Dan Graham's 'New Works By A Small-Town Boy' @ Regen Projects

For over fifty years, Graham’s expansive multidisciplinary practice has encompassed video, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and a prolific body of writing on religion, music, art, architecture, garden design, and popular culture. Forming a central theoretical thread throughout the course of his career, his work has examined the function and role of architecture in contemporary society, and how it frames and reflects public life. Since the 1970s he has produced what he refers to as pavilions, hybrid constructions that are part architecture and part sculpture. Inspired by ornamental buildings found in 17th and 18th century European pleasure gardens, Graham’s sculptural pavilions are comprised of simple geometric forms and constructed using materials associated with corporate architecture like metal, aluminum, transparent and/or two-way mirrored glass, and sometimes juxtaposed with natural elements like hedges. Functioning as built environments, the pavilions create unusual optical and physical experiences for the viewer – blurring the lines between public and private space – and making apparent that our material surroundings structure the very core of our societies by determining the form of our vision and sight.

A selection of photographs relating to his seminal magazine artwork, Homes for America(1966), and taken by Graham during a 2006 visit to his native suburban New Jersey, feature images of diverse architectural styles punctuated with lawns, topiaries, and shrubs. Displayed in a sequenced formation on the gallery walls, each image highlights Graham’s interest in serial structures, topology, and systems of information as evident in the peculiar color ranges, materials, and repetitive geometries of the suburban American landscape. A series of architectural models and video works provide further context for his ongoing exploration of the built world. New Works By A Small-Town Boy is on view at Regen Projects through August 18. 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs Oliver Kupper

Young Joo Lee @ Ochi Projects

Young Joo Lee combines inspiration from her dreams with personal and political histories to create drawings, sculptures and films. On view in the downstairs gallery, Paradise Limited is a three-channel animation based on Lee’s year-long project about the nature sanctuary at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Lee documented her research as a 25-meter scroll drawing, a reference to traditional Korean landscape painting, and created a sculptural scroll display to house the work, which provided the background for the film. In the upstairs gallery is Song from Sushi, an animated music video, written from the point of view of a sushi woman served on a sushi conveyor belt. She sings about the stereotypical depiction of Asian women as exotic sexual objects in media and cultural representations. Lee’s work is a glimpse into how our environments are not only outside of us, but how they truly alter our perception and inform our personal identities. Mine is on view at Ochi Projects through July 21st. 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock. 

No)one. Art House Performs Sky Echo @ The Getty Center

Choreographed by Samantha Blake Goodman, Sky Echo is a psalm whispered to the universe, drifting the dancers in and out of the museum’s fountains. It is a trio performed by Bianca Medina, Chris Emile, and Sasha Rivero. The dancers move in costumes provided by New York-based designer Mara Hoffman to live musical accompaniment by vocalists AKUA and Anthony Calonico. This transcendent performance sways audiences and softly carries viewers to a place of bliss. photographs by Lani Trock

Katherina Olschbaur Presents "Horses" @ Nicodim Gallery Los Angeles

The horse, to Katherina Olschbaur, is a banner of freedom, but also one of constraint. Some of her subjects are galloping unbridled, powering through surreal, fluorescent landscapes as the ground bows, its surface giving willfully to the weight of each hoof. Other equines are restrained, bound to human figures—occasionally draped over human figures—erotically reinterpreting dressage as fetish play, begging the question: who’s riding whom? Horses is on view through August 18 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Marlene Dumas Presents "Myths & Morals" @ David Zwirner New York

Myths & Mortals is Marlene Dumas' first solo presentation in New York since 2010, features a selection of new paintings that range from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled portraits. Alongside these works, Dumas is debuting an expansive series of works on paper originally created for a recent Dutch translation by Hafid Bouazza of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593). In these drawings—tender and erotic with hints of violence—the artist renders the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her tragic passion for the handsome youth Adonis in her singularly expressive ink wash. Myths & Mortals is on view through June 30 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Ambition: An Exhibition Of Photographs By Bob Mizer @ M+B Photo Gallery

Ambition is an exhibition of photographs by the late Bob Mizer. Mizer was one of the most significant figures of twentieth century homoerotic art and was a celebrated pioneer in developing the visual language for post-war gay culture. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery and will include over 30 never-before-exhibited images from the Bob Mizer archive. The show runs from June 23 to August 18 at the M+B Photo exhibition space 1050 North Cahuenga Boulevard Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper.

