by David S. Rubin   Michael Kohn Gallery , Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 25, 2026 Bruce Conner, “NEON NIGHT, WICHITA, KANSAS,” 1963, ink on paper, 26 1/8 x 20”. All images courtesy of Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. The Beat Generation is currently having a moment in Los Angeles. Although the timing is partly coincidental, Marc Selwyn Fine Arts is exhibiting works on paper by Jay DeFeo, Parker Gallery and The Box are presenting a major Wally Hedrick retrospective, and Michael Kohn Gallery is showing Verifax collages by Wallace Berman and drawings by Bruce Conner. Conner was something of a renaissance man in that he was proficient in several mediums. Although best known for his macabre assemblages made from detritus and his pioneering experimental films, the latter of which are on view in a tangent exhibition at the Marciano Foundation, Conner devoted much of his artistic practice to drawing. Conner’s initial preoccupation with the medium can be traced to 1963, when he became intrigued with a new kind of pen that had just hit the market — the Pentel water-based felt tip “magic marker.” In one of his first attempts at working with it, Conner produced “NEON NIGHT, WICHITA, KANSAS” (1963), a black-and-white composition of rigorous, gestural hatching. Named for the city where the artist spent his youth, the imagery evokes images of trees or foliage and the movement of nature’s forces, yet it also emphasizes the autonomous pen marks, analogs in ink to the visible brushstrokes in DeFeo’s ultra-thick, highly textured oil paintings of the late 1950s. Bruce Conner, “UNTITLED (JULY 24, 1965),” 1965, felt-tip watercolor pen on Rives RFK paper, 10 x 10”. Like many of his Beat contemporaries, Conner was interested in exploring his spirituality, which stemmed in part from a transcendent experience he had as a child. In the 1960s a good place to engage in spiritual pursuits was Mexico, where he lived in 1961-62 and shot footage for his 1967 film “LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS.” In addition to exploring psychedelics, he also learned about the mandalas and related cosmologies of ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures. His Mexican sojourn was pivotal in shaping his drawing practice. By 1965, Conner had developed a methodology of making a drawing a day using automatism, the process favored by Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists of working spontaneously, with no predisposition of what the final composition might look like. Created organically through meditative mark-making, “UNTITLED (JULY 24, 1965)” (1965) sports a wood grain pattern like those in Max Ernst’s frottage drawings made by rubbing sheets of paper placed over floor surfaces. Bruce Conner, “UNTITLED,” 1972, ink and Yes glue on paper, 22 1/8 x 20”. Due to the strong contrasts between the drawn marks and the undulating crevices of white paper, Conner’s drawing is activated by optical vibrations, which for him signified states of higher consciousness. They would have been right at home in “The Responsive Eye,” a landmark Op Art exhibition held the same year at the Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, Conner’s inclusion of the drawing’s date in the title bears a striking parallel to the work of his New York-based contemporary On Kawara, who was by then making a daily painting of each day’s date. Bruce Conner, “INK BLOT DRAWING,” c. 1992, ink on paper, 23 x 6”. Perhaps the most significant examples of Conner’s felt-tip drawings are the mandalas, such as “UNTITLED” (1972), where an abstract field of energy made through repetitive mark making is contained within a circle, with areas separated by concentric rings formed by leaving areas of the white paper unarticulated. While contemporaneous with the conceptual targets of Jasper Johns and the formal ones by Kenneth Noland, Conner’s mandalas are spiritual and cosmic. From a Jungian perspective, they represent a visualization of the totality of the self. On a metaphysical level, they suggest the infinite and the sublime, which more closely aligns them with the painted abstract “zips” of Barnett Newman or the translucent planes of paint saturation by Mark Rothko. In 1975, Conner developed another approach to meditative drawing that he would continue through his later years. Beginning with a blank sheet of paper, he would make several accordion folds to create vertical registers. Then, he would apply small droplets of liquid ink within each column, folding it over and then opening it so that a bilateral inkblot, akin to the familiar Rorschach test, would be formed. The blots could then be tweaked further using a pen or a brush. Most of the examples on view here were made during the final decade of Conner’s life, at which point he often attributed them to “Anonymouse,” “Anonymous,” or “Emily Feather,” pseudonyms that reflected his objection to the art market’s tendency to emphasize an artist’s name over their work. It is probable that he used his real name simply for the drawings that he liked the most, which could explain why he used it for the striking, if not mesmerizing “INKBLOT DRAWING” (c. 1992) and “INKBLOT DRAWING (DECEMBER 4, 2000)” (2000). In both examples, the extreme verticality of each column, along with the crystalline ink impressions, suggest Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, the Garden of Eden, or heaven’s “Pearly Gates.” In that respect, Conner’s ink blot drawings seem to be in perfect harmony with the work of the American modernist Joseph Stella , whose paintings of gardens are also cathedral-like, and the 19th century French playwright Victorien Sardou , whose automatic drawings of the “celestial residences” of historical figures, which were purportedly created through “dictation” from spirits, possess a similar structure and delicacy. Bruce Conner, “INK BLOT DRAWING (DECEMBER 4, 2000),” 2000, ink on paper, 6 1/4 x 11”. Drawing served Conner well as a vehicle for communion with the cosmos, ultimately resulting in a personal visual language that is accessible to anyone through its sheer beauty and open-ended interpretability. David S. Rubin  is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous  exhibition catalogs , and his curatorial archives are housed in the   Smithsonian Archives of American Art . For more information: www.davidsrubin.com .

