Hung Liu @ Walter Maciel

My review of Hung Liu @ the Walter Maciel Gallery was published by The Magazine. Check it out online or find it at a local LA gallery or newstand.

Hung Liu
Rat Years 1948 1960 1972 1984 1996 2008
Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles
(310) 839-1840 www.waltermacielgallery.com

Rat Years 1948 1960 1972 1984 1996 2008

Chinese astrology is organized in twelve-year cycles. Each year is named after an animal, and each animal has symbolic associations believed to shape the tenor of the year.

Chinese-American artist Hung Liu was born in the year of the rat, an animal the Chinese associate with prosperity, order, aggression, war, death, and pestilence. Now in her sixth rat year, Liu has significantly shifted her focus inward for an exhibition of self-portraits, a marked departure from the meta-historical portraiture and abstract work she is best known for. Each piece is painted from a photograph taken during a rat year and accompanied by a digitally rendered painting of a drawing made at the age she was in the portrait. While the formula of pairing self-portraits with old drawings is simple, in this case it works. Liu's formal mastery lends her paintings a distinctive gravity. Painted on unprimed linen, the brushstrokes evoke the sketchy quality of a graphite drawing. When combined with the rich colors she uses to offset small details (a cape, scarf, or brooch), a dazzling play of textures ensues.

Though her self-portraits are intimate and compelling, Liu's Rat King series steals the show. A rat king is a mythic group of rats that live their entire lives bound together by their tangled tails, cemented by dirt, blood, and excrement. Liu began thinking of the folkloric rat colonies in the wake of the earthquake that decimated the Sichuan Province shortly before her trip to Beijing this year. The pastel-hued Rat King II is practically transcendental. Tails delicately twist together like a bouquet, the pale, half-erased rats seem like they are being beckoned to a spirit world. Rat King 1, on the other hand, is a broody, realistic depiction of a rat king preserved at the scientific museum, Mauritianum, in Altenburg, Germany. The image is darkly beguiling and violent, evoking myriad situations where humans are trapped by their conditions, whether political, social, or environmental.
by Jesi Khadivi

Lari Pittman

My review of the Lari Pittman exhibition at Barbara Gladstone in Whitehot Magazine.

LA based artist, Lari Pittman, presents exuberant large-scale paintings in his third show at the Gladstone Gallery. His new body of work is a compelling twist on the tradition of vanitas paintings, 17th century Northern European symbolic still-lives that explore (among other things) man’s mortality and the fleeting impermanence of life’s pleasures. Unlike his Dutch and Flemish brethren, however, there is little room for somberness in Pittman’s paintings. The implied morality in Pittman’s work goes over like a firecracker rather than a lead balloon. On first glance, the paintings are garish. Like a design you would see on a suburban craft fair patron’s t-shirt. The colors are jolting and the iconography is mystifying. Pittman’s densely layered paintings borrow heavily from Pop (think James Rosenquist), tribal art (batik and Thai shadow puppets seem to be an inspiration), and graffiti art. Nonetheless, a bizarre unity begins to coalesce after a few moments with his work. In Untitled #14 a humanoid rabbit-type figure scales a pyramid festooned with delicately hatched patterns towards a shimmering star. A swollen rain/tear drop hangs delicately by a thread from the top of the painting. Bulbous fruits, and I use the word fruit lightly, are interspersed throughout the bottom of the composition, while intestinal looking piping twists throughout the image. The end result is a highly symbolic illustrative style with a Rube Goldbergian quirkiness. Untitled #7 shares some of the iconography of Untitled #2. Translucent layers of highly detailed patterns are painted atop each other. The shadow figures and dripping water remain, yet urns and fried eggs are added to the mix.

In Pittman’s hands, the anxious uncertainty of the vanitas painting is retooled into a celebration of life’s impermanence chock full of stylistic and multi-cultural references. The delicacy with which he paints his bubbles and urns are a paean to life’s possibilities rather than a portent of its brevity.

