Desire Encapsulated: Make Room's Inaugural Group Show @ Their New Location In Los Angeles

Desire Encapsulated features a slate of more than fifteen artists working between painting, sculpture and installation to expand on the theme of desire—how it is perceived across different psychological spaces and artistic practices, and how it is "encapsulated" through different artistic practices across time, medium and space. The exhibition presents a group of artists' work that considers desire as part of the fundamental human experience, a shared experience and the driven power of humanity.

The artists participating include Andrew Sendor, Catalina Ouyang, Guimi You, Lior Modan, Bambou Gili, Miguel Angel Payano Jr., Joeun Kim Aatchim, Lita Albuquerque, Yuri Yuan, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Yanyan Huang, Yifan Jiang, Yesiyu Zhao, Ruby Leyi Yang, Chris Oh, Hiba Schahbaz, and Claire Colette.

Desire Encapsulated is on view through July 31 @ Make Room Gallery 5119 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles

Star 80: Nick Taggart's LA Stories Encapsulates An Era & A City's Electric Energy

“Gillean”, 1980, acrylic on board, mounted on panel, 23 1/4” x 23 inches Gillean McLeod in the loft on Spring Street that she lived in with her band Party Boys. The band played in downtown lofts and bars such as Jacarandas and Brave Dog. They built the stage at Al’s Bar and were one of the first bands to play at what became a gathering spot for the downtown art and music scene.

“Gillean”, 1980, acrylic on board, mounted on panel, 23 1/4” x 23 inches

Gillean McLeod in the loft on Spring Street that she lived in with her band Party Boys. The band played in downtown lofts and bars such as Jacarandas and Brave Dog. They built the stage at Al’s Bar and were one of the first bands to play at what became a gathering spot for the downtown art and music scene.


text by Steffie Nelson


When the British-born artist Nick Taggart came to Los Angeles in 1977, he planned to stay for three months. Four-plus decades later, he is still here, living on the same Glassell Park street he was told about at a Stranglers show in London. Then twenty-five, Taggart, who studied illustration at Cambridge University, found LA’s legendary light, eclectic architecture, and frontier landscape irresistible—and the antithesis of gray, recession-bound London. He quickly connected with the vibrant underground art and music scenes centered in downtown LA and Hollywood, at clubs like Al’s Bar and the Masque, which gave rise to iconic punk and new wave bands like X, The Go-Go’s, Devo, and Missing Persons, as well as lesser-known groups like Party Boys and Fender Buddies, who became his friends. 

All the while, Taggart sketched his new city in his notebook, depicting the color-soaked mystique of the Santa Monica Pier, Hollywood’s Stardust Motel, Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock, and the dynamic characters in his social and creative orbit. But it wasn’t until he switched from colored pencils to acrylic paints that Taggart finally found a way to capture the city’s light. “Once I started using acrylics I felt like I could get that intensity within the shadows,'' Taggart says today. “Even in the shadows there’s like a blue glow; even the dark has light.” 

 
 

In 1980, Taggart painted a series of portraits of friends in their native environments. They included the stylist and musician Gillian McLeod, pictured in her Spring Street loft with her lavender Gibson guitar; the photographer Jules Bates, who is shown leaning against his restored Nash Metropolitan, defiantly holding up his left hand to reveal two missing fingertips he’d lost in an explosion; and punk fans Sandy and Rochelle, whose gumball-palette fashions coordinate with the graffiti’d wall of a venue in Little Tokyo. 

In another painting, the purple pointy shoes on a pair of legs standing over a topless blonde woman, who is lying poolside in a clear plastic raincoat, belong to the fashion designer Gregory Poe, the older brother of gallerist Jeff, of Blum & Poe, and designer of said raincoat. That work caught the eye of Jann Wenner, who tried to commission something similar for Rolling Stone, but Taggart was traveling, and already on to the next thing—which at the time included book and record covers and T-shirt and poster designs for the pop culture emporium Heaven, a counterpart to Fiorucci. The paintings went into flat files, where they remained, unseen for 40 years, until Taggart started sharing some of his archives on Instagram during the pandemic. 

