Mieke Marple: Bad Feminist @ Ever Gold [Projects] In San Francisco

Bad Feminist reflects on the ancient Greek myth of Medusa in the era of #MeToo. Taking its title from Roxane Gay’s book Bad Feminist: Essays (2014), in which the author describes a sexual assault she experienced as a child, Marple reflects on historical depictions of women and rape in light of today’s changing understanding of the power dynamics at play within society at large. Bad Feminist is on view through January 18 at Ever Gold [Projects] 1275 Minnesota Street Suite 105, San Francisco. photographs courtesy of Ever Gold [Projects]

April Street: The Lady of Shalott @ Vielmetter In Los Angeles

Comprised of 16 fabric-relief paintings, April Street’s The Lady of Shalott melds landscapes with corporeal elements to create portrait-like vignettes where waterfalls cascade into braids and hair extensions, surreal forms and voluminous lines define space and hyper-sexualized otherworldly elements rise inside and throughout her multi-dimensional surfaces. The Lady of Shalot is on view through January 11 at Vielmetter 1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter

Liz Glynn: Emotional Capital @ Vielmetter In Los Angeles

Liz Glynn’s 2017 MASS MoCA solo exhibition, Archaeology of Another Possible Future, considered the contradictions of the contemporary American economy, where value is increasingly abstract and established through declarative acts divorced from material reality. In Emotional Capital, Glynn explores the intersections of material and affective realities as they play out in and on bodies within the context of increasingly polarized and irrational political and economic systems. Emotional Capital is on view through January 11 at Vielmetter 1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter

Tony Marsh: Like Water Uphill @ The Pit In Glendale, California

Tony Marsh’s Like Water Uphill consists of eleven of Marsh’ ceramic works from his ongoing Crucible and Cauldron series. Marsh’s practice fixates on the long history of the creation of vessels. His method of production is predicated on the acceptance of failure, and an interest in the unpredictable. As a medium, ceramics are known for their fragile nature, not just their delicate nature after having been fired, but also their tendency to collapse, explode, crack, or fall apart while the clay is still wet or during the firing process. The ability to overcome these obstacles, and adhere to chemical and compositional constraints is often times what warrants the success of the finished piece. However, Marsh’s approach in his Crucible and Cauldron works embraces discovery and ultimately searches for unpredictable outcomes. The works are built up from multiple applications of mineral mixtures, different glazes, pigments, and even found scraps of other ceramic material. Like Water Uphill is on view through December 14th at The Pit 918 Ruberta Ave, Glendale. photographs courtesy of the artist and The Pit

Hugo Crosthwaite: TIJUAS! (Death March, Tijuana Bibles and Other Legends) @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

 In TIJUAS! , Crosthwaite will present selections from several bodies of work that continue his exploration of this ever-evolving transnational culture, among them the Tijuana Bibles , a new series of stop-motion drawing animations and books; graphite, charcoal and ink on canvas and panel paintings; new Tijuanerias  ink drawings; and Death March , a phenomenal 27 foot 30-panel work mural. This will be the first time this work will be presented since it was commissioned in 2010 for Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection  at the Chicago Cultural Center. TIJUAS! (Death March, Tijuana Bibles and Other Legends) is on view through through December 21, 2019 at Luis De Jesus 2685 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles . photographs courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus

An Interview With Multidisciplinary Artist Jónsi On The Occasion Of His Exhibition @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery In Los Angeles

