Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Passing Through Time, Memory, Decay: A Journey That Wasn’t

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at the Broad Museum (through February 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Time. It can be both friend and foe. It eludes us, slips through our fingers and yet also seemingly extends ad infinitum. The fourth dimension in all of its frustratingly enigmatic glory serves as spellbinding subject matter for the Broad Museum’s current group showcase, A Journey That Wasn’t. Rather than focus on a particular artist, movement, or epoch, co-curators Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer instead chose to delve into this abstract, multifaceted concept. Comprised of 55 rarely seen works, all from the Broad’s vast collection, this sweeping exhibition acts as a philosophical treatise on the passage of time, memory, and decay. [Read more…]

Getting Lost On The High Ground Of Greater Than L.A.

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at Desert Center, Los Angeles (through 21 July 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot 

There’s something about Los Angeles that makes people constantly wrestle with what it means and never tire of describing how life is lived here. No other place, not even Paris or New York, has sponsored such a compendium of self-reflexive art and literature, almost all somehow both obsessive and ambivalent at the same time. L.A. is the kind of place where people who’ve never been here have more passion and frequently more insight about its nature than natives, which is to say, Hollywood especially, is such an aspirational, archetypal place, that there’s almost more cultural currency in projection and fantasy than in a direct yet diffuse experience of it. [Read more…]

Manifesta 12 Promises The World, And Delivers

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by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“I have pushed for the transformation of Manifesta . . . into a more inclusive, pragmatic and sustainable format that turns signals into substance.” – Hedwig Fijen, founding director of Manifesta

1. Opening Rites To Our Common Humanity

Buzz words fly around at the press conference launching Manifesta 12 in the breathtaking Renaissance Church of Santa Caterina: incubator, civic cooperation, testing ground, sustainability, interconnection, flowing networks. The 12th edition of the biennial took as guiding vision the “Planetary Garden,” a term coined by French gardening philosopher Gilles Clément. They add that Manifesta, the nomadic biennial, was created in the early 90s as a response to the erection of new partitions and borders in Europe after they had been felled in the previous decade. Manifesta 12 wants to shift perspectives, in order to imagine and promote caring for the world through collaboration, the second tier of its title, “Cultivating Coexistence.” This “cultivating,” a gardening of sorts, is to replace the existing paradigm of one species’ domination at all cost. The concept of cultivation is to be applied to the city of Palermo itself, with the ambition of bringing lasting change and empowering its citizens of all origins and classes. [Read more…]

Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again

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at the Pasadena Museum of California Art
through October 7 (upon which time the museum will permanently close)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

“If men had babies, there would be thousands of images of the crowning.” – Judy Chicago, 1982

Since 2002, East Union Street’s illustrious Pasadena Museum of California Art has reliably showcased some of the city’s most vibrant, eclectic, and socially-conscious exhibitions, including 2018’s The Feminine Sublime and Testament of the Spirit: Paintings by Eduardo Carrillo. As a modern and contemporary art hub renowned for presenting Southern California’s finest art and artists, this progressive artspace has undoubtedly elevated Los Angeles’s cultural discourse over the course of its 16-year run. With the recent news that the PMCA board has decided to close this beloved museum following the conclusion of its current exhibition, Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again, in October due to fundraising issues, witnessing this exquisite collection of Chicago’s rarely-seen feminist tapestries from the early 1980s in this transcendent, sublime location is now all the more important. [Read more…]

Made In L.A. Is A Tapestry Of Diversity, And A Golden One

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at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Like an intricately woven tapestry, Made in L.A. 2018 stitches together a diverse sampling of some of the most dynamic and noteworthy artists working in Los Angeles today. Presently on display at the UCLA Hammer Museum, this sweeping biennial exhibition boasts 32 textile, performance, painting, video, sculpture, assemblage, photography, and installation artists hailing from a total of 13 states and seven countries. Together they weave a grand and gripping narrative highlighting critical socio-political issues, including representation and marginalization. [Read more…]

Archive Fever: Repetition And History In The Works Of Kudzanai Chiurai

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by Khanya Mashabela

Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice visualises history and its tendency for repetition. The cyclical nature of history is as much a subject as Colonial and Post-Colonial southern Africa and its governance. He shows us history outside of the limitations of linearity and its related belief of progression or digression. This representation is particularly potent within the African context, largely because its position as ‘inferior’ within the binaries of First World and Third world — and White and Black — relies upon the belief that Africa and Africans are connected to the ancient past, while the West has been portrayed as having a monopoly on modernity and postmodernity. [Read more…]

Hung Viet Nguyen’s Artistic and Spiritual Alchemy

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by Genie Davis

Artist Hung Viet Nguyen is a magician and an alchemist. His paintings evoke the beauty of nature, its wonder and its spiritual quality. He takes the real and reconfigures it, shapes it into a mysterious, reverent space. With images that are both landscapes and stunning mosaic-like patterns, the Vietnamese-born, Los Angeles-based artist transports viewers into paintings that resemble an enchanted realm. [Read more…]

