Video artist Guy Ben-Ner is a year-long inhabitant of MASS MoCA‘s galleries. His exhibition Thursday the 12th, on view from May 2009 through March 2010, explores family life and imagination, while also questioning culturally proscribed lifestyles. One video, Stealing Beauty, plays like a conventional family sitcom, except that the setting is Ikea store displays in New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Another video reinterprets Truffaut’s[…..]
Hammer Museum. Curated by CalArts–he was privy to the school’s infamous conceptualist think-tank days–Johnson has spent his career merging postmodern headiness with cartoon humor and colliding highbrow with lowbrow. His lighthearted, yet still confrontational, photographs flip the photographic on its head. They don’t even resemble photographs; they resemble drawings or prints, a fact that reflects Johnson’s irreverent process (he scans found imagery and drawings and[…..]
Marilyn Minter In Cheim & Reid‘s current exhibition, women portray the bodies of other women in ways that are both historically grounded and forward thinking. Called The Female Gaze, the exhibition acts as a survey of sorts, presenting a wide range of approaches, some morally ambiguous and others socially incisive. The intergenerational, international span of artists includes Berenice Abbott, Marina Abramovic, Vanessa Beecroft, Louise Bourgeois,[…..]
Scott McFarland‘s photo series, A Cultivated View, now exhibiting at the National Gallery of Canada, documents sculpted Vancouver gardens. The images, as carefully controlled as the gardens they depict, are strangely insidious. Unlike the nature photographers and National Geographic features he mimics, McFarland makes landscaped spaces seem absurd, like deceitfully calm settings for Wes Anderson films. Sponsored by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP),[…..]
The Rise and Fall of Shame, Jason Yates‘ summer exhibition at Circus Gallery, blurs the boundaries between high and low art, making the art world’s obsession with cultural elitism seem prosaic and stifling. On Circus’ first floor, Yates’ ink, paper and mylar “paintings” riff off of Jasper Johns’ Corpse and Mirror vocabulary, using hatch marks to set up a striking conversation between minimalist clarity and[…..]
The Colin Gee, a writer/director/performer who studied with acclaimed French mime Jacques Lecoq and worked as a principle Cirque du Soleil clown between 2001 and 2004. Gee caught the attention of Whitney curators when, during the museum’s Calder exhibition, he proposed a performance that commemorated Calder’s “blog. Most recently, he posted scenes from “
It’s the 18th Street Art Center‘s birthday. The Santa Monica art center began in 1988 as the headquarters for High Performance magazine and soon grew to provide live-work spaces for approximately 30 tenants from a variety of backgrounds. Now 18th Street is a thriving exhibition and residency space and it’s celebrating its 20 year mark with an exhibition curated by Ciara Ennis. The exhibition opened[…..]
