John Valadez Extends the Chicano Arts Movement in Chaos Anime @ Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

ocean scene John Valadez chaos beach

John Valadez, Chaos, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

A trailblazer of the early Chicano Arts Movement in the 1970s and 80s, John Valadez’s work has come to define an iconography of Chicano experience in the city by catalyzing its changing dynamics and reconstructing a mythical allegory that speaks to an alternate vision. Through a multidisciplinary practice spanning 45 years, and encompassing documentary photography and portraiture, public murals, paintings, and pastel works, Valadez has cultivated a style that transcends genre designations. Never settling into one box, his work evokes a fluidity between multiple cultures and visual lexicons, effectively mirroring the unsettled experience of the Chicano identity. Valadez continues to pursue politically engaged work—a persistent voice championing generations of Chicano and Latinx communities.

John Valadez: Chaos Anime presents new paintings that address the shifting global dynamics and social climates facing new generations of Chicanos today, alongside recent works that revisit earlier themes. Together, the works exhibit the breadth of the artist’s social commentaries and further contextualize his lauded approach to painting. Drawing from current events, cultural histories, city life, and such experiences filtered through lucid dreaming, Valadez implements realism, mannerism, abstraction, and montage as a vehicle for allegory and satire to ignite a myriad of socio-political conversations. Themes of invisible borders, sublime skies, tempestuous seas, and juxtapositions between reality, dreams, and the natural world versus the consequences of human interferences, are but some of the constants throughout the trove of Valadez’s urban proverbs. A pivotal moment in Valadez’s new body of work is his extension of Chicano Movement principles, speaking to global matters of displacement, gentrification, economic disparities, famine, the environment, and geopolitics.

Chaos Anime is on view through June 8 @ Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, 1110 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

 
women at the beach John Valadez

John Valadez, Piernas Anime, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

 

Two Men Sitting: Read Our Interview of Photographer & Curator Job Piston →

Two Men Sitting, Delfi, 30 x 40 in, lustre print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3 (option 17 x 22 in, metallic lustre print)

Muna Malik and Job Piston arrive on a Greek island sprinkled with sunflowers, daisies, and the sight of a tossed olive oil can. The two artists are gazing upon the Aegean Sea stretching out in front of them. They are in Hydra on a bench in the shadow of the Deste Project Space, not far from where they met for the first time to participate in the art and curatorial residency with ARC Athens. An oversized wind spinner with the melancholic face of the Greek god Apollo by Jeff Koons peers down over them. Apollo is often associated with sun and light, representing the illuminations of truth and knowledge. It is a fitting setting for a conversation around photography and metamorphosis, as they discuss the artist and curator Job Piston’s latest Los Angeles solo project Estate Sale. Read more.

Find Infinitude in Callum Innes' Turn @ Sean Kelly in Los Angeles

Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles

Callum Innes’ Turn at Sean Kelly in Los Angeles is an escapade into the shape. The exhibition features his latest Tondo works, alongside his Exposed Paintings, Split Paintings, and Shellac Paintings. Innes utilization of shape and color seeks to reinvent itself repeatedly. There’s a sense of playfulness with how the traditional shape can be rendered, and how the manipulation of color can transform the space within a shape. This transformation of space is what makes Innes’ work so iconic; the hardness of his rectangular and circular figures are almost intimidating. There’s a sense of intense certainty around Innes’ work: square, circle, rectangle, line. The infinite history of these figures is perhaps what makes them so sturdy in their presence; they stand in themselves like sargeants in command. There’s something calming about this sense of complete certainty; the deliberate alteration of the traditional shape is uniform, mechanical, and familiar. The occupation of space within the shape itself is what forces Innes’ work outside the confines of all that we know to be the average circular or rectangular formation. The geometric display is pervaded with different intonations of pigment, while still steadfastly holding onto the robust structure that is quintessential of Innes’ work. 

Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles

His latest exploration of the Tondo simultaneously catalyzed an experimentation with materiality. For this series of work, Innes’ circular figures are made of plywood panels. The sleekness of the surface invited a new methodology involving the application of color. This embrace of movement in process further enunciates the notion of time in Innes’ work. The infinitude of the shape is subliminally apparent; we are conscious of the fact that the standard shape is something that has always existed and will always exist. The notion of time becomes further warped across materiality, where the time spent making these forms varies and is dependent upon the surface of the work. 

Turn becomes incredibly nuanced when it’s embedded within the context of time and shape. The rotation of a circular form is ubiquitous in its implementation. To turn is to move, and to simultaneously occupy time. Innes directly engages with the advent of motion, but does so in a way that is entirely unchaotic. The structure that he gives time can be comforting, but it’s more so reflective. The sturdiness with which Innes presents abstract concepts lies at the heart of this ability for reflection; the idea of turning becomes inseparable from the idea of shape. To turn becomes reminiscent of both the infinite and finite. The end of the turn finds itself at the end of the circle, which doesn’t exist.

Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles

Turn is on view through May 4 @ Sean Kelly, 1357 N Highland Avenue Los Angeles CA

Alina Perkins Eternalizes the Ephemeral in La Fiaca @ Fernberger

Alina Perkins, La Fiaca, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Fernberger.

Fernberger is currently presenting La Fiaca, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and a new installation by the multidisciplinary artist Alina Perkins. In her native Argentina, la fiaca is a term used to describe a blissful, nourishing idleness—an introspective pace and productive space that she embraces to pursue intellectual meditation and creative invention. Her resulting artworks are portals into alternate, though familiar, realities—resisting the literal and functional, welcoming the surreal and sensorial.

She layers her canvases with blurred, chalky brushstrokes in verdant shades of red, orange, green, and yellow, and dusty tones of purple, blue, ivory, and slate. Each painting portrays an ambiguous object, scene, or vista: an egg seated on a plush cushion, a knife pierced into a lush field, a book open to a blank page.

La Fiaca is on view through May 11 @ Fernberger, 747 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029

Read Our Interview of Avery Wheless on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition with BozoMag in Los Angeles →

Avery Wheless is a Los Angeles-based painter who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. With her mother, a ballet instructor, and her father, an animator for LucasFilms, it’s no wonder she became a painter and video artist with a penchant for the theatrical. Her video works often depict movement artists performing choreography, and her painted portraits often depict everyday people engaging in the unconscious performativity of everyday life. Her current solo exhibition Stage, Presence on view at a private residence in Beverly Hills with BozoMag includes portrayals of the artist and her friends occupying glamorous spaces, caught in moments that subtly reveal the effort that comes with looking at ease. These acts are not celebrated or bemoaned. They just are. One friend reaches into the cocktail dress of another to lift and expose the fullness of her breast in anticipation of reuniting with an ex. Other figures unwittingly become subjects as they applaud an unseen performer or spy pensively on others while sipping martinis. The pageantry of hyper femininity is as vulnerable as it is manicured when you look at it from the right angle and Avery Wheless has a way of depicting it all simultaneously like an emotional lenticular on canvas. Read more.

At the Edge of the Sun Is A Beautiful Amalgamation of Los Angeles' Many Faces @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Photo by Charles White.
Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.

At the Edge of the Sun is organized by an intimate constellation of twelve artists who have connected over the past decade through artistic discourse and shared experiences of living in Los Angeles. The exhibit convenes works informed by underground economies, California landscapes, night life, local histories, systemic architecture, surveillance, youth culture, public transportation, backyard kickbacks and more. At the Edge of the Sun collectivizes a nod to personal contexts and the artists’ sense of time and place, turning away from familiar mainstream stereotypes of Los Angeles in favor of embracing their own landmarks, memories, communities and visions of their city.

