select publications
professor otis houston jr.
More striking than his overalls and melon-cap was the expression of absolute calm and contentment on his face as if he were standing beside not a heaving highway but a mountain lake. What I remember is straining in my seat to look back, transfixed by the grace and gravitas of the man painting over the exhaust, the sirens, the crush of cars, with a smile on his face...continue reading.
jessie homer french’s paintings of wildfires reveal the beauty in destruction
hugh hayden examines the prosthetics of power
where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me...continue reading.
teresa baker recontextualizes traditional materials within modern discourse
if art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye...continue reading.
select commissions *recommended
david ‘mr.starcity’ white paints the pleasures and perils of creative passion
as Loverboy makes flowers unfurl from the earth, Mr.StarCity coaxes his vibrant portraits from soil, sand, pumice, charcoal, and acrylic. Their rough-hewn surfaces are lush yet acerbic, the gritty textures recall the sensation of having one’s hands in the ground. Loversboy's face, a polychromatic bouquet, emerges from the confines of a tightly cropped frame...continue reading.
gabrielle garland brings us closer to home
“the house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. When I recall the quote to painter Gabrielle Garland, she’s quick to tell me that she, like Bachelard, is “definitely a phenomenologist. That’s me!” To view her luminous oil paint portraits of technicolor houses is to understand precisely what Bachelard meant by the “psychic state” of a home...continue reading.
nancy friedland & ryan dobrowski leave room for mystery
The Romantic writer John Keats once observed that all one needs to write poetry is a “feeling for light and shade.” Nancy Friedland and Ryan Dobrowski’s lucent compositions make a similar case, not for poetry but for painting. Both artists modulate the effects of light and darkness to wrest significance from ambiguity...continue reading.
*gerald davis reimagines the vanitas painting
to memorialize flowers in full wilt, stems bowed in acquiescence to the natural order of growth and decline, is to undermine the traditional imperative to rebuke the ephemerality of beauty and instead embrace life as it presently exists—yes, even wilted, yes, faded, yes cobwebs and all—....continue reading.
camilla engström’s figuires repeat their landscape as the landscape
engström’s figures are rutilant, at once ethereal and carnal, the creators and creations of their landscapes. Their expressions are peaceful, pensive, and their dispositions benevolent, sublime. While fluid, glowing brushwork renders skin smooth and supple, complex chiaroscuro shading begets depth and anatomical definition....continue reading.
*skylar hughes’ waking dreams
resisting both narrative and categorization, the polychromatic images present an alternative way of seeing that is multifarious and dynamic. The world here is in flux, gracefully advancing toward knowability before again retreating, receding like the tide back into the sea. Inspired by the liminal periods of dusk and dawn, the muted palette emphasizes fluidity and ambiguity...continue reading
james goss wants you to come look a little closer
goss sculpts, scrapes, layers, and manipulates enormous amounts of oil to emulate the crenelation of a flower petal, the lushness of a patch of grass, and the grit of a sandy beach. To see the ridges and grooves on the trunks of the elm trees is to feel their scaley bark beneath your palm in an inspired moment of synesthesia...continue reading.
*jieun reiner and niki ford celebrate the multiplicity of identity
both born of the earth, in subject or in substance, and shaped by the desire to manifest an internal tension in physical form, they enable the possibility of existing in the liminal space between nationalities, genders, and generations, between dreams and reality, past and present...continue reading.
cha yuree gives physical form to internal experiences
to understand it this way, is to see how Cha’s women are engaged in something far more robust than their static poses could possibly convey and perhaps more fluid than the rigidity demanded by the roles they’re forced to perform...continue reading.
brian robertson shows us not who but what we are
we are, despite all our efforts to conceal it, animals. Animals, whose behaviors are determined, in large part, by a complex series of chemical reactions. “We’re blind to our blindness,” says psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the difficulty of knowing ourselves...continue reading.
hiroya kurata paints us as we are now
this is what food looks like 2023: highly processed white cake with frosting and strawberries. This is what children looked like: chaotic, cheerful blurs of energetic life force in cotton shorts. And light: dappled. And parks: serene. And mothers: overworked but ever-present...continue reading.
super future kid is seeing double
the twin figures seen throughout, rendered in an exuberant color palette and arranged in striking compositions appear as two halves of the same whole; their relationship, a third thing that transcends the limitations and boundaries of the self...continue reading.
jonathan edelhuber chooses carpe diem over momento mori
evidence of erasure, rupture, and addition indelibly preserved on the canvas’ surfaces affords the works not only a spatial depth but a temporal one as well. Each painting or sculpture reveals the stages of its creation, from blunt, flat strokes and splatters to robust finishes and scraped-down layer...continue reading.
adam beris breaks out of the grid
in this way, the works become almost like Rorschach Tests, where each viewer sees themselves and their own tastes, assumptions, and experiences reflected back toward them...continue reading.
