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Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Heather Woodbury

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Writer Heather Woodbury takes on the day’s most pressing issues, from the environmental crisis to Christian fundamentalism and crazy TV lust, in As the Globe Warms, her serialized video “performance novel” and avant-soap digest.

As with previous works What Ever and A Tale of 2Cities, ATGW is written live on stage in real time, with plenty of audience advice and online chronicling. The new, expanded production picks up with Episode 25, but the vaguely circus-like energy and freshly baked character-driven nature of her narrative collages make it easy to dive right in. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Google Art Project

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

With its massive Art Project, Google employs its dominance over digital media to present a vast online archive of the world’s most enduring and beloved fine art masterpieces, along with street-view tours of the institutions that house them.

Each featured museum was given free rein in selecting the breadth and scope of its contributions, resulting in an array of ancient and modern works, cross-referenced by place and artist. The real treats are the mega-high resolution on the zoom-enabled pics, viewer’s-eye tours of impressive architecture — and the chance to play online curator yourself with priceless objects of beauty. … Read More

Art

Jennifer Steinkamp: Contemporary Art’s Madame Curie

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Video artist Jennifer Steinkamp’s decades-long love affair with digital art is still as passionate as ever. Best known for gently swaying curtains of flowering vines, her large-scale video installations use pixels like a pointillist deploys pigment, creating immense images from millions of microbe-size dabs of color. The impact of her work is in large part due to her manipulation of CGI code simulating the organic movement of explosions, breezes, ocean tides, and the human body. … Read More

Photography

Heather Cantrell: You, Me, and Everyone She Knows

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

LA-based photographer Heather Cantrell is having way too much fun. Her photos of the artists, curators, dealers, writers, collectors, and friends who populate her world are eccentric, enigmatic documents taking aim at conventional understandings of how the portrait functions, from art history to pop psychology. Her subjects collaborate with Cantrell’s premises; interacting with zany props like taxidermy animals, elaborate masks, candles, potted plants, clothing, books, and exotic textiles to create individualized tableaux. … Read More

Art

Thomas Houseago’s Hulking Totemic Sculptures

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Thomas Houseago readily admits to the echoes of early Cubist-style Africanism in his sculptural work for floor, wall, and lawn. Looking at African art through Western-tinted glasses, he shares the Cubist’s appreciation for the psychological symbolism of masks and imposing nudes. The visceral impact of bulbous plaster, choppy wood, and hefty metal readily serves his sophisticated update of a Primitivist aesthetic. But he’s a modern LA artist, after all, who is very aware of all this embedded historical content, and his work is full of winks and nods to its pop culture filter. His new show at L&M Arts in Los Angeles, All Together Now, includes a juggernaut of roughly hewn, totemic figures and abstract landscapes for the contemporary tribalist. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Morrison Hotel Gallery

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

New York’s Morrison Hotel Gallery showcases the rich and diverse world of fine art photographs both of and by rock, blues, and punk’s greatest legends, from Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen to Blondie and Björk.

Co-founder Henry Diltz is responsible for the gallery’s namesake Doors album cover (and dozens more classic-rock memes), and shows photographers as varied as Jim Marshall and Autumn DeWilde, with a special appreciation for photography by artists better known as musicians, such as Julian Lennon and Dave Stewart. The epically thorough website is searchable by band, year, and genre, and includes special web-only exhibitions.

View the gallery’s extensive on-line archive, watch videos of Dave Stewart and others discussing their work, and keep up with events at the gallery’s NYC locations. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: The Open Daybook

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Manifested as both a book and an exhibition, The Open Daybook reimagines the calendar year as an interactive art project, then as a room-sized mixed-media timeline.

Curated by the book’s editor, David P. Earle, the show displays original art by 300 of the 371 artists in chronological order, providing a chance to view the wide array of scale, media, and style as a singular vision, in contrast to the two-page days of the functional publication — finally answering the age-old question, how do you measure the shape of a year? … Read More

Art

Preview: Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2011

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which opens tomorrow and runs through January 30, wraps up a month-long, city-wide pageant of international art shows that included photo l.a, artLA projects, and the Los Angeles Art Show, along with a handful of smaller niche projects. Staging its first annual return with a move from the Pacific Design Center to Santa Monica Airport’s Bark Hangar, ALAC features more than 70 galleries representing 11 countries, a jam-packed roster of tours, performances, panels, and special events throughout the weekend. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Supermarket Sarah

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

London-based Supermarket Sarah’s online home is more than a shopping site; it’s part gallery, part set decoration, and a full-on obsession for everyone involved.

Starting in her living room and expanding into public spaces, including a residency at Selfridges, Sarah’s uniquely inspired collaborative “walls” display an eclectic array of new and vintage clothes, art, design, and objects ranging from plastic-sushi zip drives to ruby-slipper roller skates — all fully wired for impulse buys. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Will Cotton

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Painter Will Cotton has a sweet tooth when it comes to art, fashion, eye candy, and real candy — including Katy Perry’s bubblegum pop.

Cotton’s lustrous, sticky-sweet visions of seductive innocence depict nude angels nestled in confections suitable for Marie Antoinette (the Sofia Coppola version). An accomplished painter with an already impressive c.v., Cotton skyrocketed to international attention for the cover art on Perry’s Teenage Dream, before going on to art direct the pop-culture touchstone that is the “California Gurls” video. … Read More