Cole Sternberg's FREESTATE @ El Segundo Museum of Art

Taking ESMoA and LA’s South Bay City of El Segundo as ostensible “campaign headquarters,” FREESTATE features new artworks by Cole Sternberg conceived as fabricated historical ephemeras and objects, sovereign documents, and fictional propaganda. The gallery space is split into three rooms, forcing the viewer to experience each as a separate moment along the path to the Free Republic. 

Room one is an elaborate canvasing office, replete with posters, buttons, lawn signs and other public activation propaganda. Sternberg has even drafted a new Constitution for California, published in pocket form for easy mass dissemination. Room two is the brain of the concept. As “California Dreamin’” plays on repeat, the walls of this room are filled from floor to ceiling with works on paper chronicling the artist’s mind map of secession. They explain the historical heartache, the environmental elegance and the logistics of a peaceful and beneficial transition. The final stage is the largest and calmest. Feelings of escape and freedom permeate from Sternberg’s environmental sculpture and collage, which sit quietly against a traditional museum backdrop, demonstrating a future where one can breathe.

FREESTATE is on view through March 2021 at ESMoA 208 Main St, El Segundo, CA 90245. To learn more go to www.thefreerepublicofcalifornia.com

Marc Horowitz "Diagrams For Living" @ No Gallery LA

No Gallery is pleased to present Diagrams for Living, an exhibition of paintings, collages, and video work from Marc Horowitz. The first room of the gallery is occupied by new paintings completed in Los Angeles during quarantine. The second room hosts collage works on paper and collage-like video culled from the artist’s vast archive of personal footage gathered throughout pre-pandemic travels. Marc Horowitz - "Diagrams For Living" will be on view until December 13 at No Gallery, 961 Chung King Rd Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Watch The Premiere Of "Dedicated To Pooch" By Very Nice Massage

Very Nice Massage are back with their sophomore album, Based On The Data. Released on all streaming platforms as well as cassette tape by Baby Race Records, the album maintains their signature dream-like approach to song structure steeped in post-algorithm schizophrenia, yet there has been a complete overhaul of their palette. This new sound brings their spacey ambitions into full fruition. Very Nice Massage have created a mysterious world that refuses to be solved and the endless pleasures of investigation that keep you coming back for more. Follow @verynicemassage and @babyracerecords on Instagram, stream them on your platform, or better yet, get yourself a limited-edition cassette.

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

People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers. Click here to read more.

Art Of The Divine: Kilo Kish and Rikkí Wright In Conversation →

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Rikkí Wright and Kilo Kish are two of the eight artists exhibiting in this year’s edition of Womxn in Windows, a socially distant group show that clearly presaged the conditions of our current moment in its first edition last year. Visitors are invited to walk along the storefronts of Chung King Road in Chinatown and watch short films through each window with scores that can be accessed via QR code. Founded and curated by Zehra Ahmed, this year’s artists were invited to exhibit work that examines the intertwined relationships between culture, religion, and society. These films remind us how womxn have relied on faith and on each other as well as on a desire for equality, understanding, and the power to make the right choices for ourselves. In both Wright and Kish’s films one observes an intimate relationship with the spiritual, however from highly contrasting perspectives and with completely unique aesthetics. Click here to read more.

Read Our Interview Of Artist, Abolitionist & Facilitator Brianna Mims →

Brianna Mims is a polymath if I’ve ever seen one. Along with a lifetime of training in myriad dance forms and becoming a multidisciplinary movement artist, she can likely be found speaking publicly on the role of the NAACP and transformational justice in the abolitionist movement, or walking runway at any number of fashion weeks, or developing curriculum for children to feel safe in moving and communicating freely. Then again, she might just be researching the efficacy of our local welfare system, or brushing up on her Arabic. click here to read more

Romancing A Wound: Read Our Interview With Multidisciplinary Artist Estefania Puerta →

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“I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it.” Click here to read the full interview. Estefania Puerta’s Womb Wound is on view October 11 - Novermber 15 at Situations in New York.

