Reviews of last-chance-to-see shows at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, The Hole, and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and a film about an architect who deserved better. Plus a confluence of architectural, archival, political, and alimentary topics in new recommended exhibitions and public events at REDCAT, VSF, Advocartsy, Long Beach Museum of Art, LA Freewaves, Inglewood Photography Festival, WeHo Pride Arts Festival, a meaningfully artful Skirball dinner, and a pop-up art and books tea room with a purpose.
Furthermore, on the evening of Thursday, May 22, our editor Shana Nys returns for another lively Art/Space 114 artist talk, amid announcing her new remit as the new DTLA nonprofit kunsthalle’s Writer in Residence!
Feature
REVIEW: Five Painters at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. John Brooks, Canyon Castator, Kenwyn Crichlow, Pam Posey, and Vanessa Prager help the gallery celebrate 13 years of exhibitions by highlighting a prismatic plurality of what is possible with paint. Across works from the monumental to the nearly miniature, in styles from the pastoral to the post-Pop, heavily impastoed to darkly impish, queer, quixotic, and impassioned, the five painters offer not only a range of ways to handle pigment, but of ways to see the world. Fans of the gallery’s program will be familiar with the paint-eating corpulence of Vanessa Prager’s botanical still lifes. Verging on both portraiture and symphony, the way she builds her nearly all-over floral proliferations is fractally ordered like a wild garden yet miraculously retains its formal coherence—more replicating than depicting its color-forward blossom riots. Canyon Castator also surges toward the maximal, but by employing armatures that speak to historical tropes of arrangement and citation, packed with renditions of expressively enhanced Pop culture characters. In their illustration-based stylizations, volatile economies of scale, and social critique these paintings evoke classical formats (like the Last Supper) before giving Hulky Jesus his steroid injection and gathering the cohort of pouty, pervy putti to the rumble.
John Brooks offers a whole alternative method for organizing and understanding the world. Operational elements at work in his large-scale paintings include but are not limited to interpretive photo-based portraiture, inventive phenomenological landscape (there are more stars reflected in a rippling lake than there are in the night sky itself), forced and flattened perspective, eccentric art historical citations, queer visual wit, a love of poetic flourish and his own work as a writer, any excuse for a wibbly-wobbly pattern, and a tertiary palette that is so off the beaten path that the clown with a dog carrier in his belly suit looks right at home.
For meditative melodrama, relax into the diffuse conflagration of the firelight burning in the sweeping cosmological wonder of Kenwyn Crichlow’s pageant of abstract members; stay long enough to notice the spirits that emerge from its twilights. Pam Posey reminds us that sometimes a whisper is a scream, and that eliciting a hyper-detailed atmospheric landscape from the tip of a single-hair brush holds its own kind of grandness. Her works are diminutive in size and make you lean all the way in—only to discover a cascade of fine detail and bigger-on-the-inside spatial expanses in each pocket universe of a painting. Closing this Saturday, May 24 in Hollywood; dianerosenstein.com. —SND
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