Tomas Saraceno’s Literally Uplifting Solar Rhythms

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at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

As much a visionary as he is an artist, Tomas Saraceno, a visionary artist, clearly follows in the footsteps of such innovators as Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, and others whose aesthetic brilliance parallels their deep desire to sustain humanity on this planet. The influence of his friend, the great Olafur Eliasson, for whom he briefly worked as a studio assistant, is obvious. But Saraceno goes beyond flexing the muscles of his considerable technical flair to invent designs that are or can be implemented as part of his Aerocene project, started in 2015, the stated goal of which “proposes a new epoch, one of atmospherical [sic] and ecological consciousness, where we together earn how to float and live in the air, and to achieve an ethical collaboration with the environment.” [Read more…]

Iranian Art, Past and Present: In The Field Of Empty Days

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at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.”  Rumi, 13thcentury Persian Poet

The poetically entitled In The Field of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art is a dense yet sprawling exhibit that features compelling images from artists whom we may not have seen before. A hallmark of these modern and contemporary Iranian artists is their ingenious blending of images related to myth, history, social disruption, political upheaval and religious restriction in their work. They, like so many contemporary artists, are mining the past for re-presentation in the present. [Read more…]

Laurie Simmons: Avatar Artist For Our Age

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From two concurrent exhibitions:
Clothes Make The Man: Works from 1990-1994, at Mary Boone Gallery
2017: The Mess and Some New, at Salon 94, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

We live in the age of the avatar, and over the course of several decades, Laurie Simmons has proven herself to be the ultimate avatar artist for our age. (Think of her shocking 2015 “The Love Doll” series: sophisticated Japanese sex toys beautifully chronicled in suburban household settings, like Dare Star’s classic 1950s character “The Lonely Doll.”) [Read more…]

An Expansive, Boundary-Blurring Exhibition In David Bowie is

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at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Angelica Villa

Arranged in a matchless array of material from David Bowie’s archive, the Brooklyn Museum’s David Bowie is encapsulates the icon’s expansive complexity. The exhibition explores the breadth of visual and musical inventions and collaborations of the artist’s prolific career. Posing challenge to social convention and encouraging freedom of self-identification for several decades, the artist’s cultural relevance is beyond compare or distillation. Including 400 objects sourced from the musician’s archive, the interdisciplinary range of material showcasing album covers, drafts of handwritten lyrics, costumes, photographs, film and audio of Bowie’s career draw together a kaleidoscopic retrospective portrait of the artist’s many selves. [Read more…]

A Love Letter In Sprays: LA’s BEYOND THE STREETS

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At Werkartz, Los Angeles (through 6 July)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Wandering through the cavernous, labyrinthine yet thoroughly modern galleries of BEYOND THE STREETS — graffiti and street art historian Roger Gastman’s love letter to the genre — the viewer stumbles upon a modest and intimate installation resembling an ancient Roman temple. Closer inspection, however, reveals references to a myriad of other religious traditions, including Buddhist prayer wheels and a relief sculpture of the Biblical serpent tempting Eve. It is this blending of worlds, this juxtaposition of old and new, East and West, and high and low-brow art that defines this  extravaganza of an exhibition [Read more…]

KAN Offers Up A Fresh Way ‘To Look’

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at Durden and Ray, Los Angeles (through 26 May)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

KAN, the group exhibition at Durden and Ray, is a subtle, poetic show that shines with both its intent and its artwork. Curated by Sijia Chen and Lydia Michelle Espinoza, the show features the work of Chen and artists Carl Berg, Gul Cagin, Hai-Biao Cai, Huang Cheng, Roni Feldman, Ed Gomez, Jenny Hager, Ruowan Li, Ty Pownall, and Zhengsai Xie.

Primarily abstract work, with some figurative pieces, KÀN in Chinese translates as “to look,” and that is what each piece encourages us to do remarkably well here. Viewers are invited to observe captured moments, to take-in even the most minute or quiet details with intention and purpose. Each piece in the exhibition is quietly contemplative. Regardless of mediums — which are varied — the works encourage the viewer to turn inward, to go beyond the casual glance and truly study a piece. Many, though by no means all, of these works have subdued palettes, in most cases the palettes chosen by the artist fall into a specific series of shades. [Read more…]

The Aggressively Uncategorizable Roger Ballen

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Roger Ballen: Ballenesque
at Fahey/Klein Gallery (through June 16, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective
by Roger Ballen and Robert JC Young
Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., $80.00