*andy dixon addresses the age old adage: does size matter?
portraying works of art as commercial objects, subject to reproduction and arbitrary market values, is to remove them from the realm of the sacred and the untouchable and understand them in their historical context, which is to acknowledge the social systems that made their creation possible and to interrogate the ways their subjects venerate and perpetuate those hierarchies...continue reading.
additional publications include: typo, khora, blackbook magazine, man repeller, calliope, into the gloss, earnshaw’s, and footwear plus. fashion and culture clips available upon request.
kate pincus-whitney sumptuous foodscapes capture L.A.’s culinary scene
for artsy
For Ernest Hemingway, a “moveable feast” referred to a formative experience of a place—in his case, Paris—that stayed with you long after you’ve left. For self-described artist-anthropologist Kate Pincus-Whitney, the enduring experiences that inform her paintings are literal feasts, too, centered around shared meals in her hometown of Los Angeles. Stuffed celery from Musso & Frank Grill, Nancy Silverton’s Caesar salad...continue reading.mickalene thomas makes space for love at the broad
for W
The art critic Jerry Saltz recently described Mickalene Thomas’s work as “a brick thrown through the window of art history.” Perhaps this was in reference to the way her nude portraits subvert the traditional male gaze or how her portrayal of Black queer female bodies challenges ingrained hierarchies. Or maybe it’s because of her unconventional use of craft supplies like rhinestones, felt, and glitter or because her mixed media paintings refuse formal categorization...continue reading.betye saar’s radical assemblages have inspired a new generation of black women artists
for artsy
Betye Saar has made art for over six decades, yet in many ways, her work feels more relevant and urgent than ever. Her intricate and inventive collages, assemblages, and installations, dating back to the 1960s, merge the political with the mystical, imbuing historical narrative with personal, ancestral memory...continue reading.curators fashion a new story for sculptor camille claudel that centers her prodigious talent
for art news
Though the figure lacks a head, arms, and left knee, she is stolidly centered. The burnished bronze figure writhes, pulling the skin and tendons taut across the delicate bones of her back. The attenuated surface, animated by the innumerable minuscule movements required to maintain the figure’s equilibrium, trembles with life. The absence of the left knee, lower thigh, and upper shin exposes the figure’s breasts and abdomen; her bottom rests on the back of a sudden ankle...continue reading.shattered:basel abbas and ruanne abou-fahme find meaning in remembrance and resistance
for artillery (print)
In the 18th century, when the Iranian elite heard rumors of the grand mirrored halls of Europe, they sent merchants to procure as many sheets of brilliant reflective glass as their boats could carry. Still, the mirrors cracked in their elaborate frames somewhere between Venice and Tehran. Rather than attempt to reassemble the shattered glass, artisans inlaid the thousands of pieces in sweeping geometrical patterns along walls and across ceilings. The mesmerizing designs...continue reading.professor otis houston jr.
for autre (print)
More striking than his overalls and melon-cap was the expression of absolute calm and contentment on his face as if he were standing beside not a heaving highway but a mountain lake. What I remember is straining in my seat to look back, transfixed by the grace and gravitas of the man painting over the exhaust, the sirens, the crush of cars, with a smile on his face...continue reading. how contemporary women artists are reimagining cubism—and the body
for artsy
“Nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen,” wrote Gertrude Stein in Picasso, her 1938 portrait of the Cubist pioneer. In the early 20th century, artists around the world set out to process and represent the effects of accelerated urban, industrial, and technological progress on visual perception. Early Cubists, concerned with the spatial relationship between a form and its parts, dissected familiar objects...continue reading.jessie homer french’s paintings of wildfires reveal the beauty in destruction
for artsy
Coming from someone else, the sentiment might register as untrue or intentionally contentious, but looking at Homer French’s intricate painting of jimsonweed blooming between scorched pinyon trees, or another of a pearlescent plane soaring over a field of turbines, the viewer understands her sincerity. You see what she sees: a world alternately ravaged and renewed by man’s capacity for devastation and rebirth....continue reading.
