This Empty World, the latest exhibition by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt (at Fahey/Klein, Los Angeles, through 27 April), is a captivating account of wildlife colliding hard against an endless tide of human encroachment and unchecked corporate development. Once roaming free upon endlessly expansive and entirely majestic lands, these now endangered animals find themselves wandering amid stands of cement walls, their destinies perilously disrupted by ditches, bus stations, construction sites, highways, dried river beds and, of course, people. So many people. Everywhere, locals — whose mere presence carries with it an indeterminable fate of doom — stare away from these gorgeous creatures, grounded as they are in their own sense of isolation and despair. When their eyes do seem to meet, at least in Brandt’s photographs, the encounter is altogether fruitless, for the two are equal victims of a global environmental destruction that churns-on despite local action. [Read More…]
artist
Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite
at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Nancy K. Turner
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities
–Maya Angelou
Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite, is an intimate in scale, personal in scope, potent exhibit. It documents through photographs, ephemera, and fashion, Kwame Braithwaite, his wife Sikolo, his brother Elombe Brath and their circle of musician and artist friends as they built a movement based on the philosophy of cultural empowerment, dignity and affirmation originally espoused by Marcus Garvey. [Read More…]
film
The Extraordinary Fast Color Breathes New Life Into The Superhero Genre
Superhero origin stories typically center on a hero coming into their power and realizing the responsibilities therein. In studio-made films, this arc is accompanied by flashy costumes, super-villains, and elaborate action sequences. But as the superhero genre evolves, inventive indies are pushing their tropes into thrillingly unexpected new realms. In Fast Color, writer/director Julia Hart uses the superhero origin structure to explore the struggles and glory of becoming a mother. [Read More…]
artist
Awakening the Spirit in Motion: Christina Quarles
But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles (through May 9)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Christina Quarles’ dazzling But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same transports viewers into a lush and seductive world, a world that takes viewers on a brilliantly motion filled ride with contorted figures that veer between narrative and abstract. We struggle to understand the image, yet we intuitively know the seemingly impossible, terrible and wonderful positions relationships thrust us into. [Read More…]
books
Proxy Among the Spiders: An Imagined Louise Bourgeois In Now, Now, Louison
Now, Now, Louison, by Jean Frémon
New Directions Publishing, 112 pps. $13.95
There once was a little girl named Louise. Sweet, endangered, watchful and tragic, this little girl, who in her permeable nomenclature was also referred to as Lousion, bore the embryonic shadow of the son and heir that her father desired. Louise and her mother, Louison and her father, a baleful diet of scissors and stones, a garden overgrown with weeds. Here is where the myth begins. [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
Figueroa Slim. Originally from Oklahoma, he tells me he was living there back when The Oklahoma City bombings happened in 1995. Slim has lived in a handful of places since, with the past 10 years spent living in Skid Row, talking and dressing slick. He’s trying to raise ten thousand dollars to clear up some fines he owes and he’s ready to be put in the movies and get paid. [Read More…]
Art At The Crossroads: Artists Addressing The U.S./Mexico Border
With the threat of closing the U.S./Mexico border looming, people whose lives do not intersect with the border on a regular basis are thinking more about the border than usual. But before this recent wave of attention, artists have been drawn to the border and have been drawing attention to the myriad issues it raises through performances, street art, public art, photography, and augmented reality (AR). [Read More…]
Soul Of A Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power 1963-1983
at TheBroad Museum, Los Angeles (through September1)
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman
There are many ways to look at the passionate and very earnest Soul of A Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, at The Broad Museum. It is foremost a show intended to be experienced in the context of American politics during the tumultuous decades of the sixties and seventies when, for the first time, many Black artists were emboldened to question and re-imagine their place in a society steeped in racism. The strongest of the overtly political works are rooted in a sense of urgency or despair yet reveal universal conditions that transcend their times. There is an arc to the exhibit that is somewhat like the five stages of grief. The show starts with awareness, moves toward anger, then acceptance, and ends with work that is largely unconcerned with the initial problem altogether. The focus moves from civil rights to questions of personal, artistic and cultural identity. Is that progress or the illusion of progress? [Read More…]
The Line
Future Gaze And The Dystopically Rendered Face
at Coagular Curatorial, Los Angeles (through March 30)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’ into the future…
House the people / Livin’ in the street / oh, oh there’s a solution…
–Steve Miller Band
What do you see when you look into the future’s face? That is the question posited and replied-to at Future Gaze, a two-person exhibition at Coagula Curatorial. [Read More…]
Kim Dingle: I Will Be Your Server (The Lost Supper Paintings)
at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through May 4)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Priss has captivated the artworld with her mischievous antics since she first appeared in Kim Dingle’s artwork thirty years ago, dressed in her Sunday Best and ready for battle. Dingle’s imaginary character split and replicated, like a Tribble on StarTrek, into a bi-racial pair, Fatty and Fudge, and then into a wild pack, the “Priss Girls.” These ornery tots run amok: causing mayhem, having fights, raging temper tantrums, and destroying things. Priss and her gang of rambunctious pre-pubescent girls inhabit a world with no adults, no men, and no rules. [Read More…]
The Storm of History: Sergei Bundarchuk’s War and Peace
The movies now give us an “epic” nearly every week of the year. Digital technology, corporate budgets and the public’s own current thirst for shallow escapism have paved the way for visions both ludicrous and wondrous. Chiseled, tattooed ruffians bestrode kraken-like monsters in Aquaman, cyborgs levitate from futuristic cities buried in trash in Alita: Battle Angel. But what do these films have to say? As we wallow in popcorn excess, Janus Films restores and re-releases the grandest, deepest epic of all, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. Made in 1967, it shames everything, and I mean absolutely everything, playing at the ArcLight today. Slated for a June release on DVD and Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection, it is touring various arthouse spots and must be seen on a proper, wide canvas. Your humble correspondent was lucky enough to catch such a screening at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. It will grace the Egyptian in Hollywood on April 27. [Read More…]
The Wind Is A Savage And Insightful Horror-Western
Tales of the Wild West often focus on cowboys who conquer tough terrains and ruthless foes with their glistening guns and macho bravado. Bucking convention with The Wind, screenwriter Teresa Sutherland and director Emma Tammi dust off a forgotten and frightening real-life phenomenon that terrorized the pioneering women of the west. And the result is a horror-western as savage as it is insightful. [Read More…]
The Literal Sounds Of Plastic On Matmos’s Plastic Anniversary
Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne
In music, in general, combining high conceptual aims with what we call accessibility (a troublesome concept on its own) is not an easy thing to pull off. My no doubt annoyingly subjective list of musicians who’ve achieved a balancing in this equation (ear-friendliness + modernity) would include, say, Robert Wyatt, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Jon Hassell, Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Terje Rypdal, Annette Peacock, Diamanda Galás, Coil and the Velvet Underground. This varied bunch shares the notion of basing the work on musical or thematic ideas, and in so doing not skimping on the soul; the goal is a kind of beauty. [Read More…]