It's interesting to consider the development of land art in relation to the nuclear anxieties that took up residence in our post-World War II imaginations: the return to the desert, the holes that Michael Heizer dug out like some distant relatives of the cavities left on test sites, the “bombed-out" quarries and landscapes that Robert Smithson favored. Looking at Brian Stechschulte’s paintings, I keep thinking of how much the... (more)
Anita Ragusa's paintings look like the work of two different artists. One series features faux naïve renderings of baroque interiors peopled by pallid, disaffected women; the other, lyrical compositions of nubile young men entwined with flowers. While it's not unusual for artists to work in different manners, the wide disparity between Ragusa's two bodies of work disrupts... (more)
A virtual aesthetic conflates with traditional painter’s practice in Simon Aldridge’s paintings, based on landscapes from videogames or, most recently (as in "Roxy" and "Tyburn," 2007), on his own photographs of surfing locales and public parks. Aldridge selects computer-generated panoramas that are cropped and abstracted in a method drawn from virtual... (more)
Leftover magazine clippings, broken slabs of concrete, aluminum foil and excess tile samples, perhaps discarded from a construction site or an architect's studio, are recovered by Elena Bajo's brand of bricolage. Her practice emphasizes how deconstructed and recontextualized objects form subtle relationships. The work begs the questions; how does one... (more)
Having spent my formative years listening to impossibly fast drum patterns and praying for the day robots would finally come and incinerate my small San Diego suburb, I find that I have an immediate affinity for the work of Brian Bress. His installations, photographs and performances trigger a cascading array of caustic references and emotions, in turn nostalgic and angst-ridden, awkward and humorous. Bress’ studio... (more)
Prior to the mid-20th-century rise of globalization and its attendant international-style architecture, mom-and-pop neon motels and liquor stores that were themed according to various vernacular fantasies prospered along highways throughout America. This vernacular architecture referred to local, traditional, and/or cultural forms associated with a particular region, and reflected the power of... (more)
As an archive the family photo album works against its own purported logic: its narrative carefully orchestrated through a lifetime of editorial interventions to convey a happy, perhaps fictive family history. With luck, memory falters and the album's seductive certainty remains. Bitter disputes are forgotten and the smiling Kodachrome faces persuade the album's reader... (more)
A Venus flytrap's color and shape attract many unsuspecting creatures that end up struggling in the quick clamp of its jaws. Nichole van Beek's work contains the same beautiful lethality, at once attractive but silently menacing and primal. The graceful line work is reminiscent of 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel's drawings of underwater life, but rather... (more)
Los Angeles-based artist and activist Patrick "Pato" Hebert works with materials ranging from domestic ribbons to public billboards to explore the ways human connections can be translated into visual art. This notion, defined by Hebert as an "aesthetics of interconnectedness," is poetically articulated in a recent work titled Hopes and Fears. Using Yoko Ono's... (more)
Cathy Akers’ large, anonymous cube—Natural Selection 2 (2006)—could be a blue-collar version of Kubrick’s monolith or a distant relative of Robert Morris’ dead-grey structures. With peepholes drilled into every side, it may be closer to Tom Burr’s sexualized post-minimalist work. After all, the holes are at awkward heights; some of them force us to bend over in order to get a good look... (more)
