Installation

Alejandro Almanza Pereda

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From our friends at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, today we bring you a video of Alejandro Almanza Pereda’s installation at San Francisco Art Institute, which is installed in front of Diego Rivera’s famous mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1930–1931). Almanza Pereda says, “We were thinking about how to re-think Diego’s piece, and question it a little bit, and question[…..]

Martin Creed: Work No. 360 at the Henry Art Gallery

Martin Creed. Work No. 360: Half the air in a given space, 2015. Installation view. Courtesy of the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Photo: RJ Sánchez, Solstream Studios.

Let’s just state the obvious: Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: Half the Air in a Given Space, on view at Henry Art Gallery, is insanely fun to experience. Pushing your way through a space filled (true to the installation’s title, only halfway) with over 37,000 pearly gray balloons is like being in a mosh pit, surrounded by marshmallows. It’s a ridiculous image, to be sure,[…..]

Zoe Beloff: A World Redrawn at the James Gallery, CUNY

Zoe Beloff. Two Marxists in Hollywood, 2015 (film still). Courtesy of the James Gallery, Graduate Center, CUNY.

It is a strange fact that Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Bertolt Brecht all resided in Los Angeles, California, in the 1940s. Unsurprisingly, few of them found their wartime haven a particularly sympathetic milieu. Brecht’s stay was especially ill-fated, ending with his interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and consequent return to Berlin. A decade earlier, the Latvia-born film director[…..]

Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth at MOCA Storefront

Noah Davis. Imitation of Wealth, 2015; installation view, MOCA: storefront. Courtesy of the Artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Cameron Crone and Carter Seddon.

For the next three years, the estimable Underground Museum, co-founded by husband and wife Noah and Karon Davis, will bring artworks from Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) permanent collection to its unassuming storefront in the largely black and Latino working-class neighborhoods of West Adams and Crenshaw. Reciprocally, MOCA presents Noah Davis’ Imitation of Wealth, which was first exhibited at the Underground Museum, in its new[…..]

Talk to Me: Samuel Levi Jones at ProArts

Samuel Levi Jones. Talk to Me, 2015; installation view; mixed media on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland.

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Marie Martraire reviews Talk to Me: Samuel Levi Jones at ProArts in Oakland. In front of Oakland City Hall, thirty-three large square collages are hung on[…..]

From the Archives – Material Practices: Stitching, Fabric, and Textiles in the work of Contemporary Chinese Artists

Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City, Sydney, 2003       photo: Yin Xiuzhen         collection by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, image courtesy the artist

For Labor Day weekend, we bring you this piece from the archives that deals with gendered, often invisible labor—the kind not celebrated on national labor days. Luise Guest explores the work of several contemporary Chinese women artists using embroidery in revolutionary ways. This review was originally published on January 10, 2014. Mao Zedong once said that revolution is not a dinner party. Less famously, he said[…..]

From the Archives: Pierre Huyghe at LACMA

Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask), 2014. Film. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser and Wirth, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe

This month marks the opening of the first major Australian solo exhibition of Pierre Huyghe’s work at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, so today we revisit this review by Alex Bigman, who assesses the humor and mythology of Huyghe’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This article was originally published on January 21, 2015. There is a scene in Pierre Huyghe’s shadowy, dreamlike film The Host and[…..]