The German artist Anne Imhof is known for her promiscuous trans-medial practice. Her exhibitions unfold as highly dramatic and immersive environments comprising elements of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, music, and performance – notably, dance. These large-scale works include “Faust,“ which was mounted in the German Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale and won her the Golden Lion. In 2021, Imhof commandeered the entirety of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris with her “Natures Mortes,” a somberly ecstatic effort described by the critic Caroline Busta as “a requiem for twentieth century subculture – if not for the twentieth century, full stop.” Documentary fallout from that exhibition reappears throughout her most recent work. Imhof’s “EMO,” mounted at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles between February 15 and May 6, 2023, was her first in this city, and the largest presentation of her work thus far in the US. In this film, we meet with the artist in the gallery to discuss her working process, which tends to involve close observation of how bodies interact with pictures, objects, and architectures in everyday life. Of particular interest to Imhof is the perspective of youth, to whom the world often appears as an alien construct, yet one that nevertheless must somehow be claimed. “Who owns what? Where is the money going? Where can you be and not be?” she asks. Her work, she suggests, reflects their modes of precarious occupation. It relates to “a generation of people that need to look very carefully.”

Held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art between September 4 and December 18, 2022, the group exhibition “Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising” focuses on the complex relations between fine and applied art in the sphere of publicity. From the early 1970s right up to today, this show traces a genealogy of artists, who work with the tropes of promotional imaging. A broad range of approaches is featured, some critical, some complicit, some ambivalent. Underlying every work on display, however, is a profound sense of affinity. If advertising was invented to sell products we don’t really need, then its ultimate object would have to be art. Yet art must also be sold, and so is implicitly advertising itself. Ultimately, in the words of the curator, Rebecca Morris, “these realms blur … We don’t have these structures up anymore that say, ‘this is art and this is an advertisement’ … I think we have abolished these and I think this show shows us that.” In this film, Morse conducts a walkthrough of her exhibition, narrating its origins, conceptual development, and structural realization. Also included are three featured artists – Carter Mull, Kim Schoen, and Jeffrey Stuker – each of whom provides a unique perspective on the exhibition theme.

Aaron Curry is an artist with a long-standing investment in the forms of modernist abstraction, which he treats fondly and with a certain irreverence. His works in painting and sculpture draw on a long list of art historical precedents, from Paul Klee to Alexander Calder, but are equally indebted to the cartoons of Chuck Jones, punk rock, and BMX bike design. In this film, which was produced on the occasion of Curry’s solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery titled “Metal Plastic Paint” (September 17 – October 22, 2022), the artist discusses his complex negotiations between the realms of high art and popular culture.

The exhibition “Split Diopter” was developed out of a series of conversations between its three curators—Jan Tumlir (Art Theorist/SCI-Arc Art History Faculty), Reza Monahan (Artist/SCI-Arc Channel Producer/Director), and Marcus Herse (Artist/Chapman University Studio Art Faculty)—concerning the relations of fine art and cinema. The principal question they sought to engage with their show is: how do advancements in technical optics impact creative practices? This question was further elaborated in consultation with a range of artists that work with moving-image media.

Their input was factored into a documentary video that comprised one part of the exhibition. The other part consisted of an installation of artworks that together functioned as an “extruded film,” in the curators’ words. The machine for producing the “waking dream” of cinema was dismantled into its constituent elements—still frame, action sequence, mise-en-scene, prop, soundtrack, poster, etc.—each of which was assigned to an individual work of art. Navigating this array of objects in the space of the gallery, viewers were enjoined to imagine their own filmic narrative, while also reflecting on its material means of construction.

Writer and independent curator Michael Ned Holte reflects on “how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith,” an exhibition he organized for the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena. The show is based on the longstanding friendship between Buchanan, Hafif, and Smith, who were part of the first MFA class at UC Irvine from 1969-71. In this film, Buchanan and Smith speak about their involvement in experimental cooperative art spaces such as F-Space in Santa Ana and the Woman’s Building on Grand View in Los Angeles, and their radical, free spirited exploration of unconventional materials, forms, and performance over their decades long careers. The exhibition highlights the divergences as well as the “empathic overlaps” of these three remarkable artists.

Josh Callaghan’s sculptures uncover the relations between commodity and culture, creating humanistic forms out of consumer products. For Callaghan, quotidian objects are a kind of societal gauge; their forms are reflections of our common values and therefore, ourselves. The Night Gallery exhibition featured in this film brings these interests to a markedly more monumental scale. Through the stylized landscape of “Family Tree,” Callaghan utilizes many materials such as camera tripods, sourced and repurposed by the artist to conduct a micro-survey of his shared life, and in turn suggest something essential about human behavior, social structures, and the passage of time.

