary destroying oeuvre, the trance of performing, thinking in the live image, and the archetype of ritual. Read the full interview in Autre's Spring 21 issue—preorder is available now (each preorder will receive a free full digital edition immediately after checkout). Athey's retrospective, Queer Communion, curated by Amelia Jones, is on view until April 4th at Participant New York. And will travel to ICA LA Summer 2021. Directed by Mat+Kat Cinematography by Austin Kearns. Makeup by Laramie. Styling Aleksandra Koj and Kristina Koelle. Production by Kendall Thompson
Diane Kotila's Boy Kings @ Deboer Gallery In Los Angeles
In Diane Kotila’s Boy Kings each painting depicts Pharaoh Tutankhamun, often referred to as the ‘boy king,’ and images of the young Egyptian water boy Hussein Abdel Raasoul who is tied to the discovery of Tutankhaman’s tomb. Writing about her approach, Kotila has described her painting as “an exploration of historically and culturally familiar portraiture.” A research heavy examination similar to the excavation of tombs; dirty and messy with moments of clarity and discovery.
Boy Kings is on view through April 17 @ Deboer Gallery 3311 E. Pico Blvd. Los Angeles
Our World Two: An Online Group Show @ Steve Turner
In its second iteration of Our World, Steve Turner presents an online group exhibition which features new works by seven artists (Patrick Bayly, Siro Cugusi, Jingze Du, Jon Key, Gabby Rosenberg, David Shrobe, and Shirley Villavicencio Pizango) who come from various parts of the world and who have coalesced to become part of the gallery’s world. While the artists work in a broad range of media, styles and concepts, all make deeply personal work that is a consequence of their biography, geography, identity and mentality. Their world is our world and we are delighted to present this in early March, when the art world previously gathered for the Armory Show in New York. With no travel, no art fairs and no opening receptions, we want to demonstrate that life goes on, art goes on and community goes on.
Our World Two is available to view online through April 14 @ Steve Turner Gallery
Introducing Our Spring 2021 Cover Featuring Lee "Scratch" Perry →
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