SND (aka Shana Nys Dambrot) is the luckiest girl in the world. Growing up in Manhattan, she studied Art History at Vassar and worked for Leo Castelli, Larry Gagosian and the Guggenheim Museum before moving to LA in 1995 in search of more open ranges, and since that time her fine art & design reviews, features and interviews have appeared in scores of publications including Modern Painters, Art Review, ARTnews, Whitehotmagazine.com, Kotori Magazine, tema celeste, Angeleno, Art Asia Pacific, Intersection, TimeOut LA, Juxtapoz and Coagula Art Journal, and she is currently the LA Managing Editor at Flavorpill.net and a Contributing Editor at its affiliate publication Arkrush.com, as well as at west coast bastions Artweek and Art Ltd.
SND thinks of herself as a fresher, more modern kind of critic than the stereotypical elitist didact. Her goal is to inspire a love of art in a broad an audience, using as little impenetrable artspeak as possible. See, the world is full of very smart people who never took an art class; they have the yearning and the capacity to bring art into their lives but don’t know where to start, and SND wants to show them. Her blog at Uber.com/snd is the most powerful tool in her arsenal to date; giving her a platform to share a kaleidoscopic range of interpretation, discovery, adventure, curiosity and behind-the-scenes access to the hardy and heady LA art world that has given her so much.
Happy Birthday, America. It’s a day for fireworks, although given the drought and the danger and the fires already burning on our hillsides, maybe we should stick to the metaphorical or political kind this year. You can start with Obama’s incendiary (pun intended) speech on Patriotism. I especially like the part about saying what you think without hearing a knock at the door.
Speaking of fires, Jennifer Vanderpool and Paige Wery and I carpooled up to Santa Barbara for a talk at the CAF (Contemporary Art Forum) last night (Thursday). It was a great event, like 50 people and Jen and I had a conversation about the interplay between personal narrative and site-specificity in installation art, we sort of arrived at this great point about “site” meaning circumstances, etants-donnes, rather than extant places. Availability of technology and materials, political contexts, personal histories, actions, etc. It was a great talk, they videotaped it and are editing it right now, I’ll let you know when it’s posted. But the point is, I didn’t realize until came around a corner on the 101 North and saw the sky that Goleto was adjacent to Santa Barbara and that Goleto was on fire. The sky was crazy, split right down the middle between azure paradise and the lands of Sauron in the Hobbit. Crazy! After the talk we drove around the UCSB campus and got amazing views of entire ridge lines burning. The whole place smelled like campfire. It was terrifying.
Speaking of fireworks, tomorrow the Joint Custody Project opens at Found Gallery, and if Brady’s blog is anything to go by, there will be sparks flying. People are freaking out. Is it wrong that I’m kind of looking forward to some art drama? Gallery life can be so dreadfully polite sometimes it’s dreary. This at least will be interesting! Plus I’m thinking of stopping by the Bronx Zoo at La Cita on my way to Hyperion. It was such killer sick fun last week, I think it’ll make a nice platform for launching the evening. See you around the way!
Hey all! I'm in the middle of a million crazy things like always, but to calm things down a bit I thought I'd turn you on to one of my publications, Whitehot Magazine, an on-line international reviews and features pub you'll dig. I just published a review of SE Barnet's show at Gallery de Soto and I had so much fun writing it I thought I'd share. Plus it's ironically perfect because I'm running all over town these days (you'll see what I mean). Enjoy!!
"If you love live drawing, girls, drinks, or just really think apes are sexy, join Ghettogloss at La Cita for The Bronx Zoo every Saturday this summer. It's gonna be a hot one."
What am I doing these days? Well… I just got back from the Getty where Flavorpill threw another kick-ass DJ and (this time) punk rock music party. You’re welcome, Los Angeles! No trouble at all, really, it isn’t.
I don’t know what I’m doing messing around on the blog when I need to get some rest—have to take off early in the morning, hit the Jen Steinkamp show at ACME for a magazine and check out their newly expanded digs, then next door stop in and say farewell to the public part of Milo Gallery, shutting its doors and going private after tomorrow…and this is all just first thing in the morning on the way to the main event, hinted at above, the Bronx Zoo at La Cita. It’s a drawing salon with a bar and models in lingerie and ape masks out in the garden behind La Cita on Hill Street, brought to you by the ladies of Ghettogloss. The series will culminate in a Fall show at the gallery which I’m curating for them from the best Bronx Zoo results. Good times.
Then it’s the group show at Acuna-Hansen where my dear friend from Kansas City David Ford is showing, and we scoop him up and head back to Ghettogloss so we can survey the space for the political altarpiece performance we’re building there with David for the Election Night returns in November.
