Directed by NINJA and Terence Neale
Archives for April 2018
New Speed-Smack Philo-Rant From Cut Chemist: “Die Cut (Wrap)”
Featuring Myka 9 & Deantoni Parks
on A Stable Sound
A Word With Artist And Activist Barbara Carrasco
Barbara Carrasco was starving. She had just dropped off her husband, the artist Harry Gamboa Jr., at LAX and driven cross-town to meet me at their old hangout, Phillipe’s. As we sat down with French dip sandwiches and talked about her life and work I realized that underneath the easy laugh and unpretentious manner there was an incredible strength that had allowed her to travel from the projects of Mar Vista, to the halls of UCLA, to battle the sexism and racism from both the Anglo and Chicano communities, to work with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to get her MFA at Cal Arts and to beat cancer. [Read more…]
David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Through July 29, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
What is the value of community? For David Hockney, one of Britain’s most prominent living painters, the circle of friends, fellow artists, and employees joyfully and intimately rendered in his current Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) exhibition, 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life reveal the invigorating and inspirational power of camaraderie. While portraiture has historically been a tool for the elite to showcase their wealth and status, this egalitarian collection portrays individuals from all walks of life, including the artist’s dentist and housekeeper. Also, as none of these portraits are commissions, Hockney here is instead driven by the desire to honor and celebrate the people in his life. Much like a mosaic or network of unique yet interconnected cells, these exuberant, vibrantly-hued acrylic paintings all combine to form a harmonious and cohesive body of work. [Read more…]
Cargo Is A Uniquely Exhilarating Zombie Thriller
Who will we be at the end of the world? This is the nerve-gnawing question at the heart of Cargo, a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller that feels like the lovechild of Pat Frank’s nuclear war novel Alas, Babylon and George Romero’s Living Dead films. Zombies are a threat on the fringe of its Australian Outback setting, while at its core Cargo is the story of a father trying to find a viable future for his infant daughter. [Read more…]
Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. And The Pulitzer
Kendrick Lamar recently made history as the first non-jazz, non-classical music artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for 2017’s DAMN. Immediately it was a polarizing move. Many felt it promptly elevated Lamar’s status to “Greatest Of All Time,” catapulting him into a cohort that includes the likes of Nas and Jay-Z. Some questioned the authenticity of the win; was it a consolation prize of sorts, after Kendrick lost the 2017 album of the year Grammy and also best rap album of the year several times in the past? In a similar vein, was it an attempt to appease the #OscarsSoWhite set by giving the award to a Black hip-hop artist, the first ever. Was it also an appeal to hip-hop loving youth (as hip-hop recently surpassed rock ‘n’ roll – another Black American creation – as the most listened to genre in the United States), many of whom had no idea there even was a Pulitzer Prize for music? Or was it a well-deserved award given to a deserving artist, one of the most critically acclaimed of the last decade (so acclaimed, in fact, that some argue that DAMN. isn’t even Lamar’s best album to date, wondering why the award didn’t go to 2015’sTo Pimp A Butterfly instead)? [Read more…]
Fay Ray: I AM THE HOUSE
At Shulamit Nazarian (Through May 26, 2016)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
Teeming with traditionally feminine objects and symbols, including eggs, diamonds, chalices, flowers, feathers, and seashells, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Fay Ray’s current Shulamit Nazarian exhibition, I AM THE HOUSE, investigates issues of bodily objectification and the meaning of womanhood. The surrealism-inspired photo collages, dye-sublimation prints, and suspended sculptures seen here reveal the female form to be a vessel, carrying not only biological offspring but also memory, melancholy, joy, and the divine. [Read more…]
New Work From Black Milk: “Laugh Now Cry Later”
From the Fever release:
Kendrick Lamar’s Pre-Pulitzer, “untitled 06 l 06.30.2014.”
