LOS ANGELES — As a primary member of the Light and Space movement of the 1960’s, Helen Pashgian played a pivotal role in establishing the legitimacy of California art in the second half of the 20th century. However, being one of the only women in LA’s macho art scene of the era, her work was often overshadowed. An exhibition of new sculptures at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills, as well as her inclusion in a recent encyclopaedic Pacific Standard Time show, aims to set the record straight.
Reviews
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Historic Protest from 1960s and 1970s California
LOS ANGELES — West Hollywood, known popularly today for its thriving design culture and LGBT community. During the day, you can visit any number of design studios and the sprawling Pacific Design Center complex. At night, Santa Monica Blvd. lights up with raucous bars and bouncing clubs catering to the local community. Affectionately known as “Weho,” the city, which is independent from Los Angeles, has also been a site for numerous citizen actions, from Proposition 8 protests to protests against the Hyatt. It’s only natural, then, that a new show, Decade of Dissent: Democracy in Action 1965-1975, should open in West Hollywood’s terrific new community library, just across from the Pacific Design Center.
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Pulling Down the Curtain
Franklin Evans is a Brooklyn-based artist. You might have heard of him as a result of his involvement in PS1’s 2010 installment of Greater New York. I knew little about the artist until I walked into his current exhibition Eyes on the Edge at Sue Scott Gallery. He is a painter and installation artist of the self aware/self conscious brand. Upon entering the gallery the visitor is forced to walk across a Plexiglas-faced bookshelf installed on the floor. Resting on the upturned shelves is a carefully installed library — presumably the artist’s own.
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The Legacy of Edward Gorey Preserved at Columbia University
In 2010, Columbia University received a donation of an extensive collection of Edward Gorey items from Andrew Alpern, an architectural historian and attorney who spent four decades acquiring the illustrator’s work. The 700 objects in the collection include almost every edition of every book Gorey published, as well as drawings, etchings and pieces of his design and illustration work. Gorey Preserved, now exhibited at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, is a glimpse into the collection, and into Gorey’s mischievously dark world, where death could be as playful a character as a cat on a unicycle.
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Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (Mar 2012)
This week, reviews of Dr. Dog, Mohsen Namjoo, Rodrigo y Gabriela & C.U.B.A., Sia Tolno, Lana Del Rey, Clams Casino, Leonard Cohen, Snow Patrol and more.
Posted inPerformance
On Black Dance: Shifting Movement, Words, Identities
I am watching a black man gyrate in front of me in a thong over gray briefs. A tuft of synthetic, orange hair peeks out from the front of the triangular fabric. His nearly-shaven head glistens as beads of sweat trickle down his face. His dark eyes stare intensely at us.
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On The Threshold
There are a number of things that distinguish Zak Prekop, who was born in 1979, from other young painters. The most important one is that he hasn’t turned what he does into a style or, in today’s parlance, a brand consisting of signature gestures. For while he has developed a method of making based on collage and optical disturbance, he has kept his options open. He embraces both the literal and the fictive as well as intertwines them in ways that are assured and compelling.
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Poor Forrest, Dead and Gone
To walk into the artist Robert Gober’s installation of paintings, photographs and writings by Forrest Bess — a visionary painter and self-described, self-surgically-altered “pseudo-hermaphrodite” — was to encounter art frontloaded with (as the reader put it) “cultural significance while also being visually intoxicating, or mesmerizing, you can choose a description.”
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New Long Island City Gallery Combines Brooklyn DIY with UES Posh
The Jeffrey Leder Gallery has reopened in Long Island City in a charming two-story brownstone building on a tree-lined street not far away from the Sculpture Center and PS1. The space is a nice alternative to the white cubes of Chelsea and captures a bit of the DIY sensibility of some of the apartment galleries of Brooklyn or the East Village. The third exhibition here utilizes both floors with the work of two strong painters who complement one another; Charles Marburg’s abstractions on the parlor floor and Violet Baxter’s representational work on the top floor.
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Scope Kills With Kindness
After celebrating ten years of contemporary art fairs nationally and abroad, Scope New York has decided to make the move uptown to mingle with the big boys. The fair is enclosed in an enormous white tent on 57th Street at Twelfth Avenue and provides a much-needed respite from the hysteria of the Armory Show. Fifty-seven galleries are represented, approximately half of which are based in New York. The Middle East appears to be the one region noticeably absent from the international pool, but strong entries from Santo Domingo and South Korea show that this fair is still digging deep into underrepresented terrain.
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Curators Take On the Art Fair
If artists knew how to take breaks, they’d probably find different professions. True to their people, art-party company The They Co. has put together an ambitious “break” from the commercial art madness of Armory Week — a colossal, curator-driven, thematic art exhibition on three floors of an old school in Nolita. Spring/Break’s 23 curators, both independent and gallery-affiliated, from boroughs near and far, present a dynamic, thoughtful response to the inaugural show’s theme, “Apocalist: A Brief History of the End.”
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Searching For An Explanation at the Moving Image and Independent Fairs
After attending both the Moving Image Fair at the Waterfront Tunnel and the Independent in the old Dia:Chelsea building, I realized that art fairs and the art contained within them are suffering from the same problem as many recent exhibitions in major museums: It’s nearly impossible to appreciate the art by itself without a detailed explanation of the artist’s background and motivations.
