Shana Nys Dambrot

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....

To the degree that every contemporary art museum is an Instagram stage these days, the emergence of unapologetically social media-oriented art projects was probably inevitable. We live in a world where LACMA (home of “Urban Light”) has an Instagram artist in residence, and the Broad (home of that ridiculous Koons) launched itself with Influencer events. So then it almost makes sense that it’s now a world that also panders to the insta-glam impulse — and L.A. is definitely part of the trend....

In case you haven't heard, there is a very special reason to visit the Coachella Valley over the next two weeks. No, besides that. The 2019 edition of the sprawling Desert X land art biennial ends on Sunday, April 21, and if you haven't made the trek, it's time to make your plans....

Artist Gregory Siff was an early (like, Tumblr early) believer in the power of social media to communicate with audiences and connect with the world. But like many artists, his relationship to Instagram is increasingly complex, full of promise, fraught with peril, and indelibly requisite. His persona and his art both express a unique blend of urbanity and nostalgia, with pop-byte poetry and expressionist gesture that is graphic, photogenic and sweetly charismatic. As Siff looks to a spate of upcoming projects, L.A. Weekly spoke to the artist about the role that social media has played in his life and career....

The new edition of the Joshua Treenial art festival is this weekend, April 12-14. Along the Pioneertown/Joshua Tree/29 Palms continuum, with a gathering and performance hub at BOXOProjects, a proliferation of art exhibitions, installations, land-art happenings and studio tours all highlight the affecting landscape and the unbounded creativity of its inspired denizens....

York Chang is a unique presence in the L.A. Art world, a consummate practitioner of multidextrous concept-driven painting and sculpture who is also a practicing lawyer. Although his art is not about legal matters in a direct or political sense, his intentions are to break down information overload to arrive at more fundamental, if fractured, truths about human experience. Between fiction and social discourse, information and empathy, truth and truthiness, the mixed media paintings, collages, photography, appropriations and meta-narratives he generates do that thing art does best — using artifice to get back to reality....

Source Material, the company Samantha Shay founded in Iceland and New York after attending CalArts in Los Angeles, is a revolving extended family of interdisciplinary music, visual and theater artists. Shay’s desire to take aim at the king, so to speak, came from the impulse to re-examine the classics through modern filters, not only to topple the past but to engage the future....

The outdoor limited-run land-art sculpture “Desert Sea” by Cristopher Cichocki is on view outdoors every day and night through May 5, offering a changing sculpture of plants, fossils and environmental and studio art materials that is both alluring and eerie, organic and alien. The multimedia performance “Circular Dimensions” activates the work with a one-night-only event on April 6. And nearby, Jeff Frost’s video-art masterpiece “California on Fire” screens Thursdays through Saturdays through April 20 inside a repurposed stable....

Thinking now about the global street-art craze, it’s worth remembering a time not so long ago when even its most beloved practitioners were, at best, marginalized by the art world and, at worst, criminalized by society. When Corey Helford Gallery opened in Culver City in April 2006, the manifestation of its owners’ personal love for the progressive urban and pop surrealists they had been collecting and supporting for years, it seemed to be an anomaly. In retrospect, it was actually a pioneer....