Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for September 2019

Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End

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at AF Projects, Los Angeles (through October 12)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Robert Gunderman’s current exhibition at AF Projects could be understood as both a meditation on the nature of time and an investigation into the elusiveness of memory. The title of the exhibition, This End, powerfully yet simply encapsulates and personalizes the idea of transition and death, how each of us, burdened as we are within our own physical vessels, must contend with the ever-impending notion that we too will pass. Gunderman sees this “passing” as an opportunity for self-awareness and exploration wherein the “end” might just become yet another beginning. [Read more…]

The Lodge is a Stark and Chilling Follow-Up to Goodnight Mommy

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is back with their much-anticipated English-language debut, The Lodge. And while this psychological thriller has plenty in common with their first film, the vibe is decidedly different. [Read more…]

Takashi Miike’s First Love Is A Delightfully Earnest Rom-Com Set To An Onslaught Of Slaughter

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge killer, a grimacing ghost in tightie-whities, and a pair of gruesome yet pretty damn funny decapitations. [Read more…]

Samuelle Richardson And Joy Ray In Beyond/Within

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at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through September 28)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

The two-person exhibition now at Launch LA on La Brea literally and figuratively soars. Curated by MOAH’s Andi Campognone, Beyond/Within features the work of artists Samuelle Richardson and Joy Ray. The exhibition is uniquely paired. Both have utilized paint and fabric, create textile art, and rely on painterly technique. Richardson, whose fabric sculptural work here depicts primarily birds – but also human heads – some with bared teeth, is also a highly skilled artist when working in paint. The grace and fluidity of her sculpture, and its elegant refinement in what is traditionally considered “craft” materials, evokes her background. Using, embracing, and even accentuating the rougher aspects of her fabrics, the pieces recall the fact that they are created, not actual, living birds, while revealing themselves simultaneously to be delicately alive and transcendent. They could fly, if you let their magic in. [Read more…]

The Long Walk

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Brad Sanders 

Lao horror director Mattie Do makes films where the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is permeable, but the people who pass through it often pay unimaginable costs for the privilege. In her debut feature Chanthaly, the title character can communicate with her dead mother, but only when she forgoes the heart medication that keeps her alive. Do’s second film, Dearest Sister, features a young woman who begins to see the spirits of people who are about to die, but only after she develops a degenerative eye disease. Engaging with the ghosts turns her into a vessel for winning lottery numbers, but it also sends her into debilitating seizures. The Long Walk (2019), Do’s third collaboration with her screenwriter husband Christopher Larsen, gives its lead spirit medium the most complicated risk-reward analysis of all. Taken as a loose trilogy, the films do nothing less than invent a Lao national horror cinema. [Read more…]

Sacraments Of Splendor In Naudline Pierre’s For I Am with You Until the End of Time

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at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (through 26 October)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

No doubt Brooklyn based artist Naudline Pierre keeps the sacraments, though not necessarily the ones decried by the Almighty Himself, living instead, I would imagine, according to a more personal but none less rigorous code of ethics informed more by beauty and love than by traditions and dogma. Her first exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian, aptly titled For I Am with You Until the End of Time, which is from the King James Bible Matthew 28:20 which cautions the reader to observe all of God’s teachings no matter the evident cost. This statement could also be considered comforting, or a means by which us mere mortals might soothe our aching souls, knowing that we are connected somehow to the divine. One thing is clear for sure – Pierre believes in the healing powers of love – most importantly our own innate ability to transform dark and disturbing experiences into something more joyous. [Read more…]

Maria Lassnig’s Ways of Being

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at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In the self portrait Du oder Ich (You Or Me), Maria Lassnig points one gun at the viewer, the other at herself. Either I kill you or I kill myself, or both. Her face expresses fear, dismay, perhaps disgust, but not aggression. If she shoots at the viewer and her double, the brush-flourishing painter, it’s out of sheer terror. In her 80s, Lassnig depicts herself in the nude, without sparing us any detail of her ageing body. Sagging breasts, folds of flesh, hairless pudenda. The visitor is warned: the works in Maria Lassnig’s retrospective will not shy from brutal truths. We live in angst, in solitude, our bodies decay, we die, or those we love die. Women are subjected to male domination, artists to opportunists and passing trends. These facts of life, of her life, of ours in their universality, are delivered through Lassnig’s very own brand of expressionism: broad strokes, distortion of the body and face, grotesque, symbolism. So why does the work in the exhibition leave an impression of such striking beauty? [Read more…]

