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March 16, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

When I showed her the photo afterwards she said she didn’t realize she was holding up her hand. She asked me for change, and I didn’t have any, but I offered to buy her breakfast instead. She said, that’s alright and gave me a dime.

Suitcase Joe is a Los Angeles photographer who lives anonymously in our amongst. His Instagram page is an important document of our times. @suitcase_joe

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tears of Things

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 […]

Atmosphere So Thick You’ll Choke: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast […]

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

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 […]

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13) Reviewed by John Haber No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? […]

Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning

out October 25 on Young God Records Reviewed by John Payne Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which […]

In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone […]

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner …there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all Bob Dylan The painter’s first duty is to be free Philip Guston In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in […]

Process And Fierce Redemption In Betye Saar’s Call and Response

at LACMA (through April 5, 2020) Reviewed by Genie Davis Betye Saar’s riveting, 40-object exhibition currently at LACMA offers a fascinating insight into the artist’s process. It’s strong focus on the power of redemptive faith and personal strength in the face of adversity is passionate and compelling – which can be frankly said of all Saar’s […]

Audacious Digs In Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech

at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Reviewed by Seren Sensei In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing […]

Lightly Through The Looking Glass With Apple’s [AR]T Walk

By Mayne Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five […]

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

Reviewed by John Payne Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, […]

Hiroko Oyamada’s Mordant Fable, The Factory

Reviewed by John Biscello The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada New Directions, 128pp., $13.95 The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s […]

Corrosion And Other Maladies In Peter Doig’s Latest, Paintings

Paintings, at Michael Werner Gallery, London (16 November) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones With Peter Doig – who has a collection of new paintings on show at the Michael Werner Gallery, London – corrosion is paramount. His paintings seek to overturn themselves from within, alluding to altered states, to dreams and hallucinations. His paint has become […]

A Movable Feast In The Dystopic The Platform

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Imagine: you awake in a cold, concrete prison cell. There are no windows, no doors, one cellmate, and a big, square hole in the center of the floor. Should you peek down into it, you’d see a cell below the same as yours. And beneath that lie so many more that […]

Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End

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 […]

The Lodge Offers a Chilling Follow-Up To Goodnight Mommy

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 […]

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

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 […]

Samuelle Richardson And Joy Ray In Beyond/Within

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, […]

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