Artist Kate Newby’s site-responsive practice is rooted in prolonged acts of observation, prolific acts of making, and physical gestures of excavation, insertion, and accumulation. Curiosity and intuition lead her to examining areas where buildings “break down a little bit,” as the artist puts it, and to bringing into view eccentricities and localized details (borrowing a term from writer Maggie Nelson) of a place. Newby uses varying combinations of light, wind, existing architecture, found objects, as well as newly made ones—often produced with the help of local craftspeople or factories—to create temporary, sensorial, open-ended installations that playfully bring the outside in and the inside out.

Black Hole is an artist-run space for audio in Los Angeles. Conceptualized by the artist Micah Silver, Black Hole is an environment where people can “listen to, think and talk about audio materials that are not possible to experience with widely-distributed audio technologies”. Located in Gardena, visitors enter through an unmarked door into the listening room - a black space with speakers mounted throughout. There, they experience their “session”, a time allotted to listen to a particular work.

Simphiwe Ndzube (b.1990, Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Cape Town, South Africa. He received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Ndzube’s work is characterized by a fundamental interplay between objects, media and two-dimensional surfaces; stitching together a subjective account of the Black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective.

Romi Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Their work investigates the personal, political, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world that reduces land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. From building open-source platforms to upend the continued practice of solitary confinement to crafting community-based archives to combat gentrification, their artistic practice investigates cartographies of ancestral intelligence, unassimilable data, algorithmic violence, and blackness.  

Join Jeffrey Deitch Director, Melahn Frierson, and Arts Educator, AJ Girard, as they walk through and reflect on curating their exhibition “Shattered Glass”. The massive 40-person group exhibition features works by Fulton Leroy Washington (a.k.a. Mr. Wash), Kandis Williams, rafa esparza, Shaniqwa Jarvis and Raj Debah, among others. “Shattered Glass” presents empowered narratives that are often made marginalized and overdetermined structurally in art institutions and beyond. 

Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines themes of power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. Baker Cahill’s artwork pushes the boundaries of visuality, redefining what it means to be a digital artist working in public space. Her spatial creations are often presented in augmented reality (AR) and are accessed via her free app, 4th Wall. Through the app, Baker Cahill has created a platform where viewers can immerse themselves in her virtual artwork as well as the work of other artists. As a curator, Baker Cahill uses 4th Wall to explore resistance and creative inclusion, by collaborating with other artists and inviting them to share urgent concerns or untold stories.

Raed Yassin (born 1979, Beirut) is an artist and musician whose work often originates from an examination of his personal narratives and their position within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. He graduated from the theater department at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003, and since then has developed his conceptual practice through multiple mediums, including video, sound, photography, text, sculpture and performance. In one of his largest and most recent works “The Sea Between My Soul,” installed at the Onassis Stegi Foundation in Athens Greece, Raed Yassin’s hyper-disciplinary practice evolves into a multi-sensory theatrical performance and sculptural extravaganza. A rock musical performed by taxidermy animals, “The Sea Between My Soul” crosses boundaries between installation and theater, music and light, life and death and is a morbid reflection on the long-standing history of fatalities in the Mediterranean Sea.  

Join Canadian artist Kelly Jazvac and geologist Patricia Corcoran as they discuss the global problem of plastics pollution and their collaborative work to address it. Jazvac, Corcoran, and oceanographer Charles Moore introduced the now ubiquitous term “plastiglomerate” in a 2014 article published in GSA Today, based on field research conducted on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii. Since then, Jazvac and Corcoran have helped to found the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary group of artists, scientists, and others working to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes region. As Jazvac points out, simply recycling plastic is not a feasible solution, given the overwhelming amounts dumped into the environment. More awareness-raising and engagement with communities, governmental agencies, the plastics industry as well as practitioners from various disciplines are needed to tackle the deeply entangled problem of plastics pollution. 

Artist, designer and educator, Shona Kitchen, uses digital, analog and biological elements to forage through different technological landscapes. In her work, Kitchen explores the psychological, social and environmental consequences of technological advancement and failure. Whether creating a surveillance system for a school of fish or a tidal monitoring sign for a creek-bed, she uses her work to provocatively critique our relationship with natural and technological worlds in order to speculate about what could be. Kitchen’s work spans public art, conceptual narrative proposals, book works, exhibitions and interactive sculpture/installation. Her practice is frequently collaborative, research-based and site-specific. Her projects often function as imagined propositions, and/or alternate or future histories. Kitchen’s work reveals and subverts the unseen technological forces in the world around us to expose our shifting role as creators, consumers and unwitting victims of technology.

