June Editor’s Picks

As we break from Snap Reviews for the summer,
enjoy monthly curated picks from our editors across exhibitions,
books, food, TV, and more.

Exhibitions

Christine Howard Sandoval at Parrasch Heijnen
May 27–July 16, 2022

Christine Howard Sandoval, Niniwas- to belong here (installation view) (2022). Single-channel video with audio, 9 minutes and 1 second; edition of 3. Sound design in collaboration with Luz Fleming. Image courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen.

Walking into Christine Howard Sandoval’s exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen immediately transports you into the artist’s perspective. A large video projection, which was filmed with a bodycam mounted to Howard Sandoval’s head, spans the first gallery. The camera looks down over her body as she walks barefoot across the caked earth around Mission Soledad, a Spanish mission in the Salinas Valley that settled on Chalon/Ohlone land. Howard Sandoval’s methodical, first-person tracing of the land reads as a type of reclamation, a connection to her Indigenous identity wherein memory—as well as trauma—are rooted first and foremost in the body.

Sculptural mounds made from paper and rich brown adobe span the next gallery, recalling vernacular architecture and the ancient craft of basketry. The fragility of the paper forms belies the rigid strength of the dried adobe, which maintains a soft, malleable appearance even as it weaves complex, lattice-like layers. In Split Metate, between two worlds (2022), the woven mound is split into two mirroring shapes that nestle together but never touch—a profound representation of a severed relationship with the land.

Howard Sandoval extends her exploration of adobe and paper to large drawings in which she uses tape to apply the clay in regimented lines and grids. The caked adobe clings to the paper substrate and chips away in certain areas, leaving behind a ghostly print. Reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s minimal explorations of land and meditation, these drawings seem to be studies of land that has been segmented and ordered, like crop circles and neat squares of farmland viewed from an airplane. But the exhibition’s title, the green shoot that cracks the rock, suggests the potential for the land, and those connected to it, to rebel against the oppressive order that has all but overtaken it.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland,
and Contemporary Works from LACMA
at Charles White Elementary
November 27, 2021–July 30, 2022

Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA (installation view) (2022). Los Angeles County Museum of Art at Charles White Elementary School Gallery, 2021–22. Image courtesy of the artists and LACMA. Photo: Brica Wilcox; © Museum Associates/LACMA.

LACMA’s current exhibition at Charles White Elementary in MacArthur Park, Family Album, highlights photographs by Dannielle Bowman and Janna Ireland alongside a selection of works by contemporary artists of color from the museum’s permanent collection. Presented in a variety of ways (in store-bought frames, glass vitrines, and as projections), the photographs contend with what it means to create visual records of family and community. The show presents nuanced and focused, yet distinct visions of community that feel particular to this city and its accompanying history of displacement, segregation, and violence.

Bowman’s rich and evocative black-and-white photographs are a standout. They tend less toward classical portraiture than the rest of the works on view, though the presence or proximity of people is always intimately felt. In Inglewood I (2019), a basketball in an otherwise bare backyard sits nearly in shadow before a puzzle of intersecting fences, brick walls, roofs, and power lines.

The gallery’s second room deals in the past, including works by artists like Star Montana, Sandra de la Loza, Leslie Hewitt, Mercedes Dorame, and José Manuel Fors, whose practices involve the re-photographing or re-presenting of archival found and family images. (The room also includes photos by the inimitable Deanna Lawson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Laura Aguilar, whose contributions to the genre cannot be overstated.)

Nearby, a series of 35 mm slides by Zora J Murff are mounted in a Kodak Carousel projector. For the duration of my visit, the projector whirred and clacked rhythmically, cycling through the images, but none were visible on the wall. In the context of the show, for me, it prompted a meditation on what can and cannot be accessed in the case of certain kinds of vernacular photographs, about the emotional weight they can carry, and what they are capable of conjuring in those who were present for their making or those who otherwise love their subjects. The role of these pictures is such that they transcend art.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Vian Sora at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
June 4–July 16, 2022

Vian Sora, An (2022). Oil and mixed media on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

At first glance, Vian Sora’s works look like cosmic implosions. Flat, organic forms act as viewfinders for boisterous textures that resemble bubbling, oozing acid; wet, dense cement; and hazy cosmic dust.  But Subduction, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, does not speak of intergalactic or otherworldly realms. Rather, it pertains to the entropic and ever-changing geological processes of the earth.

From the Latin prefix, “sub-,” meaning under, the process of subduction occurs when two plates collide, causing one to thrust beneath the other before it is recycled into the earth’s mantle. Iraq, Sora’s native country, sits on a portion of the Arabian plate and forms part of a massive and complex zone of continental conflict. Drawing a parallel between Iraq and subduction zones as sites of collision, Sora’s works ruminate on the forces that feed the chaos and instability of the country. Echoing the way in which earthen matter is recycled post-collision, Sora contends that society, too, engages in cyclical processes of regeneration, rebirth, and replenishment.

