Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Terry Allen’s The Exact Moment It Happens in The West

By Leave a Comment

at LA Louver (through September 28)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Entering into Terry Allen’s universe is not unlike the imagined sensation of standing on an egg as it rolls across a hard wood floor, never stopping long enough to crack. The process by which we come to understand and appreciate his work requires a level of commitment on the part of the viewer not unlike balancing on an egg in that there are so many nuances and brilliantly imaginative connections being made all at once, that you feel that if you look away — even for an instant, that egg could shatter beneath your feet and you would be left with nothing but egg on your face. [Read more…]

Existential Angst In The Haunting Expressions Of Sedrick Chisom and Dan Herschlein

By Leave a Comment

Concurrent solo exhibitions at Matthew Brown Los Angeles
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Our world was forged in dissonance, and as a species we seek out discordance, adversity, pain and violence, and not only in the living world, but in fantasy as well. We relish the death of the villain at the hands of the hero. These are very old stories – tales, as the great Joseph Campbell once stated, where “the hero must give up the life he has planned in order to have the life that is waiting for him.” [Read more…]

The Incidental Orifice In Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel

By Leave a Comment

At UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s been said that all great artists have only a few “real” subjects and those subjects nearly always reference love, sex or death. In fact, these pivotal subjects could arguably be the holy trinity when it comes to the imagination and the deeper impulses that drive the creative process. So, Picasso had his underage lovers, his bull testicles and his minotaur. Magritte his pipe, umbrellas and top hats and Cezanne his monumental, sacred mountain.  [Read more…]

A Conflation of Dueling Sentiments In Alexandra Grant’s Born to Love

By Leave a Comment

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…]

Artists As Keepers Of Radical Thought In The Weight of Matter

By Leave a Comment

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through June 15)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The Weight of Matter, on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, takes as it central premise the idea that artists are the keepers of radical thought, of dreams and incongruities, of nightmares and deepening schisms, and that these ideas are worth each and every dissection, no matter how minute or painstaking. On the surface, the exhibition appears to expand on the theme of materiality – how artists utilize their materials in new and inventive ways, yet if we look more closely, all the works included here begin with materiality as a central subject, and then deliberately and systematically subvert the process by which the works are imagined. [Read more…]