by Liz Goldner Long Beach Museum of Art , Long Beach, California Continuing through May 31, 2026   Robert Williams, “Heralding the Entry of King Infinitus,” 2021, oil on canvas, 30 x 36”. All images courtesy of the artist. The obsessively creative Robert Williams, now age 83, has spent a lifetime exercising a sensibility that embraces the apocalyptic, the grotesque, and the caustic. Much of Williams’ imagery springs from his dreams and memories of a difficult childhood spent mostly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where as a teen he was a juvenile delinquent who was expelled from high school, inherited his father’s interest in cars and hot rods, and discovered his unique talent for depicting chrome. The foundations of Williams’ style, long termed “lowbrow art,” blend an old master style of figuration combined with dystopian imagery, psychedelia, and popular illustration. Its roots lie in his youthful apprenticeship with car detailing master Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and the underground comics movement of the late 1960s, in particular “Zap Comix.” The nearly 60 works in “Fearless Depictions,” spanning the last twenty-five years of the artist’s output, come at you in a delirium of mad, relentless monsters. Robert Williams, “Auditory Sadism,” 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 12”. Williams is also a prolific writer in a cockeyed existential manner. His essays describing his paintings are an integral part of the show, going well past the usual wall labels. His open-ended descriptions leave us free to interpret the paintings’ equally elaborate messages. Here are some of my favorite paintings from the show, from which I’m guessing you will come away with your own greatest hits. At the entrance to the show, “Heralding the Entry of King Infinitus” (2021) immediately accosts us with its repetitive interpretation of an unnamed, mad blonde-haired king (unnamed and by no means a portrait, but who might that allude to?), clad in royal purple, as courtiers and sycophants announce his presence. The magic of this piece is that the king is not a singular figure, but a relentless succession of identical monarchs dominating the canvas well into the distance. Among Williams’ nearly incomprehensible descriptions of the king, he writes, “King Infinitus lives in the Kingdom of Astroperpetuity. But for our purposes, the king exists in an impure space-time setting.” Robert Williams, “Death by Exasperation,” 2010, oil on canvas, 36 x 30”. “Auditory Sadism” (2013) centers on a young man lying in a field with his hands covering his ears, blocking out the relentless sounds coming from seven open jaws with red, snake-like tongues, all yelling at him. The distraught figure is a stand-in for anyone who feels bombarded by constantly changing media messages, from podcasters and pundits who compete for our attention, and from anyone who launches into seemingly endless verbal onslaughts. Williams writes, “In this picture, the graphic noise is so silently earsplitting that the viewer can hardly see over the incessant tirade.” “Death by Exasperation” (2010) is a parody of the Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” from “Through the Looking Glass.” Williams’ painting features a purple Jabberwock collapsed on the ground and under the care of a modern medical team, as an enormous red Non Sequitur dominates the scene. A stern doctor stands calmly before the composite creature, as a nurse attending the fallen Jabberwock glares at him in the midst of the commotion. The artist brings the Victorian-era nonsense poem into a whole new realm of the absurd. The poor Jabberwock is appropriated to become a part of Williams’ own menagerie of fantastic illusionistic creatures. Robert Williams, “Justifiable Concern,” 2020, oil on canvas, 30 x 36”. “Justifiable Concern” (2020) could be a little league baseball player’s — and his mother’s — worst nightmare. The boy in his baseball outfit and his well-dressed 1950s-style mom are shopping in a sporting goods store, where they are confronted by “a bloated red devil feigning insufferable agony. His swollen, distended belly is erupting in several places, violently expelling its writhing contents,” as Williams writes. The devil is expelling a variety of miserable cartoon characters, including pirates, devils, clowns and an Indian, while the mom covers her son’s anguished face with her hands. The surreal apparition reads as a product of both mom’s and son’s imaginations, as though it reflects a disagreement, one that continues to preoccupy them. “The Intruder,” 2023 continues the devil in the sporting goods store story, as it explodes the myth of the picture-perfect family preparing to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner together in their well-appointed dining room. The mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother and grandfather are confronted by a cartoonish interloper made of piping and studs with a long nose and tongue. It gleefully comes through the front door even as it lifts the home off of its foundation. If the family appears to be one from out of a storybook, the invading creature exposes deep secrets and fears. Robert Williams, “The Intruder,” 2023, oil on canvas, 30 x 36”. Throughout the show Williams appeals to our fascination with imaginative details and the blended pleasures of comedy and horror. Sixty years on, so much has changed for this paragon of everything lowbrow who enhances our understanding of the underbelly of our world, which has become as dystopian as it was during the counterculture movement that first brought Williams to public attention. Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by Matthew Kangas Fountainhead Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through March 28, 2026 Matthew Dennison, “Augrest Vestal,” 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”. All images courtesy of Fountainhead Gallery, Seattle. Largely self-taught after a brief stint at the Portland Museum Art School, Matthew Dennison has carved out his own civilization of peculiar people. Set in hemmed-in indoor-outdoor spaces, Dennison’s scenes are deeply subjective conceptions free of anecdote, even as they allude obliquely alluding to his narrative painting of previous years. It’s tempting to contextualize Dennison into a folk-art or outsider art niche, especially since many of his paintings are framed by found recycled doorways or humble painted architectural moldings. As we gaze into these container frames, we encounter another world equally ambiguous, both in narrative, site, and, more significantly of late, gender. While the artist’s early works were representational and figurative, for example of swimmers and animals, the current work creates its own race of androgynous beings, neither male nor female. They are shorn of hair and grouped in embracing pairs, neither siblings nor parent-child dyads. As a result, their appeal is dependent upon our own ability to sympathetically absorb the artist’s constructions of unfamiliar people. Without reference to race, poverty or other social issues, so common in figurative art today, Dennison’s canvases — painted with his hands in gloves instead of with brushes — declare their individuality through their sheer hermetic qualities: who or what is going on here? Matthew Dennison, “The Sound,” 2026, oil on canvas, 24 X 24”. The twelve pictures on exhibit vary in size from two to four feet. Since the imagery is continuous from scene to scene, their scale does not matter much. The larger ones do take on a more public tone, daring us to participate in the drama of the characters, who are always straight-faced, never staring at one another or out at the viewer but preoccupied by their glances beyond the frame’s edge. For example, “Augustea” initially seems to depict a woman and child but, look again, and it’s a small adult. Two other figures inhabit “Memoric Field,” and yet more pairs occupy floating space in the largest work, “Augrest Vestal.” “Scientist” hints at the folly of scientific certainty in an age that challenges its authority, while “Zolly Dother” puts someone in a bright pink dress who could be in drag or be transgender. Matthew Dennison, “Thust Cloudeo,” 2026, frame on, oil on panel, 29 x 17”. Highly prolific, Dennison has had annual shows of his work throughout the Northwest and across the Southwest and Midwest since the 1990s. Dennison’s reputation extends well beyond the clubby wrap-around comfort of Portland. In lieu of a well-deserved museum retrospective, it’s difficult to speculate on the growth or evolution that brings him to the current works. Widely written about in journals from his native region to Maine and Iowa, and included in institutional collections in Kansas and Michigan, it could be that Dennison’s art is geographically misplaced in the Northwest. That leads to the impression that he is better linked to a group of artists he has hinted at admiring, the American Magic Realists of the 1940s. Besides Jared French, Paul Cadmus, and Ivan Albright there is, more pertinently, George Tooker. The latter’s blank-faced staring figures are trapped on subway station platforms, in closets, and in confining chapel-like alcoves that prohibit interaction but bind individuals together into socially disparate crowds. I regard Dennison as an unknown, unacknowledged descendant of those Magic Realists. Unlike him, they were all obsessed with the crisp designs of Renaissance art, but nonetheless they have served as the closest antecedents for this Portland outsider artist more than half a century later. Matthew Dennison, “Bethed Core,” 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”. With such a persistent, not to say resistant, uncertainty of meaning, the ambiguity of Dennison’s aesthetic was underscored by the artist in an interview when he noted, “I like the sense of mystery … what is going to happen next? There is a little bit of the unknown and I always want to know what the next thing is. I think that is kind of what my work is about.” Narrative anticipation rather than the usual pleasures of the eye is what drives interest in Dennison’s work. