L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “Becoming a human being isn’t just something you get with your birth,” novelist Zadie Smith told Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt in 2006. “It’s an exercise and it takes your whole life.” Smith said this following the publication of On Beauty, her relentless opus in which 450 pages of identity-searching ends in disaster—slander, scandal[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Religion and art seem equally good at revealing people’s vulnerabilities, which is perhaps why the sacred often works so well as a subject for artists. A month ago, I attended mass and was struck by how devout the acolyte looked, holding his brass candle-lighter and wearing his white robe. Then, following the[…..]
Drew Heitzler rephrases history in ways that seem both furtive and strangely revealing. In his most recent work, he culls characters, settings, and plots from the visual history of the still-young Los Angeles. Rearranging and re-imagining three films from the early 1960s, all of them productions in which the rebel spirit of Easy Rider seems to be slowly eating into the stylized melodrama of noir,[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Making films is not easy. Most people know this and almost as many find the difficulties of movie-making enthralling, which explains the proliferation of articles, TV interviews, and radio specials on the subject. Just last week, I nearly pulled off the freeway to better concentrate on radio host Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Oren[…..]
Catherine Wagley, DailyServing’s longest standing contributor is no stranger to the Los Angeles art community. Since our inception in 2006, Wagley has regularly contributed to the massive list of artist’s featured on DailyServing, while also building insightful commentary on the art happenings of Los Angeles, including the recent articles Another End to Irony, The Third Chapter of Blum and Poe and Faux Koons. Thanks to[…..]
The Henry Art Gallery at Seattle’s University of Washington is hosting a rare kind of exhibition: a 100th birthday show for a living artist. Milton Rogovin, who began his career as a documentary photographer in the early 1950s and was still working as recently as 2002, will turn 100 on December 31, 2009 and the exhibition is unambiguously titled Happy 100th Birthday, Milton Rogovin! This,[…..]
When I was an undergraduate painting major, my drawing instructor, a cool-headed minimalist who approached teaching with as much restraint as he did art-making, warned me not to preach to the choir. I had made a series of over-stimulating, muddy drawings in which decadent magazine imagery swam in bleeding pools of ink. The drawings criticized consumer culture (loudly), but they didn’t do much else. “Everyone[…..]