Dani and Yvonne Bas Tull, who run the gallery ODD ARK • LA and are fellow Northeast LA artists, began to take notice of Taggart’s Instagram posts—the work from the 1980s, in particular. “It got to a point where it was kind of exciting to see what he would post next,” recalls Dani Tull, a born-and-bred Angeleno whose mother had an art studio on Skid Row during that same time. Recognizing a little-known slice of LA art history and a vital link between the renegade spirit of the underground and the global art market of today, they approached Taggart—now an art professor whose work skews toward meticulous organic abstractions—about a show. 

LA Stories: Paintings and Drawings from 1980, featuring six paintings and nine oil pastel portraits of models and cultural figures like Brooke Shields and Grace Jones (available as limited-edition prints, along with a limited-edition t-shirt featuring a Heaven design), is a technicolor time capsule. The high-gloss surfaces and saturated hues, angular compositions and cuts of clothing, sculpted coifs and bold slashes of blush and lipstick, all point to the digital age on the horizon, yet are masterfully rendered, in fact, by hand. Seen up close, minute details are revealed within the brushstrokes. For Taggart, who framed the paintings for the exhibition, seeing them in a new context after forty years has been revelatory. “It's sort of more interesting to see them now,” he notes, adding that perhaps he was simply “waiting for the right moment” to show them.  

In Tull’s opinion, the screen-friendly nature of the work makes it that much more rewarding to see it in a brick-and-mortar space. He views presenting the paintings IRL, as it were, as an opportunity “for people to ponder the history of the LA art community. And in that pondering we have an opportunity to think about where we’re at, and where we’re going...Aside from that, the paintings are really fucking cool.”

LA Stories: Paintings and Drawings from 1980 is on view for the first time by appointment only through August 1 @ ODD ARK • LA. text by Steffie Nelson

Ring Down The Curtain Group Show @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Ring Down the Curtain is an idiom borrowed from theater that marks the end of a performance. After more than a year of isolation and lockdowns, digital surrogates and Zoom fatigue, this group exhibition signals a return to embodied optimism by offering works that embrace materiality and empiricism.

The show includes artists working to parse the complexities of gender, sexuality, identity, and power through a dedication to labor, design, and craft. A carefully considered intersection of ceramic, textile, paint, video, and installation engages sensory perception, creating somatic markers that challenge histories of cultural performativity, particularly as they apply to women. Each artist expresses their unique interests in the relationship between tactility and the significance of elicited bodily experience.

Featured artists include Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Oona Brangam-Snell, Trulee Hall, Isabel Yellin, Sarah Zapata, and Bari Ziperstein. Ring Down The Curtain is on view through June 19 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles.

 
 

Read Our Interview Of Agnes? Following Her Transition Cum Durational Performance @ Belsize Park In London →

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Agnes? has made waves in London with her most recent exhibition, Transgenesis. Spending twenty-three consecutive days in the abandoned Belsize Park leisure centre, performing for eight hours straight, Agnes? has welcomed visitors to watch in awe as we see her transform into a larger-than-life, human-octopus creature, a form that symbolizes both life and death. Transgenesis, meaning one or more DNA sequences from another species being introduced by artificial means, is explored by Agnes? through her experience of transitioning from male to female. Since beginning her transition, Agnes? has explored the symbolic connotations behind water and its relationship to her experiences of ‘mutating’ from one being to another, using the liquid to wash down her hormone drugs, an action that is simultaneously transformative and destructive all in one swallow. Read more.

