Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for April 2019

1.7

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

I was shooting photos on the corner of Stanford and 5th when Durrell Penny here, made it clear he didn’t like my being there. I could feel things might get aggressive, but luckily I’ve been coming around long enough for others on the block to let him know my intentions are good. Many residents of Skid Row don’t want their picture taken for all sorts of reasons, and I respect that. I hung out and talked with him a while and by the end of our conversation he asked me to take his photo and leave it with this quote: “What would a penny from heaven, do on earth?” – Durrell Penny [Read more…]

Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again

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at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 19 – September 2)
Reviewed by Jill Conner

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is set to open Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again, a stunning retrospective that presents the artist’s large-scale compositions, installations, portraits, sculptures and films. The title of this exhibition suggests something relational about Warhol, which sounds odd at first because he had been so well connected.  Since moving to New York City in 1949, he became the most sought-after commercial illustrator in advertising design, where images and their subsequent repetition in print bridged perfectly with popular culture. [Read more…]

Knives and Skin Blends Teen-Noir, Dark Satire And ’80s Musical Numbers

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Have you seen Carolyn Harper? That’s the horrid question that thumps in the hearts of the characters in the trippy teen-noir Knives and Skin. It was another quiet night in a Midwest small town when band geek Carolyn Harper went missing. Her pom-pommed shako cap will be found near a river that keeps silent on the secret of that night. But as her friends and family search for clues — or her corpse — the fragile façade of normalcy and pleasantry is shattered. In its place come boundary-pushing flirtations, uncomfortable parent-child confrontations, a mounting dread of mortality, and a string of acapella musical numbers, thoughtfully plucked from a catalog of ’80s classics.

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1.6

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

I met Maria near an area of Skid Row known as Cuban corner, because it’s where most of the Cubans congregate. She’s been off the streets for a few years now, after spending a year in jail at the age of 58. It was her first time in jail she tells me, and that’s where she finally decided to turn her life around. She had a bad drinking problem that led her to have other problems and finally landed her in jail. She pointed to a tent in the same spot where she used to pitch her own tent for many years. Now she lives with her sister in another part of LA, but she comes to Skid Row to pray for those who are still here and whatever else she can do to give back to the neighborhood. She left me with these parting words: “Happiness is here in all of us, we just have to peel back the layers of guilt, shame, and pain and allow ourselves to have it, regardless of what we’ve done or been through.” Maria is a beautiful person, inward and out, and it radiated out of her when I was around her. You could just feel it in her presence. [Read more…]

An Interview With Activist Photographer Nick Brandt

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By Cynthia Biret

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…]

12.22

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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.

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…]

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite

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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…]

The Extraordinary Fast Color Breathes New Life Into The Superhero Genre

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

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…]

Awakening the Spirit in Motion: Christina Quarles

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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…]

Proxy Among the Spiders: An Imagined Louise Bourgeois In Now, Now, Louison

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Reviewed by John Biscello

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…]

Art At The Crossroads: Artists Addressing The U.S./Mexico Border

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by Ellen C. Caldwell

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…]

12.15

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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.

Sarah, the one cutting hair here, came down from Portland Oregon a few weeks ago to join a friend in a t-shirt bootlegging venture, but things didn’t pan out. In her past she went to school to learn how to cut hair. Seen here she is doing a fix job on her neighbor, after he attempted to cut his hair himself. She tells me I should’ve seen it before she got to work on it. Apparently the guy in the photo is not great at being a self barber. [Read more…]

Soul Of A Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power 1963-1983

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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…]

Matthew Shipp Trio’s Signature

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on ESP-Disk’

Reviewed by John Payne

The rather prolific Matthew Shipp is the most relevant jazz pianist of the last few decades. With more than 85 releases of bold ‘n’ brave music as a solo performer and in duo/ trio/quartet formats alongside the avantish jazz likes of the David S. Ware Quartet, Ivo Perelman, Sabir Mateen, Darius Jones, Joe Morris, Jemeel Moondoc, Mat Walerian and two tons of others, he hasn’t had time to take a vacation. Several years ago Shipp told me he was thinking of retiring from recording, because, he said, there was just too much music out there in consumer land. I’m glad he didn’t, because his recorded output since spouting such balderdash has only grown more profound — and truly electrifying. [Read more…]

Alice Neel: Freedom

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at David Zwirner, NYC (through April 13)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

In a sense, Alice Neel’s portraits are always naked, at least psychologically; Neel brilliantly stripped her subjects down to their bare essence. As Joseph Solman, a fellow artist and old friend from her Socialist Realist days, once put it, “She turned a person inside out. If she did a portrait of you, you wouldn’t recognize yourself, what she would do with you. She would almost disembowel you, so I was afraid to pose for her. I never did pose for her.” Or as another old friend, artist Benny Andrews said, “I always said she was looking at you like an X-ray…” [Read more…]

Teen Spirit Has More Heart, Better Bangers Than A Star Is Born

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

The rise to fame story’s moves so familiar that audiences can dance it blindfolded. Enter the undiscovered talent, raw but passionate. Their circumstances are grim. There may be poverty, family tragedy, and/or abuse. Still, they cling to the hope that music might save them. They find that one person in the room who believes in them. They rocket into the spotlight. But fame is not easy. Sex, drugs, and rock star decadence comes hard on the heels of glamorous makeover that turns them from ordinary to icon. Then–somewhere amid the glitz and grit–they trip through an important life lesson that gives the audience a cozy — even smug — sense of satisfaction. In his directorial debut Teen Spirit, actor turned writer/helmer Max Minghella plays off clichés, offering a drama that is as surprisingly intimate, beautiful, and bittersweet. [Read more…]