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Flattening Exercises: Q+A with Jordan Wolfson
Raspberry Poser, the single work in New York-based artist Jordan Wolfson's latest show, at REDCAT in Los Angeles [through Jan. 27], unfolds on a delirious 14-minute loop of animation, photography and video, all bound together in a meditation on looking. Image feeds trail the screen, yielding paintings by Caravaggio, snapshots of beach-going coeds befitting MTV's "Spring Break" specials, children's playroom interiors, and home construction zones.
A hand-drawn child bounds in and out of pictorial space that unceasingly shifts. Transparent, animated condoms wriggle up into the sky and spill hearts over the streets of SoHo to the tune of Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You." CGI HIV retroviruses, superimposed into the virtual tour of a high-end interior design store, bounce rhythmically, buoyantly and menacingly to Beyoncé's "Sweet Dreams" on granite counters and bedroom displays.
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Open Systems: Q+A with Abraham Cruzvillegas
Works by Mexico City-based artist Abraham Cruzvillegas behave like magnetic open systems. This year, as part of dOCUMENTA 13, the artist developed a public project involving a game of pick-up sticks, with which he devised a series of activities. Based on its chance system, Cruzvillegas recruited people, objects, and his own body to form social sculptures (picnics, walks, or games in the street), which passersby were asked to capture on their mobile phones.
Best known for his "Autoconstrucción" series, Cruzvillegas often lends use-value to the castoff by calling attention to reclaimed or neglected materials. His 2009 film of the same title documented impromptu architecture in his native Ajusco, Mexico, picturing scores of improbable homes made of detritus recycled to suit residents' needs. The film, whose title translates to "self-building," describes the assembly of bricolage structures as a community's means of identity formation.
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Agathe Snow's Moral Surfaces
The sculptures that comprise "Tout Dit (2D)," New York-based artist Agathe Snow's first exhibition with OHWOW in Los Angeles [through Dec. 8], tell cautionary tales. Inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins, the artist's latest series of wall works (all 2012) began as pages and pages of writing—hypothetical scenarios with moral undertones, employing figures of speech that relate to being trapped in one's head. Snow culled 20 situations from this writing, which she has translated into assemblages of papier-mâché, foam, found objects, and gestural splatters of paint. "The movement between text and sculpture is very literal," said Snow. "I take words, phrases, and questions, and illustrate them. Language makes me laugh a lot. I find it to be so reductive and at the same time so explosive."
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Frequent Flying with Ei Arakawa
New York-based artist Ei Arakawa opened his latest performance-cum-exhibition at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, "I Am An Employee of United, Volume 2" [through Oct. 27] with a vision of excess compressed into a YouTube clip. The artist dimmed the lights and hit play on his MacBook Pro, projecting a video of a death metal band performing in a low-ceilinged wooden coop, complete with chickens, spilled blood, heavy guitar riffs, and an appearance by performance artist Bob Flanagan. The video's booming sound was incongruous with the demure, slightly askew rectangular glow on the wall. Quick cuts of zoom shot after zoom shot of shadowy filth unfurled as the artist, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, before reciting over his microphone headset the number of miles he flew each month over the course of the most recent calendar year, "total: 101,000 miles."
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Art Platform LA Faces Traffic, Uncertainty
The second edition of Art Platform Los Angeles opened last week with the news that the fair itself was on the block. (Owner Merchandise Mart (MMPI) is shopping a group of art fairs, as first reported by A.i.A.) This news lead some to question its viability in a town that has seen so many art fairs come and go. The gallery roster this year clocked in at a robust 75, holding steady from last year, though big name dealers from last year, including Susanne Vielmetter, Kavi Gupta, Richard Telles and Perry Rubenstein, were absent.
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Two slide carousels, 80 slides each, approx. 9-minute loop. Courtesy Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.
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