Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Tomas Saraceno’s Literally Uplifting Solar Rhythms

By 1 Comment

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…]

Laurie Simmons: Avatar Artist For Our Age

By Leave a Comment

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

By Leave a Comment

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…]

The Aggressively Uncategorizable Roger Ballen

By Leave a Comment

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

By Leave a Comment

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

By Leave a Comment

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

By Leave a Comment

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…]

Stray Dog Of Tokyo, Daidō Moriyama

By Leave a Comment

by Ian Buruma

Daidō Moriyama: Record 
edited by Mark Holborn
Thames and Hudson, 424 pp., $70.00

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance—Photography in Japan 1960/1975 
edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser
Steidl/Le Bal/Fotomuseum Winterthur/ Albertina/Art Institute of Chicago, 679 pp., $75.00 (paper)

Daido Tokyo
by Daidō Moriyama
Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., $40.00

Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.  [Read more…]

Hank Willis Thomas: What We Ask Is Simple

By Leave a Comment

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

By Leave a Comment

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…]

Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas

By Leave a Comment

at the Seattle Art Museum
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman

Figuring History, at The Seattle Art Museum, raises the question, “How do we perceive that which isn’t there?” For Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas, that is not a rhetorical question. For these three generations of African American painters, the absence of people of color in art was personal. Their ability to tell their stories with such verve and conviction and their choice to break through conventions about whom and what should be represented in art has transformed art history. Each artist faced the challenge differently but together their work shifts the paradigm of race and representation in museums towards a more inclusive record of what it means to be American. [Read more…]

A Word With Artist And Activist Barbara Carrasco

By Leave a Comment

by Pancho Lipschitz

Barbara Carrasco was starving. She had just dropped off her husband, the artist Harry Gamboa Jr., at LAX and driven cross-town to meet me at their old hangout, Phillipe’s. As we sat down with French dip sandwiches and talked about her life and work I realized that underneath the easy laugh and unpretentious manner there was an incredible strength that had allowed her to travel from the projects of Mar Vista, to the halls of UCLA, to battle the sexism and racism from both the Anglo and Chicano communities, to work with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to get her MFA at Cal Arts and to beat cancer. [Read more…]

David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life

By 1 Comment

at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Through July 29, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

What is the value of community? For David Hockney, one of Britain’s most prominent living painters, the circle of friends, fellow artists, and employees joyfully and intimately rendered in his current Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) exhibition, 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life reveal the invigorating and inspirational power of camaraderie. While portraiture has historically been a tool for the elite to showcase their wealth and status, this egalitarian collection portrays individuals from all walks of life, including the artist’s dentist and housekeeper. Also, as none of these portraits are commissions, Hockney here is instead driven by the desire to honor and celebrate the people in his life. Much like a mosaic or network of unique yet interconnected cells, these exuberant, vibrantly-hued acrylic paintings all combine to form a harmonious and cohesive body of work. [Read more…]

Fay Ray: I AM THE HOUSE

By Leave a Comment

At Shulamit Nazarian (Through May 26, 2016)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Teeming with traditionally feminine objects and symbols, including eggs, diamonds, chalices, flowers, feathers, and seashells, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Fay Ray’s current Shulamit Nazarian exhibition, I AM THE HOUSE, investigates issues of bodily objectification and the meaning of womanhood. The surrealism-inspired photo collages, dye-sublimation prints, and suspended sculptures seen here reveal the female form to be a vessel, carrying not only biological offspring but also memory, melancholy, joy, and the divine. [Read more…]

Robert Colescott: The Art Of Caricature

By Leave a Comment

At Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (Through April 28, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Honoring the life and legacy of beloved American figurative artist Robert Colescott (1925 – 2009), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a sweeping retrospective of this satirical painter and draughtsman’s most celebrated works. Bristling with saturated tangerine, crimson, and aquamarine hues, these scathing yet sanguine images brilliantly satirize American race and gender dynamics while fusing surrealist, pop art, and abstract expressionist aesthetics. [Read more…]

The Universe As Canvas For Inscrutable Wonder

By Leave a Comment

Vija Celmins
at Matthew Marks Gallery, West Hollywood
Reviewed by Christopher Michno

In a world increasingly short of attention, Vija Celmins has for more than four decades been depicting a narrowly delimited set of subjects with a degree of emotional distance that has offered expansive space for reflective thought. In her current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood, Celmins returns again to these same subjects—the surface of the ocean and views of the night sky, littered, as it were, with stars. Accompanying the paintings, mezzotints and drypoints of these familiar motifs are examples of Celmins’ formal dexterity applied to trompe l’oeil objects, paired with real world counterparts: two rocks, one, a painted bronze, the other, geologic artifact; and two sets of blackboards, each set comprised of a fabrication and its found partner. These six objects engage themes that run beneath the immediate surface of her constructions: the natural world, and human systems of knowledge that reflect our constant probing of that world. [Read more…]

The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide

By Leave a Comment

at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body”

A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE and American artist David Taylor, examines and documents through stills, a documentary film, large-scale graphics, a solid-steel obelisk and historical research presented as wall text, the original border between the United States and Mexico as determined by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821. Their historical, political and cultural piece sets about to establish a border that was never physically marked by placing 47 steel obelisks along the 2400 mile border that never was. The treaty was rescinded 27 years later, after the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, when Mexico ceded 55% of its land to the United States in a land grab disguised as a war. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young lieutenant who fought in the war, and later admitted (and is quoted here in the exhibition) “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war…I thought so at the time…only I had not the moral courage to resign.” [Read more…]

Lauren Halsey: we still here, there

By Leave a Comment

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Appearing simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic, the labyrinthine cave formations presented in MOCA Grand Avenue’s fantastical current installation, Lauren Halsey: we still here, there are bathed in ethereal suffusions of cerulean, emerald, magenta, and violet light. This site-specific showing presents maximalism at its most celebratory and poignant with several diverse sources of inspiration, including Chinese-Buddhist caves, the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and Watts, the sculptural architecture of André Bloc, and the music of Parliament-Funkadelic. Punctuated with a plethora of tropical potted plants, reflection pools, and found objects, this exhibition exists as a wondrous, whimsical realm, a vision of a just and inclusive society. [Read more…]

Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

By Leave a Comment

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Borrowing from its vast and momentous photography collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is currently exploring themes of intimacy, non-traditional relationships, and marginalized people through Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin. This gripping group exhibition centers around images from Brassaï’s provocative 1976 photobook, The Secret Paris of the 30’s, Arbus’s posthumous treatise, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), and Nan Goldin’s famed autobiographical slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). These honest and intimate depictions of young lovers, prostitutes, and gathered friends form a timeless bond between viewer and subject and reveal the perennial desire to be loved and accepted. [Read more…]

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

By Leave a Comment

by Pancho Lipschitz

Gusmano Cesaretti pulls a book off the shelf in his South Pasadena studio and hands it to me. The book is on Chaz Bojorquez, the Godfather of East L.A. graffiti. He opens the front cover and shows me where Chaz has written in beautiful stylish script, “To El más chingón. You started my career. Thank you. Chaz.” The story of how an Italian kid obsessed with American culture ended up documenting the birth of East L.A. graffiti culture is just one chapter in the crazy fairy-tale that is Cesaretti’s life. [Read more…]