Then we’ll probably get drunk at the Red Lion next door. Great margaritas. Then I'll wake up regretting it all and staring down deadlines on Sunday with an ice pack on my head. Good times.
So for the many folks who have been asking what I'm up to, here's a partial answer at least. I'm in the middle of co-curating a show at Found Gallery way over on the East Side. It's called the Joint Custody Project and I think it's going to be amazing. Blind collaborations between 11 pairs of brave souls.
The gallery site has all the information about the concept, as well as a blog about the process, so I recommend checking in there for updates, but in the meantime save the date for the opening: Sat 5 July, it should be a wild one.
I'm starting work on a couple of very different shows for the Fall as well, both at Ghettogloss. One is part of their new drawing salon series at La Cita, and the other is still too preliminary to talk about but it has to do with the election. So much for keeping things simple!
In the heat of the cooling off of primary season (start practicing saying President Obama!! Woot woot!!), it might be easy to miss tomorrow's local vote, but don't it's a very important one and the forces of darkness and greed are counting on you being distracted to slip their plan through. The vote on 2 propositions is extremely important and will affect your life and the lives of others.Please take the time to go to your voting poll, it only takes a few short but vital minutes. Here's how it goes as I understand the situation. Props 98 (dangerous) and 99 (legit) deal with real estate, rental taxation and increase rates, the viability of rent control, environmental responsibility for developers and protection against enforcement of creepy imminent domain laws.
NO = 98 YES=99
Thank you very much. We are the people. We have the power.
Proposition 98, on the June 3, 2008 ballot, would strip renters of the most basic protections they have against unfair landlords. Please help defeat Prop. 98 by voting No on 98, Yes on 99 on June 3 (that's today! Tuesday! Work it out!). Click HERE to find your polling place.
Wealthy landlords have spent millions to push their deceptive measure. They want voters to believe 98 is about eminent domain. But, hidden in the fine print of Prop. 98 are provisions that would enable landlords to hike rents with no limitation, unfairly evict tenants and withhold security deposits. Read more and get involved by clicking HERE.
Proposition 99, also on the same ballot, would prevent government from taking a home to give to a private developer. Real reform, with no hidden agendas. Thank you for your time! xoSND
A couple of weeks ago I took part in this fantastic conceptual film screening aboard a charter bus. TheXin Lu Video Bus Tourwas a project by filmmaker and video artist Ming-Yuen Ma, and it was that rarest of birds, an experimental art event that was truly a success. An afternoon program of short films was keyed to play on the in-ceiling DVD screens, their order synchronized with stops along the route and punctuated by performance art pieces and chaotic happenings. I'm a fan of art that attempts such profound literal and semiotic experiments. It makes the familiar strange, transforming folks into tourists in their own hometowns, sojourners in their own lives, thereby jostling them (okay me) into a position of inquiry and dislocated curiosity that is the envy of all artists and scientists. Do it the next time one comes around if you get the chance, it's worth your time to get to know what you don't know you don't know about where you've put down your roots.
My colleague Christa from Taschen has a theory about Lucian Freud and I’ve been investigating it ever since we had coffee on Wednesday. It goes like this: the size of your head in his portrait of you is a reflection of his personal opinion of your intelligence. Women in general have smaller heads, just look at Kate Moss! Even Queen Elizabeth got the treatment, half her head is the crown.
I bet by now you’re sick of hearing about how busy I am with all the stops on the fabulous itinerary of my life. If it makes you feel any better I’m under full-on house arrest pretty much all this week, kind of like self-imposed detention. But the sleeplessness has been particularly worth it lately with lots of yummy, politically progressive rock and roll music from one end of the Rage Against the Machine spectrum to the other. Let me explain…
First came the kick-off for the Nightwatchman (aka Tom Morello) and his national Justice Tour. My friend Carol is doing a complete blog post after every stop so I suggest you just hit the Nightwatchman page and get caught up, but essentially they are taking an all-star indie legend revue around the country, Partnering with local social activists, and rocking out without ever forgetting why. It’s a beautiful thing. Then week gets bookend with the “Like a Complete Unknown” Dylan tribute at the Skirball, where we witnessed, among other things Michael Franti rocking the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Zack de la Rocha radiating like a supernova on “Only a Pawn on their Game”. It was pretty smooth, and it gave me the strength I needed for the nasty turn of events in recent Obama headlines, plus it had a certain LA poetry to it…
I’m seeing a bunch of great art this weekend, but I might not be able to make it to everything… what are you most excited about? Greg Crewdson? Incognito? Some more melting ice somewhere perhaps?
I had so many great images, I thought they deserved their own page. So visit this site: http://snd.uber.com/images, or click on the My Websites tab, and peruse...
