Neyat Yohannes

It seems fitting that the band take stock here, of all places, because it happened to be the last place Ganser was together before the big lockdown of March, 2020. This is a homecoming of sorts, and they’ve arrived at the bowling alley with a cautious optimism for the future that juxtaposes the apathy that fans have come to expect from their lyrics and musical style. The post-punk band has a stage presence that can go from world-weary blasé to energetic resiliency in an instant, so a little jaded apathy feels par for the course.

Handwriting on the Wall at Blum & Poe is the culmination of 28 years of artmaking and storytelling and marks the first major Los Angeles presentation of the late artist’s work (Dial died in 2016). Through Dial’s incisive mark-making, the exhibition ruminates on cultural inequalities that both predate the artist’s life and persist beyond it, touching on the history of slavery, the election of the nation’s first Black president, the Southern Black church, mortality, and other subject matter both universal and personal.

In 2023, it’s no longer very interesting to scrutinize why major museums and galleries are looking to diversify their rosters by showing more BIPOC artists—the case for diversification among exhibited and collected artists has been made abundantly clear by now. But it is worth considering how more diverse rosters have played a part in the increased institutional interest in Black figuration, and how this interest has made overdue space for images of Black subjects at rest.

We tend to prefer the shiny beginnings of things or find fuel in the drama of their endings, but Skylar Haskard thrives in the middle.

Art fairs are descending upon Los Angeles this week, and there’s more to see than ever before. This year, Frieze expands to the Santa Monica Airport, and Felix Art Fair rings in its fifth iteration with an extra day of laid-back poolside viewing. Meanwhile, L.A. Art Show enters year 28 with a larger global presence, as SPRING/BREAK arrives with the promising theme of “Naked Lunch.” But if all that isn’t enough, the city is bustling with unmissable gallery shows too.

Half a century later, SCI-Arc’s Wednesday Night Lecture Series—also known as the Design Forum Lectures—is alive and well thanks to the continued diligence of a dedicated faculty, students, and staff. Every week, anyone who’s interested can attend a world-class lecture as has been the case since the school’s founding in 1972, when Kappe first introduced the program.

In her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Mirror Shy, Anna Park appropriates the visual language of mid-century advertising to consider the concept of agency—or, in some cases, a lack thereof.

“Genres are boring,” says Alicia Gaines, the Chicago band’s purveyor of cavernous vocals and sludgy basslines. “I’d rather identify with a character.”

Her bandmates Charlie Landsman and Brian Cundiff are in total agreement. “I fucking love Harry Dean Stanton,” says Landsman, Ganser’s mustachioed guitarist, whose equal parts precise and tizzied plucking often sounds as if it’s cutting through to his insides. He turns to Cundiff, “And you like Crispin Glover a lot.”

Many of Park’s early memories center around labor, and the objects in her paintings—even the trinkets that she associates with rest— are inescapably tied to work and commerce. What does it look like when our most potent memories, of those intimate, in-between moments shared with loved ones in domestic spaces, are mediated by labor? Park takes these fleeting occasions and stretches them out on canvas to present a new, inspired way of reconciling with the working class experience.

A giant monstera, a jade plant, a rubber tree, and something tall thriving further in the background come into focus. The space looks tranquil, like a Dominic Chambers painting in which figures hole up with a book, meditate, or get lost daydreaming. It’s then unsurprising to find the artist himself in this serene, plant-filled setting. Chambers’s oeuvre has long been concerned with Black life, but his recent paintings explore rituals of rest and sites of leisure.

“Plan B: a population bomb,” begins Anne Hathaway. She’s dressed in a lab coat, busily opening drawers and doing NASA things. “Within 30 years, we could have a colony of hundreds,” she explains. It was purely a coincidence that I watched Christopher Nolan’s rendering of a post-Earth eventuality, Interstellar (2014), last week, right before encountering Lucy McRae’s solo exhibition Future Sensitive at Honor Fraser.

In one of her devoted, often fanatical paens to Los Angeles, Eve Babitz mused, “In Los Angeles, it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one.” Olivia Hill captures the slipperiness of our local mirage in Strike-Slip, her current solo exhibition at Bel Ami, paying particular attention to Southern Californians’ tenuous relationship to nature.

Early in his career, Jenkins saw the limitations of popular media and the ways that it enforces systems of white supremacy, but he also believed in the visual medium’s potential to offer individuals the ability to share narratives of their own, counteracting the popular media monolith. In his videos, he took on a self-reflexive role as both witness and subject, giving him the freedom to defiantly reframe the ideas about Black people that mass media (film, television, the news) was churning out with wanton disregard for the tokenized caricatures it propagated.

Fifty years later, “Womanhouse” is back. Anat Ebgi is celebrating the West Coast’s defining blueprint for feminist art while reflecting and expanding upon it. What was once subversive can seem quaint against our current cultural landscape, but this show extols the 1972 exhibition for its triumphs as it coaxes it into the present context.

Devin Troy Strother approaches Undercover Brother, his show at The Pit, with a similar philosophy, summoning nervous chuckles from some and indulgent belly laughs from others. It’s the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Strother, and the work in it ranges from figurative caricatures on canvas to ceramic figurines that engage in what the artist calls “revisionist art history” and “rebranding” meant to unearth deeper intentions from familiar cultural artifacts of the last century.