For more of The Art of Chase check out his Instagram or website
He is also having a show that opens this weekend on 3/31/18 at Castelli Art Space
For more of Bue The Warrior’s work check out his shop here or Instagram
Mar 292018
May 202017
My Madinah. In pursuit of my ermitage…, 2004
Jason Rhoades Installations, 1994-2006 at Hauser & Wirth is a lot of show. It’s a big exhibition with several rooms packed with things. Many, many things. In one room numerous neon expressions for female genitalia hang over a mosque-like environment (above), and in another over countless tourist novelties, bare mattresses, and truck nuts (pictured below).
The earlier work, like My Brother/Brancusi, which was created for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, feels a bit stronger, or at least less controversial. Photos of Brancusi’s studio and Rhoades’ brother’s room are on the walls, while his version of his brother’s room complete with a tower of donuts (somehow still intact) that alludes to Brancusi’s Endless Column, and mechanical objects, fill the center of the installation.
This description is from the press release of The Creation Myth, 1998, another of the better pieces in the show, and gives an insight into Rhoades thought process behind the work-
The artist sought to understand why, how, and what humans create by exploring Creationist and Evolutionist theories in tandem. The irreverent representation of the human body and brain is structured into levels to suggest our categories of perception: the archetypal, the real, the unconscious and the rebellious. Each of the six nouns in the work’s subtitle (‘The Mind, the Body and the Spirit, the Shit, Prick and the Rebellious Part’) is metaphorically portrayed, while the function of the brain itself unfolds through a calculated combination of readymades and images. A series of stacked tables constitutes the ‘brain,’ in which a ‘train of thought’ – a toy train mounted by a snake’s head and tail – circles. Digestible ‘information’ enters the ‘brain’ in the form of pornography-wrapped logs of wood, representing the physicality of creation. Cut and disseminated, ‘information’ is incessantly processed and reproduced by cameras, mirrors, and computers. Smoke rings erupt from ‘the Asshole,’ a fleeting byproduct of the frenzied machine, a personification of the Spirit, alluding to the pursuit of the ephemeral moment.
If you love his work, the chaotic installations and selfie opportunities will delight you. If not, there is still plenty to think about after seeing the show.
Tijuanatanjierchandelier, 2006
This is a good interview discussing the exhibition with the curator (and former partner in the gallery) Paul Schimmel.
This exhibition closes 5/21/17.
Mar 042017
(above work by Sandra Low, Steve Seleska, and Amy Kaps)
Currently at Walter Maciel Gallery is With Liberty and Justice for Some, for which the gallery invited artists from across the country to do 8×8 inch portraits of individuals who came to the United States as immigrants- including historic subjects, personal friends, relatives, strangers, and sometimes self portraits. The gallery is also donating a portion of each sale to various non-profit groups including ACLU, Planned Parenthood, The Trevor Project, Center for Reproductive Rights, and the LA and SF LGBT Centers. Also showing at the gallery is I.D. Please!, with works by artists Hung Liu, John Bankston, Lezley Saar, John Jurayi, Maria E. Piñeres, Nike Schröder, Dana Weiser and Monica Lundy, who have all developed studio practices based around notions of identity.
This exhibition closes 3/4/17.
Also closing this weekend in Culver City-
Egan Frantz‘s The Oat Paintings at Roberts & Tilton
(image above via Roberts & Tilton)
And at Kopeikin Gallery are Ardeshir Tabrizi‘s Observations in Linear Time (palm tree), and Jason Engelund‘s Meta-Landscapes and Visual Ambient Drones (blue).
Ardeshir Tabrizi
Jason Engelund
(images via Kopeikin)
Feb 112017
Rodeo 10, 2016 (Photo credit Jeff McLane)
Hillary Clinton, 2016 (Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer)
Karl Haendel‘s solo exhibition BY AND BY at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, is a collection of highly detailed drawings mixed with earlier work made in 2000, and a new video piece. Included in the earlier work is State Motto Map, a colorful map of the United States, with each state’s motto labeled on it. Washington State’s motto is Alki, or Al-ki, a Native American word meaning bye and bye, and is where the title of this exhibition is drawn from.
