Author: Jared Millar

[caption id="attachment_6942" align="alignright" width="345"] Blinky Exhumation Bone, Jeffrey Vallance[/caption]Blinky the Friendly Hen was memorialized Saturday by Los Angeles performance artist and curator Jeffrey Vallance on the occasion of the artist’s walk through of the Cal State Northridge gallery exhibition “Blinky the Friendly Hen: 40th Anniversary Exhibition.” Vallance, a 2004 Guggenheim fellow whose "Relics and Reliquaries" was exhibited at CSUF Grand Central Art Center in downtown Santa Ana in 2007, purchased Blinky the Friendly Hen in the frozen poultry section of a Ralphs supermarket on April...

19 February, 2019 /

[caption id="attachment_6776" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Matt Maust, Dum Vacation, 2016, detail images[/caption] The worlds of rock music and fine art have long traded personnel back and forth, from John Lennon dropping out of art school to make music as one of the Beatles to Captain Beefheart dropping out of music to make paintings as Don Van Vliet. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, whose solo show at the Akron Museum of Art just ended, is a more recent exemplar of the creative spirit who is able to walk in both...

05 September, 2016 /

Mark Zuckerberg by Ray Turner 6:45 p.m., Costa Mesa Mark Zuckerberg, having done as much as anyone who isn’t Steve Jobs to push us all headlong into the digital age (whether we wanted it or not) now tastes the revenge of the analog world in a show of paintings at Coastline Gallery. Curated by David Michael Lee, Like MARK features the Facebook founder’s face as portrayed by the likes of F. Scott Hess, Julio Labra and Bradford J. Salamon. [caption id="attachment_6715" align="alignright" width="150"]Marinus Welman, Harnessing the Energy (detail)[/caption] “Revenge”...

01 August, 2016 /

4:30 p.m., Venice Los de Abajo is a Southern California printmaking collective whose members strive to keep alive the Latin American tradition of printmaking while also experimenting with new techniques and individual expression. Their show "Division: Reflections and Shadows" at SPARC in Venice, Calif., an Art Deco former police station, is socially-engaged in a way uniquely appropriate to the coming Trumpocalypse, as in Yvette Mangual's Flight, inspired by the Caltrans immigrant crossing signs on the I-5, or Daniel González's Unidos o Morimos, which plays off of...

26 June, 2016 /

The Orange Coast Review is Orange Coast College's literary journal. The current issue (which I art directed) contains sixteen pages of art from mostly local artists working in various media, including works by Bradford Salamon, Lindsay Buchman, Pamela Diaz Martinez, Nguyen Ly and Riley Waite, who is represented by two pieces from his Playing With Fire series of portraits of young heroin addicts drawn with candle soot on paper. The cover painting by Fatima Jamil combines traditional realism with contemporary abstraction. A reading from the journal...

26 April, 2016 /

Red, by John Logan, is a play about the business of being an artist — the commissions, the professional jealousies, the rivalries between generations and the physical and mental act of putting paint to canvas. Originally staged in London in 2009 and now at South Coast Repertory through February 21, the play features Mark Harelik as the painter Mark Rothko — at the height of his success in 1958, newly commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant at Manhattan's Seagram Building...

10 February, 2016 /

[caption id="attachment_6439" align="alignright" width="305"] Art and Craft (2014), directed by Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman and co-directed by Mark Becker.[/caption] Mark Landis is a curious little man, aged 60 years but looking much older, with a high-pitched, mumbly voice, pronounced ears and a residual wisp of hair at the top of his head. Known to dress up at times as a Jesuit priest, he would surely be played by John Malkovich in the movie of his life, but for the fact that his life lacks the...

25 September, 2015 /

The First Friday art walk in Oakland, California — known as Oakland Art Murmur — is a chance for galleries throughout the city, from uptown to downtown to Jingletown, to throw open their doors for an art-loving public. Current shows of note include Kurt Fishback’s “51 Portraits of Women Artists” through July 18 at Transmission Gallery in West Oakland and Chicago-based painter and textile artist Samantha Bittman’s “Material Data” through July 4 at Johansson Projects. The Friday commute is a killer for Orange County residents though,...

07 June, 2015 /

The 2015 faculty exhibition opened tonight at Cal State Fullerton’s Begovich Gallery (a chance, perhaps, for students to grade the teachers). Fine artists in the show include Julie Orser, Joe Biel and Joe Forkan. Rebecca Campbell fills an oven with classic paperback literature in Liebe Mütti (courtesy of LA Louver), presumably to be cooked until done at 451° Fahrenheit. Jim Jenkins supplies a kinetic sculpture consisting of school chairs, dunce cap, globe and paper airplane entitled I Ain’t Much for Book Learnin’ and John Leighton...