Camera Ephemera @ Found Gallery

Originally published in the November issue of Whitehot

Polaroid photography is a loaded, over saturated territory. Vice Magazine and NYC enfant terrible Dash Snow, have popularized the genre via images of waifish chicks flashing their tits and strung out hipster guys blowing rails, brawling, and fucking. The raw immediacy of these images holds some appeal, but they lack sensitivity of artists like Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley who document countercultural groups (that they belong to) without flaunting or pandering. The Vice Magazine Polaroid aesthetic has more in common with hip hop’s tradition of bragging and boasting than Goldin or McGinley’s penetrating snapshots. Staging bacchanalian rabble rousing for the camera is amusing, but quickly becomes tiresome. The compulsion to document oneself constantly underscores the possibility for counter culture to mutate into what journalist Douglas Harder calls “a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum.”

Ashley Tibbits’ first curatorial foray at Found Gallery is an effort to reclaim the Polaroid.Camera Ephemera attempts to reinstate the medium’s capacity for tenderness. “For many, such pictures are tied closely to memories of childhood, of family. Perhaps we realize that the physicality of holding a precious image in your hand might be a feeling as increasingly obsolete as the medium itself,’ Tibbits writes in her statement for the exhibition. She presents a wide range of approaches in this nine person show. “I didn’t want it to be a line of Polaroids on the wall,” she explains, “I wanted to show the different directions you could take the medium.” And she does. Camera Ephemera showcases 9 distinct photographic visions. Tibbits presents a series of self portraits of herself and an anonymous cut out figure enacting sweet, mundane routines. Clearly a paean to a distant (or past) love, the piece is cheekily endearing. Calethea deCanto’s warm, blurry photographs mounted on wood conjure up Maya Deren’s experimental film masterpiece, Meshes of the Afternoon, with its poetic evocation of inner experience.David Louang’s taut sun burnished portraits and interiors are clear indicators of the nostalgia and inherent melancholia Tibbits described in her curatorial statement. Joshua Wysocki’s framed landscapes are the most straight forward of the bunch, but his clear eye for structure and color make them one of the exhibitions stand-outs.

Despite their current ubiquity in underground art exhibitions and fashion/lifestyle mags, there are no solipstic party shots in the exhibtion.

What does Tibbits think about the popular bawdy boys club aesthetic of Vice? “Don’t even get me started about them,” she says and takes a sip of her coffee.

Digitial Issue of Fabrik

The new digital issue of Fabrik is online featuring Information at the Signal, my interview with Ed Ruscha! Check it out here.

Julian Hoeber

Published in the November issue of ArtWeek

Julian Hoeber: All That is Solid Melts Into Air
Blum & Poe
September 6th through October 18th
By Jesi Khadivi

In Sartre’s seminal existential novel Nausea, a young historian is cast into conceptual upheaval when inanimate objects and everyday situations suddenly become alien and menacing, thus beginning an odyssey of dissolution, despair, and ultimately a revelatory reexamination of the nature of being. Julian Hoeber’s third solo exhibition at Blum and Poe, a meditation on psychology and nausea entitled All That is Solid Melts into Air, contains a kernel of this anxiety, but there is no crybabying over the fractured psyche; the crisis of fragmentation is instead embraced and cheekily explored through art historical bricolage. Hoeber’s Op inspired drawings and eviscerated bronze cast heads stylistically diverge from the visceral gore of his slasher influenced films and photographs, but his trademark dark humor shines through the coy restraint of his new body of work.

The works on paper exhibit a mélange of influences-- Abstract Expressionism, Outsider Art, Pop, and Conceptual Art references all elbow up against one another. Blue and red lines zip vertically through Ab Ex, while gouache erasures of the concentric circular pattern creates a rippling effect. I Don’t Care…, an Op send up of Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl, is a taut example of Sartre’s “sweetish sickness.” It’s the most successful of Hoeber’s attempts at optical illusion and its reference to drowning is something many Americans can relate to given the current mortgage and banking crisis. Whether intentional or not, Hoeber’s persistent Op spirals and bronze heads riddled with puncture wounds are chillingly evocative of the economy’s downward spiral and our seemingly endless state of military engagement. A litany of anxieties could be ascribed to the work, but the artist does not explicitly articulate any. Hoeber’s work engages with malaise from a distance and functions more as an exploration of angst than an overwrought expression of it.