Join Los Angeles-based artist Clarissa Tossin in conversation with Kavior Moon [Liberal Arts faculty, SCI-Arc] in this latest SCI-Arc Channel film as they discuss colonialist histories, counter-narratives, and notions of futurity in relation to Tossin’s wide-ranging works. Tossin’s interdisciplinary practice fluidly moves between sculpture, video, performance, and photography to consider the contradictions of modernism, cultural hybridity and translation, as well as possible futures to be excavated from material forms in the present day.

The Israeli-American artist, Noa Yekutieli, explores the notion of narrative formation by engaging various mediums including site-specific installation, manual paper cutting, photography and drawing. Through disassembly and assembly, Yekutieli explores time, decay, and restoration via a cultural and personal lens. The negative space of the paper cuts renders absence visible, attesting to a loss of information or misplaced memories. Mirroring the human desire for control, the paper cutting is a labor-induced effort that doesn’t allow mistakes, it is an irreversible process that emphasizes and demonstrates irreversible destruction.

The “Arabesque” represents a global cultural formation linking together a diverse array of architectural patterns, motifs, geographies, ideologies, and histories. In the exhibition “Arabesque” held at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in Spring 2020, contemporary artist Rayyane Tabet explores alternative understandings of the Arabesque by weaving together the narratives of two relatively little known, but highly important, historical figures: Jules Bourgoin (1838–1908) and Julia Morgan (1872–1957).

Internationally renowned artist Do Ho Suh works across various media to produce drawings, films, and sculptural works that explore notions of memory, displacement, individuality, and collectivity. Suh is widely known for his fabric sculptures that reconstruct former residences in Seoul, Rhode Island, Berlin, London, and New York. Suh is interested in how the body relates to and inhabits space, particularly domestic spaces, and how the concept of home can be represented through architecture.

Step into an immersive sonic journey through artist and musician Jónsi’s first solo exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery on SCI-Arc Channel.

Artist Shirin Neshat discusses “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again” her career spanning exhibition at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Neshat describes how the narratives and characters in her work, based on autobiographical references, are brought to life in combination with the poetic language that is used to shape and express those narratives.

Lauren Bon is an ecological artist and her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

In her work, artist Alice Könitz explores the interaction of institutional structures, systems of display, public participation, and the built and natural environments. In 2012, Könitz founded the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), a nomadic sculpture and experimental exhibition space that began as an open-air pavilion outside her studio in Eagle Rock.

Artist Oscar Tuazon reflects on the role of his project the “Los Angeles Water School [LAWS],” a multi unit structure engaging with the Los Angeles River. For several years LAWS provided a platform for bringing people together around the question of water through exhibitions and panel discussions commencing with a community organized exhibition called Language and a roundtable engaging Tongva histories of the river and indigenous thinking around water.

York Chang: “The Signal and the Noise” considers relationships between images and text, and ways in which collective action is influenced by public spectacle and new forms of propaganda. In this project, Chang employs mixed media strategies, appropriating newspapers, graphic displays, found images, and sculpture, to create an immersive environment with artworks that question how information is disseminated and consumed.

An exhibition walkthrough of Guillermo Kuitca’s recent exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles with artist Analia Saban and SCI-Arc Director/CEO Hernan Diaz Alonso. Kuitca’s theatrical paintings include layered information from architectural plans and cartographic maps, exploring themes of dislocation.

Join Kavior Moon [SCI-Arc faculty] as she discusses Zoe Leonard’s recent “Survey” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. A mid-career retrospective that included artworks from the mid-1980s to the present, Survey featured a wide-ranging selection of photographs and sculptural installations that address gender and sexuality, subsistence living and the urban environment, and memory and loss. Instead of attempting to attain the “perfect” shot in her photographs (à la Henri Cartier-Bresson), Leonard has continually reworked her photographic and her larger artistic practice through notions of fragmentation, contingency, and complexity.

Please join Yunhee Min [Artist / UC Riverside Faculty] and Peter Tolkin [Partner, TOLO Architecture] on SCI-Arc Channel as they discuss and reflect upon the making of their immersive, site-specific installation “Red Carpet in C” at the Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside.

