Riot Material

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theater

The Primal Delights Of Gather: Surprising Stories and Other Mischief

at the Carrie Hamilton Theater at Pasadena Playhouse
Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman

One of the unsung heroes of American theater is Paul Sills, whose groundbreaking Story Theater technique re-invented dramatic storytelling and influenced a generation of actors, directors and playwrights. Sills, who co-founded the famed Second City theater troupe in Chicago and directed performers from Ed Asner and Alan Arkin to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, used improvisation, mime and dance to dramatize fairy tales, folk stories and ancient myths. Sills’ vision was to revisit the ancient traditions of oral storytelling for modern audiences. [Read More…]

♥

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film

The Apocalypse Is Agreeably Upon Us In The Dead Don’t Die

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we say, ‘Fine.’ That’s the criticism that cuts through Jim Jarmusch’s star-stuffed zombie-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, where the undead not only feast on human flesh but also gravitate toward the distractions they were obsessed with in life, be it coffee, cell phones, or Chardonaaaaaaay! It’s a strange journey that is savagely funny, sophisticated and unnerving.  [Read More…]

artist

interview

Christina Quarles And The Aesthetics Of Ambiguity

An Interview with Lita Barrie

Christina Quarles is at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists who are making ambiguity the aesthetic of our time. Few artists can incorporate as many painting styles as fluidly as Quarles does because few artists have the chops to paint and draw as well as she does. Even fewer have the philosophic rigor and intellectual muscle to upturn the cultural assumptions underlying the history of painting – and have such obvious pleasure doing it. [Read More…]

art

Ross Bleckner’s Burnt Offerings

Pharmaceutria
at Petzel Gallery, NYC (through June 15)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Ross Bleckner’s luminous canvases of the 1980s and 90s, often rendered in grey and evoking distant galaxies, possess an otherworldly light, which is apt, since many of his paintings of that time memorialize those lost to the relentless onslaught of AIDS.

Bleckner, whose first show in five years is on exhibit at the Petzel Gallery through June 15, is still making elegiac, gauzy images of loss. But this time, the loss that plagues us is, sadly, self-inflicted: our current political and social divisiveness, and more portentously, the plight of our planet, that Garden of Eden we have managed to more or less destroy. [Read More…]

That Evening Sun

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

While visiting Crushow, I was lucky to catch this moment of his daughter coming to see him. It was a moving day for him. Every two weeks the residents have to move their tents and belongings to a different location while the city comes and cleans the streets and sidewalks. Anything that is not removed is thrown away. Sometimes people lose invaluable possessions that cannot be replaced. But Crushow says the upside of the street cleaning is people don’t accumulate too much stuff, which in itself can drag you down. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Old Smoke Fuels The Sound Fury Of Theoretical Spontaneity

Baczkowski/Lopez/Corzano’s Old Smoke
on Relative Pitch Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Because of his self-anointed position as the ambassador of all jazz, Wynton Marsalis served as musical advisor on Ken Burns’s episodic documentary on the genre for PBS. By deleting any real discussion of the music’s experimental arm, it was understood to be a death blow for avant-garde jazz. At that point, the entirety of jazz was atrophying, despite Marsalis’s acclaim. He attempted to cut off what he deemed an unneeded appendage to save the body he loved. Marsalis has further slashed at free jazz in the ensuing years, perhaps unable to believe his initial assault did not mortally wound the sound. [Read More…]

The Disorienting, Confounding And Enthralling New Work Of Guillermo Kuitca

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through August 11)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

As if dreams of buildings, rooms, floor plans, and landscape had landed within his abstract works, Guillermo Kuitca’s often mysterious images take viewers into a world entirely different from our own. At LA’s Hauser & Wirth, Kuitca’s works collapse, repeat, and spatially shift the spaces they represent, weaving a visual language that is both surreal and yet recognizable, evoking both past and future and an impossible present. The exhibition offers viewers a robust variety of the Argentinian artist’s  work, including lustrous mixed media on paper images that represent performance spaces such as the Hollywood Bowl, Staples Center, and the Sydney Opera House, among others. [Read More…]

Garry Winogrand: Color

at Brooklyn Museum, NYC (through December 8) Reviewed by John Haber Garry Winogrand: Color contains a monster four hundred and fifty photographs. … [Read More...]

The Line

A Conflation of Dueling Sentiments In Alexandra Grant’s Born to Love

at Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles (through July 6)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Artist Alexandra Grant refers to herself as a “radical collaborator,” a dualistic thinker, a synthesizer of textual images into visual form as for many years she has worked closely with both writers and scholars to create luminous paintings that both incorporate and re contextualize the words of others. In the case of her most recent body of work however, Grant has chosen to turn inward, mining a more personal landscape that encompasses the written texts from Sophocles’ Antigone. At the core of Sophocles’ play is the radical iteration, given the year in which it was written and the fact Greece was a patriarchal society, that a woman can have a voice, an identity, a deeply personal conviction, insisting, as Antigone does, on divine altruism and the healing power of love. Love is the driving force that fuels Grant’s work, so it only seems natural that she would gravitate to the prescient words spoken by Sophocles heroine — “I was born to love, not to hate.” [Read More…]

Our Future Revisited In Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels

by Ellen C. Caldwell

During a time in which eight U.S. states have passed bills to limit women’s rights to abortions, Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels seem timely and relevant. Made between July 1998 and February 1999, this series of ten works features personal and quietly anguished portraits of women who have just undergone or are undergoing, at-home, illegal abortions. Rego, born in Portugal and living in Britain, was motivated to create this series about her home country after a referendum to liberalize existing abortion laws was proposed and defeated in Portugal during the summer of 1998. She saw this as a rallying cry for change and used her art as a response and motivator. [Read More…]

Remembrance IncARnaTe In Inherited Memories

at Castelli Art Space, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Inherited Memories, at Castelli Art Space in Culver City, is a graceful, poignant, intensely moving exhibition from Shula Singer Arbel, Dwora Fried, and Malka Nedivi. Each of the three artists has created powerful, transcendent work that deals with the fact their mothers survived the Holocaust. They acknowledge their mothers’ traumas and the way in which their mothers’ memories have affected their own work, and their own lives. [Read More…]

Beauty and the Beast Both Defines And Defies The Figurative

at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through June 8)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Beauty and the Beast is a compelling two-person show that both upends and celebrates formal figurative tradition. It is an exhibition of contrasts: the personal and the political, the interior and the external. The two artists, Jorg Dubin and Andrea Patrie, are disparate in style and subject, but their works speak to each other here, a kind of call and response between the most defined and the more evocative articulation of the physical body. [Read More…]