Allison Schulnick
Some Paintings: The Third LA Weekly Annual Biennial
Curated by Doug Harvey
12 January - 16 February
Track 16 Gallery
"Some Paintings," the third LA Weekly Annual Biennial, curated by the alternative paper's stalwart art critic, Doug Harvey, features work, none of which has previously been exhibited, by over 70 living Los Angeles painters. The press release describes Harvey's curatorial premise as an idiosyncratic and optimistic love letter to an art form that is seemingly very much alive and kicking in Southern California. Among the artist in the show are Allison Schulnick (above), Chris Pate and Amir H. Fallah, both of whom I have written about in previous top tens for Saatchi Online. For a full rundown of the artists in the exhibition click here. The opening promises to be lively with performances by the Spirit Girls, Wounded Lion, and John Kilduff of Let's Paint TV.
MIchael Asher's notes on the museum floorplan
Michael Asher
Santa Monica Museum of Art
January 26 - April 12
Cal Arts professor and venerable conceptual artist Michael Asher will show a "major" installation in his hometown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art - his first local exhibition in decades. Asher's installation, which involves partially reconstructing 44 exhibitions' worth of walls, will give new meaning to the term feeling 'walled in', as visitors will not be able to walk through the normally cavernous space. They will, however, be able to see the footprint of the space's storied art world past and read through Asher's copious notes and drawings that detail the plans, blueprints and documentation of the museums historical exhibition walls.
Rosson Crow, 'Live in the Black Pussy', 2007
Rosson Crow: Night at the Palomino
Honor Fraser Gallery
January 26 - March 29
Rosson Crow is a painter to watch. Her latest depictions of lush and often louche interiors recall Wild West saloons and various dens of iniquity - one painting (above) portrays the Black Pussy lounge in the studio of the late Jason Rhoades. Crow, who often finds inspiration while shopping for vintage clothes, frequently looks like she has marched out of one of her own paintings. Recently, she was seen promenading down La Cienega Blvd in a full length emerald green ball gown from the 1950's, replete with her signature fire engine red lipstick.
Erik Bluhm
Erik Bluhm: Cooperate With The Energy And Anything That Happens
David Patton Los Angeles
12 January - 9 February
Erik Bluhm's beguiling exhibition immediately resonated with my third eye. I swiftly cooperated, and discovered glorious Bluhm-land in full 70's techno vision. Bluhm, who reconstitutes 60's and 70's vintage magazines into millions of cut pieces, re-arranged to create stunning collages with striking and pared-down symbolic forms, uses his work to hark back to an era when Alternative Living and new age belief systems were being explored in Southern California. Please visit Topanga Canyon and Big Sur, for modern day evidence of this...
Scoli Acosta
Scoli Acosta: Bountiful
LAXART
January 19 - March 1
Los Angeles-based artist Scoli Acosta's debut and first solo installation at LAXART involves video, sculpture and paintings. Acosta, who has been described as "obsessive" when it comes to transforming common, everyday objects into new hybrids, has a seeming ecological bent. He likes using objet-trouve that are not only found, but are frequently distressed and aged by nature. Case in point: his red bricks with mortar, which are repeated in artworks around the gallery - they were washed up by the sea on local beaches. In full recognition of nature's wondrous and free bounty, Acosta will also take part in the LAXART billboard project which bares the word "bountiful" in a tropical font.
Karen Liebowitz's studio
Karen Liebowitz: Leviathan (from the Manifesting Prophecy Series)
Rosamund Felsen Gallery
Until February 9
Karen Liebowitz's first solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery reveals a series of paintings with an invented mythology that pertains to a Leviathan - a biblical sea monster that some believe appears during apocalyptic times. And they really are very odd paintings. Naked mermaid-type women can be seen sewing nets or riding giant corpulent octopus tentacles, strange images that lingered quite uncomfortably in my head for a couple of days (and nights). The landscapes in the background are beautifully painted, recalling great historical landscapes from Fragonard on. And yet the painting of the figures is handled a little more crudely, which may be purposeful and to somewhat jarring effect. Felsen, who recently showed the peculiar work of bizarro artist/puppeteer Morton Bartlett, has an uncanny knack of finding artists with an edge that tickle the hairs on the back of your neck.
Walead Beshty
Walead Beshty: Science Concrete
China Art Objects and Redling Fine Art
Until February 8
The much talked-about conceptual artist and former Artforum critic Walead Beshty, who is London-born and educated at both Yale and Bard, is shows his exhibition titled 'Science Concrete' across two LA galleries. Not bad considering his most recent show at Wallspace Gallery in New York came down just six days ago. www.chinaartobjects.com www.redlingfineart.com.
Brad Eberhard
Possible Impossible Dimension: Six Artists on the Brink of Abstraction
Curated by Holly Myers
12 January - 16 February 2008
Eagle Rock Center for the Arts
LA weekly and Los Angeles Times arts contributor Holly Myers proves that making friends with an artist can be a very good thing - for an artist at least. After striking up an acquaintance with Brad Eberhard - and making good upon Myers' ongoing interest in abstraction - a show was born. It features up-and-coming LA-based artists Dan Bayles, Dorsey Dunn, Brad Eberhard, Max Lesser, Chris Natrop, and Bari Ziperstein. This exhibition presents a slew of artists with similar spatial and worldly concerns: people whose careers are about to break open.
Ruby Osorio
Ruby Osorio: Looking through the Blind
January 12- February 16
CherryandMartin
Happening upon the delightful and feminine vision of Ruby Osorio is more like lifting a veil to a fanciful, nymph-centric universe than looking through the blind. Well, my blinds offer nothing as enchanting as these views, anyway. Osorio - who employs watercolour paint and hand-stitched threads to depict sinewy forms of fauna and flora - surprises followers of her work with new imagery: skulls and body-parts, albeit rendered in her magical and disquieting figurative style. As with most fairy tales and myths, Osorio's pretty imagery belies its darker message.
The Public School - Orientation
January 25, 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm
TELIC
Haven't you always dreamed of school with no curriculum, where you can decide the classes you attend as befits your fancy? Alternative artspace TELIC in Chinatown's Chung King Road promises exactly that later this month. The website reads: "The Public School opens with a presentation of speculative classes proposed by artists, designers, scientists, and other fascinating cultural producers. The Public School is a school with no curriculum, located underneath TELIC Arts Exchange. It operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach that); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, TELIC will find a teacher and offer the class to those who signed up."
London native Emma Gray writes about the arts in Los Angeles and was the former West Coast Editor of ArtReview magazine. As well as being the LA correspondent for Saatchi Online's magazine, she writes the L.A. Confidential column on Artnet.com.
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