Sakura (safety cones on panel) Golden Leaves (safety cones on panel) Neopolitan (safety cones on panel) Arctic Slush Ethnomorphic Landscapes Grass for Klimt

Sustainable art? Ethnomorphic Landscapes by Lana Shuttleworth. 

She created these wonderful pieces using cut-up traffic cones and other found material.  Her art begs the question:  how can we as a society continue to live in harmony with nature if we continue producing plastic junk? 

These landscapes are part of a selected group show that opened last weekend at George Billis Gallery in LA and continues through June 16.  George Billis, of course, has previously established a successful contemporary art gallery in NYC before opening the one at 2716 S. La Cienega Blvd in LA.  Be sure to stop by for a visit. 

The art of Sesame Street.

This short showing at Known Gallery in Los Angeles over the weekend featured an impressive lineup of artists including Dabs & Myla, Evol, Jasper Wong, Jeff McMillan, Mark Dean Veca, Kelsey Brookes, Anthony Lister, Augustine Kofie, and many more. Proceeds from this group exhibition go to benefit the City of Hope Department of Pediatrics (images from The Seventh Letter).

Currently living and working in NYC, Michael Kagan’s exhibition, I Am My Father’s Son, is showing at Space Gallery SBH in the French West Indies until Apr 14.
Using iconic images of astronauts and rocket launches, in this current series, he plays with the possibilities and power of light. So, sometimes the images appear photo-bleached and other times subdued in softer shadows.  Inspired by artists such as Richter and De Kooning, Kagan experiments with the tension between abstraction and representational painting.
 

Color Photographs from the New Deal (1939-1943):  a collection of amazing photos from the Great Depression. 

On view now until Apr 29, so if you’re in NYC make sure to go and see this unbelievable exhibit at Carriage Trade.  This intro is from their site: 

Largely forgotten until the mid-seventies when they resurfaced in the Library of Congress archives, the color photographs of the Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information (1939-1943) document the later period of FDR’s New Deal, an ambitious series of government programs designed to address the brutal effects of the Great Depression on the social and economic fabric of 1930’s America. While the Library’s archive of black and white depression-era photographs is more familiar and more often reproduced, the color images, taken within three years of the invention of Kodachrome film, are striking for their rich, saturated colors and rigorously formal compositions.

On May 2, famed NYC-based photographer Ryan McGinley is set to open a new exhibition at TEAM Gallery in NYC entitled, Animals. Running until Jun 2, the exhibition is his first and will feature color studio portraits of live animals with nude models.  According to the TEAM website: This body of work has two starkly contrasting sides, epitomized by two of the photographs on view. In the comical Dakota (Marmoset), a tiny monkey hangs from a male model’s pubic hair, partly obscuring his genitals. The human legs and torso are covered in scratches and the marmoset stares directly at the camera, wearing an expression of apparent shock. In Parakeets, a flock of lushly colored birds tears across a blue background while a girl, face obscured by a blurred green and white wing, stretches out her arms in an imitation of flight. The barroom roughhouse of the former and dulcet elegance of the latter act as the exhibition’s counterweights. Where the first piece is grotesque and lascivious, as humorous as it is horrifying, the other — a gushing moment of poetic beauty — strikes a profound emotional and visual harmony. High-res

On May 2, famed NYC-based photographer Ryan McGinley is set to open a new exhibition at TEAM Gallery in NYC entitled, Animals. Running until Jun 2, the exhibition is his first and will feature color studio portraits of live animals with nude models. 

According to the TEAM website:

This body of work has two starkly contrasting sides, epitomized by two of the photographs on view. In the comical Dakota (Marmoset), a tiny monkey hangs from a male model’s pubic hair, partly obscuring his genitals. The human legs and torso are covered in scratches and the marmoset stares directly at the camera, wearing an expression of apparent shock. In Parakeets, a flock of lushly colored birds tears across a blue background while a girl, face obscured by a blurred green and white wing, stretches out her arms in an imitation of flight. The barroom roughhouse of the former and dulcet elegance of the latter act as the exhibition’s counterweights. Where the first piece is grotesque and lascivious, as humorous as it is horrifying, the other — a gushing moment of poetic beauty — strikes a profound emotional and visual harmony.

Outdoor art installations by Chris Engman.

Engman’s work undoubtedly begs closer examination.  It calls attention to our misperceptions—the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think, and how we think we see and think we think—and the inconstant and constructed nature of memory.  He takes the human condition as a central theme and examines the illusive and unknowable nature of reality.

Engman is currently exhibiting at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles as part of “Dualities, Omissions, Loops, and Ruptures: Chris Engman, Cody Trepte, Samantha Roth, and John Houck”, an exhibition of four LA-based artists on view at the gallery until Apr 7.

Unreal Estate:  Austin-based artist Tim Doyle’s debut solo show at Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco.

The show runs from Feb 3 till Feb 23. His collection shows locations that we all know and love, but can never actually visit in that they only exist in our pop culture memory. As Doyle says:

“Some of us have been going to these places for decades - some of these places were taken from us, way too soon.”

Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali

German-born artist Anselm Kiefer lives and works in France and Portugal. He is currently presenting ‘Il Mistero delle Cattedrali’, an 11,000 square foot installation at the White Cube Bermondsey Gallery in London, until Feb 26. 

Kiefer’s mixed media exhibition explores the idea of alchemy and spans four decades of the artist’s work including several sculptures and paintings formed from a variety of materials such as terracotta, resin, copper, oil, rubber, salt, paint, lead, steel and all manner of organic material. He balances powerful imagery with acute critical analysis and many of his featured pieces investigate themes of mythology or religion, and the period of Nazism in his homeland’s history.