Read A Conversation Between Ferrari Sheppard & Michèle Lamy On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ UTA Artist Space →

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Ferrari Sheppard is an enigmatic, multi-disciplinary artist whose practice defies classification, and lives firmly at the center of a three-dimensional venn diagram. Likewise, the work of Michèle Lamy is as fluid and instinctive as it is crystallized in her unmistakable and ever-expansive character. She is not just a maven of fashion, design, and art, or an innovator of music and former restaurateur. She is a cultivator of community and expression. Sheppard is not just a painter, writer, photographer and music producer. He is an activist who has worked to provide relief aid in Haiti, shape economic policy and development in South Africa, and shine light on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes perfect sense that the two of them would fortuitously meet at Mr. Chow’s while stepping outside for a cigarette. Sheppard’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, Positions of Power, at UTA Artist Space is a testament to the mistreatment of a generation for profit by the criminal justice system. They are love letters to those who carried the weight of the “war on drugs” and risked it all in pursuit of freedom in the United States. Their structural composition is the result of an almost unconscious, improvised dance. A process that the artist refers to as “walking while painting.” The figures are laid heavy with dark brown and black pigments that visibly absorb light, and are gilded with a reflective gold trim, creating a balance that feels harmonious and befitting. At the center of the gallery’s main space lies a brutalist, three-pronged elmwood bench of mythical giant proportions. A place to put everything down and spend some time with the work. A creation that could only come from the collective minds of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens. And the perfect place for these two chameleonic masters of material, sound, and ceremony to discuss their work. Read more.

The Parapsychic Sculptor: Read Our Interview Of Corin Johnson →

 
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Artist Corin Johnson has spent over thirty years traversing the art world with his exceptional stonemasonry and wood carving craftsmanship. Corin has collaborated with some of the world's most renowned visual artists including Paul Noble, as well as focusing on his own practice (which includes drawing, modeling, and unique stone, marble, and wood carvings), the work is varied with a unique and colorful story behind each piece. Recently, he has found himself locked down in his studio with the musically-acclaimed Nick Cave. They met in the ‘90s when the musician reached out having seen a bust of himself created by Johnson; a commission by a Cave fanatic. During lockdown, the duo have formed a creative bond and partnership. Read more.

Honoring The Murkiness: Read Our Interview Of Estefania Puerta & Abbey Meaker On Curating The Ephemeral →

Brian Raymond Tree Hollow Composition, 2021 Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork Run time: 10:00

Brian Raymond
Tree Hollow Composition, 2021
Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork
Run time: 10:00

Is it in our nature to make art? Is art inherently ephemeral? Is there a boundary between art and nature? How can we look to nature as a blueprint for the art that we make? These are all questions that come up as I consider Land Chapters, the inaugural exhibition by Artist Field, a platform for projects that respond to and engage with natural environments. Curated by Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, this exploration of the boundary between nature and self is a deep dive into the works of 16 artists split into three chapters. The first chapter is comprised of installation works that can be found deep in the woods of Richmond, Vermont on the Beaver Pond Hill Property. The second chapter comes in the form of a tape with recordings from six different artists. And the third chapter is a print publication with text from seven additional artists. All together, these works serve as an attempt to embrace all of the hard-to-pinpoint expressions of art within nature that so often fall under the towering shadow of negated space left by the Land Art movement. Read more.

Love Letter to L.A.: New Works By Beverly Fishman @ GAVLAK Gallery In Los Angeles

Love Letter to L.A. is GAVLAK gallery’s first solo presentation of new work by Beverly Fishman. The exhibition’s declaration of affection signals a pivot to the personal in Fishman’s new body of work, for which she has developed a distinctive color palette for objects that occupy a liminal position between two and three dimensions, subtly acknowledging a debt to styles with California roots, including the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements. The enticing and deceptive optical effects the new works produce also expand upon Fishman’s long-standing investigations of how physical and mental states with no fixed visual forms of their own—namely, pain and wellness—are articulated in the marketing of pharmaceutical conglomerates to an increasingly medicated general public.

Love Letter to L.A. will be on view through June 5 at GAVLAK Los Angeles.

Global Fax Festival: A New Performance Film By David Hammons In Collaboration With Monday Evening Concerts

‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performanceby David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021

‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performance by David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021

Hauser & Wirth’s digital art magazine Ursula presents ‘Global Fax Festival’ – a new performance film by David Hammons dedicated to composer/conductor Lawrence D. ‘Butch’ Morris and created in collaboration with Los Angeles’ venerated Monday Evening Concerts and virtuoso pianist Myra Melford.