access to abstraction: anna libby and anne rosen find freedom in collaboration
for artillery (print)
communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from...continue reading.hugh hayden examines the prosthetics of power
for autre
where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me...continue reading.teresa baker recontextualizes traditional materials within modern discourse
for autre
if art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye...continue reading.duke riley makes it real
for artillery (print)
mesmerizing geometric patterns unfurl kaleidoscopically from the center of a hexagon on the gallery’s back wall. At first glance, the crystalline mosaic, with its aquamarine, amber, and opal planes, is breathtaking. Only upon close inspection does one see that the lustrous seashells are interlaid not with gems or glass tessera but with a rainbow of...continue reading.select commissions *recommended
*hayley barker’s ‘shifty,’ ‘shimmery’ landscapes
for brepols publishing (print)
Her verdant compositions, teeming with the elan vital of diaphanous grasses, lacy petals, and succulent citrus fruits, compel viewers to stop and rest awhile. As musical tones make nearby objects vibrate at the same frequency, the tender thrumming emanating from Barker’s pictorial worlds encourages reciprocal harmony. The pervasive sense of benevolence and serenity is bewitching....continue reading.*tidaywhitney lek and veronica fernandez paint memory as memory is
for night gallery
Both women plumb the depths of their experiences to render the ecstasy and agony of the human condition in painterly bids for connection and acts of witness. In densely layered compositions that merge past and present, inherited and embodied memories, self and other, both artists give form to stories of love and loss as personal as they are universal...continue reading.david ‘mr.starcity’ white paints the pleasures and perils of creative passion
for the pit
as Loverboy makes flowers unfurl from the earth, Mr.StarCity coaxes his vibrant portraits from soil, sand, pumice, charcoal, and acrylic. Their rough-hewn surfaces are lush yet acerbic, the gritty textures recall the sensation of having one’s hands in the ground. Loversboy's face, a polychromatic bouquet, emerges from the confines of a tightly cropped frame...continue reading.gabrielle garland brings us closer to home
for the pit
“the house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. When I recall the quote to painter Gabrielle Garland, she’s quick to tell me that she, like Bachelard, is “definitely a phenomenologist. That’s me!” To view her luminous oil paint portraits of technicolor houses is to understand precisely what Bachelard meant by the “psychic state” of a home...continue reading.
*chase barney’s technicolor vessels strain to contain their contents
for the pit
According to historical records, the proverbial wisdom in the 17th and 18th centuries saw god, not the devil, in the details. That is until Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced god dead and amended the original idiom to der teufel stecktim detail or the devil in the details. For Barney’s effervescent clay sculptures, god is nowhere because he is everywhere, and the devil predominates by hiding in plain sight...continue reading.nancy friedland & ryan dobrowski leave room for mystery
for la loma projects
The Romantic writer John Keats once observed that all one needs to write poetry is a “feeling for light and shade.” Nancy Friedland and Ryan Dobrowski’s lucent compositions make a similar case, not for poetry but for painting. Both artists modulate the effects of light and darkness to wrest significance from ambiguity...continue reading.
