Honeyed Strings And Sanguine Pop To Boot: “In The Capital”

March 10, 2019 By CvH Leave a Comment

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Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Phenomenal Nature

at The Met Breuer Reviewed by John Haber Mrinalini Mukherjee had a dual fascination, with Modernism and the myths of her native India. If they seem impossible to reconcile, they both drew her to local materials to make the myths her own. Mukherjee worked in fiber for more than forty years, so it seems only natural […]

Firecrackers Is A Raw Nerve Of A Film And An Explosive Debut

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko “Why are you so angry all the time?” The heroines of writer/director Jasmin Mozaffari’s debut feature Firecrackers have plenty of reasons to rage. Living in poverty in a suffocatingly small Ontario town, recent high school graduates Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans) have little hope for their futures. All they […]

The Deeper You Dig Makes Horror A Twisted Family Affair

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko It was an accident. A dark night. A remote road. A girl sledding alone. A man driving home. And just like that, 14-year-old Echo Allen is dead. A tragedy to be sure. But what happens next is true horror. By following her killer and the mother Echo has left behind, The […]

Twenty Que with Larry Bell

by Erin Currier Even a cursory investigation into nearly any seminal cultural moment, institution, or movement in the latter half of the 20th century, reveals the presence of artist Larry Bell. Bell’s presence in the Arts is akin to the glass boxes that he is most known for, that, at once, reflect, reveal, and transform their […]

Anthony Braxton’s Accessibly Antithetical Quartet (New Haven) 2014

on Firehouse 12 Records Reviewed by John Payne This monumental four-CD box set photographs the one-time meeting of an avant all-star and super-like-minded foursome: The infamously abstruse saxophonist and conceptualist Anthony Braxton partnered with Nels Cline (guitar), Greg Saunier (drums) and Taylor Ho Bynum (brass). It is music that, because of the heavily theoretical predilections […]

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

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 […]

The Art of Self-Defense Makes A Menacing Joke Of Toxic Masculinity

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko You probably think you can kick Jesse Eisenberg’s ass. Which makes him perfectly cast as the protagonist of The Art of Self-Defense, a dark comedy exploring the allure and dangers of toxic masculinity. Writer/director Riley Stearns applies a crisp and dark sense of humor to a low-key thriller about one man’s […]

Nick Broomfield on Muses and Bohemian Memories in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

By Alci Rengifo Nick Broomfield is now 71 years old, and while he has not lost the feisty, investigative energy of a born muckraker, he is now continuously traveling back into the past. In his memories, two figures have been manifesting themselves as of late: Leonard Cohen, poet, songwriter, almost mystical icon and Marianne Christine […]

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

Reviewed by Ann Landi Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters by Phyllis Rose Yale University Press, 272 pp, $26.00 We live in an age when shows of photography are a mainstay of many major museums, and a handful of artists who seriously pursue the medium have even achieved celebrity status (think Sherman, Arbus, Mapplethorpe). So it’s […]

Captive State And The Sacrificial Maze Of Mutiny

Reviewed by Seren Sensei Captive State was initially misunderstood. Released in March, it received mixed reviews, described by some critics as ‘murky,’ ‘lugubrious,’ and ‘unexciting.’ Despite star turns by brooding young upstart Ashton Sanders (Moonlight, Native Son), indie darling Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man In San Francisco) and industry veteran John Goodman, it grossed only $8 […]

Michael Ajerman’s Possessions And Marty Schnapf’s Loves and Lovers

at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (through August 17) Reviewed by Genie Davis Michael Ajerman and Marty Schnapf each offer their own elegant and sensual images in two strong solo shows at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. While Ajerman works with vivid colors in his figurative oil paintings, Schnapf’s current body of work is in nearly-life-size black […]

The Formidable And Innovative Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner: Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre, London (through 1 September) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Sometimes a retrospective can abbreviate an artistic life into a series of airless high-peaks without taking notice of the lower-lying ground. Lee Krasner’s exceptional exhibition, Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre in London, achieves the exact opposite. The […]

The Incidental Orifice In Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel

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 […]

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970

Reviewed by Coco Fusco Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970 by Vivien Green Fryd Pennsylvania State University Press, 349 pp., $49.95 Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table […]

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made […]

Ari Aster’s Midsommar Is A Horrifying And Exhilarating Follow-Up To Hereditary

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko “I wrote this while going through a break-up,” Ari Aster said at the special advance screening of Midsommar. “I’m better now.” The filmmaker’s darkly humorous confession played well to the crowd at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, where press and select members of the public gathered to see Aster’s hotly anticipated follow-up […]

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

Reviewed by Christopher Tayler Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson Ecco. 224 pp. $19.99 Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine Pietro Bembo, a Venetian poet and scholar, staked his first claim to fame in a short book he published in 1496, when he was in his mid-twenties. De Aetna described, in Latin, a hike […]

Christina Quarles And The Aesthetics Of Ambiguity

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 […]

The Last Black Man In San Francisco

Reviewed by Seren Sensei Life is stranger than fiction. Things happen without rhyme or reason, and we, the living, are pulled along, anchoring ourselves to friends, family, lovers; people, places, and things in an effort to stay afloat, to make sense of it all. In The Last Black Man in San Francisco the protagonist, a […]

The Apocalypse Is Agreeably Upon Us In The Dead Don’t Die

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we say, ‘Fine.’ That’s the criticism that cuts through Jim Jarmusch’s star-stuffed zombie-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, where the undead not only feast on human flesh but also gravitate toward the distractions they were obsessed with in life, be it […]

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