Hoeber flexes his latent gore muscles in a series of “shot, beaten, and bitten” bronze busts on mirrored pedestals which are equally as illusory as the drawings. While the heads have been brutally pummeled and pumped full of lead, for the most part their faces are curiously dispassionate, as if they were killed during a moment of meditative contemplation or sexual ecstasy. The classical presentation and rarified material deny the adrenaline that could be derived from a more active representation of violence, yet (even more creepily) allow the material results of brutality to be appreciated at an aesthetic distance.

The artist clearly embraces what he calls “postmodern silliness.” In his artist statement he proudly proclaims himself a “tube” that has “eaten up all that dead stuff. Cooked it. Chewed it up and made some shit out of it…chewed up history, digested it and pushed out something which although stinking a little of death, has a certain whole synthesized, digested quality.” Lest we get too bogged down in high mindedness, it’s important to remember that Hoeber can be funny. Really funny. In his drawing Stupid Face, the glowering visage of an aging hipster hovers over yet another concentric circle and several works on paper have a knowingly juvenile fixation on breasts. Yet his work succeeds not because of his clowning, but because aesthetic and cultural rigor are conflated with jocularity.

Information at the Signal

My interview with Ed Ruscha is on the cover of the latest issue of Fabrik. Check out the magazine here until I can figure out a way to embed the file. (It's on page 8)

John Lautner

John Lautner: Between Heaven and Earth
Hammer Museum
Through October 18th
By Jesi Khadivi

Published in Whitehot Magazine, October



American architect John Lautner worked in the right place at the right time.
As one of the progenitors of Googie architecture--the ultra modern, futuristic architectural style that takes its name from a coffee shop Lautner designed on Sunset Boulevard-- his early work dovetailed with the burgeoning automobile and aerospace culture of 1950s Southern California. Lautner’s 1960 commission Chemosphere, a space aged octahedronal dwelling perched upon a twenty foot pole, was described by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “most modern home built in the world” and has been featured in numerous Hollywood films. Lautner’s structures are full of glass and exaggerated curves, many of them nestled in stunning natural landscapes. He was disparaged for his poppiness by many critics of his day (Googie architecture only began to receive academic credibility with Venturi, Izenour, and Brown’s Learning From Las Vegas), but his work remains compelling today because it functions at the interstice of organic architecture and the flamboyantly stylized anticipatory fervor of the atomic age. This fusion was doubtlessly fostered by the blend of natural and unnatural splendors in his adopted home of Southern California, his utilitarian North Woods upbringing, and the tutelage of his mentor, the seminal American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.



Sadly, the Hammer’s Lautner exhibition is the least stimulating of this summer’s architecture fare (The MoMA and the Whiteney Museum in New York mounted exhibitions about pre-fabricated architecture and Buckminster Fuller respectively). Despite the loftiness of its title, the show is leaden and a bit of a downer. The exhibition is comprised of three rooms filled to the brim with architectural drawings and cardboard models. Large scale plaster models are installed in front of projections of landscapes, presumably to contextualize the buildings and give the viewer the feeling of “being there.” This only succeeded in drawing me closer to the exhibition text, which was informative and interspersed with thumbnail views of gorgeously executed photographs of Lautner’s buildings. It’s a pity there weren’t larger scale versions of these photos included in the show because they deftly encapsulated the complicated beauty of Lautner’s buildings. While the exhibition suffers from didactism, the accompanying programming is both thoughtful and inventive. The museum has hosted walk throughs of various Lautner homes, a screening of a documentary film about Lautner, as well as a symposium on post war architecture.