Peter Frank

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Joan Tanner

Peter Frank
No paint is apparent in Santa Barbara artist Joan Tanner’s installation “On Tenderhooks”; unfinished plywood and various forms of plastic predominate. Every shape, every object, has been found in the street, appropriated from the store shelf or fabricated in the studio — or a combination thereof. The scale jumps from......
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Knock, Knock – Whose Home

Peter Frank
Does it all boil down to real estate? It sure seems to in California, and artists — always the unwitting tool of gentrification — tend to be sensitive to this cruel fact. “Knock, Knock — Whose Home?” rounds up commentary in various forms on the personal and political passions of......
Isis Rodriguez

All in the Family, Isis Rodriguez

Peter Frank
Artists breed artists in the bedroom as well as in the classroom, and Los Angeles boasts its own painterly dynasties. “All in the Family” traces four local lineages, reintroducing stalwarts of the scene and their brood. Ann Thornycroft shows fitfully these days, so it’s good to see her limpid cubo-geometries......
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Leyla Cárdenas, Block Party, Works on Paper By

Peter Frank
Leyla Cárdenas isn’t just another UCLA art star, she was born, raised and still lives in Bogotá, and her MFA years up here only heightened the urban tropicalísmo that suffuses her work. The tactility of distressed surfaces — pavement, warehouse doors, the walls of shabby houses — impels Cárdenas almost......
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Claire Falkenstein, James Turrell

Peter Frank
As elegant and prickly as their maker, the sculptures of Claire Falkenstein conflate the two dominant directions in postwar abstract art: intricate geometry and expansive gesturality. They also quite consciously emulate nature — specifically, plant formation — while also quite consciously avoiding its imitation. But in the selection here, a......
Courtesy Solway Jones

Ben Patterson

Peter Frank
Fluxus artist Ben Patterson’s latest exploration, reconstituted as an installation in cast concrete and flowing water, traces a small and crucial phenomenon on the earth’s surface: the Los Angeles River. Patterson recapitulates the course of the river through our urban environment in five grooved slabs, each elliptically documenting a stretch......
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Suzan Woodruff, ernest Silva

Peter Frank
The thinned acrylic pigments Suzan Woodruff has sent coursing across her surfaces with ever more voluptuous abandon have clearly followed their own natural course. They form rills, deltas, waves and eddies, as would any fluid leaving residue. But, however much we see and recognize this, our eyes insist on reading......
David Reed

David Reed, Eli Langer

Peter Frank
The painterly gesture plays a crucial role in David Reed’s art, even in the rough-hewn landscapes the New York painter realized early in his now four-decade career. Whether thick and slathery, as in his works from the ’70s, or fluid and translucent, as in the more recent canvases, Reed’s broad......
Helen Pashgian

Stepping Into the Light

Peter Frank
Practitioners of a supposedly superannuated aesthetic, veteran light-and-space cadets Helen Pashgian and Lita Albuquerque forge ahead with confidence, brilliance and more than a touch of magic. Albuquerque’s photographs document her earthworks, realized with vast applications of colored pigment to everything from the desert to the Washington Mall. Albuquerque flies into......
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Steve Tobin, Hagop Hagopian

Peter Frank
Steve Tobin, a many-faceted sculptor, began his career as a ceramist, and has returned to the earth to — well, to blow it up. Tobin fashions vessels of various sizes, details their skins, and then, instead of firing them, sets off depth charges in their bowels, practically turning them inside......