Reviews

The Fantastical Imagination in “Chapter One” @ Brea Gallery

Feb 11, 2020 | 0 Comments

The Brea Art Gallery is a small, distinct gallery that is often overlooked; however, its current exhibition, “Chapter One,” is a reminder that it is a staple of Orange County. An inviting display of imaginative multimedia artworks can be seen from the glass outside. What lies inside is an arena of fantasy and storybook beginnings. The exhibition’s central theme is tying together the importance of imagination and narrative-based art, which shows through its display of works from many different...

Jeffrey Vallance at CSUN Art Galleries

Feb 19, 2019 | 0 Comments

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...

Ching Ching Chen at The Irvine Arts Center

Nov 18, 2018 | 0 Comments

Saturday night I made it to the opening of Re:Balance at the Irvine Arts Center. All around a great show but the stand out in the show was the work of Ching Ching Chen. I wanted to write something more detailed here but for the sake of transparency, I bought a piece from the show. That's how much I liked the work. As I was standing in front of one of the pieces from the Letting Go series, I overheard a couple behind me discussing the work. The woman said the work wanted to make her cry. I...

The Meticulous Majesty of Peter Greco in Laguna

Mar 10, 2017 | 3 Comments

Typographic street artist and designer Peter Greco has spent his entire adult life learning the mastery of communication through language and lettering. His artwork celebrates the centuries old tradition of the art of calligraphy and the fascinating world of typography while paying homage to the many different cultures that have kept this tradition alive. He has shown all over the country, but based out of Los Angeles and teaching at Art Center College of Design, his artwork rarely makes it...

Keeping Time: An Opening for “Rhythm” at Irvine’s Great Park Gallery

Sep 5, 2016 | 0 Comments

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 worlds. Several more examples can be seen in the exhibition “Rhythm” at Irvine’s Great Park, which...

No Name features big names at DAX Gallery

Aug 17, 2016 | 0 Comments

When I first visited DAX gallery for its opening in 2013 owner Alex Amador had big plans for the Costa Mesa space that would bring fine urban art to Orange County. Over the past few years, in part due to how hard it can be to maintain a gallery, DAX has shuffled around some of its original aspirations. I was curious to see what the gallery was up to when I met with curator Alec Van Sealund for the August 13th opening of No Name. Van Sealund joined DAX in 2015 and explained the gallery...

Satiated in Santa Ana: “Pleasure Objects” @ Gallery 211

May 11, 2016 | 2 Comments

Local artists Alyssa Arney and Liz Flynn are very aware of the superficial nature of Southern California, where beauty is valued over health, and the constant presence of advertising is louder, brighter, and more attractive than honesty. Finding their way, separately, toward fiber arts, was an important journey for each artist, but finding their way toward each other, and creating an open dialogue with their community, other women, and internally, has fueled their artwork and their...

Art from the OC Review at Orange Coast College

Apr 26, 2016 | 0 Comments

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...

“SUCCESSIONS” @ Jamie Brooks Fine Art

Apr 12, 2016 | 2 Comments

“SUCCESSIONS” OPENING: April 2, 2016 Jamie Brooks Fine Art 2967 Randolph Avenue Unit C, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 949-929-4143 What is better than an artist’s fresh, brand new, and stimulating paintings? It is seeing David Michael Lee’s 15 year retrospective “Successions”. In this expanse of time, Lee, through his daring and personal exploration of accepted painterly elements, broadens our understanding of artistic possibilities. From graduate school to the present, the groupings of work encompass...

The Red and the Black: A Play about Rothko at SCR

Feb 10, 2016 | 2 Comments

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...

INTERSECTION @ Jamie Brooks Fine Art

Nov 24, 2015 | 0 Comments

Written by: Roberta Carasso The selection of work by artists – Arno Kortschot, Connie Goldman, and Gary Petersen – is a look into the dimensions artists develop to express formal and spatial ideas – fully dimensional, the suggestion of dimension, and the illusion of dimensionality on a flat canvas. Also, because the art is intermixed, one artist’s work hung near another artist’s work, the viewer is given an additional opportunity to contemplate far more spatial and formal possibilities had the...

