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by Matthew Kangas Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle Continues through May 16, 2026 Norman Lundin, “Studio Floor and Wall,” 2025, oil on canvas mounted on archived panel, 19 1/2 x 30”. All images courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle. Subjectivity of vision is one qualifier for legitimate realism, and Norman Lundin’s new paintings express that in spades. Seen in an exhibition titled “Landscapes, Mostly, Other Things Too,” Lundin’s breadth of vision and subject matter has never been more evident or elegantly expressed. To each traditional genre he explores — landscape, still lifes, figures — he brings a deeply personal, often brooding and ominous insight that obliquely reflects the darker elements of the time we inhabit, including environmental danger, strained personal relationships, and the tendency to escape into worlds just this side of fantasy. Now approaching 90, Lundin has had a lifetime of international achievements both as a painter and as an admired teacher, with numerous visiting residencies piled on top of his 40 years at the University of Washington School of Art. His tenure there was somewhat at odds with the 1920s School of Paris ties of department co-founders Ambrose Patterson and Walter Isaacs and their students’ postgraduate studies with Fernand Léger in Paris. Lundin’s closest friend on the faculty, Francis Celentano, was a pioneering Optical Perceptualist. Could their influence have had an effect on the bracingly formal compositions of their younger colleague despite his hyper-traditional training in Norway and at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Cincinnati? Norman Lundin, “Coffee Pot and Two Cups,” 2026, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”. Examining the 19 paintings on display, all done just in the past two years, the formalists’ shadow is unmistakable. Gridding up the picture plane, as in “Studio Evening,” “Studio Floor and Wall” (both 2025) and “Coffee Pot and Two Cups” (2026), Lundin’s pictorial strategies seem haunted by his late colleagues in a way that only strengthens their staying power and adds to their mysterious content. Still life and landscape elements are so separated from one another that they tempt a symbolic reading. Colors are restricted, too, as if in a Cubist palette, so that a bright red band on a paper cup sticks out and a thin white line of sunset above the ocean beach doubles as a pure horizontal line regardless of the landscape depicted. A captive of realism due to his training and teaching, Lundin has escaped tedious repetition of subject by varying each encounter with nature or the studio, averting strict identification in favor of delicately placed objects and closely observed outdoor scenes, increasingly darkened by weather, wildfire smoke, and the solitude of a studio. Norman Lundin, “Wetlands Stream,” 2026, oil on canvas, 36 x 60”. The studio window is a constant in the new interiors, often seen late in the day, prodding us to gaze out at indeterminate skylines or adjacent buildings and construction sites. In turn, these take on the role of formal organizers, pulling each painting together in ways that go beyond the mundane subjects of the scene: tables, coffee cups, water carafes and cardboard boxes. For example, in “Across the Studio” (2026) a white plastic detergent bottle sits on a table between a cropped stepladder on the right and three paintings to the left stacked against the wall with their backs facing us. Seemingly random, the composition is a perfect balance among the elements. Two smaller cardboard boxes peek out from behind the ladder. Redefining a still life, Lundin inserts objects of autobiographical significance. They render the composition a quiet tour de force and a talisman of the artist’s activity within the privacy of the studio. In “Box and Three Jars” (2025), the centered cardboard box atop a black table holds the jars above a white can against a gray background. To a modernist, the “Homages to a Square” series (1950-1976) of Bauhaus master Josef Albers are inescapable historical forerunners. With “Light Bulb and Drapery” (2025), the light bulb acts as a pun for effusive artificial light throughout, and the drapery is an oblique homage to Lundin’s old friend, stripe-painter Celentano. Norman Lundin, “Lightbulb and Drapery,” 2025, oil on canvas, 34 x 50”. The new landscapes are familiar but tinged with a gloom that is the formal result of smoky late-afternoon or evening skies and smoldering forests nearly set on fire. Together with the still lifes, they, too, offer potentially symbolic readings of nature in peril. In a crowd of younger eco-conscious landscape painters, these recent views lift Lundin beyond his realist and modernist legacies with great ease that makes for a late career triumph. 