Liquid Dreams Group Show, featuring Koak, Dorian Gaudin, Genesis Belanger, and more @ Ghebaly Gallery

Liquid Dreams is a group show featuring work by Kelly Akashi Farah Atassi, Davide Balula, Genesis Belanger, Neïl Beloufa, Lila de Magalhaes, Dorian Gaudin, Sayre Gomez, Patrick Jackson, Koak, Joel Kyack, Mike Kuchar, Candice Lin, Gina Osterloh, Philip Pearlstein, and Kathleen Ryan. Liquid Dreams is on view through August 10th at Ghebaly Gallery, 2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles.

Opening Of 'A Journey That Wasn’t' @ The Broad Museum

A Journey That Wasn’t considers artists’ complex representations of time, and features the return of the beloved video installation, The Visitors, by Ragnar Kjartansson. The exhibition presents more than 20 artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, Elliott Hundley, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Paul Pfeiffer and Ed Ruscha. The featured works in the exhibition—ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, film and installation—examine the passage of time by alluding to nostalgia or sentiments about aging, often depicting specific places in states of decay; these works can act as documentation, memorial or symbol. Still others imply movement or narrative within single still images; in these works, historical styles and events are ruptured, collaged and re-contextualized as to become portals into seemingly other worlds. is on view through at The Broad Museum 221 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Environment[al]: Curated By Herwig Baumgartner & Marcelyn Gow @ SCI-Arc Gallery

Environment[al] is a public exhibition examining contemporary attitudes toward environment in a post-digital context. The capacity of constructed natures to produce admixtures of the natural and the synthetic is a focus. The changing character of environment in the context of technological innovation is considered through the projects in the exhibition. Taking into account recent approaches to our understanding of environment and contemporary modes of ecological awareness, the exhibition considers the possibility of environments where qualities are fused with objects not normally associated with them. Sites, objects, and spaces become estranged to engender multiple authenticities and produce a fusion between architectural form and forms germane to constructed natures. A multivalent implementation of environment, one that involves an agile negotiation with the changing character of the ecological in the context of technological change begins  to surface, these environments produce invigorated forms of tangible architectural presence and performance. Environment[al] is on view through August 26 at SCI-Arc Gallery 960 East 3rd Street Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Icons Of Style: A Century Of Fashion Photography @ The Getty Center

This exhibition surveys the rich and varied history of modern fashion photography, exploring the ways in which photographers whose careers have been closely associated with the industry have shaped evolving notions of style and beauty. Drawn from the Getty Museum's permanent collection and supplemented by loans from private and public sources, Icons of Style features more than one hundred-sixty photographs presented alongside a selection of costumes, illustrations, magazine covers, videos, and advertisements. On view at Getty Center through October 21. Photographs by Oliver Kupper

Catalina Ouyang's Death Drive Joy Ride @ Make Room

Death Drive Joy Ride is Catalina Ouyang’ s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition features a new body of sculpture, installation and video. Taking East Asian fox spirits as a departure point, the work positions mythic desires for immortality alongside a contemporary endeavor to find joy and community amid a seemingly inexorable drive toward planetary destruction. Death Drive Joy Ride speaks (or wails) honestly from the positionality of its maker: a lonely Chinese-American girl clawing her way through our Wicked Problems. Death Drive Joy Ride is on view through August 8 at Make Room 1035 North Broadway Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Jack Whitten's Self Portrait With Satellites @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

‘Self Portrait With Satellites’ takes viewers on a journey through the various permutations of abstraction that span the artist’s entire career. The exhibition brings together self-portraits and other paintings from Whitten’s own personal collection, many of which the artist studied on a daily basis, and offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s core beliefs about art, his deep philosophical concerns, and the people that inspired him.

Complementing the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will debut its new book ‘Jack Whitten. Notes from the Woodshed,’ which collects Whitten’s studio writings and other texts from the artist’s six-decade career. Edited by Katy Siegel, this publication provides a window on Whitten’s relentless artistic experimentation in the studio, exploring the way his practice intertwined with his daily life. Alongside transcriptions of Whitten’s handwritten documents are selections reproduced in facsimile, redolent of the studio’s atmosphere and the way the artist’s creative impulses pervaded every part of his world. 'Jack Whitten. Self Portrait With Satellites will be on view at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Daily from Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm from June 23 through September 23, 2018. 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Lorraine Nicholson's Tribeca-Nominated Life Boat Is Now Available Online

A group of students are brought together to play a real-life game called “Life Boat.” After the customary “get to know each other” exercise, their counselor Mr. Drexler (Stephen Dorff) poses a difficult question: if this classroom were a sinking ship, who in the group deserves to be saved?