The film documents Hammons’ first-ever restaging of his noted 2000 project ‘Global Fax Festival’ here conducted in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard in early May 2021. After more than a year of isolation during the pandemic, Hammons conceived this event as a gesture toward the reawakening of Los Angeles, set within the space that two years ago hosted the largest survey of his work ever organized.

The new ‘Global Fax Festival’ performance film features a solo improvisational piano performance by Myra Melford. A former Butch Morris collaborator, Melford plays in dialogue with projected footage of Morris, who passed away in 2013, performing Conductions®, his trademarked technique that merges conducting and improvisation.

Virtually Cool: Otis College Annual Fashion Show Features Designs Inspired By The Work Of Noah Davis

This Saturday, May 8, Otis College will be holding their annual fashion show for the classes of 2020 and 2021, broadcasting digitally in lieu of an in-person event. In support of their first-generation population, which comprises roughly 30% of the student body, the public will be invited at no cost for the first time and encouraged to contribute financially during the program. These students worked under the mentorship of industry heavyweights like Ruth Carter, David Meister, Jonathan Simkhai and B. Akerlund in addition to many other prominent costume and fashion designers who work with Universal, Vince and ALC.

Virtually Cool also features a collaboration with designers Arthur Thammavong and Deborah Sabet from Vince, who tasked students to make a line of clothing based off of the late American artist Noah Davis' paintings.

RSVP now to attend.

Repeat: Sculptures By Janet Levy, Choreography By Diane Gemsch @ SWB Experimenthaus In Zurich

As we navigate our lives in these times of a pandemic, the question about home and living becomes even more pronounced. Janet Levy questions what is home and what is the significance of home, collecting objects from her surroundings to create a site-specific sculptural installation. In kind, Diane Gemsch creates an emotional response by physically bringing this action to movement while engaging with the house and sculpture installation.

Repeat is on view by appointment through May @ SWB Experimenthaus Neubühl, Westbühlstrasse 59, 8038 Zurich-Wollishofen. photographs by Rudolf Moser

 


Ben Sakoguchi's Chinatown @ Bel Ami In Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi’s combinations of commercial signage, history painting, and Pop Art comment on the American Dream and its fraught entanglement with xenophobia and racism. With acrylic paint on canvas, Sakoguchi reassembles imagery from film posters, newspapers, comics, and internet searches to reveal subtexts of local discrimination, mass media exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence. A Japanese American who spent years of his childhood living in an internment camp during World War II, Sakoguchi comments on a century and a half of prejudice against diasporic Asians. Contending with overlapping histories that contribute to ideas of Asian American identity, Sakoguchi creates an ironic primer on capitalism’s treachery with an audacity that challenges and uplifts.

A publication with essays by Eli Diner (Critic, Curator, and Executive Editor of Cultured magazine), Steven Wong (Curator and the Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA), and Ana Iwataki (Writer, Curator, and PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) will be released in PDF and printed form during the course of this exhibition.

Chinatown is on view through April 24 @ Bel Ami 709 N Hill St. #105, Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi Chinatown, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Ben Sakoguchi
Chinatown, 2014
Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Randolpho Lamonier Presents My Kind Of Dirty @ Fort Gansevoort

 
 

My Kind Of Dirty is Brazilian artist Randolpho Lamonier’s first exhibition with Fort Gansevoort. This online presentation brings together recent textile works in which Lamonier responds to his upbringing in Contagem, an industrial city in southeastern Brazil, drawing  upon observations of hardship and inequality to create powerful expressions in vivid colors, word  combinations, and raw images. The artist locates his inspiration in an environment where joy grows  proportionally to misfortune and likens his work to diaristic entries. Rendered in deceptively humble handwork and fabrics, the scintillating psychedelic landscapes on view in My Kind Of Dirty celebrate “the  exuberance of life that resists against the necropolitical agenda guided by the current Brazilian government,” the artist has said. In this way, Lamonier’s approach to representation acts as personal revolution, whereby the aura of possibility defines his blueprint for the future. 