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 John Zotos Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas, Texas Continuing through May 9, 2026 Anna Membrino, “Dew,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 65”. All images courtesy of Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas. In Anna Membrino’s approach, landscape painting starts with photographs of the natural world. Then, with a technique involving collage and digital alterations on a computer screen, she arrives at an image worthy of the intense shifts in scale, color, and surreal mystery that has defined her output over the last ten years. The images are surreal to the degree that they depict a reality with a color scheme all their own. It’s a presence replete with memories, anxiety, bliss, and/or dreams. Her major works always require a large-scale format, which in a work like “Dew” averages around 65 by 65 inches. Anna Membrino, “Steep,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 69 x 69”. For these new paintings, Membrino has inverted her point of view. Previously we beheld a scene as if walking onto a theatrical stage, where the vegetation and other elements form a perimeter around a clearing. Now Membrino places us among, or behind, the elements that form that visual border, obstructing the view onto a vast space beyond. By doing so, the scale of the elements closer to the surface are perceived as larger than in reality. This resembles the cinematic use of such a conceit by Raul Ruiz in his neo-surrealist film melodramas, where flowers and vegetation move around the actors, engulfing the frame and disorienting the viewer. Anna Membrino, “Drift,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 72”. In “Steep” (2026), a vertical stalk with leaves sprouting in all directions firmly occupies the foreground in a deep, detailed, pulsating blue. It resembles a bamboo tree that has taken up most of the center left area of the canvas. After trying to peer beyond the tree, we see farther into the background. There are a series of rolling hills in a lilac-purple hue that bathes them in sunlight, surrounding a watery lagoon in blue that also reflects the rays of light. In the deep background there is a hint of light red, a sign that dawn approaches. We either delve into memories of consciousness on the shore of oblivion, like the instant we wake from a dream, or suddenly lapse into sleep. Anna Membrino, “Blaze No. 5,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12”. In  the largest work, “Drift” (2026), we peer through a vantage point in the center of the composition defined by long vegetative stalks capped by leaves rendered in a light turquoise. Bathed in light, the flora navigate the canvas from the left, around the top, and to the right, circumscribing the visual field and obstructing a clear view of the sky in the background. Visible below is a water feature surrounding a span of land in green. The hint of a horizon line intentionally gives “Drift” a measure of depth missing in other paintings like “Steep” and “Dew,” where obstruction and confinement complicate Membrino’s ever-changing relationship with nature. What never varies is the idea that the viewer stands in for the general human presence. There remains no evidence of the human figure in these paintings, or any suggestion of how the landscapes may have fallen prey to human agency. Unlike in the physical world, where we’re hard-pressed to find untouched nature — primarily because it only exists as something culturally identified — Membrino’s hyper-realities may offer a temporary escape from the actuality of our painful present. John Zotos  is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.

by Jody Zellen David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 25, 2026 Elizabeth Murray, “2.B.!,” 1990, oil, matchsticks, canvas and wood, 68 1/4 x 49 x 4 1/2”. All images courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. The surprising yet somehow inevitable pairing of Elizabeth Murray (1940 - 2007) and Betty Woodman (1930 - 2018), two artists whose beautiful, idiosyncratic works made them icons of their generation, opens up new avenues of discovery. Woodman, a ceramicist and Murray, a painter, were both exceptional colorists who created abstract works utilizing eccentric shapes and patterns to explore the relationships between composing in two- and three-dimensional spaces. They experimented with hybrid forms. Murray's canvases were hardly ever just rectangles, and Woodman's ceramics often included a painted element mounted on the wall. Both women were known for layering geometric and organic forms to build their complex, nuanced and idiosyncratic pieces.  The exhibition unfolds like a conversation or a dialectic in which we contemplate the relationships between the works. Within two modestly sized spaces are paintings and sculptures spanning the years 1982-2015. Installed to highlight formal relationships (and not chronologically), the objects prompt the eye to zig-zag across the walls, at first taking in all of Murray's bombastic painted reliefs, then scanning Woodman's more delicate, freestanding and wall-based ceramics. Eventually we hone in on where they intersect. Is it through texture? Color? Shape? Or the fracturing of surfaces? Betty Woodman, “Reaching,” 2012, glazed earthenware, epoxy resinb, lacquer, acrylic paint and canvas, 26 x 46 1/2 x 1 1/2”. Murray’s “2.B.!” (1990) hangs next to Woodman's “Reaching” (2012). “2.B.!” is a three-dimensional oil in which Murray collaged together cut-out canvases that form a backwards letter "B," a reversed number "2," and a bright pink exclamation point. The work takes its point of departure from the graffiti lettering that covered the walls and subway cars of New York in the 1970s and 80s. It also references the soliloquy in Shakespeare's “Hamlet” in which the words "to be, or not to be" are spoken. In “Reaching,” Woodman adheres flat fragments of curvilinear earthenware glazed in white, red and black to a canvas painted with an array of subtly colored concentric rectangles. The orange lines that fill the "B" echo the black lines of glaze in Woodman's ceramic shapes. Another notable relationship transpires between Woodman's “Balustrade Relief Vase: 96-20” (1996), and Murray's “Midnight Special” (2000), installed across the wall from one another. In “Balustrade Relief Vase,” Woodman breaks apart vase forms and assembles the varied pieces on the wall. The shapes appear to dance as we try to reconstruct the object. Murray's large painting shares a similar palette to Woodman's ceramic deconstruction, as well as its spirit of light-hearted composition. Murray's work is filled with intestine-like shapes that encircle her oval canvases. Elizabeth Murray, “Moonbeam,” 1995-96, oil, canvas and wood, 109 x 63 x 6”. Murray's “Moonbeam” (1995-1996) and Woodman's “Santa Barbara” (2005) use different subject matter while engaging in another compelling dialogue. In “Moonbeam,” Murray brings the outside in. Her paintings often depict abstractions of domestic interiors. This one is essentially a bed with two pillows that twist and turn in on themselves. The bedposts curve into the painting and hover over the pillows as collaged elements. A painted green-yellow line that cuts diagonally across the composition is the moonbeam of the title. Like many of Woodman's other pieces, “Santa Barbara” is a combination of painting and ceramic. In this work, she depicts a quasi-interior space. A light blue and pink painted backdrop is bisected by a washy black horizontal band. In front of this is a ceramic vessel in two parts from which emerges swirling fragments that boil to the top of the wall. Looking at Murray’s work and then at Woodman’s, one sees spectacular formal similarities, especially in both artists' use of shape and color. Betty Woodman, “Santa Barbara,” 2005, glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, paint and canvas, 95 1/4 x 84 3/4 x 9”. At work are forces drawn from Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, as both women were interested in breaking forms apart and putting them together anew. They reimagined traditional art mediums, never denying their interest in formalism while pushing boundaries and often exploring the relationship between the artwork and its placement. The blurring of positive and negative space and traditional figure/ground relationships were key to both artists' practices. While never denying their femininity, they created large, extravagant works filled with vigor and energy, as well as an undeniable delicacy and intimacy. Both employed abstract language, delighting in visual pleasures, and were dedicated to their chosen media while rebuffing accepted aesthetic norms, opting to chart their own paths. Seeing their works together allows for a conversation that examines similarities and differences in themes and approaches pertinent to both artists. The comparison is enriching. 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 Michael Shaw Perrotin, Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 25, 2026 JR, “The Wrinkles of the City, Istanbul, Hasan Saltik Eye, Turkey,” 2015. All images courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Los Angeles. Having never previously seen JR’s work in person, taking in his mini-retrospective, titled “Horizons,” I’ve still fallen short of experiencing the quintessential JR: a large-scale black & white mural. Most typically these are photographs of an individuals’ eyes, sometimes full face, looking directly out at the viewer, ideally several of them clustered together. Made with “ wheat past[e] and gigantic mono photographs ” the media itself is about as unsophisticated as it gets, but not so the results. One of several murals reproduced here, as a now upscale framed photo, features the party-space host Jim Budman’s eyes and brow glaring out at us in the Venice neighborhood of L.A. Another is of a loving older couple resting atop a roof in downtown L.A., presumably only visible if you were in a higher rise building nearby, or in a helicopter. Both were part of his “ Wrinkles of the City ” series from 2011. As it quickly becomes clear, these murals were designed as much for reproduction — including, naturally, on social media — as for the in situ experience. JR, “Giants, Kikito, October 7th 6:40 p.m, Tecate, Border Mexico-USA,” 2017. JR had the foresight, the ambition, and even the community-engagement skills to launch his iconic cropped portraits, first in his native Paris but soon into urban landscapes around the world, with a high virality quotient. My introduction to his work (from afar) was a powerful collection of eyes, along with partial and occasional full faces, spread across a favela in Rio de Janeiro, an action he called “ Women Are Heroes ” (2008). Fast forward to “Horizon,” which samples various works from the last 15 years, and those earliest gestures of insurgency and rebellion have been diluted, even neutered, by the realities of the market and JR’s ascendency in it. Like Bansky, JR’s work compresses the divide between street art and high art, and he’s become nearly as well-known as Banksy in the process. Another quality these two artists share is their accessibility. It just isn’t possible to have that level of notoriety without being both easily digestible and inducing a degree of sympatico with a mass viewing audience. Two projects from “Horizons” stand out for comparison in their divergence: one for its use of the human figure, the other without. The former, “ Giants, Kikito ” (2017) was produced at the U.S.