Mr. Drexler’s tactics are far from textbook, which immediately becomes clear to our protagonist, Elsa (Elizabeth Gilpin). Mr. Drexler, a survivor of a similar program, gets caught up in the emotions of his exercise. As the game and stakes heighten, he successfully demonstrates his apathetic students’ real desire to save their lives. But at what cost? 

 

Mary Heilmann's First Solo Exhibition In Over 20 Years @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

‘Memory Remix,’ Mary Heilmann’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition in over 20 years, is a survey of paintings, ceramics, and furniture in which the artist’s unwavering dedication to abstraction merges with sly references to her favorite landscapes, songs, movies, and Mexican weavings. This preeminent American artist is acclaimed for her unique ability to deploy the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous freehanded spirit of the Beat Generation from which her generation emerged, and for her weaving of pop culture influences into a wholly original and pioneering oeuvre. Heilmann’s deft handling of paint and spatially dichotomous compositions have exerted a profound influence upon a younger group of artists.

Grounded in the soul of California, Mary Heilmann’s work draws from her memories of the distinctive colors and lines of the West Coast’s landscape and surf culture. Throughout a childhood accompanied by the radio’s ubiquitous soundtrack, Heilmann often watched the ocean tumble to the shore, rode the ‘mountain waves’ at Manhattan Beach, and read Allan Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which stoked her great admiration for poetry, jazz, and the idea of the Beats. Under these influences and through the deceptively simple means of painting – color, surface, and form – Heilmann physically manifests nostalgic impulses, memories, and allusions to popular culture that remain accessible on both personal and universal levels. In this way, her work transcends the seemingly opaque structures of geometrical abstraction by infusing it with the content of daily life. ‘Memory Remix’ is on view through September 23 at Hauser & Wirth 901 E 3rd Street Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Larry Bell Complete Cubes @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

Larry Bell's Complete Cubes is Hauser & Wirth's first solo exhibition for the internationally acclaimed American artist in his hometown. Larry Bell’s innovative approach to sculpture and perceptual phenomena has placed him uniquely at the hub of both Southern California’s Light & Space movement and New York Minimalism in the sixties, which continues to inform his practice today as a forerunner of California Minimalism. This landmark exhibition offers viewers insight into Bell’s lifelong dedication to the glass cube through a groundbreaking body of work that has become inextricably linked to the emergence of Los Angeles as an internationally significant center of artistic innovation. ‘Complete Cubes’ is the first exhibition to organize Bell’s iconic glass cubes by scale, showcasing an example of every size the artist has produced from the early 1960s to the present. Featuring rarely seen works that are among the most important of Bell’s early career, the exhibition comprises over 20 sculptures ranging in size from 2 inches to 40 inches, as well as new large-scale works created specifically for this presentation, which extend new formal explorations seen in his recent 2017 Whitney Biennial installation ‘Pacific Red II.’ Complete Cubes is on view through from June 23rd through September 23rd at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Opening of Las Lenguas Group Show @ BBQLA

Las Lenguas is an exhibition about the potential languages of the body. It presents works that explore the representation of the figure by way of its inaudible gestures of expression. This is different from the soul inside of the eyes. It asks to observe the nuance of a lover, of a stranger, the alienation of a foreign language, and the failures of both the voice and the body to translate into distinguishable codes of associations. Las Lenguas are presences whose capabilities figuratively translate through the mysterious shapes made by the body to reveal or conceal in interior and exterior worlds in which it exists. Exhibiting artists include: Manny Castro, Alan Gutierrez, Yaron Michael Hakim, Shaun Johnson, Sofía Londoño, Jesse Mockrin, Nora Riggs, Ellen Schafer, and Hiejin Yoo. The exhibition is on view through July 14 at BBQLA 2315 Jesse Street Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock
 

Opening Of take care Group Show @ Gas In Los Angeles

How do radical ambitions of “self-care” persist or depart from capitalist society’s preoccupation with wellness and the industry surrounding it, particularly when filtered through technological advances? How can we imagine personal wellness that complicates or diverges from capitalist and consumerist tendencies? Taking its name from the common valediction, which is both an expression of familiarity and an instruction of caution, take care, is a group exhibition that considers the many tensions surrounding the possibilities of self-care. Participating artists: Hayley Barker, Darya Diamond, Ian James, Young Joon Kwak, C. Lavender, Sarah Manuwal, Saewon Oh, Amanda Vincelli, and SoftCells presents: Jules Gimbrone. Gas is a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art. take care will be on view through July 20, and can be seen from 12pm-6pm on Saturdays in front of BBQLA 2315 Jesse Street, Los Angeles CA 90023. photographs by Lani Trock