My Kind Of Dirty is available for online viewing through May 15

an exit from this room and others like it: New Paintings & Ceramics By Hana Ward @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Hana Ward’s newest oil paintings and ceramic works offer a visual narrative for what the artist describes as “a liberation in the mind.” With so much time spent trapped in divergent states this past year, reading and reflecting, watching the news – vacillating between feelings of hopelessness and anticipation – Ward found herself thinking about the experience of transformation, of coming into one’s power – specifically about how this experience might unfold for Black women.

Taken individually and as a whole, Ward’s most recent paintings and ceramic works invite viewers to create more loving space within themselves, allowing for the potential to thrive during an otherwise unforgiving and isolating time. Each portrait relays a deeply personal inner metamorphosis that also manifests outwardly, through an individual’s outlook and approach to life, and even possibly, optimistically, as a society at large.

an exit from this room and others like it is on view through May 8 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles

 
 

A Strange Encounter: New Paintings & Watercolors By Harold Ancart @ C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills

A Strange Encounter is on view through May 8 @ C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills. DM the Gallery for appointments


Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Window To The Clouds @ Salon Berlin, Museum Frieder Burda

Presented at Salon Berlin, the Berlin-based project and exhibition space of the internationally renowned Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Window to The Clouds is Paris-based artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s first institutional solo presentation in Germany. Mirroring Salon Berlin’s engagement for diverse potentialities in contemporary artistic creation, Lutz-Kinoy embraces the full dimensionality of the exhibition space as he conceives an immersive and sensorial environment for visitors that sheds light on his deeply spatial approach to painting, rooted in the body and performance. Comprised of recent paintings, ceramics and a site-specific sculpture, the exhibition imagines a series of contemporary landscapes as painterly reflections that look at — and through — various architectures, historical paintings and current events. These environments act as stages for worlds of shared experience, human presence and touch. 

Window to The Clouds is on view through June 5 @ Salon Berlin Auguststr. 11–13, 10117 Berlin

 
 

Watch L.A. Dance Project’s David Adrian Freeland Jr. Perform ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me'

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After a year of dormancy brought on by the pandemic, Hauser & Wirth’s dynamic, multi-use space in Downtown Los Angeles was revived with a special collaborative performance featuring L.A. Dance Project's David Adrian Freeland Jr. His powerful choreographic work, ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me,’ was performed throughout the gallery’s outdoor spaces and within ‘The Great American Fact,’ Amy Sherald’s first West Coast exhibition. The performance, captured by Trevor Tweeten, can be viewed here. Debuting online as part of Ursula Magazine, the performance was created during the uprisings against police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans.

Choreography & performance: David Adrian
Videography: Trevor Tweeten
Music: Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed’. 
Audio recording by Michigan State University Men’s Glee Club, 2016. Conducted by Eugene Rogers

Watch Ron Athey In Conversation With Hans Ulrich Obrist For Autre's Spring 21 Issue

Let's begin with the beginning...discover the electrifying, sacrificial practice of Ron Athey. Presenting a short film by Mat+Kat to accompany artist Ron Athey's cover story and 8,000+ word interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist for Autre's Spring 21 Doppelgänger issue. Obrist explore's Athey's 40-year boundary destroying oeuvre, the trance of performing, thinking in the live image, and the archetype of ritual. Read the full interview in Autre's Spring 21 issue—preorder is available now (each preorder will receive a free full digital edition immediately after checkout). Athey's retrospective, Queer Communion, curated by Amelia Jones, is on view until April 4th at Participant New York. And will travel to ICA LA Summer 2021. Directed by Mat+Kat Cinematography by Austin Kearns. Makeup by Laramie. Styling Aleksandra Koj and Kristina Koelle. Production by Kendall Thompson