2nd Cannons Gallery
Bobbi Woods
“Foolin’ Around…Waiting…”
December 19, 2009 – January 31, 2010
Appropriate longing with mustard and ketchup, Woods mixes Ruscha’s squirts with trashy ’80s movie nostalgia. Two posters hung, lonely and surgically repainted in the diminutive vitrine.
Dexter Sinister
“Black Whiskey (blind proof)”
October 25 – December 5, 2009
Publishers sell whiskey futures; unfortunately, you can’t drink futures at an opening.
Parker Jones Gallery
Dan Finsel
“I Could be Anybody, I Could Be Somebody”
December 12 2009 – January 24, 2010
The installation’s crisp, white-vinyl-floored spareness gets punctured by a flat screen built into the wall, where “Finsel” (sweaty-faced, awkward, discomforting) channels a teenage girl’s neurotic melodrama (Beverly Hills 90210, Charlie’s Angels-era Farrah Fawcett): a dicey pantomime of self-obsession.
Ry Rocklen
“House of Return”
September 9 – October 25, 2009
Ry Rocklen is a celebrator of the forgotten, a poet of the trashed, an ennobler of the ruined, the scrapped, and the otherwise junked. Like scruffy, upstart politicians in newly found power, his touched-up objects don’t deny their tattered histories.
Francois Ghebaly Gallery
Dan Bayles
“New Paintings”
November 21, 2009 – January 23, 2010
A spare “in-here” gives way to a cluttered “out-there.” Windows marked with blinds and bars half-reveal a claustrophobic urban wilderness. These paintings bare their tape scars proudly.
Neïl Beloufa
“Tectonic Plates or the Jurisdiction of Shapes”
September 9 – October 24, 2009
To produce Kempinski, Beloufa traveled to Mali and asked people there to describe the future in the present tense; a deceptively simple premise, but one which allows the video to capture the haunted terrain between fact and fiction, the weight of the present and dystopic visions of what’s to come.
China Art Objects Galleries
Jodi Mohr and Paul Cherwick
January 30 – March 13, 2010
Jewel-like paintings of a cluttered room in aristocratic environs by Mohr counter Cherwicks’s tiny, ridiculous carved heads. You wouldn’t mind collecting either.
JP Munro (at Cottage Home)
October 17 – December 5, 2009
Libidinal baroque paintings sprung from the stoned mind of a deathmetal teen obsessed with Gustave Moreau, biker babe porno.
The Box
Robert Mallary
February 6 – April 3, 2010
Cast resin sculptures from the 60s, fashioned from despoiled tuxedoes stretched over steel frames, portentously reflect the gothy monstrosities of our current moment.
Rachel Khedoori
September 11 – October 24, 2009
A roomful of bound books on conference tables reprint every article written about Iraq since the occupation, flattened into the same style-less format. The aesthetic is inviting, even if the intended effect is uninterestingly unambiguous.
The Company Gallery
Adam Janes
“Altar Alter Mini Storage”
January 14 – February 28, 2010
Wonky plastic and wax molds of tchotchkes, scions of Richard Jackson’s slickly debased paintings, inhabit the Company’s strange garage space in a clusterfuck pop assemblage that’s so suitably LA.
Kunsthalle LA
Matt Mullican
“Works from the 1980s and 90s”
January 23 – March 6, 2010
Pop symbologist Matt Mullican (seemingly up for reconsideration at the moment) has a secondary market swing through LA. Like a 20th century retro sign shop run by a retired semiotics professor.
Joel Kyack
“The Knife Shop”
September 12 – October 17, 2009
A rattletrap masterpiece, “The Knife Shop” looks like it was made by an industrious, psychedelic mountain man, exploring just about every poetical aspect of cutlery: from the gushing fake blood fountain to the blades scavenged and crafted from, among other things, a broken Budweiser bottle.
Kathryn Brennan
Michele O’Marah
“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do”
January 9 – February 7, 2010
Elaborately handmade movies manage monumental effects, even though crafted in a diminutive studio. Like Ryan Trecartin, this is video in the era of Youtube. The subject: a trashy ’90s comic film, Barb Wire. O’Marah makes the idiocy of the original look almost charming.
Danica Phelps
“Drawings About the Present Quickly Become Works About the Past”
October 17 – November 14, 2009
This self-obsessed process artist makes me want to go home and clean my toilet: a spiritual colonic to utterly eliminate (as the press release says) “the wonderous in the mundane aspects of everyday life.”
Jeni Spota
“Fool’s Small Victory”
September 9 – October 10, 2009
Spota takes painterly obsession to its absolute cake-frosted goopy conclusion, managing to make wall works look both alluringly slathered and somewhat nauseating in their imspissated impasto.
Happy Lion Gallery
Joe Sola
“I found some Bic pens by the railroad tracks”
January, 9th — February, 13th, 2010
What first appears to emulate the simple action-video performances of early conceptualism concludes with exploding heads and a drum solo. Look out also for the Kippenberger-Sola cock-knot collab.
Thomas Solomon Gallery
Miljohn Ruperto
Isabel Rosario Cooper: A Work in Four Parts
February 13 – March 13, 2010
Beautifully shot films play on multifarious media in this spare and elegant installation; but for all its good qualities, Ruperto’s work seems to have its feet caught in yawnishly closed-off post-colonial theoretical strategies.
Josh Mannis
“Variations”
January 9 – February 13, 2010
An army of buttoned-up chubby white men in white pants and red and blue shirts dance in digital unison, wearing masks of what appear to be the bespectacled, cartoonish faces of chubby white men.
Analia Saban
“Light Breaks Out of Prism”
September 12 – October 10, 2009
A CMYK process produces naturalistic still lifes with unnatural hues, the colors squirming around each other like neon sea snakes.