Today’s article is brought to you from our friends at the Huffington Post. Do you remember your first time you saw dry ice? Mine was in a punch bowl as part of a Halloween school dance. There was something inherently magical about the material; when I first encountered it I kept blinking, waiting for what looked like an illusion to reveal itself. Watching Judy Chicago’s[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “A kiss puts form into slow and stretchy motion,” writes Sylvia Lavin. A kiss “renders geometry fluid.” Our relationship to buildings can be like that too — slow, stretchy, fluid. So Lavin suggests in Kissing Architecture, her new book with a bright pink cover and a delightfully sensual take on architectural criticism.[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In one of the snapshots Miranda Grosvenor sent to her famous beaus, she appears blurry and blond, sitting in a convertible parked with its front end in the street and back end on the grass of somebody’s manicured lawn. In this and other photos, she is always alone, and always suspiciously attractive,[.....]

In grad school, my studio was kiddie-corner from Feodor (or Theo) Voronov’s. I was always there and he was there more often than I was. I respect smart people who do the work, or people who are smart because they do the work, and seeing them get better and better and get recognized for it is sort of a thrill — it means the world[.....]

Modernity—in all its West-centric incarnations—has been debated, deliberated and disputed since the last feudal lord packed it in.  Baudelaire lambasted the arbitrary parameters that dictate “advanced” civilization; Machiavelli’s antecedents celebrated them. The very notion of a “modern” world results in a perpetual discourse on the factors that prescribe it. Within the walls of Ambach & Rice‘s new Los Angeles gallery, the dialogue persists with Alon[.....]

For the moment, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time is Betye Saar’s installation Red Time, 2011, at Roberts and Tilton.  Saar has transformed the middle room of the gallery into a shrine for past, present, and future, painting Roberts and Tilton’s interior room a bright red and allowing a variety of her customary assemblage works to act as friends and neighbors to[.....]

#Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Politics, Arts, and Culture #Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts.  Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com. Ten years ago today, on September 11, 2001, at 5:46 am Pacific Standard Time, I was asleep in the semi-darkness of an Oregon dawn.  I was still[.....]