Ben Jackel makes amazing, deceptively simple sculptures that resemble the familiar objects they depict in precise, witty detail, even as they dissemble as to what materials they are made from. He is best known for a technique of sculpting in stoneware and wax, creating a dark surface sheen and... More >>

James Franco asked Paul McCarthy, whose self-effacing, irreverent art has only gotten bolder and grosser over the years, to re-stage what happened in director Nicholas Ray's Chateau Marmont suite, among James Dean, Natalie Wood and other cast members from Rebel Without a Cause -- rumors about... More >>

On North Camden Drive, a block from Rodeo Drive, Garboushian Gallery has installed an exhibition perfect for the neighborhood -- archaic objects are glazed, over-produced and presented as novelties. But Emily Counts' sculptures of fax machines, rotary phones and boxy computers made of wood,... More >>

Jim McAllister paints pictures of pleasant pictures. In Sultriest Surrounds Subsides at Richard Telles gallery, he has painted an image of a flower garden over a smart pattern of purple and pink. If Gleaming Summer Spent is all pink and glowing orange, with a still life of vases stacked on top... More >>

One of the most exciting aspects of the current climate of interdisciplinary practice in contemporary visual culture is the incursion of architecture and industrial design into the fine-art arena -- and SCI-Arc is a big part of why that’s happening. Technically an architecture-based... More >>

This weekend marks the start of the Hammer Museum's biennial crosstown explosion of boundary-blurring contemporary art, "Made in L.A." Three days in a row of opening receptions start Friday night at the Hammer, culminate Sunday afternoon at Barnsdall and in between head to the biennial's... More >>

Renegade scientist James Carter published a zine in 1970 called Gravity Does Not Exist, and he meant it — Newton had been wrong. Carter has spent the rest of his career developing and promoting a theory to explain the structure of matter. His ideas, which Bill Clinton thanked him for... More >>

Three months ago, L.A. artist Dawn Kasper moved her studio to the Whitney Museum to prepare on-site for the 2012 Biennial. When the Biennial opened Feb. 28, VIP guest Martha Stewart hung out with Kasper long enough to tweet a photo of the artist in her haphazard, messy space, which looks like... More >>

The name "Malibu" comes from "Humaliwo," a word the Chumash Native American people used to mean "where the waves crash loudly." Benjamin Lord calls his new portfolio of stereoscopic photographs the Humaliwo Chambers, because they imagine a web of chambers and tunnels in the Malibu hillside. The... More >>

Charles Ray is good at immortalizing vulnerability, like when he sculpted his bespectacled, awkward self staring up at a towering woman or when he hired a Japanese craftsman to carve a life-size replica of a fallen, rotting hinoki tree. In his just-opened show at Matthew Marks, a naked, bearded... More >>

German artist Joseph Beuys used to do "actions," his word for "performances." His most famous was I Like America and America Likes Me in 1974, in which he wrapped himself in felt and spent a few days in an New York gallery with a live coyote. A few years earlier, in 1969 in Frankfurt, Beuys... More >>

In 1969, when Laddie John Dill started working in SoCal, he dug holes in the ground and stuck neon tubes into them to make pods of light. Soon after, he filled his studio with mountains of sand and crisscrossed sticks of neon on top of them. When New York dealers stopped in to visit, he was... More >>