Jordi Alcaraz- Ideas of Sculpture
The works in Altered States, Jordi Alcaraz’s current show at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, consistently challenge viewers perceptions. The glass frames surrounding drawings, paintings and sculptures are often broken or warped, where objects may have tried to get in or out. In others, it is the object itself that is being altered. The works get more intriguing as you progress through the gallery.
The show closes 12/21/13.
From Betye Saar’s :The Alpha & Omega-The Beginning & The End
Betye Saar’s installation at Roberts & Tilton contains many objects all coming together to contemplate time, identity, nature and the world around us. Unlike her previous show at the gallery, Red Time, which challenged the viewer with both its imagery and the power of the color itself; The Alpha and Omega, creates a feeling of calm, both in its color palette of blues and grays but also in the objects chosen like clocks and ships. In both shows, history is an important theme. This can be seen most clearly in The Challenges of Fate, a sculpture within the work, made up of a black bird perched on a cage housing a ship, which is above a globe resting on a glass box of bones, all set upon a stack of books.
Also at the gallery is Projections Part II: Film As Painting, curated by Aaron Rose. Multiple films by various artists are presented through different projections and monitor displays. The films are very different in content but work together to present the concept of film as not just film, but moving painting. There are thirteen films within the show and their creation dates range from the earliest, Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935) to Rose’s own The Dress (2013). One standout is Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1962-4) a frantic speeding up of footage of life in the 1960’s in New York.
Both shows close tomorrow, 12/14.
One room from Pet Shapes at China Art Objects Galleries
If you are in Culver City, tomorrow (12/14) is the last day for this group show. All the works are pet related, and there is even a purring chair (not shown). It’s worth checking out if you are in the area.
I first discovered Agnés Varda through the documentary, The Beaches of Agnés. She’s an incredible person, who at 85 (80 in the film), is still making films. This unique presentation of her life is both compelling and inspiring.
Check out some of her work at LACMA’s Agnés Varda in Californialand.
Image from Agnés Varda in Californialand at LACMA
Tonight (12/7) at 7:30pm, LIONS LOVE (…AND LIES) is playing at LACMA along with Black Panthers.
Info from LACMA’s website for this event:
Agnès Varda’s first-ever American feature film was shot while she was living in Los Angeles with husband Jacques Demy (his own U.S. debut, Model Shop, was released the same year). LIONS LOVE (…AND LIES) finds Warhol superstar Viva joined by Hair cocreators James Rado and Gerome Ragni as the trio, in various states of undress, play host to visiting cinéma vérité luminary Shirley Clarke (The Cool World, Portrait of Jason) in a Hollywood bungalow. Sunsoaked Southern California counterculture, New York bohemia, and Left Bank abandon all intermingle in this film about a film. LIONS LOVE (…AND LIES) graced the debut cover of Warhol’s Interview magazine and is Varda’s anarchic paean to the age of aquarius and Tinseltown transience with guest spots by everyone from Eddie Constantine to Peter Bogdanovich. This is an encore screening of the brand-new, LACMA-supported restoration of this film—in partnership with the Annenberg Foundation and The Film Foundation—which is also the inspiration for the filmmaker’s LACMA exhibit Agnès Varda in Californialand.
Also screening, Black Panthers (1969, 30 minutes, color, DCP)—another film newly restored by LACMA, the Annenberg Foundation and The Film Foundation—and Varda’s American debut: a powerful document of the eponymous Oakland movement’s efforts to free activist Huey Newton.
Some interesting facts about Viva– aside from being one of the stars of this film and Warhol’s movies, she also had small parts in Paris, Texas; Midnight Cowboy; and Play It Again, Sam. Both her daughters, Alexandra Auder and Gaby Hoffman, are actresses as well. She currently lives and paints in Palm Springs.
Definitely two films worth checking out. If you miss this screening, clips from the LIONS LOVE(…AND LIES) are playing in the exhibition as well.
Joel Otterson- Bottoms Up #2
Joel Otterson’s current show is “Chandelier Queer” at Maloney Fine Art. This title references the slang term “chandelier queer” defined as- “a homosexual with exquisite and/or expensive taste” or a “self-spoiled fruit”(according to Urban Dictionary). The show consists of sculptures made from found glass wear. The chandeliers are beautiful and seemingly fragile creations which take take what most consider trashy objects, and turns them into something glorious.
Otterson is one of the artists selected to be in the Whitney Biennial 2014.
One of the paintings from the series The Women by Sarah Awad
Currently at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, this show closes Saturday (11/30).
Images from Lari Pittman’s From A Late Western Impaerium
From the Regen Projects press release:
Pittman’s From A Late Western Impaerium constructs a loose narrative of nationhood that travels between our present time and the distant past. The compositionally dense works play with the social and current realities of today, with an interest in ornamentation and surface, and draw on the legacy of history as told through the Western canon of painting and the applied arts. Pittman poses the question of what a contemporary “history painting” might be today.
For more information about Lari Pittman, check out this article in Artillery Magazine
The show is up until December 21, 2013.
Today (11/23) at Regen Projects there is also a Raymond Pettibon book signing from 4-6pm.
Images from the film L’Enfer by Henri-Georges Clouzot
From the press release for The End of the Night:
LACE is proud to continue the collaboration with Ceci N’est Pas… in presenting The End of the Night, organized by curator Martha Kirszenbaum and designed by Exhibition Designer Marianne Zamecznik, is a bold group exhibition exploring the impact of French filmmaker, Henri-Georges Clouzot and his unfinished 1963-1964 film, L’Enfer, on notions of abstraction, the kinetic, and optical illusions in contemporary French art. For this exhibition, Kirszenbaum has invited five artists whose works reflect on Clouzot’s pictorial and sound experimentation and respond to his visual and sensorial imagination: a historical figure, Julio Le Parc, and four emerging artists, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Isabelle Cornaro and Pierre-Laurent Cassière. Kirszenbaum’s project is a double exhibition – the other half taking place at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, emphasizing a similarly themed exploration of the work of Los Angeles experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger.
When you see the clips from Clouzot’s film at this show, it is easy to see how it could inspire an exhibition. His use of spinning lights to create the illusion of changes in the actress’s face is one of the more mesmerizing aspects of the film.
One of the standouts from the show is the double channel projection video installation, The Eighth Sphere, by Florian & Michael Quistrebert. The two projections of geometrical shapes merge and separate creating interesting effects.
Also at LACE tonight (11/14) there is a town hall forum that is open to the public.
