L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley I wasn’t there last night when L.A.’s downtown Art Walk, held monthly, turned into a stand-off with police. Instead, I was on my couch, three miles away, watching it all on CBS News’ U-stream and following updates on twitter. I dozed off when there were hardly any stragglers left on the street,[…..]

Molly Springfield’s show at Thomas Robertello Gallery, titled “The Proto-History of the Internet,” isn’t really about the Internet. In actuality, the conceptual drawings, quizzical icons, and indexical paragraphs on view serve as obscure guide-posts pointing the way to broader dilemmas about the production of knowledge. The show is challenging by design. As viewers, we’re privy to certain facts while others are intentionally withheld. Dry diagrams and[…..]

MoMA PS1 is an art institution reputable for its exhibitions and events that inspire an unparalleled contemporary dialogue in both the United States and internationally. It’s building – a recovered and repurposed public schoolhouse – alone commands a stamp of novelty. The exterior recalls an architectural era that predates the now ubiquitous rolling glass façades with its sumptuous terra cotta bricks and ornate eaves. It’s interior has[…..]

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this[…..]

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world. Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Rain in Los Angeles is apparently bimodal — there are dry years followed by a few wet ones — which means the average precipitation is reached by factoring the wet and dry years together. We must be in a wetter year now, because there have been multiple rainy days just this week.[…..]

Kristi McGuire is an artist, writer, and editor living in Chicago, Illinois. She is coeditor of The Contemporary Visual Studies Reader, forthcoming from Routledge this fall. She can be reached at postmenlikedoctors [at] gmail.com.  Stock image photograph produced by Google image-search for “stock photography.” I once thought that I could summon the ambient act of reading on the Internet as part of a singular project of prognostication:[…..]