12 April, 2015 /

[caption id="attachment_6257" align="alignleft" width="470"] [/caption] An exhibit of Iberian Peninsula-inspired paintings by Laguna College of Art + Design students and faculty opens this week at the LCAD Space at Forest & Ocean Gallery in Laguna Beach. “The Majesty of Spain and Portugal” shows the artistic response of participants in last summer’s LCAD summer abroad tour in Madrid, Toledo, Salamanca, Porto and Lisbon. The artists are Amy Bergener, Aaron Brown, Gabriel Castro, Andrea Clarke, Lani Emanuel (whose oil painting Sorolla’s Steps is shown above), Madelyn Foster, Juliette...

02 March, 2015 /

Every arts district needs a Bavarian beer hall serving fancy Old World weiners. Downtown Los Angeles has Wurstküche, San Diego's Gaslamp has the sausage fest known as Sausage Fest, and now, on Santa Ana's Fourth Street, with a soft opening through March, comes Wursthaus. Some kinks are still being worked out, but the food is worth engaging. Order at the front counter — try the smoked cheddar bratwurst on a pretzel bun or go exotic with the hickory smoked wild boar — then look for the...

01 March, 2015 /

In the sculptural work of Portuguese artist Miguel Palma, a cast concrete block might mark the open page of a favorite book. A half-finished Erector set model of the Eiffel Tower might appear alongside a 19th century photograph of the real Eiffel Tower at a similar stage in its construction. Engineering, architecture, history and even biomechanics all provide stimuli for the artist’s toylike imagination. Currently wrapping up a three month residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, the Lisbon-based artist's recent focus is on...

17 January, 2015 /

With gas prices down and the stock market reaching all-time highs as we approach the end of 2014, no doubt you’re looking for a place to put your excess cash to work. If so, you might want to consider throwing your weight around in the local art market this holiday season. Here are a few options in and around Orange County:   Cal State Long Beach’s 47th Annual Holiday Art Sale runs through this Wednesday, December 10, and features everything from ceramics to printmaking. Something tells us...

08 December, 2014 /

[caption id="attachment_6093" align="alignleft" width="465"] Las Damas, oil on canvas, appeared in the 2008 issue of OCC's Orange Coast Review. [/caption]A celebration was held Saturday in Santa Ana for Newport Beach artist Marilou Hogeboom, who passed away this month at the age of 87. Her work in recent years was seen most regularly at Orange County Fine Art’s co-operative Showcase Gallery, where the memorial was held, but in the early 1950s, as daughter Katy recalls, she exhibited large tapestries at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts....

23 November, 2014 /

You probably didn't notice unless you rode a bus to the beach this summer, but for a while there was a bit more art in the streets than usual. Sponsored by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and with monetary support from various related advertising companies, the Art Everywhere US project featured reproductions of American art from the collections of LACMA, the Whitney and other participating museums. The outdoor exhibit was nationwide, with billboards and subway posters in some locations. But in the local area it...

05 September, 2014 /

Late summer is hardly peak season in the art world: Schools are out of session and gallery owners are on vacation. If art is being seen, it’s most likely at one of the outdoor festivals at the foot of Laguna Canyon Road or in the art competitions at the local county fair. Obviously nobody wants to be indoors when it’s 90 degrees, but there are a few shows ending soon that will make a quick venture indoors a worthwhile endeavor. [caption id="attachment_5974" align="alignright" width="135"] A.M. Rousseau,...

19 August, 2014 /

illustration by Jared Millar (after Alfred Lutjeans) Museums these days are in the content creation space: From MOCAtv to the obligatory museum blog to the iPad apps put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art — for better or worse, it’s about more than just publishing a scholarly catalog with a section of color-printed plates. Lately the Laguna Art Museum has entered the multimedia fray with a series of documentary films by Dale Schierholt entitled “California Masters.” The first of these, “Tony DeLap: A Unique Perspective,”...

01 July, 2014 /

The landscape-painting industry has had a hold on Laguna Beach for so long that the very idea of landscape in the resort town by the sea is inevitably fraught with cliché, but Thursday night's art walk provided some fresh perspectives on the genre with the work of two master painters at the Laguna Art Museum and the photography of Tom Lamb at Forest & Ocean Gallery. [caption id="attachment_5729" align="alignleft" width="254"] Wayne Thiebaud's Waterland, 1996, oil on canvas[/caption] Wayne Thiebaud, raised in Long Beach and still painting at...

09 March, 2014 /

An MFA exhibit currently on view at Cal State Fullerton installs a fantastical world of imagination in the campus' West Gallery, but like a wonderland apparition it's only up for a few days, so if you'd like to see it in person you'll have to visit soon! Tiffany Ma, who over the past few years has been involved with feminist collective performance art as part of the "Guerrila Gowns" project and was in the recent "Rage Bear" show at downtown Santa Ana's GCAC, studied photography...

23 February, 2014 /