Kenny Scharf Karbombz! Rally Presented By Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Kenny Scharf’s Karbombz! are regularly seen driving on the Los Angeles streets and freeways. Since starting the project in 2013, Scharf has painted 260 cars around the world, about 100 of which are in Los Angeles. For the rally Scharf invited all of the Karbombz! drivers in Los Angeles to participate in a rally, which will took place on Santa Monica Boulevard between San Vicente and Sycamore. About fifty Karbombz! participated. Scharf’s Karbombz! range from beat up jalopies to luxury brands. The drivers come from all walks of life. Potential Karbombz! owners connect with Scharf on the street in front of his murals, through other drivers, and through Instagram. An essential part of the project is that the cars are always painted for free. Kenny Scharf currently has a exhibition on view at Jeffrey Deitch gallery with two hundred fifty new paintings of faces, all of them different, called MOODZ, on view until October 31st. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Multidisciplinary Artist Chris Emile Presents AMEND @ MAK Center In Los Angeles

An exhibition and series of four performances by multi-disciplinary artist Chris Emile, AMEND explores Black male identity through movement, cinema, sculpture and sound. Emile employs archival & contemporary found footage with artifactual set design to re-render the modern architectural marvel that is the Schindler House into a sacred, private place: a home amenable for Black dealing and healing. An intergenerational cast of three dancers acting as one man, move the audience through the house and through time working their way through the question: who, if not me, decides what a Black man is? This performance series took place on September 26 at the Schindler House of the MAK Center in Los Angeles. continues from its original dates in March 2020, which were postponed due to the coronavirus. photographs by Lani Trock

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

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

To: Brad and Gideon

From: The Editors

Dear Brad and Gideon, 

To start, we want to thank you for writing your “exquisite corpse serial novella” with us. When you mentioned the concept back in winter, we were immediately intrigued. It sounded like the perfect sandbox for writers like you two to play in, a recipe for something unusual and surprising. Over these months, it’s been fun to watch you ping-pong the novella back and forth, unaware of the other’s intentions and ideas, fingers crossed that it will result in something cohesive and whole. We’ve laughed out loud at some point while reading every single chapter. 

All that said, we’re emailing today just to express a few concerns. Click here to read more.

Ed Clark "Expanding The Image" @ Hauser and Wirth Los Angeles

Los Angeles... A pioneer of the New York School, Ed Clark (1926 – 2019) extended the language of American abstraction beyond expressionism through his inventive use of pure color, abstract form, and the seductive materiality of paint. Following Hauser & Wirth’s recent New York exhibition of Clark’s paintings made from 2000 to 2013, ‘Expanding the Image’ will be the gallery’s first exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the artist. On view will be works from his highly formative years of 1960 through 1980, two decades during which Clark made pivotal breakthroughs that expanded the language of abstraction. Make an appointment to see the exhibition here. On view until January 10, 2021 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles CA 90013. Installation photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

Serkan Sarier’s "They Eat Their Young" Is A Prescient Reflection Of The Current Moment

 
 

Serkan Sarier’s first solo exhibition in Germany features installations and complementary paintings made onsite during a nine-week residency hosted by the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen. It draws inspiration from The Little Mermaid, a story written in 1836 by Hans Christian Andersen after he was rejected by the man he loved, as well as the artist’s own memories of rejection, feelings of otherness, and moment of transformation. As a member of a Turkish migrant family (Gastarbeiter Familie) and a German citizen, Sarier often explores the subaltern in his work; in the case of They Eat Their Young, he does this through mythical bodies that are not only trapped and isolated, but removed (both socially and geographically) from each other and the observer. It is a hybrid of classical Greek and Roman sculptural references combined with the artist’s own cultural heritage. An exploration made relevant by the scores of younger immigrant generations currently seeking asylum in the Western world.