In a series of three new gallery-based works, Jónsi riffs on the invocation of sensory inversion in Goethe’s fifth Roman Elegy in which the Romantic poet makes a connection between the experience of a lover’s body and a classical marble sculpture with the phrase, “see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” In Jónsi’s remix, Goethe’s advice to experience the world in a different way is given a sonic update that might read as follows: “hear with a feeling ear, feel with a hearing hand.” Seeing, hearing, feeling – each of these senses collapse upon one another in Jónsi’s work as sound takes a concrete form and the tactile and the auditory merge into a surprising synesthesia. While one might read these works within the lineage of bombastic noise experiments harkening back to those of the Italian Futurists who championed the revolutionary aspects of noise in opposition to formal music, Jónsi’s approach is far more interested in exploring the phenomenological complication and extension of the senses as an antidote to a world in which we are constantly confronted by the agitated white noise of contemporary civilization. In his work there is an overarching attempt to assert the primacy of the auditory, the tactile, and the visual in helping the human organism navigate its way through this unmoored and volatile world. Jónsi’s solo exhibition is on view through January 9, 2020 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 N Highland Avenue. photographs by Jeff Mclane, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Click here to read our interview with Jónsi

To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962 – 1972 @ Hauser & Wirth New York

In a brief but explosively inventive career, Alina Szapocznikow (1926 – 1973) radically re-conceptualized sculpture as a vehicle for exploring, liberating, and declaring bodily experience, from the ecstatic, to the harrowing, to the uncanny.

Through her material experiments, Szapocznikow generated a series of lamps, exemplified here by the ‘Lampe Bouche (Illuminated Lips)’ (1966) works, functional sculptures of glowing female lips extending from elongated stem-like bases. Although the artist lived and worked in Paris at the time, her focus on malleable material as a proxy for the body firmly positions her among contemporaries practicing in the United States, including Eva Hesse, Hannah Wilke, and Lynda Benglis, as well as noted friend Louise Bourgeois, to whom Szapocznikow dedicated and gifted two of the lamps on view.

An integral component of Szapocznikow’s practice was her mastery of new materials and techniques. Thus, she produced most of her work in her own studio rather than outsourcing fabrication to a factory. By focusing on an intimate, tactile relationship with her mediums, Szapocznikow was able to push the experimental boundaries of artistic gesture, resulting in such works as Souvenirs. On view on the gallery’s second floor, these sculptures, radically integrate polyester resin, glass, wool, and photographs that capture both personal and collective histories – images ranging from a picture of Alina as a child, to a photo of a female victim of a concentration camp, to a portrait of ‘60s icon Twiggy. The Souvenirs suggest mementos – or memento mori – for an ambiguous new era.

To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962 – 1972 is on view through December 21 @ Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street New York.

Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting @ Hauser & Wirth New York

Over the course of his four-decade career, Mike Kelley generated a remarkably diverse oeuvre in an array of media, conflating so-called high culture and low culture, critiquing prevailing aesthetic conventions, and combining traditional notions of the sacred and the profane. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, features paintings from different series created over a 15-year period, between 1994 and 2009, spotlighting the breadth of the artist’s engagement with the medium of painting.

The Timeless Painting exhibition and publication contribute new perspectives to the discourse around the artist’s work, challenging conventional readings by exploring Kelley’s own meticulously documented intentions as a point of departure; resituating these works within the larger formal context of his oeuvre; and expanding traditional definitions of painting.

Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting is on view through January 25, 2020 @ Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street
New York

Chung Sang-Hwa: Excavations, 1964-78 @ Levy Gorvy in New York

Chung Sang-Hwa: Excavations, 1964–78 is an exhibition of paintings from a formative era of Chung’s five-decades-long career. It includes works from a crucial period in which the Korean master was immersed in the international avant-garde milieus of both Asia and Europe. The paintings illuminate the conceptual and technical trajectories that led Chung to the profoundly original, finely honed approach that defines the art of his mid and late career. By highlighting the eclectic transnational influences in which Chung was immersed throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the exhibition provides rare insight into the progression of his practice, in order to galvanize discourse surrounding Chung’s singular approach to the medium.