Sinuous forms found in works such as An, Ki, and Subduction (all 2022), add the human body into this precarious mix. Heads, feet, and limbs morph into textured surfaces and compositions that reflect humankind in the face of social, ecological, and political adversity. But in materializing the entropic forces often unavoidable in life, Sora reminds us that all is not lost. Like two plates, chaos and instability collide with regeneration and rebirth. Regardless of which one plunges beneath, all will eventually be recycled, returning anew.

–Alitzah Oros

Reading 

As a serial multitasker and someone who generally loves what I do (even as I am endlessly overworked), Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back has been like a cool salve, coaxing me towards more days spent with my toes in the sand and fewer staring at the computer. The book charts the ways that the American system has exploited our labor, luring us to believe the myth that work is equal to love. Winding through the conventions of the nuclear family, domestic work, academia, nonprofit, and arts work, Jaffe suggests that our labors of love are siloing us into endless work and, ultimately, isolating us from community. “The compulsion to be happy at work…,” she writes, “is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love.”¹

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

I recently reread Kelly Pendergrast’s great essay “Screen Memories,” published last year in Real Life, which proposes that screenshots are part of the essential vernacular photographic language of our time. “The screenshot is a gesture that lays claim to the act of seeing,” Pendergrast writes—one that grabs visual information in a way that feels slightly antithetical to the swaths of the (largely) image-based internet that are mediated, owned, regulated, and mined by corporations.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Back in February, my professor gifted us several issues of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Journal. I’m just getting around to reading them now. My favorite bits are the “Acquisitions” and “New Collections” sections at the very back of the journal—the half-page blurbs give context and/or details about the newest additions to the archive. They’re short, sweet, and perfect for my summertime goldfish brain. 

–Alitzah Oros

Eating 

My husband and I recently tried Holbox after a neighbor mentioned consuming it religiously during the early pandemic, when takeout was a small glimmer of normalcy. It’s no wonder that Jonathan Gold included this spot, nestled inside the bustling Mercado La Paloma, in his annual 101 list—the ceviche is slathered in lime and avocado; the fish tacos are little pockets of joy; and even the rice and beans sing with a unique limey flavor. In recent months, Holbox has cemented itself as a regular in our takeout lineup. 

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

I’m well overdue for a visit to The Goat Mafia, which I discovered in last year when a friend and I tried to eat our way through the entirety of L.A. Taco’s annual “Taco Madness” lineup in a single weekend. They specialize in birria, but I still think about the goat cheese and beet quesadilla, topped with dill and drizzle of agave, that I ate last year while they temporarily operated out of their front yard. It has come to my attention that they can now be found at DTLA’s Smorgasburg on Sundays, where you can also now find me.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Less than one mile from my home is heaven in the form of a Lebanese restaurant. They have this otherworldly garlic sauce that you can order a to-go container of for five bucks. Since making this discovery, I’ve found a way to consume it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Between you and me, I’ve also definitely just grabbed a spoon and gone at it—lights off, the fridge still open—as if it were some tangy, garlicky ice cream of my dreams. I love you, Open Sesame.

–Alitzah Oros

Watching 

I was overjoyed when season 2 of Hacks came out last month. There is something electric about the dynamic between Deborah Vance, the wealthy has-been Vegas comedian expertly played by Jean Smart, and Ava, the self-assured, bisexual, Gen Z comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder) who is hired to write jokes for Vance in hopes of making her act more relevant to a changing world. The show explores the generational divide between the two characters—which often manifests in the exploitative working conditions and verbal abuse Vance slings onto Ava—yet the two have a bizarre connection and tenderness that always seems to win out.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Not a niche recommendation by any stretch, but after the new season pulled off the villain origin story reveal that Game of Thrones couldn’t, I’ve begun a complete series rewatch of the spooky and always delightful Stranger Things.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Per Erin’s recommendation, I’ve started watching Ozark and I’m so incredibly invested. It’s funny—I feel like Jason Bateman is always in chaotic situations, trying to pick up the pieces. Except in Juno. He was the chaotic one in Juno.

–Alitzah Oros

Alitzah Oros is an art historian currently based in Los Angeles.

More by Alitzah Oros

Erin F. O’Leary is a writer, editor, and photographer from the Midwest and raised in Maine. A graduate of Bard College, she has lived in Los Angeles since 2018, where she writes about photography and image culture.

More by Erin F. O'Leary

Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and founder and editor-in-chief of Carla. She is an arts correspondent for KCRW. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013.

More by Lindsay Preston Zappas