Shaped by the environment of both his family’s culture and everyday life in Hanau, Serkan expresses this juxtaposition in his use of color and materials. The pervasive and suffocating nature of humankind is made visceral by way of large rocks drenched in iridescent car paint, the weight of them supported by metal grates that line industrial plastic containers; a proper plinth for a rodent being studied in a lab. Great care is taken in the details of faces, gloves and feet. Yet, the genitalia remain vague, if not feminine, on otherwise masculine bodies. One figure dons a large pair of rubber gloves identical to those worn by the artist’s father years ago when he was of working age, its face composed of a deflated rubber mask is squashed and frozen in a moment of anguish. Mannequins made from a soft, rubbery material bring a haunting humanity to wholly cold forms. Each sculpture is immersed in a fresh new coat of car paint that harkens Western Germany from the 1950s through the 1970s, an era when most Turkish immigrants were employed by the automobile industry. They glitter with the promise of assimilation: an opportunity to provide for one’s family in a new Western life.

They Eat Their Young is on view through September 20 @ Stiftung Reinbeckhallen Reinbeckstr. 17, 12459 Berlin. text by Mimi Krtinić Rončević, photographs courtesy of the gallery

Majeure Force: Part II Group Show Marks Tenth Anniversary Of Night Gallery In Los Angeles

In this second installment of Night Gallery’s tenth-anniversary exhibition, forty-one artists have been assembled from its roster and surrounding community to celebrate the exuberant city of Los Angeles. It is a testament to the endurance of creativity and the power of art to continue bringing people together. The closing celebration included a performance by Daniel Gaitor-Lomack photographed below by Lani Trock. Majeure Force Part Two features work by Sarah Awad, Cara Benedetto, Josh Callaghan, Cynthia Daignault, Mira Dancy, Ian Davis, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Samara Golden, Paul Heyer, Ridley Howard, Khari Johnson-Ricks, JPW3, Grant Levy-Lucero, Tau Lewis, Anne Libby, Rose Marcus, Jesse Mockrin, Luke Murphy, Rashaad Newsome, Sterling Ruby, Melanie Schiff, Elaine Stocki, Claire Tabouret, Marisa Takal, Kandis Williams, and Andy Woll.

Watch The World Premiere Of The Music Video For Eddie Chacon's "Pleasure, Joy, And Happiness" Shot On An Alpaca Farm In New Zealand

Eddie Chacon experienced proper, peak-nineties acclaim in the soul duo Charles and Eddie: they scored a global No. 1 in 1992 with “Would I Lie To You,” appeared three times on Top of the Pops. After a hiatus, Chacon returns with “Pleasure, Joy and Happiness,” which is available on the boutique Los Angeles-based label Day End Records. This is a thoughtfully considered album of quiet, confident R&B: it doesn’t jump out at you, but rather gets in you. Produced by John Carroll Kirby, the like-minded artist and collaborator with Frank Ocean and Solange Knowles, it features restrained percussion from Kanye West’s Sunday Service drummer Lamar Carter. Celestial soul as a break from chaos, these are quietly challenging songs as timeless as they are contemporary. Music produced with footage from the Shamarra Alpaca Farm in New Zealand, by Chacon and Sissy Sainte-Marie. Editing by Brandon Bloom. Preorder the LP here.

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

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They recommend that when dealing with rapists and murderers you say your name or your kids names, talk about them - “Our son Oscar just started walking!” They even suggest telling your attacker you’re pregnant when you aren’t, which Bobby didn’t like the dishonesty of. When he robbed people he told the truth about what he wanted and what might happen and preferred his victims be honest in return. Considering the circumstances he knew it was an unreasonable expectation. The personalization strategy made sense objectively. Criminals who aren’t set on murder could possibly change their minds in the heat of the moment if their victims could transform themselves from objects into subjects. Click here to read more.