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Matthew Kangas Portland Art Museum , Portland Continuing through February 28, 2027 Mark Rothko, “Woman Reading,” c.1933. The selection of paintings and works on paper assembled to commemorate the opening of the new Mark Rothko Pavilion at the newly expanded Portland Art Museum could also be titled “Rothko before Rothko.” It focuses on art made in Portland where his family, the Rothkowitzes, settled in a large Russian community after they fled Latvia in 1913. With loans from the National Gallery of Art, Rothko’s son, Christopher, the Mark Rothko Foundation, a few private collectors, and the museum’s own holdings, the survey contains revelations not necessarily highlighted in earlier omnibus Rothko shows, except for the 2012 retrospective. The erstwhile Oregon resident (1903-1970) had his first museum show there in 1933, at age 30, ten years removed from Yale, which he left after his sophomore year for New York City. Part of the original New York School or Abstract Expressionists, Rothko’s art has always stood apart for its unique qualities devoid of messy gestures and concern with a content he described, in a famous essay that he co-authored with Barnett Newman, as “tragic and timeless.” Mark Rothko, “Beach Scene,” c. 1928. With his return to Portland in 1943, we see the artist addressing local color in a still life with prescient floating background areas (“Untitled” 1945), and in a portrait of his first wife Edith Sacher titled “The Craftsman,” (1938/1939) in which a jeweler is surrounded by her worktable and tools. “Woman Reading” (c. 1933) might also be a portrait of Edith. Both paintings are dominated by darker colors, close-value tones, and straightforward poses. They highlight the dark lighting, moody colors, and, significantly, uncomfortable control of the human figure that will soon be jettisoned. Of greater interest is the black-ink view of downtown Portland from the West Hills (“Untitled” c. 1930), with its slashes evoking a forest and buildings off in the distance. More revealing and telling of the few influences the artist admitted to is “Beach Scene” (c. 1928), painted the year he met Milton Avery, whose own beach scenes and broad areas of solid color foretell Rothko’s floating “clouds” and muted palette. The group of four reclining women also echo comparable figure groups by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, which Rothko doubtless would have seen in New York. Mark Rothko, “No. 16 — Green, White, Yellow on Yellow,” 1951, oil on canvas, 67 5/8 × 4 5/8”. Copyright © 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. All images courtesy of the Portland Art Museum. “Untitled” (1947) is among the first of the Rothkos now widely recognized as his individual hallmark. Barely three feet high, its dusty pink shifts from light to dark, top to bottom, covered over with two flat oblong shapes with feathery edges. It is supplemented by another early treasure, “No. 10” (1949), which announces what he called “multiforms,” six hovering yellow, green and red shapes over an orange background. The acute attention paid to surface activity, formal placement of the blocks and the overall success of the composition affirm the artist’s growing talent for abstract painting that alludes to mysterious worlds devoid of any figuration or landscape residue. It is joined nearby by the beautiful “No. 16 — Green, White, Yellow on Yellow” (1951), in which the challenge of perfect levitation and unexpected chromatic harmony is fulfilled by increasingly thin washes of paint. Whether they comprise what Rothko intended as “metaphysical or symbolic meaning” is in hindsight debatable. Such intentions become less certain as the works are seen over a half-century later, unmoored from his and Newman’s dead-serious manifestoes. Across the walkway is a somewhat hidden tribute show, “Abstraction after Rothko.” It highlights works from the museum’s collection, including many paintings once owned by art critic Clement Greenberg, whose collection the museum acquired in 2001. The group reinforces the case for the significance of the New York School, Rothko, and the other artists Greenberg championed. Kikuo Saito, “Kitchen Opera,” 1985, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 68 1/2”. © 1985 Kikuo Saito/Courtesy of Salander-O-Reilly Galleries, New York. Half of the 26 paintings, sculptures and photographs pay oblique homage to Rothko’s breakthroughs of solid color areas, diluted paint, and rejection of anecdotal or political subjects. Paramount among the works are Jules Olitski’s “The Prince Patutsky — Red” (1962), Kenneth Noland’s “No. One” (1958), and “Spaced Out Orbit” (1973) by Helen Frankenthaler. All three are painted in acrylic as opposed to Rothko’s bravura treatment of oil. They function as centered targets rather than distributing shapes but still pay tribute to Rothko’s attention to color. Noland’s concentric circles of red and yellow enclose a black-and-blue “eye,” all shifted off-center to proclaim the artist’s here-and-now allegiance to the painting’s presence, in contrast to the shy, shifting arrival of Rothko’s shapes and colors. Similarly, Olitski’s white circle over red contains black and purple curves while Frankenthaler’s is the most austere of all, a multi-colored horizontal slab across a white background. Of the overall grouping, Kikuo Saito’s “Kitchen Opera” (1985) most closely resembles the older artist’s quiet fields. Joined by the spectacular 13-foot-wide “Beta Omicron” (1959-61) by Morris Louis, the Noland, Olitski and Frankenthaler paintings all serve as evidence of the Greenberg-approved transition from Abstract Expressionism to the Rothko-influenced Color Field School. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Jody Zellen MAK Center , Hollywood Continuing through May 24, 2026 Nancy Holt, “Sunlight in Sun Tunnels,” 1976, inkjet print on archival rag paper; composite made by the artist from original 35mm transparencies 50 1/8 x 61 1/2”. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Gallery. Nancy Holt (1938-2014) is best known for her “Sun Tunnels” (1973-78), an earthwork placed on a piece of land she purchased in Great Basin Desert, Utah. Four gigantic concrete cylinders are installed there in an X-shaped configuration specifically aligned to frame the rising and setting sun during the summer and winter solstice. First and foremost, the work is experiential. It is about perception and the relationship of the human body to the minutiae of the ever-changing landscape. Though not the same, of course, extensive photo-documentation has brought the work to those of us who cannot venture to Utah.  For the exhibition “Light and Shadow Poetics,” a selection of photographs, videos, and a sound piece are presented within the space of the historic Schindler House. Installed on bare concrete walls between thin vertical windows or alongside built-in furniture, Holt's works enact a dialogue with Schindler's structure. They share interests in sightlines, shifting light conditions, and how the body is positioned within space. The exhibit brings together two masters — Holt, the conceptualist and land-based artist and Schindler, the modernist architect — both of whom were concerned with the ways light could be captured, represented and experienced. Nancy Holt, “Light and Shadow Poetics,” installation view, 2026. Courtesy of the Mak Center, West Hollywood. This is immediately evident in Holt’s “Light and Shadow Photo Drawings” (1978) a series of twenty-two black and white inkjet prints that were fabricated by the artist from the original 126 format transparencies in 2012. They fill two adjacent walls of the gallery. To create these abstract images, Holt shined a light through curved cutouts and photographically captured the ensuing shapes and shadows that were projected. The result is an array of circles, curves and arcs in opaque and transparent shades of black, white and gray that feel other-worldly, even celestial. Nancy Holt, “Light and Shadow Poetics,” installation view, 2026. Courtesy of the Mak Center, West Hollywood. Another iconic work, “Sunlight in Sun Tunnels” (1976) is a large print consisting of a grid of thirty images that focus on the changing light in the interior of one of Holt's “Sun Tunnels.” Holt placed her camera at the edge of one of the pipes and shot a picture every half hour from 6:30am to 9:00pm with the intent of documenting the movement of the sun from the perspective of the interior of the tunnel. Seeing the image in the context of the Schindler House, one becomes hyper-aware of how light fills its interior space. “California Sun Signs” (1972) is a series of nineteen square-formatted color photographs that feature the word "sun." The images document signs and illustrations celebrating the marriage between California and the sun as the source of its weather and the seductive qualities of its landscape. Installed in a loose grid, the images feel simultaneously current and dated. The photograph of a "Sunland" gas station with prices at 35 and 33 cents certainly takes us back to a previous era. Images depicting the words Sunkist, Sundaes, Sunset Palms, N. Sunair Plaza, Sunbeam Inn, Sunshine Pre-school and even Sun Air Drugs take us on a focused journey through California's desert landscapes. These snapshot-style photographs highlight bright light and blue skies. In the advertisement for "Sunair Center" the letter "S" sits on top of a yellow sun and below an arrow that points into the deep blue sky. Nancy Holt, “Light and Shadow Poetics,” installation view, 2026. Courtesy of the Mak Center, West Hollywood. During my visit to the Schindler House, the light was bright enough to make it almost impossible to see the projected video “Sun Tunnels” (1978) that documents the original installation of the work in Utah. Color reflections also overwhelmed two black and white photographs, “Concrete Poem” (1968) and “Concrete Visions” (1967). To see these images I had to bob up and down, dodging my own shadow as well as the reflection of the trees in the courtyard. While Schindler's architecture disrupted the viewing of Holt's pieces at that instant, it also called attention to the relationship between inside and outside, as well as to how light changes over time. This was exactly what Holt was exploring in her large-scale earthworks. Like Schindler, she was interested in the process of looking, the poetics of light and shadow, and the nuances of human perception. Together in this exhibition, the two artists’ visions become rich companions and counterparts. Jody Zellen  is a LA based writer and artist who creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1989. For more information please visit  www.jodyzellen.com .

