Today (3/23) is the last day to see Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting at LACMA.
From the press release:
In an attention-compromised age when images are instant and prevalent, abstract painting serves as a contradiction, acting as a conduit for the mark of the original, individual artist. While most of the work in the exhibition has been recently created and acquired, additional paintings culled from LACMA’s collection illustrate how artists have reanimated techniques and forms using other sources that are appropriated from popular culture, photography, and collage, essentially creating a new variation of abstract painting.
It’s also a good day to visit LACMA because they are having a full day of activities and performances to celebrate Nowruz, the Iranian New Year and the first day of spring.
The exhibition features sculpture, drawing, poetry, and video in an installation addressing a range of subjects from global energy production-nuclear power and the potential of geothermal energy-to utopian ideals and the relationship between art and social issues.
A series of monumental works feature organic, terrestrial forms made from resin and earth. In contrast to their raw, earthly matter, a series of highly polished stainless steel sculptures reflect and refract an illusion of the world onto their mirrored surfaces and confound the viewers’ relationship to the space around them. Similarly, several monochromatic voids appear to float on the gallery walls, their concave interiors play with the viewers’ perception of surface and depth and create the illusion of infinite space reflected in their void like interiors. A trio of amorphous wall sculptures entitled Keriah (I, II, III) refer to the Jewish mourning practice of clothes tearing. Visceral and raw, their shapes hang on the wall as if in a perpetual state of decay.
Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (3/5-3/8/15)-
Thursday
Eleanor Friedberger (of The Fiery Furnaces) is playing at the Echo
MOCA Grand Ave along with REDCAT is co-presenting a lecture with curator Raimundas Malašauskas
Director Jim McBride (Breathless, The Big Easy) will be in conversation with Peter Markham at Veggie Cloud in Highland Park after a screening of his 1967 film David Holzman’s Diary
Friday
Viet Cong are playing a sold out show at the Echo but there may be some tickets at the door
Canadian band Stars are at the Fonda with Leisure Cruise
REDCAT is premiering Thom Anderson’s (who also made Los Angeles Plays Itself) newest essay film The Thoughts That We Once Had
Saturday
The group show Paper Cut opens at Subliminal Projects and the cut paper related works look pretty incredible on the website (RSVP required)
Sunday
Farrah Karapetian and Zoe Crosher are among the artists who will be discussing photography for week one of Remembering Forward: Conversations on Photography at LAXART’s new space in Hollywood- for the full list and to RSVP
PaleyFest Los Angeles runs through 3/15 and gives fans a chance to see the casts of popular tv shows discuss them live at the Paley Center. This weekend’s lineup includes Homeland (3/6), A Salute to Comedy Central (3/7), The Good Wife (3/7), Girls (3/8) and Scandal (3/8).
Today (2/22) is the last day to see Pierre Huyghe at LACMA. There is so much to see within the show and it is, at times, overwhelming. You enter the exhibition with your name announced by a live announcer and then proceed through the maze like space to find aquariums with live sea creatures in them; video work, including a film with a monkey walking around wearing the mask of a girl; sculptures including the one pictured above with a head of live bees (Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt)); and Human, a live dog who is around the gallery at various times. It’s Huyghe’s first retrospective in his twenty-five year career and well worth a trip into his unique visual world.
The Series 2 exhibit is a modern and unexpected interpretation of a fashion show that contextualizes the Spring 2015 Women’s Ready-to-Wear collection, conceived by Women’s Artistic Director, Nicolas Ghesquière. The exhibit allows visitors to explore the creative process behind the collection through a “series” of distinctive rooms that thematically share his influences and inspirations as well as the excitement of the fashion show experience.
It is an interesting exhibit and does immerse you in the fashion show world. There is even a video section where you learn about the process of creating the items themselves. And free stickers at the end!
Today is the last day to see British artist Gillian Wearing’s exhibition everyone at Regen Projects. The two new video works are especially affecting.
Fear and Loathing, the artist’s first work produced in the US, presents a split screen with two people wearing masks, one on each side, alternating monologues about either a fear or a loathing from their personal lives. In the second, We are Here, residents of the West Midlands of England, tell stories of their lives as if they have returned from the dead. This piece was inspired by the American poet Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 book Spoon River Anthology.
