Catherine Wagley “5 Artsy Things To Do This Week” LA Weekly, August 6, 2014.
An '80s icon has an intimate show, two artists double as rappers, and dancers try to make the Hammer home.
5. Tastefully kinky
Everything in the CB1 show curated by artist Tucker Neel is in questionable taste but tastefully made. Nancy Baker Cahill’s hairy graphite drawings are smartly crafted, as are John Weston’s psychedelically colored paintings of cartoonishly shaped, colorful genitalia. Kiki Seror’s montages of stills from porn are hung on the wall in organized, respectable-seeming grids. The awkward in-between moments are the highlights, such as an inscrutable altercation between a fully clothed man and woman in a video store aisle.
4. No one is No. 1
Papillion in Leimert Park decided to forgo a group summer show and have a group of video art residencies instead. Each week, a new artist or video-making collective takes over the space. The final residency is actually a one-night performance called by the group No)one, which can be read "no one" or "number one." No)one wants conceptual and new- media artwork to be "approachable and stimulating"; at Papillion, it plans to explore the relationship between body and screen.
3. What if Bobby Fischer played basketball?
Artists Ry Rocklen and Nick Lowe have been rapping together for a few years (“rap partners” is what a LACMA press release calls them) in a group they call the Bushes. When the two get together in LACMA’s Art Catalogues store, they’ll rap a bit, then talk about Lowe’s new book and Rocklen’s , a limited-edition chess set made of trophy parts. It’s basketball-themed, so the queen is making a hook shot, while the king is a jump shooter.
2. Feels like home
Dahlia Nayar and Margaret Paek, both dancers, are collaborating with sound artist Loren Kiyoshi Dempster to get as close as they can to making the stage in the Hammer’s courtyard feel like home. Their employs a few select props, their own movements and a soundscape. Rehearsal stills show Nayar and Paek doing headstands underneath a close line, passing white socks back and forth with their feet.
If you know Patrick Nagel, the illustrator who got his start drawing for in the 1970s,
maybe it’s because you’ve seen his prints, or rip-offs of them, on beauty shop walls and windows. There are plenty there, nationwide. Nagel died young in 1984 — he had a heart attack after participating in a celebrity aerobics class — but during his short career, he drafted versions of a dark-haired, white-skinned female powerhouse over and over. Her lipstick is always immaculate. Nine screen-printed versions of her are in 2A Gallery’s current show, and one of the best is where she wears a headband and a few strands of hair fall strategically over her forehead.
An '80s icon has an intimate show, two artists double as rappers, and dancers try to make the Hammer home.
5. Tastefully kinky
Everything in the CB1 show curated by artist Tucker Neel is in questionable taste but tastefully made. Nancy Baker Cahill’s hairy graphite drawings are smartly crafted, as are John Weston’s psychedelically colored paintings of cartoonishly shaped, colorful genitalia. Kiki Seror’s montages of stills from porn are hung on the wall in organized, respectable-seeming grids. The awkward in-between moments are the highlights, such as an inscrutable altercation between a fully clothed man and woman in a video store aisle.
4. No one is No. 1
Papillion in Leimert Park decided to forgo a group summer show and have a group of video art residencies instead. Each week, a new artist or video-making collective takes over the space. The final residency is actually a one-night performance called by the group No)one, which can be read "no one" or "number one." No)one wants conceptual and new- media artwork to be "approachable and stimulating"; at Papillion, it plans to explore the relationship between body and screen.
3. What if Bobby Fischer played basketball?
Artists Ry Rocklen and Nick Lowe have been rapping together for a few years (“rap partners” is what a LACMA press release calls them) in a group they call the Bushes. When the two get together in LACMA’s Art Catalogues store, they’ll rap a bit, then talk about Lowe’s new book and Rocklen’s , a limited-edition chess set made of trophy parts. It’s basketball-themed, so the queen is making a hook shot, while the king is a jump shooter.
2. Feels like home
Dahlia Nayar and Margaret Paek, both dancers, are collaborating with sound artist Loren Kiyoshi Dempster to get as close as they can to making the stage in the Hammer’s courtyard feel like home. Their employs a few select props, their own movements and a soundscape. Rehearsal stills show Nayar and Paek doing headstands underneath a close line, passing white socks back and forth with their feet.
If you know Patrick Nagel, the illustrator who got his start drawing for in the 1970s,
maybe it’s because you’ve seen his prints, or rip-offs of them, on beauty shop walls and windows. There are plenty there, nationwide. Nagel died young in 1984 — he had a heart attack after participating in a celebrity aerobics class — but during his short career, he drafted versions of a dark-haired, white-skinned female powerhouse over and over. Her lipstick is always immaculate. Nine screen-printed versions of her are in 2A Gallery’s current show, and one of the best is where she wears a headband and a few strands of hair fall strategically over her forehead.
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