by George Melrod Official Welcome , Los Angeles Continuing through February 21, 2026 Beverly Semmes, “Body Shop,” installation view at Official Welcome, 2026. All images courtesy of Official Welcome, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Bedford It’s now been over thirty-five years since Beverly Semmes first emerged in New York as a trailblazer in the use of clothing as a sculptural material — and as metaphor. And she did so in a memorably big way, presenting giant grey coats with their arms connected in a loop; vast streaming dresses of indigo velvet and billowy pale blue organza which flowed off a wall as from an opened flood gate; expansive lakes of brilliant royal pink or blood orange velvet that pooled from a single gown. Blending issues of bodily representation and feminist themes with postmodern formalism and critiques of consumerism and gender roles, her approach was rooted in the exhilarating dynamic of the early 1990s. With their lavish textures and lush materiality, her works felt both saggy and sensual, an aesthetic stepdaughter of Eva Hesse and Meret Oppenheim. She also shared themes with Robert Gober in the form of her haunting bodily allusions; Charles Ray for her playful exaggerations of scale; and Janine Antoni with her repurposing of ostensibly feminine materials. Beverly Semmes, “Fur & Bit,” 2025, faux fur, canvas, slippers, epoxy, 28 x 34 x 5”. Photo: Evan Bedford. Beneath their seductive surfaces, the works were always cagey and pointed. Over the years, Semmes has organically expanded her practice to embrace such disparate mediums as ceramics, photography, video and performance, which have pushed her work beyond the realm of easy expectations. Her painting incorporates a vibrant hodgepodge of patterns and colors, while her fashion explorations with Carwash Collective paraded a funky patchwork aesthetic — more like a collaboration between Betsey Johnson and Jessica Stockholder than Christian Dior. A recent retrospective last fall at Tufts University (Semmes’ alma mater) testified to the breadth of the artist’s expansive oeuvre. As if in counterpoint, her current solo show, archly titled “Body Shop,” flaunts her ability to condense her sprawling plus-sized visions to a compact scale. Works are created specifically to accommodate the gallery’s limited square footage. Whatever they might lose in spectacle, these playful studies more than compensate for in intimacy, approachability, and sheer witty weirdness. Beverly Semmes, “Two Legs, Two Pitchers, Two Shoes,” 2025, faux fur, ink, acrylic over photograph printed on canvas, Vesace slippers, epoxy, 16 x 22 x 5”. Photo: Chris Kendall. “Body Shop” offers one larger work and eight mixed media wall pieces suggesting sleeveless bodices composed from fabric, painting, drawing, photos and notably, an array of women’s slippers, amplifying the Cinderella symbolism flowing through the work. While her fabric fantasies have previously implied a consumerist critique, here it becomes overt, focused on the ideals of shopping for comfort, luxury, and style. A new persona adds up to a better you. Despite their concision, the works glean freely from some of the artist’s most iconic themes and strategies. Among them is the “FRP (Feminist Responsibility Project),” in which she attempted to negotiate a feminist response to pornography by painting over photos from old porn magazines, replacing the overt imagery with a subtler iconography that felt more acceptable to a feminist eye. While “correcting” male-oriented porn, the works remained open to the shared motives of pleasure, temptation, and consumption. And although oblique, the intimations of sex and luxury lining these new works add a sense of cheerful titillation. Beverly Semmes, “Two Legs, Two Pitchers, Two Shoes,” 2025, faux fur, ink, acrylic over photograph printed on canvas, Vesace slippers, epoxy, 16 x 22 x 5”. Photo: Chris Kendall. “Fur and Bit” offers a pair of fur-lined Gucci slippers, with their little gold clasp, on a bodice of golden-brown faux fur, with its hints of upscale equine sophistication. As with all these works, it’s pinned directly to the wall, an allusion to their origins as textiles, but the effect here is unnervingly sharp. The protruding slippers are placed roughly where a woman’s breasts would be, as substitute symbols of gender-oriented comfort and desire. Mounted on the wall, the work feels reverential, but laid on a floor it could be a mistaken for a throw rug. The most opulent piece, “Two Legs, Two Pitchers, Two Shoes,” sets a pair of ornate Versace slippers atop a small painting melding curtains, patterns, and a woman’s splayed legs in knee boots — a motif repeated from her “FRP” series — atop a chartreuse faux fur bodice. The gold and black circular pattern of the pricey slippers suggests nipples, making it her sexiest evocation of foot-focused fetishism. Here it’s the slippers that you’re tempted to slide into. Beverly Semmes, “Hat,” 2025, velvet, canvas, fur, hat, stuffing, 27 1/2 x 34 x 5”. Photo: Evan Bedford. Several works highlight her painterly patterning. “Medusa” sets a pair of fuzzy lavender slippers on a small rectangular painting with splayed legs, while the gray faux fur bodice is adorned with vertical blue stripes. “Curly” sets bright pink Balenciagas atop a scumbled black line drawing and a gray faux fur bodice with an oddly similar look. “Checkers” conjures retro-styled domesticity with plain blue slippers set with glittery pale green discs, atop a black-and-white checked bodice. “Flowers and Dots,” while lacking slippers, resembles a gauzy Impressionist field of florid green and carmine, bedecked with numerous sewn pink flowers and circles, imbuing her decorative patterns with what could be a profusion of nipples or uneasy allusions to bodily injury. In “Hat,” a round fur hat occupies the center of a pink velvet bodice; despite its assertive symmetry and luxuriousness, it seems mole-like and out of place. Beverly Semmes, “Flowers and Dots,” 2025, velvet and polyester, 30 1/2 x 36 x 1/4”. Photo: Evan Bedford. Harking back to Semmes’ larger works, “Duck Slippers” (originally part of a single installation with “Hat”), mounts a plush skirt-like curtain of fabric off the wall, so it spills across the floor. A peculiar mud-brown pattern suggesting hoof prints, it glows lustrous gold in the refracted afternoon sunlight. Its base serves as a place mat for a pair of old-timey men’s slippers depicting mallard ducks. In this case, the slippers are actually in position to be worn, not just ogled, while the plush brown plume suggests a magic carpet pathway ascending to another realm, albeit in style both strange and ironic. Given how renowned Semmes is for her large-scale work, it’s a treat to be able to experience her works in a format that’s so playful and intimate. Although eclectic and challenging, they’re also undeniably inviting: enticing enough to rope you in and mischievous enough to make you puzzle over them. Merging body and consumer fetishism with a healthy dose of surrealistic pillow talk, her obscure objects of desire continue to fascinate, tantalizing with their quirky visions of class, comfort and couture. Pinned to the wall in tactile immediacy, they remain at once saucy and seductive and forever out of reach. George Melrod  has written hundreds of articles on contemporary art and culture for such publications as ARTnews, Art in America, World Art, American Ceramics, Details, and Vogue, among others. In the 1990s, he was the New York critic for Sculpture magazine, and wrote a regular contemporary art column for Art & Antiques, for whom he worked as a Contributing Editor. A native New Yorker, he moved to LA in 1998, and has since contributed to websites such as artcritical and artillery. From 2007-2017 he served as editor-in-chief of art ltd. magazine.

