Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory- “Afterlife”
Sharon Van Etten, with new band The Attachment Theory, released their eponymous album this past February which includes the song above.
They are currently on tour and playing in Los Angeles at The Wiltern on Wednesday, 5/21/25, with Love Spells.
“Radiating Kindness (Oil)”, 2023, Oil on linen
“Bold Glamour”, 2023, Digital print on linen
For AI Paintings, Matthew Stone‘s 2023 exhibition at The Hole’s Lower East Side location, he explored new ways of using the latest technology while expanding on techniques used in his previous digital creations.
Details from The Hole about this exhibition-
Two LED screens form the center of this show, displaying an unedited stream of novel AI outputs; a new painting every ten seconds. Corresponding in scale to the surrounding works on linen and functioning like smart canvases, these AI paintings transform endlessly and if you’re alone in the gallery, you will be the only person to ever see that version of the artwork.
Stone’s AI paintings—both the tangible on linen and the fleeting screenic pieces—are created through his training of a custom AI model on top of Stable Diffusion’s open source, deep learning, text-to-image model. By feeding it only his past artworks, Stone has created a self-reflexive new series of AI works that disintegrates the hegemony of the singular static masterpiece and problematizes the idea of ownership, or even what “the artwork” itself entails.
AI has become part of contemporary culture, used to solve real world problems and also create TikTok filters. It’s a tool and like a paintbrush it can be used skillfully or not. At the moment AI is throwing the art world into upheaval as artists explore its potential, galleries contend with its disruption of technique and presentation and collectors and museums feel the dissolution of authorship and ownership.
A second type of work makes its debut here, Radiating Kindness (Oil), a 3D printed, machine-assisted oil painting made in collaboration with ARTMATR labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to make innovative tools and tech. By leveraging AI, robotics, computer vision and painting scripts, their robot has created a traditional oil painting in three dimensions. You can see on the surface how the interplay between analog and digital mark making is eye-boggling.
The show also includes examples of Stone’s “traditional” technique, which is anything but: on the 13-foot wide linen painting, Irradiance, four nude figures dance over piles of strewn AI paintings. The figures in the foreground, reminiscent in choreography of Henri Matisse’s Dance (La Dance), 1910, are bodacious, athletic women, heavy and sexy like a Michelangelo marble while at the same time futuristic, weightless and splendid in impossible glass and metallic brush marks. Here Stone’s circular and sensitive approach is laid bare for the viewer, the references to art history, technology, culture, access and the pursuit for the intangible is almost overwhelming to grasp.
Stone’s approach points to the deeply interwoven nature of our offline and online lives today. He sees artists’ use of new technologies as necessary, with creatives deploying these tools in a manner that’s not motivated by big tech or financial gains, disrupting the algorithm by creating their own and exploring this new frontier without data-driven deliverables. Creating new context and room for human subjectivities and emotion in the shift from analog to digital that arguably has already occurred.
Below, in an interview for The Standard, he discusses using AI for this work further-
When working with AI, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed or do you always feel in control?
I have never felt fully in control while making art and I’ve always been back and forth between wanting to be and understanding the transformative and creative power of just letting go. The most exciting moments in my creative process have often been unexpected mistakes. Those happy mistakes have revealed something that can then be consciously amplified. Using AI creates lots of unexpected outcomes very fast. So as someone who likes accidents in this context of image making, it’s a good way to become accident-prone.
Do you consider AI as just another digital tool? Or does it feel more like a collaboration? In other words, do you sometimes feel AI might develop its own taste, point of view, conscience?
It’s a digital tool and I try to resist the urge to anthropomorphize it. But it’s difficult because it feels like such a paradigm shift and also sometimes like dreaming. I think that culturally speaking, we are moving in a direction that assigns these qualities of perceived sentience to AI even when more mundane actions are at play. It’s not clear to me how we will tell if AI has achieved general intelligence, but I think most people will assume it to be the case long before it actually happens, assuming that it does.
The images above are from David Hockney’s 2023 exhibition of iPad paintings, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, at Pace Gallery. Hockney discusses these works in this essay from the show’s catalogue.
From Pace about this exhibition-
This exhibition will present a distinct series of editioned and signed inkjet prints including five landscapes, twenty floral still lifes, and a composite of three iPad paintings depicting a bouquet of gladioli. These works reveal the presence of Hockney’s hand as well as his deliberate technique for drafting larger-than-life compositions on the iPad. While Hockney’s flowers capture the fleeting stillness of his subjects, his immersive landscapes establish the vastness of his rural surroundings. Whether bound to a single moment in time or created from multiple planes of vision, Hockney’s distinctive sense of time and space draws from art historical examples ranging from the Bayeux Tapestry and seventeenth-century Chinese scrolls to the still lifes of Henri Matisse.