Sometimes an artist’s style is so aggressively uncategorizable, so interdisciplinary and outside conventions, that it defies not only genre, but any meaningful comparisons to history or peer — and their name simply becomes its own adjective. Meet US/South African artist Roger Ballen, whose sui generis style of photography-based practices has been dubbed Ballenesque, because there’s literally no better way to describe it. Of course, in this case, Ballen himself began referring to his own work that way fairly early on, in the 1990s, and honestly he has a point. [Read more…]

Klimt and Schiele: Drawn

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at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Reviewed by Adam Kirsch

Klimt and Schiele: Drawings
by Katie Hanson
MFA Publications, 150 pp., $49.95
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

As you enter “Klimt and Schiele: Drawn,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you are faced with a choice. Begin on the left, with Gustav Klimt’s Seated Woman in a Pleated Dress, and you will find yourself following Klimt down one wall of the single, large room; pick the right, with Egon Schiele’s The Artist’s Mother, Sleeping, and you are in his more colorful and astringent territory. Not until you have completed the whole circuit does it become clear that these two paths are also mirror images, each organized around the same rubrics: “Inner Life Made Visible,” “The Stuff of Scandal.” It is the curator Katie Hanson’s deft way of paying obeisance to the familiar coupling of the two artists—the heroic heralds, with Oskar Kokoschka, of Viennese modernity—while also insisting on their difference, even their irreconcilability. [Read more…]

Rashid Johnson: The Rainbow Sign

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at David Kordansky Gallery (Through May 19, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Viscous black liquids cascade down the picture planes as scrawled drawings of agonized grimaces and anxious eyes confront the viewer at every turn. Indeed, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Rashid Johnson’s current David Kordansky exhibition, The Rainbow Sign is a masterclass in haunting and subtly violent imagery. Extracting its title from an often-cited passage in James Baldwin’s 1963 bestseller, The Fire Next Time, this eclectic collection of wall sculptures, ceramic cups, mosaic portraits, and psychedelic collages presents a poignant reflection on notions of cultural identity and protest. [Read more…]

Chaim Soutine: Flesh

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at the Jewish Museum, NYC (through September 16, 2018)
Chaim Soutine with a chicken

Chaim Soutine with a chicken

Reviewed by Will Heinrich
Courtesy of The New York Times

The most well-known story about Chaim Soutine has him alarming his Montparnasse neighbors by bringing in fresh sides of beef to paint, and dousing the carcasses, as he turned out one gory, ecstatic still life after another, with blood to keep them fresh.

Born outside Minsk, in what is now Belarus, Soutine (1893-1943) arrived in Paris in 1913. There he endured almost a decade of struggle before finding a few patrons, most notably Albert C. Barnes, the great Philadelphia collector, who catapulted Soutine to fame and fortune when he bought every canvas in the painter’s studio in 1922. [Read more…]

High & Dry: Land Artifacts – Visions of the Desert

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at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster (through July 15)
Opening Reception, Saturday, May 12 from 4-6PM
by Genie Davis

A beautiful and evocative series of photographs form the centerpiece of a stunning exhibition at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, which explores things left behind in the desert. These “things” are not just physical artifacts but the remnants of dreams, fragments of memories, and even splinters of passing light. Osceola Refetoff’s vivid, electrifying infrared photographs are joined by historical objects from MOAH’s permanent collection, and accompanied by lyrical writing from historian Christopher Langley. It is a multi-media exhibition in the best sense, approaching and exploring the desert it illuminates from all angles. [Read more…]

Hank Willis Thomas: What We Ask Is Simple

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at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC (through May 12, 2018)
Reviewed by Angelica Villa     

Hank Willis Thomas’s What We Ask is Simple, at Jack Shainman Gallery, is a graphic montage of 20th century plight and redemption. Using iconic imagery of modern protest with an advanced photographic method, these works become fully perceivable in form and content while illuminated. Each viewer is nudged to participate in this collective exposure. The entirety of the production, its recurring pull of granular memory, operates like an antique projection, clicking through filmy capsules with pulsing light. Predicated on thorough theoretical research and a deep investigation into archival material, Thomas’s conceptual process relies substantially on the collection of both the iconic and the transient in literary and photographic relics of mass culture. [Read more…]

Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay

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the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Christopher Michno

Figuratively shouldering the weight of the world in his performance El Peso de la Tierra (2017 – 2018), Armando Cortes dragged a piece of clay equal to his own weight a quarter of a mile along Wilshire Boulevard, from Chris Burden’s Urban Light installation to the Craft and Folk Art Museum, during the opening this January of the CAFAM’s inaugural clay biennial, “Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay.” Saddled with a hand-carved wooden yoke—an object that symbolically confers the role of beast of burden—in order to tow the pyramid-shaped black clay mass, the artist posited this gesture as an expansive reference to divisions of labor aligned with immigration status and cultural identity, and as an implication of systemic racism. [Read more…]