by Lynn Trimble Vision Gallery, Chandler, Arizona Continuing through March 21, 2026 Luke Watson, “A Vista,” 2025, oil on canvas. All images courtesy of Vision Gallery, Chandler, Arizona. Arizona-based Luke Watson draws us into his world immediately upon entering his exhibition, “Land Valuation,” with a large-scale concave painting that echoes the panoramic views often sought by tourists in national parks or other iconic settings. Soon enough it becomes apparent that Watson’s landscapes have little in common with those postcard-style perspectives. “A Vista” (all works 2025) is a layered landscape that directs our attention towards not only the physical forms replete in his body of work, but also to the different levels of meaning he intends them to convey. Watson paints a wide swath of sky sitting atop a row of clouds that float just above multiple layers of rocks comprising expansive land formations. Green plants with crystalline forms dot the landscape, their stylization offering a glimpse at the ways Watson often veers into surrealism. Luke Watson, “Aspen (Glen),” 2025, oil on canvas. Nearby, another large-scale painting, “Aspen (Glen),” introduces more fantastical imagery marked by excursions into vivid colors and stylized shapes. Conical trees resembling green tutus stacked on tall poles stand amid other foliage. Purple lines conjure pathways created by the movement of water or snow. Short green structures that resemble corrugated cardboard suggest walls — not man made, as one might expect, but implicitly by the creatures who reside in this forest. The natural environment, as Watson visualizes it, may be built, but is not merely the product of human hands. Throughout the exhibition, which includes nearly three dozen works, are references and similarities to several Southwest contemporaries, including Ed Mell’s (1942-2024) angular abstractions and Steve Yazzie’s (Diné, Laguna Pueblo, and European ancestry) abstractions marked by movement and flow. The more distant echoes of Georgia O’Keefe, Vincent van Gogh, and Grant Wood, are among others the artist pays homage to. Luke Watson, “SBBT,” 2025, oil on canvas. The geometries of Watson’s mesas, rocks, rivers, mountains, and trees are rooted in three-dimensional puzzle pieces and pop-up children’s books. As noted in his statement, that process often involves “crafting paper models of landscapes and translating them into paintings that flatten complexity into planar simplicity.” The result both channels and counters forms found in nature, implying that what we see around us is always filtered through our own experiences and memories. Then he goes beyond that, speaking in paint to the ways our interactions with the environment change it. His aesthetic mission is to express how the natural world is in a constant state of transformation. The absence of human figures highlights Watson’s rejection of anthropomorphism. Instead, he center our attention on the land and its other cohabitants. When they do appear, the human subjects are mainly engaged in leisure activities such as camping, cross-country skiing, and birdwatching. They sport the types of gear you would expect, from binoculars and bike helmets to tents and backpacks. This alludes to the fact that we ordinarily mediate our experience of nature by protecting ourselves from its overwhelming forces in order to exert a semblance of control over it, or passively to assume the role of observer. Luke Watson, “Campsite,” 2025, oil on canvas. Some of the figures in Watson’s paintings have a subtle cartoon or caricature quality, proportions slightly askew, such as a head that’s too large for its body, implicating the ways that self-perception is at odds with reality. When placed near foliage or clouds whose circular shapes resemble the iconic silhouette of Mickey Mouse ears, these people appear as humorous foils to the way experiences of nature are packaged and sold as leisure.  At times we see only what humans have left behind, such as the all-terrain vehicle track marks in “SBBT,” its cloudy sky suggesting a gathering storm. In “Land Exploits,” with its tree trunks evocative of logging, and “Mine,” with its heavy equipment, Watson turns his attention to the impacts of industry on the environment. But the subtle tone of his imagery falls short of critiquing the damage wrought by extraction and exploitation. Luke Watson, “Camp Fire” 2025, oil on canvas. The exhibition’s most intriguing works are “Campsite” and “Camp Fire.” In the former, an owl is poised near a yurt-styled tent and given a glow that imparts the feel of an alien spacecraft. Tree branches have a robotic appearance that connects the impact of technology on nature itself, and the relationships between us and our environment. As to the latter, campers sit amid trees with foliage shaped much like megaphones, implying that the trees are somehow calling out or listening to the stories being told around the titular campfire. A dozen or so small oil on panel paintings depict a bird such as a cactus wren, turkey, or kestrel against a simple backdrop. Despite their beauty, these works fail to animate Watson’s interrogation of geological and manmade forces that persistently change the landscapes they inhabit. Luke Watson, “Fire Cycle,” 2025, oil on canvas. Such questions are addressed more forcefully in “Fire Cycle,” a stunning panorama that fills an entire gallery wall. The artist conveys the resiliency of nature by combining imagery of post-wildfire devastation, new green forest growth, and the return of flames. Whether the fire might have originated with lightning or another natural cause, or with human actions such as building campfires, is left to the imagination. Watson’s reimagined landscapes prompt reflection on the ways that infrastructure created to support interaction with what’s sometimes called “the great outdoors” favors those with sufficient economic means. But it also calls on all of us to recognize that those systems fail to build upon the full depth and breadth of historical and contemporary culturally-driven relationships with the land. Lynn Trimble  is a Phoenix-based art writer whose work ranges from arts reporting to arts criticism. During a freelance writing career spanning more than two decades, over 1,000 of her articles exploring arts and culture have been published in magazine, newspaper and online formats. Follow her work on Twitter  @ArtMuser  or Instagram  @artmusingsaz .

