Shana Nys Dambrot

Donn Delson is an aerial photographer with the eye of a painter and the heart of an adventurer. His large-format prints capture the scale and perspective of his view from the helicopter without doors that serves as his airborne studio. But it’s his dashing sense of wonder that animates the process of making the familiar world into a strange and magical sight, tricking the mind and delighting the eye. A series of new works open May 9 at Axiom Contemporary in Santa Monica....

Rollicking technicolor fauvism, intricate cut paper interiors, performance-derived photographs, and flirty sculpture mix things up in the current exhibition at Hollywood’s Show Gallery. Les Amoureuses, or The Lovers, takes its title from the female form of the noun, a nod to the casual collective of female artists who have produced the installation. Works by Olivia Fougeirol, Francesca Gabbiani, Marie Peter-Toltz, and Joséphine Wister Faure are on view through May 4....

A marvel of projection-mapping and beat-syncing, strobes, colors, smoke and illusion accompanied a few tracks from the album. A large stone monolith stood at the center of the room, audiences arrayed on the grass in a circle around it, as a series of increasingly complex moving images — from the psychedelic to the fractal, natural to architectural — created a parade of optical illusions, smash-bang drops and meditative interludes....

Robert Russell’s painting style is a kind of dreamy realism, wherein observation, experience, optical phenomenon and art history all blend into a seamless, fantastical critique of how we absorb and process information. Narratives that emerge resemble familiar reality — for, in fact, they are based upon it — and yet through the operations of pigment and perspective, Russell generates a version of the known that is both familiar and urgently strange....

If the exhibition names and themes of this weekend’s gallery offerings are any indication, it seems that the Los Angeles art world has embraced the advent of mainstream cannabis culture — or at the very least, the popularity of the 4/20 "high holiday" — with enthusiasm. From a blacklight gallery tour to a stoner-friendly sewing circle, a menagerie of clay characters, shows called things like The Reality of Illusions, Further, Chemtrails, Peripheries, Collapse, Sway and Consumed… well, you get the idea. From the arts district to the South Bay, it’s time to get your open mind art game all rolled up....

Brandon Boyd's new game, Deux Portes/Two Doors, was inspired by the popularity of an ongoing painting series called Portals. Made with watercolor and ink on paper, these 5-by-5-inch squares, largely from 2017 and 2018, enact an infinite set of variations on Boyd's favorite way of making art — part chance, part attentive discovery....

Released today on Amazon Prime, “From Bottom to Top” is a new series of micro-documentaries pairs artists in engaging, informal and far-ranging conversations — across both disciplines and circumstance. The project represents a unique partnership between filmmakers Bel Deliá and Annalea Fiachi and the Skid Row-based arts program Studio 526 and the People Concern....

Carmen Argote works across disciplines of sculpture, installation, performance, painting and all the in-betweens, to explore idea about architecture, the body, and the intersection of personal and shared histories. Poetically and substantially merging allegorical and aspirational structures with real, inhabited architecture, Argote generates sculptural incidents from experience and residency. In this way, immigration, cultural symbolism, and the assertively hand-rendered manifest as large-scale yet intimate spatial activations. She sends greetings from Guadalajara, where she is working on an exhibition opening this month....