13ThingsLA: April 30

Find a Way for your art calendar

Amanda Oleander, Sunrise Tree House, acrylic on canvas (Courtesy of Dorado 806)

You guys! It’s our anniversary on May 1st! And we’re having a party! Next Thursday, May 8th we’re getting together at 7:30pm at KP Projects, and all of you and your artsiest friends are welcome. But as always, there’s a little something earlier & extra (and possibly cake), special for our paid supporters. If you’re rocking the free version, thank you, and also please consider upgrading today at any level — or say yes to those incoming renewals, please and thank you — to sustain the cause of thoughtful, truly independent art writing in Los Angeles.

In this week’s issue, we offer a suitably exuberant and poignant lineup of new exhibitions at Dorado 806, LA Center of Photography / Helms Design District, Spy Projects, The Pit, James Fuentes Gallery, Walter Maciel Gallery, LAPL Central Library, Thinkspace, The Armory, and Giant Robot/GR2; plus happenings at Artbook at HWLA and at MOCA; and Bjork goes to the movies.

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Feature

Amanda Oleander, Suburbs, acrylic on canvas, 36x36” (Courtesy Dorado 806)

Amanda Oleander: The Space Between opens Saturday, May 3, 6-9pm at Dorado 806 Projects. I love beautiful things and I’m not sorry. Soothing curvilinear swells of landscape and architecture, superb peaks of rooftops across a village, future-candy sweeps of freeway and urban river, precision-kept arborism. And Oleander’s paintings give me all of that. But among beautiful things, my favorites are those that also conceal an edge, foretell a creeping unsettlement, and hint at a darker prism through which to view their lovely bounty—and Oleander gives that too. Her disorienting perspectival shifts and operatic economies of scale contain multitudes of detail, playing out along a continuum of familiarity and surrealism in a way that makes the viewer feel omnipresent and impossibly small at the same time. Also opening is the group exhibition curated by Oleander, In Good Company, which features works in a variety of mediums by a dozen or so artists who, each in their own way, also find a path between what is beautiful and what lies beneath. On view through May 31 in Santa Monica; dorado806.com. —SND

Joshua Charles Hart, David Otis Johnson, Michael McGrath at Dorado 806

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