-Mexico border in the city of Tecate. This black-and-white photo-mural cutout is of a towering toddler peering over the border fence, his fingers appearing to rest upon it. One of the exhibition’s photos embraces this illusion, while another exposes the mural’s intervention: an aerial photo showing the thoroughly scaffolded structure Kikito was built onto, and its actual proximity a good 50-or-so feet from the border fence so as to capture that ideal scale. Additionally, there’s an eight-foot-tall ink-on-wood-fencing object, with roughly the same perspective of the 1st photo, though in this version we see a man atop the scaffolding, just to Kikito’s right. An adorable child (whom JR met with his family in Tecacte) bridging the literal and symbolic gaps of this perpetual geopolitical showdown, melts our hearts and presumably melts this arbitrary borderline along with it. Using a toddler as opposed to an adult is a far narrower tightrope to walk. JR, “Giants, “Death Valley, Billboard, March 5, 2017, 3.03 pm, California, USA,”, 2017, color photograph, matte Plexiglas, aluminum, wood, 42 15/16 x 68 1/2”. Nearby is “ Giants, Death Valley, Billboard, Mars 5, 2017, 9:46 am, California, USA ” (2017), a unique framed color photo of a black-and-white billboard of a section of mountains, which is in turn a trompe l'oeil image that mimics an actual stretch of the Death Valley mountainside behind it. The piece, rather than being an outlier in JR’s work due to the landscape subject — and which owes at least a little something to the legendary conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson — is part of a significant subset of such projects. It came out of a collaboration with the popular band Arcade Fire for one of their albums. This is where one may be inclined to slam JR for selling out, and yet, at the same time, what big-time photographer worth their salt doesn’t manage to cash in on their commercial bankability? It’s really just a framing issue (literally and figuratively): Arcade Fire, in addition to being popular is well respected, and one could just as well say that the band is providing the artist with a creative opportunity as vice versa. At least compared with JR’s other tromp l’oeil work, and despite its conceptual backbone, “Giants” lacks the populist charm of its human-spun counterparts. JR, “Tehachapi, The Road, Anamorphosis, #1, USA,” 2022, color print, mounted on dibond, matte Plexiglas, 40 9/16 x 60 1/4”. Another notable project documented here is his work with Tehachapi, a prison a couple hours north of L.A. in Kern County, officially known as California Correctional Institution. A video screening shows JR photographing some of the inmates from above on a rolling scaffold, interspersed with individual inmates telling some of their stories, and his meeting with the inmates as a group. These portraits (only shown in the video, which is not included in the exhibition), cast the inmates as saintly and give them a wide breadth of humanity. To describe them as ‘repentant’ would be the obvious characterization, but there’s room for various interpretations. One unique photo (the fact that more than half the photos in “Horizons” are unique as opposed to editions is a noteworthy choice), “ Tehachapi, The Road, Anamorphosis, #1, USA ,” (2022), was a collaboration with the inmates, who wheat-pasted the exterior walls of the prison with an image of a road leading out of it. The actual windows of the prison become portals thanks to the easel-like armatures in the mural, a gesture that gives the prisoners a voice, if only a symbolic one. The community building and direct social contact JR (and his team) engaged in is incredibly admirable and, going back to bridging street art and high art, this is, in a sense, bridging the wealth of the high art world with the social and financial powerlessness of prisoners; not in the same place, of course, but the overlap alone is commendable. JR has long since transcended his graffiti-artist roots, and now it’s hard not to see him as suffering from a savior syndrome. It’s not to say that artists with means cannot or should not give back to the community, spread the wealth, etc. Of course not. It’s that when they do, it’s often all we can think about. And that’s the takeaway from these experiences, these activations, of “Horizons.” Their power and consequence can only be moved so far from their original context before they become shells of themselves. Michael Shaw  is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. His work was recently included in the exhibition “ Meshuganah ” at A Very Serious Gallery in Chicago, as well as the exhibitions “ Sociality ” at LA Tate gallery in 2023, and It’s My House!  at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, in 2022, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Culver City Arts grant in 2023, a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA. Visit Michael Shaw’s website .