A cornerstone of the series, Hockney’s landscapes call upon his observations of the changing of seasons. In each of his gridded picture planes, Hockney reimagines the Normandy countryside with bright colors, abstracted forms, and impossible angles of otherwise traditional outdoor scenes. Placing his focus on themes of renewal and rebirth, the resulting body of work reflects the pastoral nostalgia and beauty of the natural world.
First reproduced by the German newspaper, Die Welt, and later debuted at Musée Matisse in Nice, Hockney’s series of twenty flower iPad paintings captures various arrangements of blooms set against a backdrop of gingham tablecloths and burgundy walls. “I was just sitting at the table in our house, and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table,” Hockney explains. “A few days later I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase. This took longer to do. I then realized if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water, and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off.” Though attributes vary in each work, such as the species of flower, type of vase, and the color of the tablecloth, consistent elements across this series allow viewers to admire Hockney’s technique and dedication to his subject. Capturing a spectrum of floral compositions with contrasting tones and textures, Hockney displays his propensity for balancing the central artistic elements of line, color, and perspective.
At the center of the exhibition, Hockney debuts his latest large-scale photographic drawing, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed). Within the composition, Hockney is depicted twice – once on the right side of the scene, and once on the left – sitting in an armchair and looking upon his twenty flower still lifes displayed salon-style on a navy-blue wall. “This is photographic but is in no way an ordinary photograph,” Hockney describes. “I had been doing what I called photographic drawings, giving a much more 3D effect. This is because you have to look at these through time (unlike an ordinary photograph which you see all at once).” From a series of individual photographs, Hockney constructs a seamless panorama that defies the natural parameters of time and space. The photographic drawing pulls viewers into a self-referential world that is at once familiar and entirely new. “Most people thought the photograph was the ultimate depiction of reality, didn’t they? People thought, This is it, this is the end of it. Which it’s not. And I’m very certain it’s not, but not many people think the way I do.”
Recently Hockney was invited to take over the entire building of the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris for David Hockney 25. The exhibition includes- “more than 400 of his works (from 1955 to 2025) including paintings from international, institutional, and private collections, as well as works from the artist’s own studio and Foundation. There are works in a variety of media including oil and acrylic painting, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art (works on iPhone, iPad, photographic drawings…) and immersive video installations”. The core of the exhibition concentrates on his work from the past 25 years .
That show is on view until 8/31/25.
Florist- Have Heaven
This song is from Florist‘s latest album Jellywish, released in April of this year. The animation for this video was done by Kohana Wilson.
The band is playing at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on Friday 5/16/25, with Allegra Krieger.
The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night by Rosana Paulino was recently commissioned by the High Line in New York and is on view until December 2025.
From the High Line’s website about the artist and the work-
Rosana Paulino’s practice spans drawing, painting, suture, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation. Her work foregrounds social, ethnic, and gender issues, taking particular care to explore the lasting legacy of slavery and the history of both racial and gender-based violence in Brazil. The artist weaves personal, scientific, and historical archives throughout her work, using these materials to demonstrate and then deconstruct violent colonial structures, particularly as they relate to Afro-Brazilian women. Taking into account the impact these archives and memories have on collective values and belief systems, Paulino examines the construction of myths—not only as an aesthetic pillar but also as a key influence on cultural consciousness.
The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night is a continuation of the artist’s mangrove series, which depicts tree-women as a mythological archetype and symbol for the Brazilian biome. Paulino notes that mangroves, like the country’s Black and Indigenous people, have been mistreated and exploited. The artist highlights the symbolic meaning inherent in this ecosystem: It is where life begins, as a home for countless species and as a blue carbon reservoir, and where life ends, due to the decomposition of the mangrove itself. In The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night, Paulino re-imagines this duality between life and death as day and night. From left to right, the color of the sky fades from daylight to a deeper, midnight hue. In lieu of gilded halos traditionally seen in European representations of holy figures, the tree-women’s heads are framed by halos resembling the sun and the moon. Similarly, the animals surrounding the goddesses also reference the transition from day to night. On the left side of the composition, Paulino depicts two diurnal birds native to the mangrove biome: the white egret and, in the tree-woman’s hands, the scarlet ibis. To her right, the other goddess holds an owl and is flanked by two bats, both of which are nocturnal. Together, these elements present a rich, new mythological framework for the mangrove, offering a departure from depictions shaped by colonization and exploitation.
The images above are from Saya Woolfalk‘s exhibition The Woods Woman Method at Susan Inglett Gallery this past March.
From the gallery about this show-
The Woods Woman Method is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid identity, accomplished through an elaborate fiction inspired by her own family background. Combining elements of African American, Japanese, and European cultures with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, Eastern religion, and fashion, Woolfalk depicts the story of a chimeric species she names the Empathics, botanic humanoid beings with a highly evolved ability to understand the experiences of others.
