Deborah Krieger

The conventional wisdom about art in America is that New York is where the art gets made, and then it’s sold in California—in places like Los Angeles. The City of Angels is a city with a large population of wealthy art collectors and a rich cultural history of its own that has never included a particular school or coterie of defining visual artists. Perhaps in response to Los Angeles’s lack of specific painting tradition, Narrative Painting in Los Angeles, currently on view at Santa Monica's Craig Krull Gallery.

The Vision Board, currently on view at Los Angeles’ Kopeikin Gallery, uses photography, painting and other media to elevate “vision board” beyond the kitschy kind of thing you make for your soon-to-be-disregarded New Year’s Resolution. Curated by participating artist Elizabeth Valdez, the show is a powerful display of the necessity of the creative mind, and its unique, unfettered capabilities when it comes to envisioning the future.

The Art of Self-Defense pulls no punches. (There’s the pull quote for the billboard.) It’s a brutal, darkly funny parable of the dangers of toxic masculinity, and a stirring cautionary tale for the sort of men who worry that they aren’t following some circumscribed set of Rules for Men, and who think that the way to becoming the ultimate man is through violence.

It is, unfortunately, a prescient time to show a group of works that examines the history and practices of incarceration in the United States. Americans have short memories when we feel like it; the dominant cultural narrative of American innocence and exceptionalism absolutely crumbles in the face of reality, as explored in ABOLITION NOW!, a group exhibition currently on view at the Asian Arts Initiative.

If you run a Google search for “Stonewall exhibition,” you will find dozens upon dozens of arts and historical venues across the United States that put together shows related (with varying degrees of specificity) to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. In Philadelphia, Stonewall is being commemorated at Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery, in a show of sixty Philadelphia-area queer artists.

It’s just these little touches of maximum effort (oops, wrong Ryan Reynolds movie!) that make Detective Pikachu as strong as it is—that, and, of course, Ryan Reynolds’ energetic, generous voice acting. A talking Pikachu with the voice of Deadpool should not be as absolutely adorable as it is, and yet here we are.

Appropriately for a novel that explores how people relate to one another and to themselves via the use of time travel, Kate Mascarenhas' The Psychology of Time Travel pushes and pulls the reader across various timelines, always keeping us slightly on our toes.

Red Joan has Judi Dench seemingly as the main attraction, but as pretty much every other reviewer has pointed out, that’s quite the red herring; Red Joan, after all, isn’t “starring” Judi Dench, but “featuring” her. The film is, instead, a plodding, intermittently entertaining showcase for Sophie Cookson (who you might recognize as Roxy in Kingsman) encapsulated within a cliched frame narrative.

Mia Rosenthal’s exhibition Earth, sky, present, past, is small and modest but enormous in scope. In just eight ink drawings, she explores humanity’s habits of observing the world around us — earth and sky — using drawing as a way to order and grasp at understanding and see connections between our present and the past.

Us, Forever Ago is the kind of movie I was glad I could watch on my laptop at my leisure, because it’s complex and opaque enough, at times, to warrant a second or even a third viewing.

Walking into "Sculptures in the Landscape" at Temple Contemporary, knowing only that the late Hannah Wilke was a second wave feminist artist and that these works were positioned to explore femininity and nature, I anticipated seeing a passé, narrow representation of the female body standing in for the experience of womanhood itself.

I can only imagine how impossible it must be to put together a biennial that everyone likes—to curate a group of works over the course of several years that will need to speak to the issues on everyone’s minds in the here and now, even though the news cycle moves at the speed of light.

There are several layers to Lydia Rosenberg’s highly conceptual, experimental exhibition ‘The Complete Subject’, currently on view at Napoleon, each relying upon people’s individual perceptions of meaning. What you get out of ‘The Complete Subject’ absolutely depends on your tolerance for this kind of self-perpetuating thought experiment.

Joan Wadleigh Curran’s show at the C.R. Ettinger Studio, Recombinants, is not a series of works that uses depictions of plants and other flora to make a statement about climate change, or one that places images of dead blossoms into some vanitas-style context about human nature. It’s simply about what it is–the recursive, fragile, and ultimately stubborn forms of nature that continue to appear around us in all sorts of settings.

One of only three women to have won the Oscar for Best Original Score (for The Full Monty in 1997), she’s become known for her eclectic choice of projects, which includes other ’90s hits The Crying Game (1992) and American History X (1998), as well as the Anne Hathaway/Hugh Jackman Les Misérables and last year’s Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. I caught up with Dudley and got the scoop on her composing process, her thoughts on scoring for different genres of films, and the film score that inspires her to this day.