A Pitch-Black Comedic Masterwork In Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho has been thrilling critics and genre fans since 2006, when he unleashed his rambunctious yet heartbreaking creature-feature The Host. He’s awed us again and again with marvelous movies like the mind-bending murder-mystery Mother, the star-stuffed dystopian drama Snowpiercer, and the whimsical yet brutal fantasy-adventure Okja. By now, when you walk into a Joon-ho movie, you should expect something wildly riveting and wickedly clever. And that’s about all you can predict, because Joon-ho’s stories take audiences down paths twisted and devastating, often just when you think everything might just work out. In this vein, his pitch-black comedy Parasite might his masterpiece. [Read more…]

Activating Absence In Lenz Geerk’s Mixed Blessings

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at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through 12 October)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s very difficult to create a cohesive and engaging narrative with a suite of only five paintings. It’s inevitable that some works appear more central to the narrative structure than others, and in many cases the viewer is left out of the narrative loop altogether. So, it is particularly satisfying to discover work by an artist that holds up so beautifully in terms of creating an engaging and comprehensive story in only five works. In almost all of Lenz Geerk’s paintings there is either a door or a door frame, which suggests the convergence of the past with the present as we step through an open door into the future or remain behind the door in what metaphorically could suggest the past. What is interesting is that Geerk’s figures appear poised between worlds, as though the open doors were mirrors of self-reflection rather than actual tangible objects. The space of the paintings is activated by absence, by ghostly figures for whom there is no expiation, only the blurred boundaries between what was and what will be. [Read more…]

In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali

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Reviewed by John Biscello

In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali
by Sue Roe
Penguin, 295pp., $28.50

A fish rides a bicycle into the Seine. The fish begins to drown and then remembers that it is a fish and starts to fly off into the pipe-smoke colony of clouds. The bicycle floats down the river. It sees things, cycling through a flurry of wonders and impressions. There is the torn yellow umbrella making rapacious love to an industrial sewing machine under a bridge.  [Read more…]

Savagely Sharp, One Cut Of The Dead Is So Much More Than Its Buzz Suggests

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

“You have to see it,” I was told again and again by ardent admirers of One Cut Of The Dead. This Japanese zombie-comedy has been bouncing all over the world from one film festival to the next, picking up praise with every stop. But the breathless buzz was strangely, annoyingly vague. There were rumblings about an astoundingly ambitious long-take that lasts a whopping 37 minutes. And there was the giddy hinting of a big “twist.” Frankly, the gimmickiness this suggested was a turnoff, pushing the film further and further down my fest watch lists. But with this heralded horror-comedy headed to theaters, I finally decided to see what all the buzz was about. And I’m elated to reveal One Cut Of The Dead is far more than a one-(camera)-trick pony. [Read more…]

Taikai Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit Is A Bold But Fumbled Entry In His Lost Boy Trilogy

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Taika Waititi loves a lost boy. His latest, Jojo Rabbit, is the third coming-of-age comedy the Kiwi filmmaker has crafted that centers on a young boy facing trauma by embracing fantasy. 2010’s Boy ollowed a bullied 11-year-old, who fantasizes that his absentee father isn’t the despicable criminal everyone says, but instead a mix of a noble samurai and moonwalking Michael Jackson.  [Read more…]

Saint Maud

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud (2019), the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.

Maud (a mesmerizing Morfydd Clark) is a live-in palliative care nurse in an unnamed British seaside town. A recent religious convert — we don’t know why, but the film’s unnervingly gory opening more than hints at a profound trauma — Maud believes that God has chosen her to guide the fallen to salvation. This mission leads her to the forbidding hilltop mansion of Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a celebrated dancer and choreographer now stricken by late-stage lymphoma. [Read more…]