Holly Myers

Features

Holly Myers
Joshua Aster, UCLA When asked about his work, Joshua Aster replied not with a statement but with a “List of Conditions.” “The paint is heavy with water,” it reads. “The brushes are foam and bristle and sponge. The application is consistent and mindful of its neighbors. There is no definitive......
Steinkamp's control center (Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

Musical Vision

Holly Myers
Tucked away in a converted garage behind a tastefully landscaped, midcentury home on a quiet street in Mar Vista, Jennifer Steinkamp’s studio suggests a strategically concealed mission-control center. Step through the door of the modest, freestanding structure and you’ll find yourself in a long, narrow, relatively non-descript workspace with several......
Read Only: Waterbearer (1986) (Collection Sean and Mary Kelly

Eye Contact

Holly Myers
Lorna Simpson’s midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art begins in 1985, the year Simpson completed her MFA at UC San Diego, with a piece that lays the groundwork for much of the rest of the show and epitomizes many of its frustrations. Titled Gestures/Reenactments, the work involves six......
Christina Florkowski's Three Parrot Tuips (2004)Courtesy of Modernback

Art Fair City

Holly Myers
Los Angeles, thriving though its schools, galleries and museums may be, isn’t a city known for art fairs. They’ve come and gone over the years, but between the institutional disorganization of the art world, the virtual absence of political support and the still relatively sluggish collector base, few have managed......
article placeholder

The Coffee Table

Holly Myers
At 16 inches across, 9 pounds and $195, architectural photographer Tim Street-Porter’s Los Angeles (Rizzoli, 240 pages, $195) is a big book for a big subject. Clear the coffee table — you’ll need 3 feet to lay the thing flat, 5 to support the foldout spreads — and take some......

The Wacko Phenomenon

Holly Myers
Looking back on the art world in Los Angeles in the latter half of the 20th century, there’s only one gallery that rivals the sheer cultural impact of the Ferus Gallery in the 1960s, and it’s one that a significant portion of the art-going public has probably never even set......
article placeholder

Human Hand

Holly Myers
Photos by Scott GrollerIt is a sad and disconcerting thing to scan a packet of press materials and see the swelling bibliography of an artist born in 1967, full of debut references in all the right publications — The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Juxtapoz, Flaunt, several exhibition......
article placeholder

Messy, Tactile, Beautiful

Holly Myers
All photos © J. Paul Getty Trust The image that 19th-century mother-turned-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron proudly described as her “very first success” is an unembellished but extraordinary bust-length portrait of a 7-year-old girl named Annie Philpot. Like most of the prints assembled in the retrospective now at the Getty, it’s......
article placeholder

The Collectors

Holly Myers
Rosamond Purcell’s “Two Rooms,” now at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is the result of a peculiar sort of trans-historical liaison. On one side is Purcell, a contemporary Massachusetts-based artist perhaps best known for the photographs she’s taken in natural-history museums; on the other, Olaus Worm, a 17th-century Danish......
article placeholder

White Noise

Holly Myers
It’s not surprising that an exhibition like “Whiteness, A Wayward Construction” — the first of its scale in the country to broach this still largely academic theme — should appear in California, a state where “whites not of Hispanic/Latino origin” are quickly on their way to becoming a minority. If......