*things fall apart in alan prazniak’s polychromatic paintings
for la loma projects
irresolution consistently asserts the need for imagination and invention; here, the land is simultaneously water, sky, mountain, meadow, and vista, always already just up ahead. Where an exacting replica of a mountain range can only reveal something of itself, Prazniak’s compositions depend upon the viewer’s collaboration and revelation for their full meaning...continue reading.*emily yong beck’s ceramics decolonize cuteness
for the pit
the sculptures in Soft Power visualize Beck’s reckoning with history’s claim on the present and her attempt to reconcile dialectically opposed truths about a beloved art form. Offering a poignant example of the ethical dilemma slated to define our contemporary moment: Can we cleave the past from the present? The artist from the art?...continue reading.*keita morimoto imbues ordinary urban life with cinematic grandeur
for night gallery
the nocturnal cityscapes and portraits in as we didn’t know it are akin to stills captured from a single, atmospheric film or cropped sections along a much larger, continuous tableau vivant. The compositions feature moments of stillness while suggesting that action and revelation are imminent...continue reading.*gerald davis reimagines the vanitas painting
for la loma projects
to memorialize flowers in full wilt, stems bowed in acquiescence to the natural order of growth and decline, is to undermine the traditional imperative to rebuke the ephemerality of beauty and instead embrace life as it presently exists—yes, even wilted, yes, faded, yes cobwebs and all—....continue reading. camilla engström’s figuires repeat their landscape as the landscape
for over the influence paris
engström’s figures are rutilant, at once ethereal and carnal, the creators and creations of their landscapes. Their expressions are peaceful, pensive, and their dispositions benevolent, sublime. While fluid, glowing brushwork renders skin smooth and supple, complex chiaroscuro shading begets depth and anatomical definition....continue reading.*skylar hughes’ waking dreams
for la loma projects
resisting both narrative and categorization, the polychromatic images present an alternative way of seeing that is multifarious and dynamic. The world here is in flux, gracefully advancing toward knowability before again retreating, receding like the tide back into the sea. Inspired by the liminal periods of dusk and dawn, the muted palette emphasizes fluidity and ambiguity...continue reading james goss wants you to come look a little closer
for the pit
goss sculpts, scrapes, layers, and manipulates enormous amounts of oil to emulate the crenelation of a flower petal, the lushness of a patch of grass, and the grit of a sandy beach. To see the ridges and grooves on the trunks of the elm trees is to feel their scaley bark beneath your palm in an inspired moment of synesthesia...continue reading. *jieun reiner and niki ford celebrate the multiplicity of identity
for la loma projects
both born of the earth, in subject or in substance, and shaped by the desire to manifest an internal tension in physical form, they enable the possibility of existing in the liminal space between nationalities, genders, and generations, between dreams and reality, past and present...continue reading.jonathan casella’s memory palace
for the pit
“Poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau advised in his masterpiece Walden that “if you have built castles in the air…that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Jonathan Casella imagined palatial vessels capable of holding the elusive, incandescent...continue reading.cha yuree gives physical form to internal experiences
for over the influence hong kong
to understand it this way, is to see how Cha’s women are engaged in something far more robust than their static poses could possibly convey and perhaps more fluid than the rigidity demanded by the roles they’re forced to perform...continue reading.brian robertson shows us not who but what we are
for everyday moonday gallery
we are, despite all our efforts to conceal it, animals. Animals, whose behaviors are determined, in large part, by a complex series of chemical reactions. “We’re blind to our blindness,” says psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the difficulty of knowing ourselves...continue reading.
hiroya kurata paints us as we are now
for over the influence gallery los angeles
this is what food looks like 2023: highly processed white cake with frosting and strawberries. This is what children looked like: chaotic, cheerful blurs of energetic life force in cotton shorts. And light: dappled. And parks: serene. And mothers: overworked but ever-present...continue reading.
super future kid is seeing double
for mindy solomon gallery
the twin figures seen throughout, rendered in an exuberant color palette and arranged in striking compositions appear as two halves of the same whole; their relationship, a third thing that transcends the limitations and boundaries of the self...continue reading.jonathan edelhuber chooses carpe diem over momento mori
for over the influence gallery los angeles
evidence of erasure, rupture, and addition indelibly preserved on the canvas’ surfaces affords the works not only a spatial depth but a temporal one as well. Each painting or sculpture reveals the stages of its creation, from blunt, flat strokes and splatters to robust finishes and scraped-down layer...continue reading.adam beris breaks out of the grid
for over the influence gallery bangkok
in this way, the works become almost like Rorschach Tests, where each viewer sees themselves and their own tastes, assumptions, and experiences reflected back toward them...continue reading.*andy dixon addresses the age old adage: does size matter?
for over the influence bangkok
portraying works of art as commercial objects, subject to reproduction and arbitrary market values, is to remove them from the realm of the sacred and the untouchable and understand them in their historical context, which is to acknowledge the social systems that made their creation possible and to interrogate the ways their subjects venerate and perpetuate those hierarchies...continue reading.
additional publications include: typo, khora, blackbook magazine, man repeller, calliope, into the gloss, earnshaw’s, and footwear plus. fashion and culture clips available upon request.