Excavations, 1964–78 is on view through January 18, 2020 @ Levy Gorvy 909 Madison Avenue New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Rashid Johnson: The Hikers @ Hauser & Wirth New York

The Hikers unfolds through five rooms in a formal arrangement that echoes the fragmentation and accumulation of Johnson’s mosaics and collaged works on display. The viewer is first greeted by three monumental mosaics, each comprised of myriad materials familiar from the artist’s practice: multi-color ceramic and mirror tile, oil stick, black soap, wax, and branded red oak flooring. These works evolved out of Johnson’s Anxious Men and Anxious Audiences (2015 – 2018), earlier series in which frenzied, abstracted faces were rendered in black soap and wax on a grid of white tiles. Here, his images of Broken Men and their fellows explode in a storm of bold hues, errant drips of wax, splashes of paint, and splintered surfaces.In these new works, Johnson pushes the anxiety of his figures to a breaking point, both metaphorically and physically. Whether portrayed alone or in groups, as in ‘Broken Crowds’ (2019), on view in the exhibition’s second room, these broken figures speak to collective and individual identities caught in the midst of shifting social realities. As injustices and racial conflicts in the US have continued to flare, Johnson’s works have likewise become more charged and dystopian than their earlier Anxious counterparts.

Rashid Johnson: The Hikers is on view through January 25, 2020 @ Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street
New York

Cara Delevigne And Olivier Rousteing Team Up For Puma x Balmain Campaign Directed By Philippa Price

An unlikely partnership takes the form of two limited-edition capsule collections, both designed by BALMAIN’s Creative Director Olivier Rousteing and his good friend and muse, the English actor and model Cara Delevingne. This is PUMA’s first-ever collection with Cara Delevingne, who has been working with PUMA since 2016. Standing at the intersection of sport and fashion, this new collection features pieces inspired by traditional boxing gear that are infused with Parisian couture. Bra tops, boxing shorts, and sneakers are elevated with a stark color palette, hits of gold, and design elements straight out of BALMAIN’s atelier.

The campaign for the line, directed by Philippa Price and produced by MAAVVEN is a boxing-inspired, interactive campaign starring Delevingne. The campaign is not a literal interpretation of boxing but a dynamic and visceral interpretation of the timeless tale of human connection, identity, tragedy and triumph, love and hate, and the universal duality of “the fight.” In addition to Delevingne, the cast is rounded out by an incredible group of “real people,” who personify this idea of the fight.

In addition to the campaign, Price produced the live launch event, which took place here at Milk Studios in Los Angeles.

"Translating the campaign into the show concept was a lot of fun. We wanted the whole event to feel like a fight club. I worked with Jasmine Albuquerque (who also did all the choreography for the campaign) to create a 20 minute performance piece that evokes the duality of emotions behind any fight, whether it be physical or emotional—anger vs. empathy, defeat vs. perseverance, endurance, truth, forgiveness, and most importantly, love. Love for the self and love for all humans.” -Philippa Price

Big Pictures Presents Holding Space, Their Final Show On Washington Blvd

The term holding space is often used when referring to supporting another persons emotional needs by being present for them. It can also mean creating a safe and contemplative context where sacred ceremonies can be performed. Here thoughts and emotions can be more deeply explored and appreciated. Both of these definitions describe important aspects of what Big Pictures Los Angeles has been about. The gallery has functioned as a safe place for art to be seen in real life. Always striving to be a beautiful space that uplifts the art and unifies it with the community in an attempt for all parties involved to learn and grow. Artists include: Scott Armetta, Eric Ashcraft, Matthew Arnone, Michael Assiff, Alison Blickle, Spencer Carmona, Manny Castro, Chris Collins, Brian Cooper, Joachim Coucke, Matthew Craven, Doug Crocco, Tom Delaney, Helen Rebekah Garber, Steve Gladstone, Eben Goff, Dan Gratz, Ethan Greenbaum, Kady Grant, Robert Gunderman, Aramis Gutierrez, Joshua Hagler, Julie Henson, Alvaro Ilizarbe, Samantha Jacober, Shaun Johnson, Kara Joslyn, Aaron Elvis Jupin, Lauren Spencer King, kyttenjanae, Alice Lang, L, Tyler Lafreniere, Matt Lifson, Megan Lindeman, Susan Logoreci, Brendan Lynch, Grace Mattingly, Jake Kean Mayman, Max Maslansky, Joshua Miller, Hugo Montoya, Aaron Morse, Nikko Mueller, Daniel Newman, Laurie Nye, Annie Pendergrast, Manny Prieres, Alex Jacob Reed, Alyssa Rogers, Maja Ruznic, Aaron Sandnes, Ben Sanders, Marty Schnapf, Alex Sewell, Kira Maria Shewfelt, Tosha Stimage, Erik Torregroz, Erin Trefry, Lani Trock, Dani Tull, Laura Watters, Paula Wilson, Hayley Quentin, Nelly Zagury, and Mathew Zefeldt.