Los Angeles Gallerist Jeffrey Deitch reflects on the existential aspects of Ai Weiwei: “Zodiac,” the inaugural exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch.

Join SCI-Arc Channel for a glimpse of the recent exhibition ‘Larry Bell. Complete Cubes,’ presented by Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

SCI-Arc Channel joins Tim Ivison to explore the history and transformation of Fritz Haeg’s Salmon Creek Farm. The New York Times says: ‘Salmon Creek Farm is communal living, the 21st-century way. Haeg’s vision is to bring together artists whose work, he says, ‘‘goes beyond conventional studio practice,’’ and who, rather, are ‘‘responding to wilderness and the basics of daily life.’’’

Salmon Creek Farm is located two miles from California’s Mendocino coast on 35 acres of mostly second-growth redwoods. From gardens, meadows and fruit orchard on a ridge-top, the property slopes down to Big Salmon Creek in the valley. A cottage in the orchard is followed by an octagonal sauna, various out-houses and out-buildings, and ten hand-crafted cabins secluded on footpaths throughout the property and across a tributary that bisects the land.

A landmark exhibition, Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ featured more than 120 extraordinary paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by one of America’s greatest artists.

Join Marciano Art Foundation Deputy Director, Jamie G. Manné as she discusses the cinematic and sublime qualities of Olafur Eliasson’s M.A.F. theatre exhibition, “Reality projector.”

Join Artist Nevine Mahmoud for a walkthrough of her recent exhibition f o r e p l a y at M + B Gallery in Los Angeles.

An exhibition walkthrough of Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

Join LAXART Executive Director, Hamza Walker and Deputy Director, Catherine Taft, as they discuss the history of “alternative spaces,” LAXART’s diverse programming and their current exhibition, “Remote Castration.”

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill (Guest Curator – Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985) and Theresa Sotto (Assistant Director Academic Programs - Hammer Museum) discuss the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985. The exhibition focuses on the artistic practices of women artists working in Latin America and US-born women artists of Latino heritage between 1960 and 1985, providing insight into this important period in Latin American history and in the development of contemporary art.

Jan Tumlir and former SCI-Arc faculty member Christopher Michlig break down their recent exhibition at 1301PE Gallery, “Some Like It Cold” - a somber and yet irreverent meditation on the form of the street poster in the age of digitally integrated media.

Jan Tumlir and former SCI-Arc faculty member Christopher Michlig break down their recent exhibition at 1301PE Gallery, “Some Like It Cold” - a somber and yet irreverent meditation on the form of the street poster in the age of digitally integrated media.

SCI-Arc faculty members Marcelyn Gow and Florencia Pita discuss the work of Monika Sosnowska and its connections to brutalist architecture and the projection of multiple histories in a gallery talk on Monika Sosnowska’s recent exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles.

A glimpse inside the Marciano Art Foundation and a look at their Latin American collection featured in Pacific Standard Time LA/LA: Latin American and Latino Art in L.A. with Director Jamie G. Manné.

An exhibition walkthrough of Moholy-Nagy: Future Present at LACMA

Join multimedia artist Won Ju Lim as she details the complex motivations behind her current exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Join SCI-Arc Channel as we take a look inside L.A. based artist Walead Beshty’s studio and his recent Regen Projects exhibition, “Equivalents.”

Experience Sarah Cain’s vivid installation Now I’m Going to Tell You Everything, the inaugural project for the ICA LA’s courtyard wall and step into Skip Arnold’s archival and atmospheric artist’s journey Truffle Hunt.

Curated by New York Sculpture Center curator Sohrab Mohebbi, HARDSCRABBLE, a recent exhibition of Dave Hullfish Bailey’s work at the REDCAT Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles was conceived of as a landscape that forays into four territories where life learning experiments occurred, including Drop City, Colorado and Slab City, near the Salton Sea in California.

A conversation with artist Thomas Linder and SCI-Arc Liberal Arts Coordinator Jake Matatyaou discussing Linder’s recent exhibition at Ibid Gallery in Los Angeles and his current studio practice.

An exhibition walkthrough of Rick Owens Furniture at MOCA Pacific Design Center. Exhibition Curator Rebecca Matalon and Marcelyn Gow discuss the architectural and artistic influences in Rick Owens’ furniture designs.

A glimpse at Ariana Papademetropoulos’ recent exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery, ‘The man who saved a dog from an imaginary fire’.

A conversation with artist Ry Rocklen and Gallery Director Corrina Peipon discussing Rocklen’s recent exhibition L.A.