Miyoshi Barosh Presents Love @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

"The work of art created as a labor of love may sound cynical, yet it is made in good faith and contains a deep utopian wish for social change, no matter how naive and nostalgic that dream is."  ~ Miyoshi Barosh

Over the last fifteen years, Miyoshi Barosh made her work with humor and dystopian irony in a style she called "Conceptual Pop."  With an emphasis on cultural blindness toward death, decay, and the disintegration of both utopian social constructs, and ultimately the individual body itself, Barosh saw her work as "a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity politics through a handmade carnivalesque, mischievous confrontation."  Given her untimely death, her message is made even more poignant, if not tragic, because she lived it.  

LOVE was the first large-scale work that Barosh created using repurposed afghans -- those lonely and discarded, hand-made blankets which "in itchy, acrylic coziness embody feelings of dependency, obligation, and guilt." Together with I Keep Going On, these collaged and crocheted pieces play on the notion of a "labor of love." Making afghans is traditionally a women's craft that, according to the artist, refers to both the "ideal of self-less love and to the idea of unconditional love, that is expected of, but not a reality of, family." These pieces are "deliberately imperfect, damaged, and irregular like the human condition, pulled by conflicting desires for independence and dependency, freedom and obligation."

Love will be on view through February 15, 2020 @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. LA. Concurrent exhibitions honoring the life and work of the late Los Angeles artist, who died in 2019, will be held at Night Gallery in downtown LA and The Pit in Glendale. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Michal Heiman Presents "Hearing" @ The American Jewish University In Los Angeles

One of the most influential artists in Israel today, Michal Heiman navigates the worlds of photography, archival practice, critical theory, psychoanalysis, diagnosis, gender, and performance in her work. In this exhibition, her first solo show on the west coast, Heiman will continue to excavate the histories of discarded, forgotten women that have been trapped in asylums in London and Venice, or women who were denied of their legal rights in 19th-century Massachusetts. Michal invites audiences to insert themselves in these untold histories. The artist regards the gallery as a transitory workspace, in which materials from the archive she created, combining documents, visual materials, and testimonies, will be revealed in preparation for a courthouse proceeding. Hearing is on view through April 7 at Platt & Borstein Galleries at American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. Photographs by B. Neimeth for Arts at AJU

Hybrid Forms: Read Our Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers →

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

How does a country like Vietnam, absent of a black community, develop a rich brass band tradition with roots in the American South? How did the British flag inspire a Ghanaian tradition in textiles that is steeped in magical superstition? What do Aimé Césaire, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Emma Goldman all have in common? To find the answers to any of these questions you’d have to ask none other than the multi-disciplinary, head honcho of hybridity, artist Christopher Myers. His practice is as much about connecting the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Greece with those of Judeo-Christian scripture, as it is about connecting the migrations of syncratic practices across the globe and throughout history. His most recent solo exhibition, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort in Los Angeles primarily features hand-sewn flags depicting a wide array of syncratic allegories that in many ways define the globalized, contemporary psyche. Click here to read more.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya CONDO 2020: Modern Art Hosting Team Gallery In London

The group of Sepuya's work shown at Modern Art is comprised of photographs made between 2016 and 2019. Seen together, the chosen works convey the scope of formal strategies employed by Sepuya. Ranging from close up portraits of interlocking body parts, to studio portraits in which subjects are carefully poised behind and with objects, to photographs of his collages of test prints and archival material of the studio, Sepuya's strategies each speak to the self-reflexivity inherent in his practice and reveal his sensitivity and skill in capturing bodies on camera. Whether at its centre or its edges, the camera and tripod are almost always evident and always implied somewhere in each image, bringing the work firmly back into dialogue with its own technical construction and object-hood, and to Sepuya himself. The exhibition is on view through February 15 at Modern Art 50–58 Vyner Street , London. photographs courtesy of the gallery and the artist

King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Amie Dicke's One-Liner @ Anat Ebgi In Los Angeles

“Some images ask to be folded or covered, others suggest a line. They have their language. And I try to understand how they speak to me.” – Amie Dicke.

The exhibition’s title refers to a striking new technique whereby Dicke uses a continuous, meandering incision to slice into aluminum plates bearing composed fashion portraiture. As she follows her line around the immaculate bodies in works such as ONE-LINER III (Holding the Rodeo Image) and ONE-LINER IV (Listen), the artist maps the touch of her hand and eye around the images, then bends new shapes into the metal. “Nothing is really removed, nothing is lost, just opened,” she notes. By adding space where there was none, and creating work that elides the conventions of two- and three-dimensional forms, Dicke continuously distorts and realigns the possibilities of our visual experience. “They are almost a movie in one still,” she says of these intriguing assemblages.

One-Liner is on view through February 16, 2020 @ Anat Ebgi AE2 Gallery at 2680 S La Cienega Blvd, LA. photographs courtesy of Anat Ebgi

Read The First Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' New Serial Novella →

Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G & B.

Naama Tsabar Presents Inversions @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

The exhibition title, Inversions, refers to a new body of work that is installed directly into the existing architecture of the gallery. Utilizing the shallow space behind the gallery’s walls, Inversion #1 and Inversion #2 assumes an overlooked space as a site of importance or a platform for action. Fusing together elements from guitars, harps, banjos, and violins, Tsabar creates an inverted instrument that relies on the contortions and penetrations of participants’ bodies for its activation. Inversion #2 includes a singing chamber, with holes and voids in the architecture for the voices of performers to fill. Inversions is on view through February 22 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Kirsten Stoltmann and Jennifer Sullivan Presents Female Sensibility @ Five Car Garage In Los Angeles

”Female Sensibility“ is a two person show with LA based artist Kirsten Stoltmann and NY based artist Jennifer Sullivan. The title for the exhibition is inspired by Lynda Benglis’s 1973 video Female Sensibility which simultaneously acknowledges and parodies ideas around being categorized as a woman artist or defined artistically through gender. Stoltmann and Sullivan have continued aspects of this strategy in their own work through fore-fronting not just the female body and gaze, but their own specific bodies, emotional lives, and experiences, in favor of exploring the layers of meaning around self-representation and gender identity. In their work, there is a both a revised valuation of characteristics often assigned as feminine such as emotion, intuition, sensuality, and relationships, as well as a resistance and subversive attitude towards the limiting roles that women are expected to fulfill.

