Art. Word. Thought.
at Brooklyn Museum, NYC (through December 8)
Reviewed by John Haber
Garry Winogrand: Color contains a monster four hundred and fifty photographs. They play, though as a digital slideshow in sixteen tall channels on facing walls. As the very heart of the exhibition, they become a single immersive installation. [Read more…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Pee-wee lives in a tent on Townes and 6th. One of the notoriously tougher parts of Skid Row. He talked to me openly about being a heroin addict while showing me the fresh track marks on his arms. He asked if he could recite me a poem and I was shocked at how good it was. It’s easy to forget how many talented people fall to a life of drugs and lose sight of everything else. Many of them ending up on Skid Row. He told me, “I used to be a student counselor if you can believe it.” We traded information and I asked him to send me the poem he recited. If he follows through I will post it on my feed in the future. I look forward to seeing more of Pee-wee. [Read more…]
at Klowden Mann (through June 15)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
When I wrote about Rebecca Farr’s fourth solo exhibit in November of 2016, I said it was everything. I saw the show immediately following the 2016 presidential election and Farr’s show created a nurturing embrace and a place for soul-and nation-searching. In her fifth solo exhibit at Klowden Mann, Animal Love Thyself, Farr’s exhibition again feels like everything we need in an age that is amidst Trump’s presidency, amidst the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp, and amidst a time that is more and more against the rights of people who are not hetero, cis, white men [Read more…]
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…]
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 seems 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…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
On the left is a man who goes by the name Old School. I’m guessing he acquired his street name because he likes to sing old Motown songs. Old School has been living on the streets for six months. This is his second time becoming homeless. At age sixty two the chances of him getting back on his feet are greatly reduced. He said he has problems with people stealing his belongings, and the thing that gets stolen most often is his phone. He lost contact with his son because of it, and doesn’t know how he’ll get in touch with him again. [Read more…]
All Creatures Here Below is a Midwestern tragedy that, scene by scene, grows incrementally more horrific. Tearing open the wounds of childhood trauma, the director, Collin Schiffli, and his writer, David Dastmalchian, immerse us in the desperate acts of a young runaway couple, then dare us to condemn them. [Read more…]
Festival Winner at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival
Opens July 8 at the Arclight
by Genie Davis
The narrative feature A Great Lamp is a beautiful black and white film from director Saad Qureshi and his highly collaborative cast and crew. The film has a real heart as well as a beautifully defined artistic aesthetic. It’s the meandering story of three almost-lost souls seeking redemption: not from others, but from themselves, or the spiritual glow of that riverfront street lamp they hover under. There’s Max, an open-hearted, non-binary street kid posting flyers as a tribute to his late, much loved grandmother throughout the town; Gene, a drop-out from his job as an insurance processor – something he hated, but he still hides the fact that he left from his father; and Howie, an out of towner who fears a recurring dream, and whose mother may or may not have died, and who above all else hopes to view a rocket launch through binoculars. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
This mural is painted on the back of King Eddie’s Saloon on Los Angeles street, a Skid Row bar that has been open since 1906. The old bartender said Bukowski used to come in there, order one beer and nurse it all day while he wrote poetry on bar napkins. He wasn’t fond of Bukowski (third from the left). I believe that’s Tom Waits to his left. I don’t know who’s on the far right and left, or what anyone else’s relationship to the bar was either. I hear John Fante used to frequent there too, and the old speakeasy in the basement was mentioned in Ask The Dust, but under a different name. [Read more…]
at the Metropolitan Opera, New York
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman
Nico Muhly, Composer; Nicholas Wright, Librettist; Directed by Michael Mayer; Conductor, Robert Spano.
The Metropolitan Opera in New York, to its credit, has become a steadfast supporter of new operas, engaging in patronage and risk in the name of the advancement of young composers and the establishment of new repertoire, an obvious investment in the art’s future relevance and endurance. This is certainly how things should be. Last season saw the Met premier of Thomas Adès’ TheExterminating Angel. Several seasons earlier Adès’ The Tempest, based on Shakespeare, saw its debut at the Met. In the greater narrative of contemporary culture, it’s easy to forget that opera began as a popular art form, and that the rock stars of an earlier day were the composers and vocalists of the opera world. It remains a mere cultural stereotype that opera should be regarded as an elite art for intellectuals and people with money. We need think only of the likes of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for example, to find everything a popular art is and should be, an opera whose musical entertainment value and dramatic power brings us to the core of the popular and sublime all at once. [Read more…]
From Flamagra
Released today on Warp Records
Film directed by Steven Ellison & David Firth
Flying Lotus, “Fire is Coming” (feat. David Lynch)
[full track]
Things are not what they seem in Richard Shepard’s sharp and sinister thriller The Perfection. Get Out’s Allison Williams stars as Charlotte Willmore, who was a child prodigy on the cello until her path to greatness was thwarted by a family tragedy. Ten years later, Charlotte is finally free. And the first thing she does is reconnect with her former mentor Anton (Steven Weber), and Lizzie, the pretty protégé who took her place (Dear White People’s Logan Browning). Initially, it seems this might be a tale of ruthless rivalry between Lizzie and Charlotte. But that’s just the beginning of this masterful thriller that throbs with suspense and surprises. [Read more…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
“Live free” read the tattoos on his face. He and his travel companion are down from Spokane Washington and plan to travel to Arizona after spending a few days in Los Angeles. They told me they’ve been on the road for most of the last eight years. We spoke briefly of Kerouac and I told them I hoped they were keeping a journal of their travels. I’d love to read their story one day. [Read more…]
Closing May 25th at Night Gallery, U.K.-based artist Laura Lancaster’s Running Toward Nothing is absolutely heading toward a highly fluid “something.” Perhaps it is the passage into a void we cannot control or fathom, perhaps it is the way through or into a dream, or just possibly, it is the outcome of memory and a passage through this life. [Read more…]
Country music comes alive in the poignant coming-of-age drama Wild Rose. Irish ingénue Jessie Buckley stars as Rose-Lynn Harlan, a Scottish singer with dreams of being the next Nashville star. With an outlaw’s heart and an angel’s voice, Rose-Lynn strides down the streets of Glasgow in white cowboy boots and a matching leather jacket, in search of a good time or some stage time. She’s the kind of rough-and-tumble girl who enjoys a rowdy night out, a wild adventure, or a quick shag in a public park. And while this lifestyle led to jail time, now that’s she’s out, the greater obstacle to her could-be career as a country singer is being a single-mom to her young children, Winona and Lyle. [Read more…]
at The Shed, NYC (through May 19)
Reviewed by John Haber
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? At the very least, it can make art. For Trisha Donnelly, it must make a sound as well, for art is always listening, even as so many refuse to hear. Much of the planet may be dying, like her two fallen trees at The Shed, but art can speak to that as well. She has the very first show in the cultural center of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, and it makes quite an impact. It puts to the test a gallery with, as yet, too few visitors, next to a shopping mall serving too little of New York. It looks beyond that very concentration of wealth to a fragile state of nature. It also risks drowning global warming and goodness knows what else in sounds of its own. [Read more…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
People just trying to stay dry out here. [Read more…]
A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is not synonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism. [Read more…]