Ruth Pastine: BroadBands Porch Gallery, Ojai March 22 – April 22, 2018 By Shana Nys Dambrot Ruth Pastine’s chromatically saturated paintings are in some ways odes to the power of pure color, but they are also excavations of the artist’s role in communicating, manipulating, and amplifying that power. And anyway they’re too disruptive to…
BioPerversity at Nicodim Gallery through April 28, 2018 By Shana Nys Dambrot We tend to use anthropomorphized animals as proxies in metaphors and morality plays, fairy tales and Freudian projections, tattoos and illuminated manuscripts. Old myths are full of half human, half animal creatures, often gods or at least demigods. Minotaur, mermaid, centaur, Anubis, wood…
Petra Cortright: Cam Worls through April 7 UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles By Shana Nys Dambrot Petra Cortright belongs to a generation of video artists whose primary visual and aesthetic influences have not been cinema and performance art, but rather the internet and social media. It’s a key distinction, and the way Cortright does it…
Mark Bradford. New Works through May 20 Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles By Shana Nys Dambrot Folks are always trying to look for Mark Bradford in his work. But what they think they find is so often just a version of him, not so much inaccurate as wildly incomplete. Granted there’s a lot to embrace in a…
Man Ray’s LA through February 17 Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills By Shana Nys Dambrot Upstairs at Gagosian Gallery’s Beverly Hills location is a charming and eccentric collection of black and white photographs made by American artistic polymath Man Ray between 1940-1951, during his Los Angeles sojourn. A time in which he also explored painting and…
William Powhida: After ‘After the Contemporary’ through March 3, 2018 Charlie James Gallery, Chinatown By Shana Nys Dambrot Cheeky and dark in a funny-because-it’s-true kind of way, the 120+ works on paper by New York-based artist William Powhida in After ‘After the Contemporary’ combine the convincing mimicry required for satire, with the more gestural and…
Debra Scacco: The Narrows through February 17 Klowden Mann, Culver City By Shana Nys Dambrot Debra Scacco is a rare presence in contemporary art — a mindfully reductive conceptualist with the emotional soul of a storyteller. As schematic abstraction goes, Scacco’s work is warm, evocative, and unusually lyrical. Her previous work has often included…
