Matt Lipps’ newest body of work HORIZON/S, flips the traditional mode of institutional curating on its head. In this series, Lipps appropriates content from a late 1950s arts and culture publication that promises to offer a curated selection of international culture that will add a sense of sophistication to anyone’s taste. From these images, Lipps’ playfully explores what happens to the meaning of certain objects[.....]

Currently on view, through March 7, 2010, is the multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition, An Idea Called Tomorrow. Showing concurrently at both the Skirball Cultural Center and at the California African American Museum (CAAM), the exhibition features the work of fifteen contemporary artists who “imagine what a civil future looks like,” according to the press release, as the show seeks to inspire visitors to “reflect upon[.....]

This past Sunday, December 13th, distinguished California based photographer Larry Sultan died of cancer.  He was born in New York in 1946, but moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1949. He received a BA from University of California Santa Barbara in 1968 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1973. It was at SFAI that he met the artist Mike Mandel, with[.....]

Kathy Aoki is currently presenting a solo show at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery entitled The Museum of Historical Makeovers. In her faux-museum exhibition, Aoki takes on the role of a curator from the year 3011 at a cultural history museum. The exhibition specifically follows Gwen Stefani as if humanity has uncovered artifacts from her clothing lines and accepted them as culturally significant. The museum consists of several sculptural works[.....]

Josh Azzarella Untitled #27 (Unknown Rebel) (2006), Video Mark Moore Gallery has been organizing its annual Ultrasonic exhibitions for four years now, featuring emerging artists from the U.S. and elsewhere. This year’s installment, Ultrasonic IV: Fresh Perspectives, more subdued than its high-strung title suggests, seems to confront the present through the lens of the past, rephrasing visual legacies in a way that suggests nostalgia can[.....]

The ethos of the American landscape has been and continues to be a subject of great fascination among thinkers in any field or interest. The country’s flora and fauna intrigue even the most oblivious due to their extreme diversity and limitlessness. It is of little surprise then that an artist, in this case, painter Jake Longstreth, has chosen the American landscape as the launching-off point[.....]

The paintings of artist Jim Gaylord push the boundaries of identified space and the ambiguity of object relation. Referencing elements of traditional surrealism, Gaylord updates his method of creation by distilling information from film stills. Using several layers of transparent film, the artist is able to render specific elements in the found image that reduces the still down to spatial planes, shadows and general landscape[.....]