At the Edge of the Sun is on view through May 4 @ Jeffrey Deitch, 925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles

Read Our Interview of Artist Tim Biskup On The Occasion Of His 4/20 Exhibition at Face Guts →

 
 

American visual artist Tim Biskup is a rebellious outlier in the shark-eat-shark ecosystem of the art market. His project space, Face Guts, is a testament to his anti-establishment ethos. Ceremoniously opening on 4/20, his exhibition Spring Collection will include a new suite of paintings and drawings with Biskup’s unique brand of psychedelia—a vision quest of intuitive gestures and symmetrical forms that play with pareidolia through abstraction. It’s an ayahuasca trip chased by a Freudian drip of haunted symbolism that harkens to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and maybe the brain scans of enlightened butterflies. Along with new art comes the release of a limited edition yearbook. “Face Guts Year Seven” is a 56-page document of exhibitions, installations, and “whatever else catches the artist’s eye.” Read more.

Read Our Interview of Paris-Based Artist Ladji Diaby →

 
 

April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris. Read more.

Read Our Interview of Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles →

 

Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.

 

“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects. Read more.

GENDERQUAKE Is A Temporal Distillation of Fashion's Evolution @ SCAD Museum of Art for SCAD deFINE ART 2024

An ode to the evolution of fashion from the 20th century to the present day, GENDERQUAKE: Liberation, Appropriation, Rejection represents the progression of the fashion protagonist through time. The group exhibition is an amalgamation of fashion’s trending extremes, representing the strategic placement of garment on the body. The show assigns nuance to the body in form and the way clothing chooses to rest. The corporeal identity celebrates the dynamic nature of gender; its emphasis lies in the multiplicity of form and operation with the growing milieu. Light is strategically implemented here; coloration is obscured and distorted recurrently so that color takes preference over form and form takes precedence over color. We are led to examine the multidimensionality of attire in its own context. The augmentations of light are fleeting; the shift is gradual, but with each minute transposition one is delicately subdued into another reality, another dimension, to another way of seeing. We move linearly through time and metaphysically through light. GENDERQUAKE epitomizes fashion’s unique relationship to timelessness.

GENDERQUAKE is guest-curated by Stefano Tonchi with Marta Franceschini and presented as part of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) deFINE ART 2024 through June 24.

All images courtesy of SCAD.

The Perfect Specimen: Read Our Interview of Lauren Lee McCarthy On Her Exhibition "Bodily Autonomy" @ Mandeville Art Gallery In San Diego →

medical pamphlet with man spitting into a vial says "So You've Decided to Exchange Saliva"

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

When asked to read through a long list of terms and conditions before giving consent, most of us have developed a reflexive response of scrolling to the bottom and trudging ahead. There’s a miniature risk/benefit analysis that we all conduct, which includes a completely unknown potential risk in the distant future, and the near future benefit of moving on. Time is such a valuable commodity that we regularly find ourselves sharing everything from personal data, browsing data, biometric data, and more. Oftentimes, there’s no contract at all. You may have thought you were showing all of your friends how your looks changed from 2009 to 2019, but you were really training someone’s private surveillance software. The list of myopic, nefarious applications that we serve by giving ourselves away to faceless data farms in exchange for what often amounts to a forgettable laugh is endless. In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Bodily Autonomy exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, she explores two very specific aspects of the way that we engage with science and technology. With “Surrogate,” she created an application where couples and individuals who are interested in hiring her as a surrogate mother are invited to dictate everything from her eating and sleeping habits, to her daily activities, and more. While these requests are not actually fulfilled, the application itself challenges notions of reproduction, genetic selection, and commerce. With “Saliva” she has created a saliva exchange station that is activated every Thursday from 6-8pm where visitors are invited to give and receive samples of their own saliva. Each participant is given agency to label their sample as they prefer and they provide the conditions for what happens to it (scout’s honor). Doreen A. Ríos, a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego and an independent curator and researcher, spoke with McCarthy to discuss the implications of these technologies and the imperative within the work to embody a more transparent form of participation. Read more.

Read an Interview of Holly Hendry on the Occasion of Her Exhibition @ SCAD Museum of Art for SCAD deFINE ART 2024 →

 

Holly Hendry, Her bones begin to bend, 2024. Image courtesy of SCAD.

 

Holly Hendry’s Watermarks, featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24, is a site-specific oasis which playfully investigates the way water runs through virtually every facet of human life. Situated outside the museum in glass vitrines overlooking Turner Boulevard, Hendry’s four sculptural pieces encounter the world in an unconventional way. The architectural display is situated in the community; students pass it every morning on their way to class. The significance behind the work in this context becomes ever-evolving, effortlessly aligning with the shifting elements of the everyday. Her edifices traverse intricate concepts that range from the expansiveness of architecture, societal conceptions of the female form, to the connectivity of bodies via water. Interestingly balancing the lightness of uplifting artistic figuration with the weight of impending doom as it relates to our not-at-all-ubiquitous freshwater supply, Hendry’s sculptural forms are dynamic manifestations of life on earth. Read more.

Watermarks is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer with assistant curator Haley Clouser and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.

TRUFFLE by Parker Woods and Erin Green Book Launch @ Sheriff Gallery

TRUFFLE is an ode to detail; with the combining forces of Parker Woods’ intimate style of photography that takes a fresh approach to abstraction by placing it within the context of humanity, as well as Erin Greens’ honest and raw makeup artistry, depicting more than just makeup—but the person behind it. The book proposes a perspective one could only define as close, in all ways. Work that prides itself on defying the very word “pristine.” TRUFFLE’s black and white imagery along with their mix of up-close shots displaying both identifiable human features drawn in makeup amongst abstracted textured imagery creates a unique voice that speaks to you like a whisper directly into your ear. Portraying not only up close intimacy, but an undeniable vulnerability that compels you to look, even if it feels invading, the art book stands out by its artistic approach that can only be described as honest. 

With graphic design by Patrick Slack and Austin Redman, the final object is a 208-page, landscape-oriented book with slipcase and a 40.64cm x 50.8cm double-sided poster. Edition of 200.

You can preorder TRUFFLE now on their website

 
 

Lefty Out There "Tempus" @ Maddox Gallery in London

An exploration of time through the lens of growth, energy and artisanship, ‘Tempus’ is Lefty Out There’s most complex and intricately crafted show yet. Envisaging a show entirely in color, his sophisticated palette is intertwined with multidimensional shapes, forms and proportions. Exploring just how far he can push his abstractions, his trademark polymorphs breathe and grow as the exhibition unfolds through more than 30 unique works.Hailing from Chicago, Lefty’s immersion in the city’s buzzing street art scene marked the start of his career-long obsession with patterns. Always chasing perfection, his studio in Los Angeles is part traditional artist’s atelier, part experimental workshop. Harnessing the power of machinery, technology, carpentry and a myriad of different mediums and techniques, the new works reflect the patience and passion Lefty invests in every stroke and contour. Tempus will be on view until May 4th at Maddox Gallery, 12 Berkeley Street, London

Read An Interview Of Kate Mosher Hall On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition @ Hannah Hoffman In Los Angeles →

Kate Mosher Hall, 31,556,952 seconds, 2024 
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm)

I recently visited Los Angeles born-and-raised painter Kate Mosher Hall at her light-filled studio in a bricky industrial area of Glendale. With the 5 freeway buzzing nearby, she walked me through her complex and unique process, which involves silkscreening light-sensitive emulsion over gessoed canvas using anywhere from eight to thirty screens depending on the particular painting, Photoshopping, layers of collage, and paint. It’s a “choose-your-own adventure” as she says, to get the desired effect. To help organize things, she’s created a lexicon: box paintings, hole or mesh paintings, recursion paintings. Some paintings incorporate elements of all styles. Hall, a punk drummer, worked in silkscreen studios for several years before she began UCLA’s Fine Art MFA program. We talked about Never Odd or Even, Hall’s second solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, which is currently on view in Los Angeles and the way that the work employs both good and bad math, challenges modes of looking, and the infinite repetition within binary relationships. Read more.

Izumi Kato's Not-Quite-Human Figures Are Apparitions of Coexistence in Perrotin's Inaugural Los Angeles Show

#6
Untitled, 2023

Photo by Kei Okano
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin ©2023 Izumi Kato

Perrotin inaugurates their new Los Angeles location with an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Izumi Kato.