Just Like Everyone Else – Currents @ Jamie Brooks Fine Art

Nov 11, 2015 | 0 Comments

By Roberta Carasso Artists deal with human issue just like everyone else, except, being visually-minded, they make their thoughts accessible to all who can appreciate their meaning. Katie Stubblefield is drawn to that moment when things shift, the cliff hangers of life when events suddenly are no longer the same. Working with various artistic disciplines, her metaphors embrace imagery inversion from methods of horizontal and vertical processes. The final canvas captures a movement with no...

Best Wurst Option

Mar 1, 2015 | 0 Comments

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 hidden...

Bridges at an Exhibition: Miguel Palma’s “Synapse” at Coastline Gallery

Jan 17, 2015 | 0 Comments

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,...

Pamela Diaz Martinez: A different kind of haunting.

Oct 24, 2014 | 0 Comments

The physicist Carlo Rovelli mentioned in an interview recently that religion was a subject of interest to science but only out of respect for the religious as a group and very little scientific study has been dedicated to finding out the wellspring for a belief in “God” specifically. This aversion to exploring the subject of faith in a manner that approaches a possible "source" is not as lacking in fine art but still incredibly rare. Religious dialogue in art tends to be highly...

A to Z at the Brett Rubbico Gallery

Oct 17, 2014 | 0 Comments

A to Z Featuring: Craig Antrim Casper Brindle Christopher Georgesco Donald Karwelis Eric Zammitt For galleries, presentation is paramount. The alchemy of impeccable lighting, thoughtful curating and an intimate knowledge of the artist's process combined with behind-the-scenes sweat and elbow grease can transform even the most humble space into a cathedral. For this reason, it is often times the smaller galleries that can be the most inspiring. Tucked away into the end corner of a small row of...

August: Orange County

Aug 19, 2014 | 0 Comments

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. One example is “Summer Luminaries” at Brett Rubbico Gallery on Old...

Tony DeLap: Magic Made Easy

Jul 1, 2014 | 0 Comments

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,...

Love from the Hate Crew: Children of Bodom at the Observatory

Mar 9, 2014 | 0 Comments

I know a concert was good when every time I try to sit down and write my review of it, I get distracted by composing music myself instead. This was most gloriously true of the Children of Bodom concert at the Observatory in Santa Ana on March 2, supported by Tyr and Death Angel. Even though I love the word, I reserve it only for special occasions like this one- fuck… Children of Bodom were so fucking good. That does sum it up, but I will elaborate. Children of Bodom, a melodic death metal band...

Through the Looking Glass with Tiffany Ma

Feb 23, 2014 | 0 Comments

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 as an undergrad...

The OC Art Blog was created in 2004 as a way to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene.

Awakening: Moncho at Gallery Sonder

Jun 2, 2026

By Mason Fujikawa Awakening at Gallery Sonder is the first exhibition in the United States by Mexican artist Moncho. Moncho takes an instinctive approach to his practice. He doesn’t sketch or even plan before painting. Instead, he draws from his subconscious, working...

Low and Slow at Danger Gallery

May 28, 2026

By Alisa Ochoa Low and Slow is on view at House of Danger Gallery, nestled in an unassuming shopping center just off the 55, beside a Circle K and below the Attic Skateshop. The space is operated by Jackie Danger, a visual artist and brand strategist who opened the...

On Creativity, Constraints, and Staying Alive to the World

May 24, 2026

By Chris Hoff I’ve been messing around with learning to play guitar for as long as I can remember. It’s been a story of starts and stops for years. In a more recent start I picked up the book How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy. I thought it might provide some...

Art Confronts Infrastructure in UC Irvine Langson OCMA

May 24, 2026

By Maggie Luy What shifts when the ground beneath everyday life begins to move? Infrastructure is usually what disappears first. In “Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure," it stayed exposed. The exhibition, on view at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum...

Legacies Come Alive, Spring Blooms at Irvine Fine Arts Center

Apr 8, 2026

By Maggie Luy What does it mean to be remembered, and who gets to be seen? Through textured brushwork and carved forms, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma honors labor and ancestry. That legacy continues in Edgar Fabián Frías’s layered digital collages and psychedelic video...