by Andy Brumer We are posting Andy Brumer's final exhibition review for VAS with sadness. We take some pride in the relative handful of relationships that VAS, and for many years prior, ArtScene maintained with our contributors. Relationships and projects is such an important dynamic, more so for visual artists than most. It applies equally to writers. When Andy Brumer filed his review of Patrick Graham's current show nobody knew this would be his last. For many years he published original poetry and wrote about golf for Sports Illustrated . ArtScene and later VAS served as an outlet for him to express his interest in visual art. He brought a polished and distinctive voice to his art criticism. Like so many of us, he was always deferential to the creative process. In his own particular way he became an exemplar of it. So the news of his sudden passing (due to cancer) felt unexpected and unfair, seeing as how he and his wife Adelaida Lopez had just recently moved back to L.A. following the traumatic loss of their Altadena home last January. So there would no doubt have been some late chapters, now left unwritten. That is the preferred epitaph for any writer or artist. Works and essays left started but unfinished and unpolished drafts at our passing. ---- Jack Rutberg Fine Arts , Pasadena, California Continuing through April 18, 2026 Patrick Graham, “Deposition #6,” 2009, mixed media on board, 32 x 44”. All images courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Inc., Pasadena. Although Ireland has produced some of the world’s best late-19th and 20th century writers and poets, its roster of well-known visual artists during this same period is sparse in comparison. Both the father and the brother of William Butler Yeats, the country’s best-known poet, were successful professional painters, but remain obscure next to their famed family member. Many art historians, looking beyond the isolated example of Francis Bacon, concur that 82-year-old Patrick Graham deserves much credit for opening Irish visual arts to the world. Like Bacon, Graham is recognized for his role in moving Irish painting out of a stale, academic Anglo-centric style. Both their bodies of work took on the raw idiom of German Expressionism and (in hindsight) the Neo Expressionist movement in America and Europe during the late 1970’s and 1980’s. This partially explains why Graham attracted and continues to enjoy a strong international profile. Patrick Graham, “The Lark in the Morning VIII,” 1996, mixed media on board, 31 7/8 x 44 1/8”. The symbiosis between poetry and painting in Graham’s work is immediately evident in a small piece titled “Deposition #6.” All of the artist’s output presents haunting explorations of his psyche and soul. This little gem does so with a masterful blend of drawing and painting media. Graham’s “Deposition” series plays a game of hide and seek with the artist’s own visage and identity, much as John Ashbery’s iconic poem, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” references the Italian Mannerist Parmigianino’s rendering of a distorted reflection of himself. Yet, as in this line from Ashbery’s poem, Graham’s drawing also “has shut itself out/and in doing so shut us accidentally in …” Deposition in Christian terminology refers to Christ’s descent from the cross, and has long stood as a symbol of suffering and rebirth. Each work in the “Deposition” series presents a faint, smudged, primitively rendered image of the artists face and body. Bruised and fragmented, they simultaneously step forward and recede as if to hide from both his self-analytical gaze and the probing eyes of the viewer. The ink and paint of each drawing float over pieces of milky-white paper that form a subconscious sea. Handwritten words and notes surface and surround many of the fragmentary portraits. At times resembling a Rorschach ink blot test, these pieces represent a psychoanalytic self-accounting (that is, a deposition), each work functioning as both an inventory and a manifest. Patrick Graham, “Dead Swan/Captain’s Hill,” 1998-99, oil and mixed media on canvas diptych, 72 x 132”. While these fragile palimpsests pack disproportionate power into small spaces, Graham’s larger works free the artist’s expressionistic impulse into lyrical flights, especially as they are structural experiments enlivened by Irish mythologies and narratives. The sensual yet ethereal “A Lark in Morning” is industrial-looking to the eye yet painterly at its core. It shows Graham literally turning his back on aesthetic conventions, as he has executed the work on the reverse sides of two stretched canvases. The paint-splashed stretcher bars become frames that function metaphorically as doors through which the painting seems to enter and exit. In Irish folklore the lark symbolizes the joy, hope and optimism of the break of day, yet this piece challenges us with far more than melodic birdsong. On the left panel is built up a molded mass of crumbling cloth and paint into a visual blend of a vagina and a crucifix. Wax-coated strips of Plexiglas flap like disembodied wings across both panels, infusing the work with an evocation of fecundity at once sacred and earthy. Another large oil and mixed-media diptych, “Dead Swan/Captain’s Hill,” forges an apocalyptic image that may haunt viewers after they have left the show. At first glance the diptych suggests medical x-rays or a computer data print-out. Looking more carefully across a scratched and streaked field of flat black paint one perceives a forest of small blue gravestone crosses dotting the entire picture plane. Under a sickly pewter-colored night sky the artist places child-like drawings of airplanes dropping bombs on the landscape below. Patrick Graham, “The Blackbird Suite,” 1992-93, mixed media on board, 31 7/8 x 44 1/8”. Signs label places of importance in Graham’s life. Other lines of text reveal plaintive messages directed to God, akin to those left in Catholic churches and shrines around the world. It is a strange cathexis of disparate geographical locations and innocently rendered scenes of violence. The totality of “Notes from Ireland” raises and then responds to the often-posed question whether one of the lifelines left to humanity is art. # # #

by Matthew Kangas Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon Continuing through February 28, 2026 Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #9559,” 2025, oil and pencil on linen over panel, 10 x 8”. All images of Turner are courtesy of Adams and Ollman, Portland. In a tiny alcove near the back of the exhibition is a projection of a three-and-one-half minute videotape titled “Spanish Dance” (1973), choreographed by Trisha Brown for female dancers in her company. This proves to be the key to understanding Lynne Woods Turner’s new work, twenty thin-line abstract drawings on a variety of papers. The quiet simplicity of Turner’s small format works on paper (rarely exceeding 12 inches) releases a variety of linear combinations that distantly echo the movements of Brown’s dancers, often linked together sideways, shuffling their feet to the music. They reveal the breadth of the artist’s imagination — each one is completely different — underscoring the wide approbation of her oeuvre since her debut in 1976. Now 75 and based in Portland, Turner’s dedication to a strict yet personal abstraction stresses the inexhaustibility of abstract art at a time when representation dominates much of contemporary art. One reason for her particular durability may be seen in the “Spanish Dance” series: almost all, each in their own way, bear a figurative association to the female body. Parallel curves, winding hemispheres, circles and floral outlines can be seen as abstracted legs, buttocks, heads and breasts. Differing types of pencil color, paper backgrounds, and configurations of patterns are inspired by the collective movements of the dancers’ bodies as they cling to one another, twisting and turning. Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #1871,” 2024, pencil on paper, 8 x 5 3/8”. Turner’s response to the dancers’ bodies is stripped down to basic outlines lent expression with a pleasing mixture of red lines, green lines, grey and black strokes, all repeated in patterns within each drawing. Both breasts and buttocks are evoked in “Untitled #9559” (2024) while tall bodies in tight profile are implicit in “Untitled #1130” (2014). Each image obliquely emulates the corporeal formations to be seen in the video of Trisha Brown’s choreography. Both breasts and genitalia amusingly punctuate a hidden grid format in “Untitled #1871” (2024). On another level, tic-tac-toe-like grids are completed with filled-in random numbers as in “Untitled #1676” (2023), which is enriched by ink as well as colored pencils and graphite. With such apparently mathematical systems, Turner’s approach recalls the British artist Christopher John Watts, who was influenced by the original Systems Group (1969-1976) of English artists who valued “constructivist, non-figurative and mathematically driven art.” Watts has taught at Washington State University since 1988 (he has since retired) and exhibited widely in the Pacific Northwest. Turner’s drawings, with their numbers, signs, lines and grids, are close to Watts’ although in his painted-wood sculptures he takes numerical systems further. Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #1676,” 2023, pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 4 3/8 x 4 3/8”. Nevertheless, the tiny size of Turner’s number drawings forces an intimate encounter that renders them more subjective than Watts’ constructions. They beg to be deciphered while they delight the eye with pink lines and numbers appearing at the intersections of the grid boxes. Turner’s work is thus more enigmatic, even as it lacks Watts’ intellectual heft. They remain more mystery than formula. A 2017 essay by Sarah Sentilles, written as part of the Oregon Visual Arts Ecology Project, is titled “Abstract Art as Political Art: Lynne Woods Turner.” Despite her condensed, ambitious argument, she fails to convince us of Turner’s political content and raises the wider question, “Can any abstract art be political?” Sentilles argues that Turner’s hidden allusions to the female body and such women’s work as textile weaving and embroidery constitute political subjects. Maybe so, but I’m not buying it. These insights may provide biographical background for Turner, but they do not add up to political content for her blessedly ambiguous drawings, even when they abstract women’s bodies. Subjectivity alone is an ample aesthetic defense, one not in need of political or social justification to justify its existence and its quality. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Liz Goldner UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art , Costa Mesa, California Continuing through May 24, 2026 Sophie Calle, “Room 43” from “The Hotel,” 1981. Courtesy of Siglio Press Commentaries about this exhibition barely prepare viewers for its depth, expansiveness and especially for its sheer fearlessness. The show by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953) presents projects that she calls “The Spy,” “The Sleepers,” “The Protagonist” and “True Stories,” among others. The several galleries are inundated with photos and extensive text that reveal her voyeuristic perspective. These pieces compel the adventurous inquisitor to peruse every photo and the thousands of words on the walls. Calle’s projects are seductive, challenging our normal personal boundaries, springing from her intense desire to explore the vicissitudes of human nature. Her body of work, created over the course of five decades, probes humanity’s relationships, emotions and frailty, with the artist serving as a key component of the ventures. Each detailed written description is as essential a feature of her larger oeuvre as her photos. Sophie Calle, “The Sleepers (Gennie Michelet, thirteenth sleeper),” 1979, 11 black and white photographs, each: 6 x 7 7/8”, overall: 12 x 47 1/4”. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. “The Spy” is a decades-long project in which she assumes roles and spies on others’ personal lives. She has worked as a housekeeper in classy hotels, opening visitors’ drawers and suitcases, looking at their clothes, shoes and underwear, examining the beds they sleep in, the toiletries they leave in the bathrooms, and even the trash the throw out. She obsessively photographs and writes about her findings. By exhibiting the fruits of her discoveries in galleries and museums, she invites us to become co-conspirators in her secretive scenarios. Sophie Calle, “In Memory of Frank Gehry's Flowers,” 2014, pigment print with hand-cut edge, accompanied by eleven two-sided photographs & vase designed by Frank Gehry, 78 x 54 1/2 x 9 1/2”. Courtesy of the artist and Gemini G.E.L. As part of this project, she surreptitiously follows people on the streets. One of her ”Spy” sketches reads, “Concealing my emotions, I determinedly cross the piazza, circle around the monument, and pretend to study it. I feel his eyes on me. I walk along the hospital’s right wing. There’s an alcove. Finally, I’ll be out of his sight.” This and many other sketches reveal Calle’s relentlessly self-observing nature, which she mines for the resulting text and photo-based art. “The Protagonist” series, begun in the 1980s, is centered on her own life. As she goes about her daily activities into the evening and early morning, visiting the Louvre, a café, talking with strangers on the street, some of whom take her picture, attending a movie, a party, taking a taxi home in the early morning hours, she serves as her own archivist. It is difficult to imagine living an endlessly interesting, glamorous life while writing down nearly every detail, but Calle does just that. The catalog explains that these sketches can be curious, moving, embarrassing, funny, or a combination. An example: “At 2:10 p.m., I move on. I cross the Pont Royal and head for the Louvre. At 2:20, after walking quickly through the museum, I find myself in front of Titian’s ‘Man with a Glove.’” Sophie Calle, “Room with a View,” 2003, pigment print mounted on aluminum, 67 x 51”. Courtesy of the artist. “The Sleepers,” begun in 1979, is among the most curious of Calle’s series. The artist is seen asking various people, many of whom she has just met, to sleep in her bed. Surprisingly, several people agree to do so — perhaps because this project happened in Paris when mores were looser than they are today. She wrote about one participant: “He goes to bed without changing the sheets. He regrets not having brought his cat, of not finding someone in the bed at his arrival since he likes coincidences and sly looks. He says he was sleepy when he arrived, he yawned when he saw the name of the street. But he doesn’t sleep.” Observing a person, particularly one of the opposite sex inhabiting one’s own bed, and writing about it, invites us to superimpose our own fantasies — sexual and allegorical — onto the piece. “The Razor Blade,” an individual work in her “True Stories” project, relates Calle’s brief gig posing nude for a drawing class. She tells of a male student who drew her for three hours every day for 12 days. At the end of each session, he brandished a razor blade that he used to slash his drawing to pieces, left it on the table as evidence and left the room. Apparently disenchanted by his performance, Calle made the 12th day in class her last one. Sophie Calle, “Mother-Father,” 2018, pigment print, embroidered woolen cloth, wooden box, 16 7/8 x 222 5/8 x 2 5/8”. Courtesy of the artistr and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. As her fame and notoriety spread, Calle met architect Frank Gehry in Los Angeles in 1984. He offered to be her impresario and sent her flowers on the opening days of her exhibitions, all of which she photographed. These photos, along with a picture of the dead flowers, are displayed as a memorial to Gehry, who died at age 96 in December. There are those who regard Calle as an exhibitionist who transformed her bizarre adventures into amusements for the well-heeled. By the 2000s she was a celebrity performance artist. For “Room with a View” (2002), from her “Autobiographies” series, she spent a night in a room set up for her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. For eight hours, this free spirit lay in bed up there, welcoming hundreds of strangers, each of whom spent five minutes at her bedside telling her a story. The project concluded at 7:00 a.m. when she returned to earth. She wrote, “As if to confirm that I hadn’t dreamt it all. I asked for the moon and I got it.” Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by Matthew Kangas Harris/Harvey Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through February 28, 2026 Gary Faigin, “Outpost,” 2025, oil on panel, 22 x 28”. All images courtesy of Harris/Harvey Gallery, Seattle. The Gary Faigin memorial retrospective is not a museum survey, but a highly selective scan of earlier works and his final series, “Colony.” It gives his considerable audience a chance to consider his evolution as a painter and ponder the cumulative effect of his peculiar vision. Faigin, who died last year at the age of 75, was a polymath who combined his extensive studio activities with co-founding an art school, conducting art tours in Europe, and freelancing as an art critic for newspaper and radio. He was an indefatigable worker, perhaps overcompensating for his lack of an academic degree in art, substituting a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, another year in New York at Parsons and the National Academy, and most formatively, two years under the legendary Robert Beverly Hale at the Art Students League. The Gage Academy of Art, which he formed with his widow, Pam Belyea, is located in the heart of Seattle’s tech corridor, South Lake Union, modeled on the League in New York, has been a big success. It’s hard to detect any one art historical movement from which the artist’s vision emerges. Rather, it alludes to a multiplicity of influences that include Surrealism, Magic Realism, fantasy art, and science-fiction illustration. Faigin worked in depth on each series for the 20 solo exhibits during his lifetime, seen from Seattle to Santa Fe to New York and Coos Bay, Oregon. Consistent and cohesive, each series explored Faigin’s struggle to combine such varied sources into an individual style. Sometimes he succeeded, other times the struggle overwhelmed the result. Gary Faigin, “Evolution,” 1994, oil on panel, 36 x 48”. For example, the earliest work on view, “Evolution” (1994) is a bit of an in-joke, with a fruit still life of apples, pears and bananas at its center but accompanied in the upper-left corner by a monochrome depiction of a sphere, a cone and a pyramid. The juxtaposition summons up Paul Cézanne’s classic description of all art as “the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in perspective.” Faigin was nothing if not erudite. His teaching was memorable, remembered and hailed in many posthumous eulogies. Besides “Evolution,” “Cliff Dwellers” (1998) suggests future directions which took Faigin years to realize. Tiny improbable houses are perched atop enormous geological pillars he might have visited in Utah. It demonstrates the grandeur the artist aimed for, too often reduced in size for images of comparable ambition. Gary Faigin, “HOT,” 2000, oil on panel, 44 x 72”. Perhaps pointing tragically to a future series that did not occur, “HOT” (2000) foretells the terrors of climate change and the necessity of urban energy economies. The skyline resembles New York but with a fiercely burning rectangle in the middle, the word “HOT” at its center blazing like a giant movie screen. The largest work on view at 44 by 72 inches, it could be Faigin’s masterpiece: prophetic and visionary indeed. Averaging 30 by 40 inches, the steam locomotive images better capture the relationship between subject and size. “Emergency Exit” (2023) has a train implausibly crossing an icy link between a pair of icebergs. Similarly, “Counterbalance” (2005) juxtaposes a still life of vases, fruits and vegetables with a blue-green mountainous landscape. It is more convincing than other attempts to place oversized still lifes against ragged urban settings (“Station Stop,” 2013) or another set above a gushing waterfall titled “Fall Group Picture” (2009). Gary Faigin, “Station Stop,” 2013, oil on panel, 30 x 40”. Although the final series is more diminutive than “Cliff Dwellers,” it better coheres into compelling vistas that draw us in, if only in taunting disbelief. The pictures also reinforce the artist’s bitter sense of humor as he was dying. Tiny midcentury modern houses are placed in otherwise uninhabited planetary settings, with neighboring planets or moons set in darkened night skies. They focus tightly on the subjects at hand right up to and including suburban lawns, water towers, and, as in “Outpost” (2025), a spaceship ready for return to Earth as though it is a commute. “Forever Home” (2025) shoves a bungalow beneath gigantic stalactite-like rock formations, a companion to “Nocturnal” (2025) with its house trapped in an ominous valley. Each title reinforces the absurdity of space colonization fantasies, Elon Musk’s declarations notwithstanding. They conclude a lifetime of formal explorations on a high note, combining an impeccable execution with a subject that rises to the level of the artist’s skills. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Jody Zellen Billis/Williams Gallery , Los Angeles Continuing through February 14, 2026 Josh Dorman, “Peardog,” 2025, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 12 x 12”. All images courtesy of Billis/Williams Gallery, Los Angeles. Josh Dorman's idiosyncratic, encyclopedic paintings traverse time and space. They are intricate works that demand our undivided attention. Over the years, Dorman has collected a wide range of printed ephemera, culled from books, maps, magazines and technical manuals, as well as player-piano scrolls, and uses it as pictorial source material. His layered works combine these paper documents with ink and acrylic to create narratives that weave through time.  “Peardog” (all works 2025), one of the smallest paintings in the exhibit at 12 by 12 inches, is also one of the best. Just left of the center of the composition is a "pear-dog" made by collaging a vintage image of a dog's body with an antique diagram of a sliced pear that becomes its head. In the image, the pear functions as eyes. This creature rests in a colorful but ambiguous space that contains both urban elements — geometric shapes representing buildings — and natural ones such as imagined seashells and stalagmites. Along the bottom of this packed painting is an elevated roadway that passes over tree-lined hills. Dotted throughout the composition are collaged fragments of both words and animal imagery. Josh Dorman, “A Golden Age,” 2021-25, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 32 x 42”. In a larger painting, “A Golden Age” (32 by 42 inches), Dorman creates a dreamscape filled with inventive creatures that are amalgamations of animal skeletons with human heads and arms juxtaposed with tools like pliers, as well as parts from antique watches. These creatures wander through a deeply textured red-purple landscape filled with architectural fragments. Dorman bombards us with imagery, making it difficult to construct a coherent narrative. But telling a story is not the artist's intention. Dorman wants us to get lost in his worlds enough to begin connecting the various elements into our own interpretation. Josh Dorman, “Arctic Ice (Dodo),” 2025, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 9 x 12”. During residencies above the Arctic Circle and off the coast of Ireland, Dorman observed glaciers and other features of the natural world he had not previously encountered. These impressions fill works like “Arctic Ice (Dodo)” and “Arctic Ice II,” which are, uncharacteristically, more painting than collage. In both these pieces, Dorman brings together swirling bodies of water, jagged rock formations, and trapped animals, clearly a comment on our changing climate. “Fever Dream” is a hauntingly surreal work that recalls Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Two Masks” (1926). Central to the composition is the upper body and head of a figure submerged in a magenta-hued body of swirling water. The figure has a hollowed-out head. Emanating from where the face would be is a stream of sea creatures and plants flying into the polluted water. Typical of Dorman’s signature style, he weaves painted areas around and has delicately colored and collaged various paper clilppings. Fragments from maps and pieces of historical ships and antique depictions of fantastical creatures complete this dizzying and engaging imagery. Josh Dorman, “The Long View,” 2004-25, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 48 x 52”. Dorman is a master at creating new contexts for found materials. Through recontextualization he refreshes much that is old or familiar. The works function as complex puzzles in which Dorman draws from the past to comment on the present and project into the future. Figures and animals from a wide range of sources and time frames in varying scales and opacities follow roads, cross bridges, populate seas, climb mountains and peer through architectural facades. Each work creates its own unique story that ingeniously links disparate elements from then to now. Jody Zellen  is a LA based writer and artist who creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1989. For more information please visit  www.jodyzellen.com .