Imagine, for a moment, that Izumi Kato’s figurative subjects have a life of their own. From the artist’s studio in Tokyo, his subjects have traversed the ocean, crossing the Pacific to emerge in Los Angeles. Making their way to Pico Boulevard, they appear utterly at home in Southern California—a place where one can encounter the extremes of both prehistoric geology and urban modernity, where tar pits coexist with gleaming new buildings, where eternal ocean cliffs abut concrete highway. These binaries of ancient and modern, geological and man-made, are dualities that also coexist in Kato’s work, making his exhibition a fitting choice for Perrotin’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.

Izumi Kato’s exhibition is on view through March 23 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Boulevard

Willfully Surrender to the Chaos of Nature in Tali Lennox's Tremors @ Nicodim in Los Angeles

In her first solo exhibition with Nicodim, artist Tali Lennox enlists erupting volcanoes, glowing forests and mystical landscapes to explore the pleasure of submitting to the chaos and the power of nature. Tremors finds a range of female bodies in varying states of capitulation to an onslaught of mother nature’s harshest elements, finding common ground between internal and external states of disorder.

Originally inspired by the German anthology of illuminations Das Wunderzeichenbuch: The Book of Miracles, this collection takes the lead from the book of Renaissance paintings that depict both biblical and folkloric tales with a decidedly apocalyptic flair.

Shells and oysters proliferate the canvases, appearing sometimes as ominous hallucinations and at other times morphing directly into the features of the painting’s subjects, symbolising a surrender and a fusing to nature.

 
 

Tremors is on view through April 6 @ Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue #160 Los Angeles, CA 90021

A'Driane Nieves Dismantles the Policing of Emotionality in self-evident truths @ VSF in Los Angeles

A'Driane Nieves, a new world is still possible (so hold onto your radical imagination), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles / Dallas / Seoul. Photo credit: Julia Gillard.

A’Driane Nieves’ debut exhibition at VSF, self-evident truths. Combining paintings on canvas and paper with new explorations in neon and audio installation, this ambitious exhibition is also Nieves’ first on the West Coast.

Nieves’ dynamic gestural abstractions extend from a writing practice and the therapeutic potential of movement, composition, and color. A self-taught painter of over a decade, Nieves began making work after a therapist suggested painting might be a somatic path through which the artist could move to overcome the impacts of childhood abuse, particularly emotional suppression. In spite of, or perhaps because of the weightiness of this genesis, Nieves’ paintings often carry an energy of joyful, empowered liberation.

self-evident truths is a wry play on the US Constitution’s famous refrain (“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...), she asks “whose truths?, self-evident to whom?”

self-evident truths is on view through April 6 @ VSF, 812 N Highland Ave. Los Angeles

Read Our Interview Of Painter Jess Valice On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition @ Almine Rech In New York →

 
portrait of Jess Valice from behind painting a man's face on canvas
 

Each and every day we observe thousands of faces online and in person. And with each and every one, we reflexively look for clues to determine how they must feel. It is an empathic impulse endemic to us as social creatures. And yet, regardless of our perpetual, involuntary efforts, we can never be sure that we’ve ascertained any level of truth. It’s this mystery that lies at the heart of Jess Valice’s painted figures. The artist’s initial life path, which was headed toward a medical practice, laid the foundation for an approach to painting that leaves the viewer in a state of quizzical study, lost in the gaze of a subject who was never asking to be diagnosed. The predominant demons and desires of her subjects even seem to elude Valice, as she finds herself reworking each of their faces incessantly until she lands on something that feels honest. For her solo exhibition, Mara, opening today at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side gallery in New York, the subjects in question are at various points of overcoming the part of their egos that obstruct the path to enlightenment, known in Buddhism as Mara. According to Valice, “There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day… It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel.” Fellow painter and confidante Avery Wheless joined Valice in her studio as the paintings were nearly finished to delve into the making of this new body of work and demystify some of the je ne sais quoi embodied by Valice’s disaffected figures. Read more.