Holding Space in on view through November 23 @ Big Pictures Los Angeles 2424 West Washington Blvd. photographs by Lani Trock

Maya Fuhr & Janet Levy Present Twisted Two @ Merchant Gallery In Los Angeles

In Twisted Two, Janet Levy creates new sculpture works using references to snakes mating and Bender-Gestalt Test, she carves seductive alabaster and onyx sculptures including hanging alabaster work in combination with rope. Maya Fuhr explores her relationship between technology and material. A jpeg rolling through a printing process. Photographs presented as soft carpets pull you in with their complex algorithms. Psychological interpretations of her own fascination with textures and shapes. Like the Rorschach test which resonates with both Levy and Fuhr.

Twisted Two is on view through December 1 @ Merchant Gallery  3004 Lincoln Blvd. photographs by Kate Berry

2019 LAXART Benefit Celebrates The Discovery Of Art As A Gateway Drug To Culture

LAXART celebrated its 2019 Benefit on Friday, November 8 in Hollywood, bringing together major figures in Los Angeles’ contemporary art community to celebrate the nonprofit art space founded in 2005. Beginning the evening at LAXART on N Orange Dr, guests were presented with a reception and discussion between Director Hamza Walker and artist Phil Peters whose exhibition Outside/In, done with Karen Reimer, presents an audio installation derived from microphone recordings of fracking sites in West Texas, with Reimer’s quilted hand dyed fabric hanging above throughout the space. The show’s audio component also pays homage to the history of the building that houses LAXART as the legendary former recording studio Radio Recorders. photographs courtesy of Jojo Karsh/BFA.com, courtesy of LAXART

LA Is On Fire @ Wilding Cran Gallery In Los Angeles

This is the thrust of L.A. On Fire, a multimedia group show curated by Michael Slenske at the newly expanded space of Wilding Cran Gallery . The show’s title derives from a photo series, featured in the exhibition, by French artist Michel Auder. Along with the work of more than 50 emerging and established LA artists, this titular work investigates the possibility that LA has gone from Tomorrowland to an ever burning Bacchanalia. And in this moment of Nero-esque nihilism, we can’t look away as we watch our house(s) burn down: LA is on fire. The exhibition will be on view through January 11th at Wilding Cran Gallery 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock and courtesy of the gallery

Florine Démosthène: Between Possibility And Actuality @ Mariane Ibrahim In Chicago

Florine Démosthène’s contemporary take on the body, in the form of multi-media paintings and collage, represent otherworldly dystopian characteristics, furthering the artists’ study of our divine spirit. Démosthène’s heroines criticize beauty canons through the narrative of her self-made feminine heros. In this new body of work, the artist questions, “How do we connect to our inner essence? How do we connect to our ‘self,’ while disconnecting from stories and religions we have been taught?”