In salute to Kendrick Lamar’s historic Pulitzer Prize for DAMN.; this isn’t from DAMN. (ha ha!), but it points nevertheless to some high Lamarian sound. From the untitled unmastered release. Featuring CeeLo Green:
on Aftermath/Interscope
From Blonde, Frank Ocean’s “Pink + White”
Featuring Beyoncé
Directed by Mikhail Mutskyi
Blonde, on Boys Don’t Cry Records
Ed Templeton: Hairdos of Defiance
at Roberts Projects, Culver City (through April 21)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
A good mohawk hairdo is a statement that both deflects and demands attention. “Look at me! What are you looking at?” It’s a uniform of nonconformity. An easily deciphered message that screams trouble with a booming laugh. It’s a sculptural and painterly art form, hard to achieve, defying laws of both gravity and gravitas. It’s tribal plumage, it’s gender neutral, or rather, gender-blasting. It’s inconvenient and amazing. It’s kind of a dare. It’s edgy, it’s aspirational. It’s been the province of the punks, outsiders, and leather-clad. There’s nothing cooler than a mohawk. [Read more…]
Faith And Reckonings In A Dubious World: Joachim Trie’s Thelma
Cinema can become a tool for the exorcising of demons. Repressions and life experiences can suddenly be evoked and shared with everyone in the theater or watching at home. Joachim Trie’s dark and perceptive film Thelma is a gothic parable which serves as an interesting examination of the consequences of repression. A young girl becomes the receptor of her parents’ rigid, one could say Puritan, religious views of the world. Released in only a few arthouse venues and now available for streaming via Amazon, Thelma touches upon issues rarely gazed upon by mainstream/fantasy cinema. In an increasingly secular- albeit not rational- world, organized religion is being relegated more to a habit of the past. It even seems the Pope now claims hell does not exist. But for those raised within islands of dogma, belief is a very powerful and palpable part of life. [Read more…]
Robert Colescott: The Art Of Caricature
At Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (Through April 28, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
Honoring the life and legacy of beloved American figurative artist Robert Colescott (1925 – 2009), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a sweeping retrospective of this satirical painter and draughtsman’s most celebrated works. Bristling with saturated tangerine, crimson, and aquamarine hues, these scathing yet sanguine images brilliantly satirize American race and gender dynamics while fusing surrealist, pop art, and abstract expressionist aesthetics. [Read more…]
The Silence and the Fury: The Passion Of Joan of Arc At 90
“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”—Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard
If I had to choose one face as the truest and most magnetic testament to Miss Desmond’s proud claim, that face would belong to Renee Maria Falconetti in the 1928 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti, who was a stage actress and comedienne (Joan of Arc was Falconetti’s only major film role, and her final one) delivered what you might call a virtuoso facial performance, unparalleled in its plasticity of range and soul-felt expressiveness. Or in the words of the late film critic, Roger Ebert, “You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti.” [Read more…]
From Ebo Taylor & The Pelikans, The Wonderful “Come Along”
From the LP Ebo Taylor & The Pelikans
on Abookyi Records
The Raw And The Cooked: Claudia Doring-Baez And Sophie Iremonger
at La MaMa La Galleria, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Claudia Doring-Baez is fascinated with repurposed images; images culled through memory or even re-enacted. As a graduate student at the Studio School, she devoted an entire series to Cindy Sherman’s iconic Untitled Film Stills, appropriating the cinematic stills that Sherman herself had appropriated, and recreating them in oil paint; a true meta work. [Read more…]
Henrik Schwarz’s “Leave My Head Alone, Brain”
Mix 1
on Sunday Music
Capturing the Bluebird: Bukowski And The Photograph That Still Sings
The original angels were battle tested, busted he-men and women that fought tirelessly against hell and its demons. Their wings were scarred and their faces far from the clean-cut sissified versions embedded in stained glass windows and bible etchings. Angels were veterans, complete with rank, file, and all the side-effects that come along with watching your brothers and sisters die beside you in war. Angels were imperfect things with wings that fought on behalf of God.
Then there’s Charles Bukowski; a poet with an angel inside him that obeyed his commandments. An angel, he called his bluebird. [Read more…]
American Animals Is A Doc-Fiction That’s Wild Fun And Deeply Disturbing
There’s something inherently slippery about true crime documentary, where cold hard facts collide with interview subjects whose testimonies might be less than reliable. Filmmakers might be able to pin down what happened, but the why is so much trickier; and the how can be the ultimate mystery. Moviegoers like to think a documentary is the distilled truth. But in Bart Layton’s work, this daring documentarian challenges that concept by relishing in the conflicting accounts of convicted criminals, who may have confessed, but still strive to save face. [Read more…]
An Excerpt From Joe Donnelly’s L.A. Man: “Understanding Craig Stecyk”
L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World
by Joe Donnelly
Rare Bird Books, 284 pp., $16.95
During his more than 20 years writing for Raygun, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, The Surfer’s Journal or Slake: Los Angeles—to name a few—Joe Donnelly’s profiles of the famous, the underground, and the notorious were required reading. Some of his best and boldest work, which finds him road tripping with Wes Anderson, surfing with the Malloy brothers and shooting pool with Sean Penn, among other adventures, comes together in his new collection L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World (Rare Bird Books | April 17, 2018). [Read more…]