From the press release–
In this exhibition, Haendel uses the idea of the portrait to explore contemporary definitions of masculinity, power, and public identity. He undertakes the challenging task of drawing a portrait of what it is to be a man, or perhaps what is expected of men, in images that span a broad range of representations from the heroic to the abject, from the depiction of male achievement in the highest ranks of power to a raw and unsympathetic examination of a middle-aged convicted sex offender. An inquiry into what represents masculinity also requires a look at the conventions of gender representation, as masculinity and femininity have so long been defined, particularly in images, as a codependent set of complimentary traits. In “By and By” Haendel both reasserts and undermines these conventions in heroic portraits of teenage girls riding rodeo, reproductions of murals depicting black civil rights leaders, and a monumental portrait of Hillary Clinton. His drawings and his video work against a tradition of portraiture that collapses individuals into ciphers and symbols that read as shorthand for historical legacies and narrative tropes.
This show closes 2/11/17.
(images via Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects)
Jan 282017
This is the last weekend to see Kerry James Marshall:Mastery at Met Breuer in New York, definitely one of the best exhibitions I saw in 2016.
Here is Met Breuer’s overview of the exhibition-
This major monographic exhibition is the largest museum retrospective to date of the work of American artist Kerry James Marshall (born 1955). Encompassing nearly 80 works—including 72 paintings—that span the artist’s remarkable 35-year career, it reveals Marshall’s practice to be one that synthesizes a wide range of pictorial traditions to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society and reassert the place of the black figure within the canon of Western painting.
Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts rebellion in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. He is known for his large-scale narrative history paintings featuring black figures—defiant assertions of blackness in a medium in which African Americans have long been invisible—and his exploration of art history covers a broad temporal swath stretching from the Renaissance to 20th-century American abstraction. Marshall critically examines and reworks the Western canon through its most archetypal forms: the historical tableau, landscape and genre painting, and portraiture. His work also touches upon vernacular forms such as the muralist tradition and the comic book in order to address and correct, in his words, the “vacuum in the image bank” and to make the invisible visible.
The exhibition runs concurrently with Kerry James Marshall Selects, a room curated by Marshall, of work from the Met collection “ranging from the Northern Renaissance to French post-Impressionism, and from African masks to American photography of the 1950s and ‘60s, underscoring the global and historical nature of the influences that are predominant in his practice”. This is a wonderful addition that adds another layer of perspective to the work.
Taking up two floors of the building, and with work that is often filled with detailed imagery, make sure to leave enough time to take it all in.
For more information on the artist, this New York Times article discusses the retrospective, the artist’s history, and includes quotes from an interview the author had with Marshall in his studio.
This exhibition closes on 1/29/17. If you are in Los Angeles, or visiting, it will open at MOCA Grand Avenue on March 12, 2017.
(Image courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo by Nathan Keay)
Apr 162016
Mara De Luca, “INDIO”, 2015 (image courtesy Edward Cella Art & Architecture)
Mara De Luca, “INDUSTRY”, 2014 (image courtesy Edward Cella Art & Architecture)
Today (4/16/16) is the last day to see Mara De Luca’s solo exhibition Driving Sunset at Edward Cella Art & Architecture.
From the press release–
An MFA graduate of CalArts, De Luca explores the conceptual and expressive potential of process-driven abstract painting. Her works are informed by her study and re-appropriation of art historical conventions, her visual interpretation of literary sources, and the recurring visual tropes of contemporary high-end fashion advertising. Inspired by Los Angeles’ stark contrasts, a place where beautiful natural landscapes coexist alongside endless freeways and countless billboards, De Luca reveals a depth in the superficiality of surface, and an emotive complexity in formal concision.