The duality of her figures consider stereotypical and two-dimensional notions of the black female body. The artist presents her adulation for duplicates by portraying her own body, often duplicated. The existence of twins has provoked curiosity and veneration amongst numerous societies, particularly in West African and Haitian sacred cultures. Between Possibility And Actuality is on view through December 21 at Mariane Ibrahim 437 N. Paulina St, Chicago. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 @ CAAM In Los Angeles

One of the most pervasive stereotypes constructed during the post-Civil War era, and arguably the most enduring image from the days of Jim Crow, the mammy was a staple caricature in the romanticization of the Antebellum South. Popularized into the twentieth century by characters such as “Mammy” in MGM’s hit film Gone with the Wind (1939), this archetype of black domestic servitude was often depicted as good-natured, overweight, and loud. Presenting an ahistorical view of black womanhood within southern plantation hierarchies, the mammy not only embellished the realities of black life in the American South, but it also denied African American women their femininity, beauty, and strength.

Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 explores how the mammy figure was produced in an effort to temper the atrocities of enslavement and serve southern interests domestically, economically, and politically. Bringing together films, photographs, and artifacts, it examines the legacy of the institutionalized stereotype, considering a century of complex manufacturing of black femininity, power dynamics, and mass-media messaging that still affects black women’s body image, lack of agency, and sense of self. Making Mammy uncovers the nuances behind this figure and illuminates the vestiges of America’s role in enslavement through the mammy’s appearance in literature and cinema. Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 is on view through March 1, 2020 at CAAM 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of CAAM

The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain @ Wende Museum in Los Angeles

Working under the radar of the authorities that defined acceptable art, radical women artists in the former Eastern Bloc challenged both socialist and bourgeois ideals and power, as well as a male-dominated canon. Their work was innovative, and the sheer act of making it was a risk. Yet even today, little is known about these courageous and critical artists.

The Medea Insurrection introduces viewers to multifaceted, multifarious work by artists including sculptor and textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland); photographers Sibylle Bergemann (East Germany), Evelyn Richter (East Germany), Zofia Rydet (Poland), and Gundula Schulze-Eldowy (East Germany); mixed-media artists Orshi Drozdik (Hungary) and Anna Daučíková (Czechoslovakia); painter and graphic artist Angela Hampel (East Germany); sound and performance artist Katalin Ladik (Hungary); conceptual artist Natalia LL (Poland); and painter and graphic artist Karla Woisnitza (East Germany).

The Medea Insurrection is on view through April 5, 2020 at the Wende Museum 10808 Culver Boulevard. photographs by Dany Naierman courtesy of the museum.

The Intimacy Of No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" @ Institute Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

From pop culture to corporal humor, Nayland Blake’s exhibition No Wrong Holes, currently on display at LA’s Institute of Contemporary Art, plays with intimacy from every angle. Pieces like Starting Over (2000), which features Blake in a 147 lb bunny suit tap dancing to Michael Jackson, put Blake's body and its capacities on display to consider cultural belonging. Engaging with their own White passing, Blake interrogates how the bonds of culture are both formed and broken along the fault line of cultural expectation.

Blake’s consistent use of kitsch icons like Bugs Bunny asks what kind of intimacy pop culture gives us; How do recognizable figures stand in as avatars for human expression and escapism? Blake also evokes pop culture to interrogate cultural bias, pointing to the racial and homophobic stereotypes that Br’er Rabbit—originally an African folk tale—and Bugs Bunny are imbued with. 

In a number of pieces, Blake cultivates historical closeness. Through works like Magic (1990) and Joe Dallesandro as Augustin (1994), Blake serves as a kind of queer biographer, archiving the contributions of overlooked queer icons such as Wayland Flowers, Hans Bellmer, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Blake's 30-year engagement with the HIV/AIDS crisis speaks to the closeness that tragedy brings. 

The exhibition ends with a focus on Blake's current community-based practice. This work is aptly paired with Bay Area artist Sadie Barnette’s iridescent and arresting installation piece The New Eagle Creek Saloon, a replica of the first black-owned queer bar in San Francisco, founded by her father.

No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" will be on view at ICA LA until January 26, 2020. text by Rosa Boshier, photographs by Oliver Kupper