Japan is utterly strange, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as visitors to a country for whose culture and language have (nor do they want to have) absolutely no affinity. Yet their acute sense of dislocation and turmoil in which we are caught up simply play out at the fringes[…..]
Wade Guyton’s work functions beautifully on material and conceptual levels. Guyton, currently represented by Friedrich Petzel in New York, is well-known for his work using the symbol X: represented sculpturally by black planks propped in a landscape, or markered onto a photograph, or printed in repeating patterns on linen. But lately I’ve been looking at his large-scale paintings from 2007/2008 and marveling over the way[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Back when L.A. art was in its adolescence, critic Peter Plagens asked painter John Altoon why being an artist couldn’t just be about making work: I used to say, “John, what about the artist who just goes into his studio, paints paintings and tries to make them the best that he can?[…..]
Rajon Flocka James in the house! The title of Raymond Pettibon’s current show at David Zwirner, Hard in the Paint, riffs on basketball, art making, the Southern hip-hopper Waka Flocka Flame and maybe even the YouTube parody Baraka Flocka Flame. By signing the gallery wall “Rajon Flocka James,” Pettibon, whose given name is Raymond Ginn and is no stranger to cultivating an artistic persona, is[…..]
The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloging the results of his premise. – Sol Lewitt Operating on logical relationships that rule out unpredictability, seriality, as Jean Baudrillard argued in decades past, is a phenomenon inextricably tied to industrial production and modernity. To those who live in the twenty-first century some half a[…..]
From the DS Archives brings you the stunning work of Fay Ku. Drawing from her own experiences and an aesthetic nod to ukiyo-e or “pictures of the floating world,” Ku renders magnificent pieces that are at once completely modern and historically grounded. If your lucky enough to be in the New York or Wisconsin area you can check out her upcoming shows Tales Gone In[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley There are many ways to mask yourself, some more effective than others, and artists—the good ones—venture further into the business of masking than most. They’re also deep into unmasking, balancing the urge to reveal with the need to conceal. This is a more pragmatic than emotional project; even if artists tend to[…..]