The artist also includes portraits of herself within the exhibition, including a portrait of herself in a mask of her younger self, a large necklace with a pendant that is a mask of her face, and a series of sculptures of her hand with different fortune teller readings written on them.
There’s a certain sadness to the exhibition as Wearing examines lives caught in circumstances that are often beyond their control. This ties in to the idea of the fortune teller, who is sought out for the feeling that life is predestined. Yet the various fortune tellers here tell different stories for the same hand. Perhaps these are like the different stories we are presenting to the world throughout our lives, at times with our true faces masked.
Part pot luck, part slide show Slideluck LA will present the work of over 20+ photographers set to music while you eat and drink (5$ open bar-beer and wine)
Artist Chelsea Knight drove around the country having local actors read monologues and break character- tonight at ltd los angeles, actors from LA will try to do the same, drinks will be served as well
LACMA’s film double bill today is East of Eden and The Godfather– see both for $5
Also at LACMA, as part of The Director’s Series, Michael Govan (LACMA CEO) will be speaking with Tacita Dean following a screening of Manhattan Mouse Museum, Dean’s film about the artist Claus Oldenburg in his studio
There are two big art fairs this weekend- Photo LA and the LA Art Show, both downtown.
Miwa Matreyek’s incredible dance/animation projection performances have been mentioned on this site before– and this weekend along with the performance group Cloud Eye Control (Anna Oxygen, and Chi-wang Yang) she will be performing Half Life at the Redcat which was inspired by blog entries by women who experienced the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis
From a distance the paintings in Nicolas Grenier’sOne Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune, his exhibition at Luis de Jesus gallery, look like patterns and gradients. On closer inspection though, words materialize to comment on the societal structures currently controlling us.
In the first image above, Middle Ground II, anger in the darker colors moves to the “whatever” placed in gray. The center text reads “toward a bipartisan middle ground”. In the second, One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune, the top text line fading in the pinkish gray reads “mass of folks that are left out and slowly sink to the bottom”, and further lines describe increasing ways that “folks” deal with their lot in life until the bright yellow center which reads “few folks that actually make things what they are”.
From the press release-
For Grenier, color functions as a kind of ecosystem to house the social, political, and cultural systems that serve as points of departure within the work. Gradation is used as a scalable, mutable device for organizing the paintings into large, concentric forms, as well as the interface through which we experience smaller letterforms and vectors. Thus, color plays a double agent: working to both solidify meaning (produce readability) and obscure signs as they become recognizable.
Grenier will be speaking at the gallery Saturday, December 13th at 3pm. This show closes December 20th.
This has been a great year for sculpture shows in Los Angeles, and this selection of work from artists based in this city is one of the best.
From the press release:
This group exhibition will address representations of the domestic object in fine art, including issues of still life, consumerism, gender, and identity. Exploring destabilization and the transformative shifts in cultural and aesthetic value that elevate the ordinary to art, the exhibition examines how everyday objects can be lifted from the mundane.
Today (11/8) is the last day to see this impressive show at Angles Gallery.
Today (10/25) is the last day to see Kehinde Wiley‘s The World Stage:Haiti, the latest in his series of global portraits. For this exhibition he altered his usual process for finding subjects.
…Kehinde Wiley found beauty in Haiti bringing it to the forefront by creating his own beauty pageants, in the long tradition of pageant culture native to the region. In previous World Stage iterations, Wiley conducted his castings on the streets. With The World Stage:Haiti, he employed a different approach specific to the culture: open calls on the radio, posters around the streets of Jacmel, Jalouise and Port-au-Prince culminating in beauty pageants. Across the Caribbean, pageants serve as mass entertainment events, allowing locals to do more than exhibit poise, talent and physical beauty; pageants are a manifestation of collective cultural values. Wiley’s pageant winners were chosen randomly rather than through a judging process. By showing the pageant contestants paintings of European masters on which the new works would be based, Wiley deepened the connection between both place and era.
For a really fascinating look at his previous work and process, I recommend watching the recent PBS documentary Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace, available on their website (free).
