Brave New Worlds: Exploration of Space invites you to enter the creative universes of five contemporary artists through sculpturally immersive installations. 

“Motivated by the legacies of Southern California as a place of artistic experimentation, a site for self-fulfillment, and a geographic zone of light and natural resources, these artists use their distinctive spatial languages to construct worlds that both challenge convention and ignite our senses. Projects include those by Kelly Akashi, Gisela Colon, Victoria Fu, Karen Lofgren, and Adee Roberson, with works that represent each artist’s understanding of our bodily connection to the world that surrounds us.:” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“The mission of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature.

Crystal Bridges takes its name from a nearby natural spring and the bridge construction incorporated in the building, designed by world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie. A series of pavilions nestled around two spring-fed ponds house galleries, meeting and classroom spaces, and a large, glass-enclosed gathering hall. Guest amenities include a restaurant on a glass-enclosed bridge overlooking the ponds, a Museum Store designed by architect Marlon Blackwell, and a library featuring more than 50,000 volumes of art reference material. Sculpture and walking trails link the museum’s 120-acre park to downtown Bentonville, Arkansas.

Crystal Bridges acknowledges and pays respect to the Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw people and elders past, present and future, offering deep gratitude to the ancestral land and water that supports it.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“ComplexCon is a catalyst for creative collaboration between the most influential people and the hottest brands that move our culture forward. This groundbreaking festival and exhibition brings together pop culture, music, art, food, sports, innovation, activism, and education. ComplexCon launched in Chicago this July and returns to Long Beach in November. Shop hundreds of exclusive releases from the most sought-after brands, catch stunning live performances, watch inspiring talks from the most influential minds in our culture, and experience the future through the most immersive and ambitious pop culture experience yet.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Gagosian is pleased to present On the Eve of Never Leaving, new drawings and sculptures by Tatiana Trouvé. This is her first exhibition in Los Angeles.

In her large-scale drawings, cast and carved sculptures, and site-specific installations, Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, pitting the ceaseless flow of time against the remarkable endurance of common objects. Combining fragments from both natural and constructed ecosystems, she creates hauntingly familiar realms in which forest, street, studio, and dream coalesce.

“On the Eve of Never Leaving” is a translation of “Na Véspera de Não Partir Nunca,” the title of a poem by Álvaro de Campos, one of the many heteronyms of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). De Campos’s deeply melancholic writings often deal with notions of time and nothingness; they are hymns to the existential void. Trouvé—attuned to the ways in which journeys, physical and spiritual, can circle back on themselves—visually collapses past and future, echoing Pessoa’s linguistic paradoxes in uncanny material form.” per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985

“With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery. Pattern and Decoration artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s. This exhibition traces the movement’s broad reach in postwar American art by including artists widely regarded as comprising the core of the movement, such as Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Miriam Schapiro; artists whose contributions to Pattern and Decoration have been underrecognized, such as Merion Estes, Dee Shapiro, Kendall Shaw, and Takako Yamaguchi; as well as artists who are not normally considered in the context of Pattern and Decoration, such as Emma Amos, Billy Al Bengston, Al Loving, and Betty Woodman. Though little studied today, the Pattern and Decoration movement was institutionally recognized, critically received, and commercially successful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The overwhelming preponderance of craft-based practices and unabashedly decorative sensibilities in art of the present-day point to an influential P&D legacy that is ripe for consideration.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Originated by The Broad, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is the largest exhibition to date of internationally acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat’s approximately 30-year career. Taking its title from a poem by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the exhibition (which presents over 230 photographs and eight immersive video installations works) offers a rare glimpse into the evolution of Neshat’s artistic journey as she explores topics of exile, displacement, and identity with beauty, dynamic formal invention, and poetic grace. Beginning with her early photograph series, Women of Allah, the exhibition also features iconic video works such as Rapture, Turbulent, and Passage, monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings and The Home of My Eyes, and Land of Dreams, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two videos that will make its global debut in the exhibition.

Throughout her career, Neshat has constructed poetic worlds in which women and men navigate narratives that mirror interior and political realities. Inside of and against these metaphoric worlds, Neshat studies the specifics of both individual and cultural gestures and poses, often assembling and interviewing real people who have lived through some of the most turbulent events of recent history, including the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring in Egypt.

