Psychedelia is a state of mind. It is a particular mode of perception that upends our assumptions about the way that the world works. It is about heightened color, glimmering patterns, and swirling constellations of form that challenge gravity and the very boundaries between discrete objects. The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these[…..]
Today’s article is from our dear friends at Art Practical, where Jessica Brier discusses the new work by On Kawara at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries. It’s pretty safe to say that Conceptual Art’s moment has come and gone. Now that we are living in a period in which virtually all art is expected to be “conceptual” in some way or[…..]
I’m a sucker for a storyline involving a protagonist’s search for identity across generations and distant lands. More often than not this fascination is satisfied by reading a novel or watching a film, maybe listening to a three-verse country song. It’s not often that such a sprawling narrative emerges from within a work of art, but such is the case with the series of photographs[…..]
If the come hither of May’s New York Gallery Week annoyed the crap out of you, then maybe KRATOS — ABOUT (IL)LEGITIMATE(D) POWER at Team Gallery has just the gravitas you’ve been seeking. Monochrome in execution and serious in tone, this Debbie Downer of a show stands in stark contrast to the group hugs that typically fill galleries’ summer schedules. The show is dominated by[…..]
Ghada Amer is known for appropriating images of women taken from pornography, so it’s not unusual to encounter the stylistic conventions of x-rated material in her work. At her recent solo exhibition at Cheim & Read, big-breasted women display spread legs and vulvas; two women clutch each other passionately as one penetrates the other with a dildo; a single woman is seen from behind in[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When she gives artist’s lectures, sculptor China Adams often describes her work as a race against her own death. Her smooth plaster “chunks” of ensconced trash, her vampiric experiments with blood consumption and her glass Vitrines filled with mummified possessions all attempt to preserve what’s bound to decay. But, while her work[…..]
Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light[…..]