by Liz Goldner Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California Continuing through September 20, 2026 Andy Moses, “The Deep,” 2005, acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 54 x 100 x 5”. All images courtesy of the artist. Viewing these dozen paintings by Andy Moses is to share in an aesthetic vision that looks at how art can affect and shape our own visual perceptions. The work addresses the relationship between abstraction and landscape, and is achieved through broad sweeping brushstrokes, often inspired by the Pacific Ocean near where the artist grew up. Living by the water, watching the colors and light in the atmosphere had a profound effect on Moses. As a budding artist, he decided to build paintings that feel alive and animated, to have viewers to see their colors and tonalities change, while using their imaginations to connect them back to nature. He employs pearlescent paints, which contain tiny mica flakes that cause the colors to shift slightly or change appearance based on the viewing angle. He also thins the acrylic paint down “to the consistency between milk and a milk shake,” then uses an elaborate technique of tilting the canvasses, causing the paint to flow, creating the feeling of spontaneity in the finished pieces. Andy Moses, “Permian Basin,” 2010, acrylic on canvas over concave parabolic wood panel, 45 x 90 x 4 1/2”. Often working with concave canvasses, Moses produces works that simulate, “looking out from the water and seeing the curve in the horizon and the light dancing on both the water and sky,” he explains. He also began visiting the California desert two decades ago, observing the horizons and the play of light on both land and sky. “I really think of these paintings as a way of representing this sense of universal horizons, but they are still very much about color and gesture leading back to abstraction.” The earliest painting here is the tondo “Beyond the Cirrostratus” (2003). As the only all white pearlescent painting in the show, it is a shimmering example of paint attracting and reflecting the light in the room, becoming a spiritual mirror. Andy Moses, “Boreas,” 2011, acrylic on canvas over concave parabolic wood panel, 45 x 90 x 4 1/2”. “Siren Song” and “The Deep” (both 2005), comprised of deep blues and grays with striations of green on concave canvasses, are among Moses’ earlier representations of the atmosphere, looking out toward the ocean. Aesthetically minimalist, they are examples of his early forays into using paint, rather than reflective industrial materials, to capture the spirit of Southern California’s 1960s and 70s Light and Space art movement. Moses grew up in a SoCal community of Light and Space artists who worked with resin, glass, neon and other materials to reflect in their art the shimmering aspects of the area’s celebrated sunsets and seashore atmosphere. Inspired by this powerful art movement, Moses’s creative practice evolved towards paintings that employed the medium itself with its shifting colors, his technique of pouring the paint, and his shaped canvasses. His body of work creates similar effects to those of the original Light and Space era as it emerged more than 50 years ago. Andy Moses, “Geomorphology 1601,” 2022, acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 x 5”. “Permian Basin” (2010), executed on a concave parabolic wood panel, demonstrates the artist’s evolution in his pouring technique to create spontaneous striations. In various shades of red and blue, the painting evokes a brilliant desert sunset. The similar “Boreas” (2011) emphasizes the artist’s penchant for experimenting with color that simultaneously affects our perception, mood, and imagination. “Geomorphology 1601” (2022) features primarily golden hues with secondary shades of light blue and pink. A highlight of the neighboring Frank Cuprien exhibition, his painting “The Golden Hour, Laguna Beach” (c. 1923), with its depiction of golden waves rippling into the shore at dusk, could have inspired Moses’ work of a century later. Andy Moses, "Geodesy 1008," 2024, acrylic on canvas over circular wood panel, 48" diameter. Two recent circular works, “Geodesy 1228” (2022) and “Geodesy 1008” (2024) display Moses’ continuing ability to creating deftly designed vortex-like images that draw the eye towards their centers. Their stunning designs demonstrate his penchant to risk optical experimentation, rather than repeating the style of paintings that were already popular.  Altogether the 12 paintings in the show, rounded out with the mountainous “Metamorph 1502” (2017), create a visual chorus of works that metaphorically sing together in harmony. 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 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 .