Neshat’s 2001 collaboration with composer Philip Glass, Passage, will act as a pivot in the exhibition from Neshat’s early, personal work made specifically about living outside of Iran during some of the most turbulent times in the country’s history to new bodies of work which reflect universally on seismic global political events such as 9/11, the Arab Spring, and the current xenophobia in the United States over immigration. Four galleries in the exhibition feature work never-before-seen in the United States, including a body of portraits made in Iran that Neshat has never shown publicly.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“The Fahey/Klein Gallery is proud to present Volume 3, a solo exhibition of works by renowned photographer Frank Ockenfels. This exhibition is a celebration of Frank Ockenfels 3’s long career and an analysis into his personal collaged journals, featured in his first publication Frank Ockenfels 3, Volume 3.

The works of Frank Ockenfels 3, on view in this exhibition, provide a window into his visual thinking. Subjected to ink, collage, or paint, the images are no longer just photographs of an individual, but become a more personal statement of who the artist is, of his psyche, and as such, creative artistry in its purest form. The erotic, the sublime, and the violent collages are blended with portraiture that seamlessly complement each other. The photographic creations become tactile, bringing another dimension of sensory experience. His photographs are a “re-presentation” of what he saw through the lens.

Frank Ockenfels 3 is propelled by a drive and curiosity to discover an image that is not yet known. Simultaneously, he creates a visual language that speaks from the most primal and dark corners of his mind. He produces waking dreams, images that represent the darkest, least-illuminated aspects of his unconscious – projected on the individual he has photographed. He has the courage to go way beyond the expected and the obvious; breaking the boundaries of traditional photography.

Frank Ockenfels 3 does not play it safe, and as a result, he is very effective at evoking from the viewer aspects of their own psyche of which they may or may not be aware. One cannot help but feel a resonance with the chaotic vibrancy of his creativity. He leaves the imprint of his unconscious on the photographic image.

Frank Ockenfels 3 is an American photographer, artist, and director. He is renowned for his portraiture and incorporating non-photographic elements in his work. Ockenfels applies techniques like collage, painting, and drawing to his photographs. His career began working for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Spin, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and Vogue. He photographed over 200 album covers for various musicians.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“On October 10, UTA Artist Space and Carpenters Workshop Gallery hosted a conversation between Verhoeven Twins and Studio Drift, moderated by LALA Editor-In-Chief Jessica Kantor, ahead of their collaborative exhibition “Dark Fantasy.”  Curated by Ashlee Harrison and Natalie Kovacs, the exhibition marks the West Coast expansion of Carpenters Workshop Gallery. The blue chip design gallery treated it like a lavish housewarming party with a star-gazing finish at Eugenio Lopez’s compound.” – per website

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Mary Corse: A Survey in Light

“Mary Corse’s first solo museum survey is a long overdue examination of this singular artist’s career. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Corse emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. This focused exhibition will highlight critical moments of experimentation as Corse engaged with tropes of modernist painting while charting her own course through studies in quantum physics and complex investigations into a range of “painting” materials. The survey will bring together for the first time Corse’s key bodies of work, including her early shaped canvases, freestanding sculptures, and light encasements that she engineered in the mid-1960s, as well as her breakthrough White Light Paintings, begun in 1968, and the Black Earth Series that she initiated after moving in 1970 from downtown Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon, where she lives and works today.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese language did not have a word for fine art. The word bijutsu was constructed, combining Chinese characters bi, for beauty, and jutsu, for craft. This hybrid term reveals the unique trajectory of Japanese contemporary art, different from the foundations of contemporary art in the West.

Tokyo Pop Underground, curated by Tokyo gallerist Shinji Nanzuka, explores the complex history of Japanese contemporary art from the 1960s to the present through the works of seventeen artists who emerged from pop and underground culture.

Shinji Nanzuka explains that “originally in Japan, most of what is referred to as art are practical items, developed together and in integration with popular culture.” He cites examples from calligraphy to folding screens, paintings on sliding paper doors, lacquerware, netsuke, and the Ukiyo-e prints that served as posters and commercial portraits. He also mentions art historian Naoyuki Kinoshita’s study of intricately realistic handicrafts such as iki-ningyou, life-like dolls that were made for exhibitory performances. Nanzuka’s mission in this exhibition is to present contemporary artistic commentaries on this Japanese artistic heritage.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson