1.

Barbara T. Smith at ICA LA

On view at the ICA LA is the largest collection of works yet by performance artist Barbara T. Smith, an artist for whom art and life were one and the same. Born in 1931, Smith began to devote herself more fully to her art-making in the mid-60s. Her work often took the form of performance (she’s done over 160 performances across her long career) although her output also ranged across a variety of mediums and methods. Early experiments saw her utilizing a Xerox machine, pressing body parts and various objects to its surface as a means of experimental image-making (even these, while resulting in objects, can be viewed as performative acts). 

In the late ’60s, a divorce resulted in losing custody of her three children, and her performances became a vessel for her to process loss and grief. Often utilizing her own nude body, she experimented with her own limits, sexuality, and vulnerabilities. Across dinner parties, an homage to a giant squash, and later, a durational knitting project, her oeuvre plays with humor and absurdity as much as her personal experience. ICA LA’s extensive exhibition, curated by Jenelle Porter, is an excellent opportunity to dive into the extensive output of an artist who pursued experimentation and vulnerability, melding the messiness of life with her creative output.

On view: October 07, 2023–January 14, 2024 | Open map

2. Edwin Arzeta at Zodiac Pictures

Edwin Arzeta’s new body of work on view at Zodiac Pictures (a new light-filled, Santa-Monica-Beach-adjacent gallery) has a quiet poetry to it. His drawings are unassuming ––in each, delicate pencil marks make up the soft layers of a stacked birthday cake. Flowers or bows bedazzle each layer while the candles that top the confection are hazy and smudged as if in the process of being blown out. This soft ephemerality carries through a handful of sculptural works –– lamps that are wrapped in thin paper that is contoured to their beveled bases. The lamps are plugged in at the gallery, but the light that shines through their translucent wrap is temporary, lasting only until each bulb dies. Afterward, each will live on as a sculptural relic, devoid of its original function. In this way, the work seems to speak to loss as much as tender celebration –– like a helium-filled balloon slowly drifting towards the floor during the afterglow of a party. 

On view: October 22–December 2, 2023 | Open map

3. Empty, Except for the Ghost

Intrigued by an array of broken windows that line the side of an abandoned building near his home in Lincoln Heights, Brody Albert investigated the site further –– the abandoned lot is filled with rocks that passersby chuck through the glass windows, creating an ad hoc communal action drawing. For his new show at Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Albert went about dutifully recreating the windows from the building through an involved process of mold-making and casting. Once the windows were cast in polymer gypsum, he used a water jet cutter to remove the broken shards of glass –– the process mimicking the rupture of throwing rock to window (albeit through more methodical means). In the gallery, the cast windows line one wall, their paned surfaces recalling a minimalist grid while the rhythmic pattern of fissures creates an almost language-like flow.

Another floor-bound sculpture in the gallery is a small cast rolling suitcase that appears to slump in the center under a pool of water. Outfitted with a pump, the epoxy and fiberglass sculpture expunges water to feed the pool every couple of minutes, and it continues to fill and drain on a continuous loop like a dejected fountain. The exhibition, titled Empty, Except for the Ghost, points to traces of life and community, yet also feels skeletal –– recreations of ephemera that only show traces of interaction.

On view: November 5–December 17 | Open map

Fiber art's hidden influence on abstraction

When we speak about abstraction, we often think about paintings that rejected the formalism, figuration, and representation of their forebearers to pursue bold new nonrepresentational forms on canvas. Less talked about are the parallel lineages that have influenced abstraction’s history (no art genre is an island!). LACMA’s woven history does just that, charting a course through fiber’s long history and drawing parallels to abstraction’s progressions. Yet, the exhibition also insists on fiber art as a key medium of artistic exploration, spanning works from 1913 to 2023, charting not just a connection to abstraction but also a kind of interlaced history of fiber artists that is very much alive and well today. I recently talked to Greater LA’s Steve Chiotakis about the exhibition and how it points to trends of weaving and fibers being on the rise in the art world.

Life is Messy 

In a recent piece on Barbara T. Smith for the NY Times, writer Jori Finkel cites the ICA LA exhibition’s curator, Jenelle Porter, who “pointed to something else that sets Smith apart from other performance art pioneers like Abramovic and Carolee Schneemann. ‘One thing that differentiates Barbara for me is that she continually mined her own biography and made work that is not publicity- or market-friendly,’ Ms. Porter said, describing how her work resisted formulas stylistically and materially.”

Finkel goes on: “Ms. Porter tried to capture that range through the mix of videos, drawings, sculptures and ephemera in the show. ‘The show is messy — life is messy,’ she said.”