The show’s title is a reference to Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays, in which the main character drives around Los Angeles aimlessly while trying to clear her mind. There’s a sense of that sought after calm in these paintings, whose colors and dark cloud-like shapes bring to mind the skies and sunsets of California.
Apr 162016
© Eleanor Macnair (image courtesy Kopeikin Gallery)
Untitled, 1975 © William Eggleston
© Eleanor Macnair (image courtesy Kopeikin Gallery)
“Nan one month after being battered”, 1984 © Nan Goldin (image courtesy tate.org.uk)
Currently at Kopeikin Gallery are Eleanor Macnair’s delightful Play-Doh recreations of famous photographs (I’ve included the original photos for comparison, they are not in the show). In the second part of the gallery is Michael Lange’s serene series Wald/Fluss (Forest/River).
WALD | Landscapes of Memory forest in Germany (image courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery)
This exhibition closes 4/16/16.
Mar 252016
“4995” (image courtesy of Regen Projects)
“4600” (image courtesy of Regen Projects)
“0521” (image courtesy of Regen Projects)
For his current solo exhibition Choreograph at Regen Projects, James Welling combines his images of architecture and landscape (common in his previous work), with photographs of dancers to create beautiful dreamlike worlds. Welling once studied dance at the University of Pittsburgh before stopping after a year to go to CalArts, and his continued love of dance is evident in the work.
The process for the creation of these layered images is explained in the press release–
To create these works Welling photographed over a dozen dance companies in New York, Philadelphia, Ottawa, and Los Angeles. The dance photographs were then merged with photographs of architecture (buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph) and landscape imagery (western Connecticut, southern Florida, and Switzerland) in Photoshop’s fundamental red, green, and blue color channels, which are basic to all color photographs. The resulting electronic files were altered by the artist using Photoshop’s Hue and Saturation layers to create complicated, multi-hued photographs, which were then printed on rag paper using a 10 color Epson Stylus Pro 9900 inkjet printer.
For more information on how he achieved the look of the photos in Photoshop, there is a booklet at the front desk that contains a breakdown of the color channels and a list of each color adjustment layer.
This show closes 3/26/16.
Mar 182016
Doppelgangers (in foreground)
Detail of Doppelgangers
Home is Where You Are Happy, No.1
At Amy Yao’s solo exhibition, Bay of Smokes, at Various Small Fires, the fear of a polluted and harmfully modified environment plays a central role. An industrial manufactured scent fills the gallery, lead blankets are on towel racks, and a mountain of rice reveals on closer inspection that it has bits of plastic and pearls (real and fake) mixed in.
In this time of GMO’s, toxic water in Flint, and the gas leak at Porter Ranch, it’s hard not to be paranoid about what is really happening to our natural surroundings and how poisonous our daily lives really are, especially in ways we cannot discern. Yao’s exhibition is a creative and at times playful examination of these issues- but the darkness of the theme, like the scent, remains a constant presence.
This exhibition closes 3/18/16.
Mar 122016
Mom Knows
Black Flag
Detail from Black Flag
The mixed media assemblage paintings in Aaron Fowler‘s current solo exhibition, Blessings on Blessings, at Diane Rosenstein gallery, are large, highly detailed, and dense with imagery.
From the press release-
Aaron Fowler, who was born in St. Louis and currently lives and works in Harlem, creates mixed-media assemblage-paintings that depict his experiences and the lives of his family and friends in both a personal narrative and an epic journey through contemporary America. The title of this exhibition, which includes twelve portraits, tableaux, and medallions created in the past year, refers to lyrics from “Blessings”, a 2015 song by American rapper Big Sean.
In these sculptural tableaux, Fowler depicts himself as a “mirror character” called The Pilgrim. He employs oils, acrylics and collage – often pixilated ‘photo print-outs’ based on 18th C. American historical painting – alongside objects like Adidas sneakers, CDs, T-shirts, and plastic bags. The dynamic, large-scale compositions are enacted on discarded domestic materials including shutters, mirrored doors, windows, and card tables.
This show closes 3/12/16.