The Woods Women, a secret society of forest dwellers, first emerged within Woolfalk’s Empathic Universe, as she prepared for her solo exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in 2021. While an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum from 2019 to 2021, she closely engaged with its renowned Herbarium and Hudson River School collections, leading to her reimagining of the earth and sky as she considered the “speculative fictions” of these idealized American landscapes, and her consideration of indigenous North American creation myths, oral histories of the descendants of enslaved Africans, and their uses of medicinal plants.
The exhibition features drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, sculpture, and video. Among the works on view are Birthing a New Sky: Starship Moon Cycle (2022), an inspired visualization of the artist’s sister, sitting in a lotus position, anticipating the birth of her daughter. Woolfalk writes:
“For a new sky to be born she must split herself into a million pieces. Each cell in her body replicates itself, spinning in twirling orbits. Her atomized insides burst apart, cascading into the void around her. Swirling and churning, one cell makes its way back to her center, where her heart had been. This brave new life expands, forcing its way out as new light, new land – a new sky.”
Other highlights include the landscape collages, Birthing a New Sky: Manuscripts 3 and 4 (2021),and 5 and 6 (2022), in which Woolfalk posits an alternative American creation myth. While appearing to be simple abstractions, these works are quite complex, composed of hundreds of intricately pieced and layered elements created from handmade Japanese papers that she has painted and stained with watercolor and gouache, Japanese silver foil, and acrylic medium.
The series of large-scale prints, The Four Virtues (2017) depict the physical embodiments of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, qualities that are vital to the ethos of her world.
The exhibition was held in advance of Woolfalk’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Arts and Design– Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, curated by Alexandra Schwartz. That exhibition includes multimedia installations paintings, sculptures, performance, and works on paper created during the past twenty years and will be on view until 9/7/25.
Panda Bear- Praise
This song is from Panda Bear‘s first solo album in five years, Sinister Grift, which was released in February of this year.
On Saturday, 5/10, Panda Bear will be playing the Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena. There are several great bands on the lineup including- Vampire Weekend, Courtney Barnett, The Drums, Toro y Moi, Perfume Genius, Of Montreal, Beach Fossils, Slowdive, and more.
Bradley Hoffer’s works in the foreground, Michael McLoughlin’s photos on the wall behind
Images to the left and right by photographer Mike McLoughlin
Asbury Park in New Jersey is most famous for its music scene, but recently murals and other artworks are adding another reason to visit this seaside town. Many of these pieces would not exist without the hard work of local Jenn Hampton, who started the Wooden Walls Project in 2015. The collaborative arts initiative has worked on numerous projects in the area with local artists and others from farther afield.
One of these projects is New Jersey photographer Mike McLoughlin‘s Art Lives Here- a series of portraits of local arts community members. Each portrait is based on a famous work of art. All of them can be found here.
Below are a few of the murals and works created in collaboration with Wooden Walls. They are located around Asbury Park Boardwalk‘s Historic Steam Plant building and the Carousel Casino Complex. They include works by Porkchop and Bradley Hoffer who currently have a joint exhibition on view at The Art Spot.
Hearts by Amberella, work by Tina Schwarz and mural by Keya Tama
Mural by Keya Tama
Work by ONEQ (@negiyakisoba)
Work by JMikal Davis aka Hellbent
Work by Joe Iurato (left) and Beau Stanton (right)
Ray Geary “St. Shadi and the Madd Doggs” Pigmented resin on board
Work by Pau Quintanajornet (@artofpau)- “Yemaya and her Sea Birds”
Sculpture by Hyland Mather (@thelostobject)
Mural is by Porkchop and Bradley Hoffer
Mural by Porkchop of Yemaya
Currently at The Art Spot in Asbury Park are the incredible cardboard creations of multi-disciplinary artists Michael La Vallee (aka Porkchop) and Bradley Hoffer for Anti AI: A 2025 Cardboard Odyssey. Along with the exhibitions, the gallery also serves as a studio for La Vallee and a shop selling items by him and others, including a large section of modified clothing items.
Outside of the gallery are two large murals, pictured below. The first is by Porkchop and Hoffer and the second is by artists Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks.
Mural by Porkchop and Bradley Hofffer
Mural by Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks (with Bradley Hoffer section from the previous mural)
This show is on view until May 8th, 2025.
clipping.- Run It
Every month I listen to the majority of bands and musicians who are playing in Los Angeles and select some for a monthly playlist. It includes a variety of genres and usually newer work by the artist.
The song above is from LA band clipping.‘s 2025 album, Dead Channel Sky.
Below are the selections for March-