Female Sensibility is on view through March 1, 2020 @ Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, LA. Email info@emmagrayhq.com for address. photographs courtesy of Five Car Garage

Anish Kapoor New Stainless Steel Sculptures at Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents an exhibition by renowned artist Anish Kapoor. Since the 1980s Kapoor’s ambitious practice has continuously expanded the limits of sculptural form by investigating scale, volume, color, and materiality. With this exhibition, the artist’s sixth solo presentation following his gallery debut in 1992, Kapoor brings together a selection of new mirror works that challenge optical perception and phenomenological experience through experiments in shape and form. On view until February 16, 2020. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Xin Liu's Living/Distance @ Make Room in Los Angeles

“Is breeding a physiological instinct for women? I put my life (time, effort, intelligence) into an inorganic, ruthless mechanical system, and then place my bone and blood (teeth) in the center. It is part of me, my avatar. We will never be alive in the same space, it will break into pieces before returning to Earth. It came to life in the absence of gravity, but I am standing here firmly. I speculate that "humanity" will not break through the interstellar space-time distance in the form of organism. If we acknowledge our limits as biological species, how can human beings face the others, who are created and feared by us?”

— Xin Liu

Living/Distance is on view through Feb 1, 2020 @ MakeRoom 1035 N Broadway, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Lani Trock

The Art Of Elysium 13th Annual Heaven Gala At The Hollywood Palladium

The Art of Elysium’s annual HEAVEN is an artistic installation curated by some of the world’s leading and most renowned luminaries. Each year, The Art of Elysium celebrates a chosen visionary who creates their idea of “Heaven on Earth” as it relates to the charities four main disciplines: fashion & design, fine arts, music & movement, and theatre & film. The Art of Elysium was founded in 1997 to support artists working for the benefit of others. For over twenty years, they’ve paired volunteer artists with communities in Los Angeles to support individuals in the midst of difficult emotional life challenges like illness, hospitalization, displacement, confinement, and/or crisis. They also serve medically fragile children, teens, adults, seniors, those dealing with social, emotional and mental health issues, and the homeless. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Emilien Crespo "Soul Of Los Angeles" After Party at Flamingo Estate In Los Angeles

photographs by Pia Riverola

Emilien Crespo "Soul Of Los Angeles" Signing and After Party @ Owl Bureau and Flamingo Estate

photographs by Jesse Salto

Opening of Archipelago: A Solo Exhibition by Arielle Pytka At Just One Eye in Los Angeles

Archipelago tells a story of an imaginary new world, perhaps here on Earth or in the stars. As a child, Pytka always dreamt of being an adventurer and cartographer in the early days of exploration. At fifteen, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, crewing on a vintage sailboat and in 2015, she completed another transatlantic crossing, sailing in the Panerai Transat Classique, in which her team came in first place. All of this time at sea fueled her creative inspiration and interest in the discovery of distant new lands and people. The paintings in Archipelago are a reflection of her desires to map unknown places. She subconsciously began painting maps to destinations that do not exist on our globe. Some of these paintings are reminiscent of island chains in South East Asia, where she lived part-time for the last 5 years.

Archipelago is on view at Just One Eye 915 North Sycamore Ave. LA. photographs courtesy of Nina Prommer

Mika Tajima: PSYCHO GRAPHICS @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran In Los Angeles

PSYCHO GRAPHICS connects material transformation to the shape of an uncontainable future that exceeds our current bodily and psychic experience of power. The works on view manifest Tajima’s continued investigation into the production and transmutation of matter, energy, and the human psyche. PSYCHO GRAPHICS is on view through January 11 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 South La Brea Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Ariane Vielmetter: The Rose Garden @ Ever Gold [Projects] In San Francisco

In new paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Ariane Vielmetter explores representations of the female body in relation to fruits and flowers, and the ways these visual metaphors relate to lived experience. The female body, as a vessel for new life, is a natural structure for this kind of projection, and Vielmetter is particularly interested in the way this kind of imagery relates to the experiences of pregnant women. In a culture overloaded with information about best health practices, and a political climate that is very unpredictable with regards to women’s rights, the pregnant body has become an increasingly political site.The Rose Garden is on view through December 21 at Ever Gold [Projects] 1275 Minnesota Street #105, San Francisco. photographs courtesy of Ever Gold [Projects]

Marc Horowitz: The Qualitative Validation Principle @ Ever Gold [Projects] In San Francisco

The paintings and drawings on view extend the forensic system Horowitz began developing after visiting the Roman ruins in Milreu, Portugal, which inspired him to restage previously abandoned works using archeological motifs. TQVP is at times a painterly Rorschach test that asks the viewer to inhabit decisions made by the artist to expose the detritus of his own jokes, but it also seems like something or someone decided to go off script along the way. Or, that an off-color joke, though aborted, continues to make appearances, to refer to a glyph or key which would unlock deeper meanings if it were available. Alas, some mysteries remain precisely within the surface on which they were inscribed, alluding to and denying their secret in the same gesture. The Qualitative Validation Principle is on view through December 21 at Ever Gold [Projects] 1275 Minnesota Street Suite 105, San Francisco. photographs courtesy of Ever Gold [Projects]