“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through' narrow chinks of his cavern.” The genealogy of this quote—from WilliamBlake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—usually leads from Blake to Aldous Huxley to the Doors, following a lineage spiritual, scientific, and psychedelic... (more)
Los Angeles-based artist Marco Rios produces theatrical sculptural installations and humorous performances featuring his sculptural works. His Fangoria (2005) —a temporary sculptural installation executed in a university building in Irvine, California—creates a context where the viewer becomes a voyeur peeping into a ruptured wall which reveals a desk, chair and waste bin floating and drowning in a sea of red enamel. In Fangoria's... (more)
Ghost Dog may just be Jim Jarmusch’s Minima Moralia, a tract on how to live when only an irrevocable and seemingly irrational event can cut a gash in the symbolic order. Like Forest Whitaker’s face, so incongruent in relation to the beauty artifacts that have colonized screen time, so the ethos... (more)
Kara Tanaka’s sculptures investigate notions of time travel, space-time, transmutation, and transcendence. Using these concepts as a point of departure, Tanaka’s diverse artistic practice springs from an interest in representing doppelgangers. Her sculptures are hybridized, activated, strategic and hyper-aware of their immediate environment... (more)
During Joseph Beuys’ lengthy performance I Like America And America Likes Me, (1974), the artist's four-legged companion takes an unceremonious crap atop a stack of the Wall Street Journal newspapers. While this gesture does elicit an audible response from the artist, it makes me howl with abandon. Just think about it: picture Beuys in shaman drag, penned up in a New York gallery with a feral coyote for days... (more)
Dan Bayles’ works and projects surrounding the architectural and social realities of Stinson Middle School in San Antonio, Texas comprise the individual parts of a case study committed to aestheticization and intervention. Imagined as an institution of the state, Stinson Middle School here operates for Bayles as an icon of discipline, maturation, and contested governmental policymaking... (more)
Has Los Angeles-based artist Douglas Green ever been abducted by aliens? The cartoon–like drawings from his Rheology (Agent Once 000111) series are so detailed with syringes, amputations and operation table nightmares, one wonders what exactly Green digests before he goes to sleep at night. Or perhaps he’s been hanging out too much with painter Daniel Hesidence? It is fitting then, that Green lives in Southern California... (more)
Prankishness seems to be a prerequisite for our current viral and visual culture. But there’s a difference between YouTube clips of glorified vulgarity and artworks that use slapstick as a subversive vehicle for Big Ideas. James Melinat treads this tightrope with pieces that slyly reveal substance beneath punny surfaces... (more)
Science fiction texts are often awarded a kind of validity when they display a significant amount of fictional science. The easiest binary here is between the unbridled Joseph Campbell fantasia of Star Wars and the overabundance of social theory and made-up tech-speak that qualifies the Star Trek universe. The anthropological bent of much of Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction landed her accolades as a feminist and social theorist... (more)
Gina Osterloh’s serial C-print photographs and digital videos are large-scale, brightly colored affairs based on semi-performative tableaux vivants. They feature the artist herself posing inside intimate, stylized and relatively lo-tech dioramas: in a retro pants suit over-emoting against a painted sunset backdrop; standing jauntily in a tropical natural history museum botanical vignette... (more)
