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Envisioning a Gilded Vengence in Mark Steven Greenfield’s Black Madonna

November 20, 2020 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at William Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (through 28 November)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Mark Steven Greenfield’s powerful exhibition of Black Madonna paintings, currently on view at William Turner Gallery, is perfectly timed to coincide with the election of the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, to be our next Vice President; while the exhibition notably follows on the years-long Black Lives Matter protests that in all likelihood lifted Ms. Harris to the second highest office of the land.

As an African American artist who emerged out of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s, Greenfield has had a long arc of making art of consequence, art with something to say, art with teeth. In his latest exhibition, Black Madonna, Greenfield takes dead aim at centuries of racial supremacy by inverting the very narrative of white dominion: exalting Blackness while simultaneously setting aflame, quite literally, the relentless tide of teeming inhumanity that seeks in all-too-horrific ways to subjugate and enslave. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Tales Of The Unconfined: Alison Saar’s Defiant Women Warriors

February 19, 2020 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

Syncopation, at L.A Louver, Los Angeles (through 29 February)
Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Alison Saar’s work combines the raw power of tribal art with the postmodern sophistication of complex cultural subtexts. Her work is made in a near devotional way, which infuses a rare emotional intensity into her new narratives on upturning gender and racial hierarchies. Few artists can use visual materials as skillfully to create such powerful political statements. Fewer still can combine aesthetic technique and conceptual acuity in artwork that is so heartfelt it resonates with the viewer viscerally, a sensation akin to listening to a Nina Simone song. This is a rare feat only an exceptional artist can accomplish, which makes her concurrent exhibitions, Syncopation, at L.A Louver, and Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles, stand out even amidst the art fair frenzy. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Jeffrey Vallance Interview: The Story Behind Blinky

January 12, 2020 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

by Lita Barrie

Jeffrey Vallance has loved pranks since he was at high school but it did not occur to him that they could be called “performance art” until he went to art school. Vallance is so guileless he did not understand why he was called a “prankster” at first because he was making a social point. Since then he has continued to do what came naturally to him: blurring the lines between art and life because it has never occurred to him that they could be separate. Vallance is known as a pioneer of Infiltration Art (a form of Intervention Art) because he interacts with religious and political institutions and foreign dignitaries: traveling throughout Polynesia in search of the origin of the myth of Tiki and meeting with the king of Tonga and the queen and president of Palau; studying Christian relics and meeting Pope John Paul 11 at the Vatican; creating a Richard Nixon Museum; initiating a campaign “Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage” and creating a shamanic magic drum in Lapland. These art performances led to whacky sculptures, phantasmagoric paintings, collages, bricolages and frenzied drawings that draw as much on folk art and pop culture as avant-garde concepts. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

Sites Of Love And Desire In Lari Pittman: Declaration Of Independence

December 23, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through January 5)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Lari Pittman’s momentous retrospective at Hammer Museum, is not only the most ambitious exhibition organized by the museum but arguably the most important exhibition anywhere in the country — or perhaps the world, today. This career-spanning exhibition of 80 densely layered monumental paintings and 50 vibrant works on paper ends the decade on a jubilant note because as the curator Connie Butler says, “the show is really about revelation.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Mary Corse: A Survey in Light

October 30, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at LACMA (through November 11)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Mary Corse is finally having her moment in a breakout role as the luminary of  “light painting.” Although Corse has received critical acclaim since the sixties she has been overshadowed by male SoCal Light and Space artists. Interestingly, it took New York women curators to revise the canon with a fresh spin on Corse’s singular importance as the first light painter because she does not depict light as a subject but paints with light as her source material. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tears of Things

October 21, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles ( through November 2)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s haunting exhibition at Kohn Gallery is conceived as visual poetry predicated upon Virgil’s phrase “the tears of things,” from Aeneid ( Book 1, line 462), about an encounter with a mural of the battle of Troy which made the Trojan hero weep as he remembered those he had loved and lost. This famous poetic passage about the power of painting continues to fascinate scholars because it is open to  multiple subjective and objective interpretations. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

October 18, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at Luis De Jesus (through October 26)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts. We can view the conventions of art, cinema and domestic life through a bemused female gaze with no-holds-barred on taking delight in human foibles.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Christina Quarles And The Aesthetics Of Ambiguity

June 14, 2019 By Lita Barrie 2 Comments

by Lita Barrie

Christina Quarles is at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists who are making ambiguity the aesthetic of our time. Few artists can incorporate as many painting styles as fluidly as Quarles does because few artists have the chops to paint and draw as well as she does. Even fewer have the philosophic rigor and intellectual muscle to upturn the cultural assumptions underlying the history of painting – and have such obvious pleasure doing it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Interview, The Line

Deborah Roberts Explores The Fragility of Black Masculinity in Native Sons

June 5, 2019 By Lita Barrie 1 Comment

Native Sons: Many thousands gone
at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through June 8)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Deborah Roberts’ impassioned exhibition memorializes Black boys who lost their lives from the social injustices of false accusations for murders they did not commit. This solemn exhibition is predicated on African American literature and takes its title from James Baldwin’s non fiction essay, “Many Thousands Gone” (Notes of a Native Son, 1955). [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Kim Dingle: I Will Be Your Server (The Lost Supper Paintings)

April 5, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through May 4)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie 

Priss has captivated the artworld with her mischievous antics since she first appeared in Kim Dingle’s artwork thirty years ago, dressed in her Sunday Best and ready for battle. Dingle’s imaginary character split and replicated, like a Tribble on Star Trek, into a bi-racial pair, Fatty and Fudge, and then into a wild pack, the “Priss Girls.” These ornery tots run amok: causing mayhem, having fights, raging temper tantrums, and destroying things. Priss and her gang of rambunctious pre-pubescent girls inhabit a world with no adults, no men, and no rules.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Riot Sounds

Sleaford Mods, "Force 10 From Navarone," featuring Florence Shaw, can be listened to at Riot Material magazine -- in the exclusive Riot Sounds.

New From the Mods: “Force 10 From Navarone”

Sleaford Mods
feat. Florence Shaw (of Dry Cleaning)
from UK Grim

on Rough Trade

Dean Blunt's "The Rot." Listen at Riot Material under the exclusive Riot Sounds.

“The Rot” — Though A Rose By Any Other Name

by Dean Blunt
feat. Joanne Robertson
from BLACK METAL 2

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10-the-rot.m4a

on Rough Trade

The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Yehonatan Koenig. "Shulamith" (2022). At Riot Material Magazine

Yehonatan Koenig’s Subversion of the Ordinary

Knowing Not Knowing, at Matt Drey Arts (presenting with the Kava Collective) by Mat Gleason The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way. There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Idris Khan's The Pattern of Landscape at Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles. An interview with Idris is at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022) by Ricky Amadour Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

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art. word. thought.