January’s shows encourage us to look at old things with new eyes, and turn the familiar into the foreign. Dan Herschlein’s wall reliefs are unsettling visions of domesticity, while Matt Lifson’s paintings remix scratchy horror videos and pornography into layered mysteries. Jónsi lets us taste, feel, and see sound, and Quasi features alphabets and letterforms created by artists rather than developed over centuries. A career survey of influential photographer Catherine Opie features work not previously shown, Luna Luna unearths a forgotten art theme park, Vertical Cinema offers a new way to view films, and Reclaiming El Camino reframes a colonial route into a path of resistance.
Dan Herschlein: The Long-Fingered Hand
In their paintings and wall reliefs, Dan Herschlein finds dread in the domestic. Taking its title from a scene in the 1922 silent vampire film Nosferatu, The Long-Fingered Hand renders familiar scenes of home as bizarre stage sets for a surreal drama. Their heavily built-up surfaces, realistic sculptures, and unsettling compositions give the impression that one could enter, or be sucked into, the artworks, a phenomenon which made them one of the highlights of the Hammer Museum’s recent Made in LA biennial.
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Matthew Brown Gallery (matthewbrowngallery.com)
633 North LaBrea Avenue, Fairfax, Los Angeles
Through January 13
Matt Lifson: Love Solver
Matt Lifson’s paintings are curious palimpsests of desire, horror, teenage dreams, and glitchy analog tech. He draws his subject matter from gay pornography, B movies, art history, and autobiography, mixing them into oddly recognizable enigmas in ways that are compelling and confounding in equal measure.
Noon Projects (noon-projects.com)
951 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Through January 27
Jónsi: Vox
Artist and musician Jónsi creates immersive environments that expand the act of listening through other senses such as smell, sight, or touch. In his new exhibition Vox, this practice takes the form of an installation that transfigures the artist’s voice into light shining from LED screens, as well as a canopy of speakers that emit calming sounds coupled with the smell of freshly cut grass. “Silent sigh (dark),” a sculpture made of 100 speakers, creates wavelike sonic vibrations, giving physical form to the auditory.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (tanyabonakdargallery.com)
1010 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through February 3
Bahia Reverb: Artists and Place
Bahia Reverb features the work of 10 former artist-fellows at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia, Brazil. The state is a significant center of Afro-Brazilian culture, thereby offering the artists — all of whom are from North America and of African descent — unique opportunities to explore new perspectives on their shared and individual heritages. Participating artists include Sandra Brewster, Rik Freeman, Juan Erman Gonzalez, Mark Steven Greenfield, Karen Hampton, and others.
Art + Practice (artandpractice.org)
3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles
Through March 2
Catherine Opie: harmony is fraught
Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie’s photographs have offered candid views of queer community interwoven with visions of Los Angeles that convey the city’s unorthodox beauty. harmony is fraught features over 60 works spanning her career, on view publicly for the first time. The images in the exhibition are celebratory and elegiac, portraying people and places often located on the fringes of the mainstream with dynamic intimacy while serving as reminders of inevitable change and loss.
Regen Projects (regenprojects.com)
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles
January 11–March 3
Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Dijkstra Collection
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a Depression-Era program that provided work for millions of Americans to create roads, bridges, schools, and other public buildings, as well as murals and public artworks. Art for the People features works by 18 WPA artists created between 1929 and World War II, a small fraction of the 10,000 artists employed by the program, who often focused on themes of shared humanity, solidarity with workers and the dispossessed, and the utopian promise and unvarnished realities of modernity. Featured artists include Charles White, Emmanuel Romano, Harry Sternberg, Miki Hayakawa, and others.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (huntington.org)
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California
Through March 18
Quasi: Experimental Writing Systems
Written language has been used by humans to communicate and to record our thoughts and stories for millennia, evolving to reflect the needs, histories, and cultures of the communities who use them. Quasi looks at writing systems that have been intentionally invented by artists rather than organically shaped over time, drawing on science fiction, linguistic theory, and typography. Participating designers and artists include Ximena Amaya, Johannes Bergerhausen, Sina Fakour, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro, Zeke Oyinloye, the Repository of Wonders, and others.
ArtCenter College of Design, HMCT Gallery (hmctartcenter.org)
950 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, California
Through April 14
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy
In 1987, Austrian artist, musician, and actor André Heller opened Luna Luna, an art amusement park in Hamburg, Germany. It features a carousel designed by Keith Haring, a mirrored dome by Salvador Dalí, and a Ferris wheel painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat, alongside festival attractions created by Kenny Scharf, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Sonia Delaunay, and several other well-known artists. The whole operation was then packed into 44 shipping containers and sent to Texas, where it sat unused for almost four decades. After a painstaking restoration, and with a little help from Drake, an abbreviated version of the original Luna Luna has been reborn inside a warehouse on LA’s Eastside, offering a new generation of art lovers, young and old, the opportunity to experience Heller’s whimsical vision of pop culture and entertainment.
Luna Luna (lunaluna.com)
1601 East 6th Street, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
Through Spring 2024
Shifting Perspectives: Vertical Cinema
Movies are an almost exclusively horizontal medium, perfectly suited for wide landscape shots. Shifting perspectives flips this paradigm on its head (or its side, at least), showcasing films that are taller than they are wide presented in a vertical format. The exhibition looks at historical precedents dating back to the 1890s alongside experimental applications of the format, and features the debut of new works by three filmmakers from Southern California: Zaina Bseiso, Fox Maxy, and Walter Thompson-Hernández.
Academy Museum (academymuseum.org)
6067 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles
Through August 4
Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond
El Camino Real is a 600-mile route stretching from San Francisco to San Diego punctuated by 21 Spanish Missions that enabled the European conquest of California. It symbolizes the violence and subjugation that Native peoples have endured for centuries, as well as their patterns of resistance and resilience against colonial oppression. Created in conjunction with tribal communities and Native advisors, Reclaiming El Camino features Native artists who explore these unheralded and ongoing histories of rebellion, while also reconnecting to the route’s pre-colonization Indigenous roots, including Katie Dorame, Weshoyot Alvitre, River Garza, and others.
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Autry Museum of the American West (theautry.org)
4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, Los Angeles
Through June 15, 2025
Source: Hyperallergic.com