• Check out the video on Art Review dot com of Los Angeles artist Pae White discussing her Barking Rocks as part of the inaugural Folkestone Triennial.

• Kimberly Brooks’ Technicolor Summer at Taylor De Cordoba was extended and ends this Saturday (June 21).

• Culver City bar The Mandrake (and my favorite bar in L.A.) is on Facebook. You should be their friend - just search for Mandrake Bar.

• In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor opens at the Laguna Art Museum this weekend. The press release states that this “is an exhibition that presents the work of 150 artists and posits that there has been a huge, but unacknowledged art movement taking place in this country for the last 40 years.” While I don’t really know if we can call this movement unrecognized anymore (especially considering many of the artists in the show are house-hold artist names), it’s worth checking out.

One of the (many) things I adore about Los Angeles is the murals…the bizarre, incredible, so-bad-they’re-good murals like the shark biting into the Corona bottle on Beverly or the woman with the crazy hand and nails in the Adams district. We drive by them everyday and sometimes don’t notice them until, well, you can’t NOT notice them. This happened to me yesterday on the way back from lunch. Driving on Santa Monica Boulevard just after Vermont I saw this…Frieda Kahlo. And it’s so awesome I had to share. These murals are without a doubt the aesthetics of L.A. that I will miss dearly.

PORT has a fantastic interview with abLA favorite (and my personal fave as well) Ed Ruscha.

I always come back to something figurative. I am always reminded of those scenes in the movies that I saw as a kid where there would be a train approaching that would suggest people traveling. The train would start at the lower, right hand corner and then in two or three seconds it would zoom in with the noise of a train and cover the entire area of the screen. That experience seemed to stick with me. The diagonal for me is like the zoom of a train, it has affected me and I have based several paintings on those sensations. I will see where it takes me from here.

The interview coincides with the opening of Ruscha’s special exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art. His show features works that I recently saw at Gagosian in London (the diptych Azteca and Azteca in Decline as well as his new wood prints). This is somewhat similar to what Tyler Green has been discussing on MAN.

• Do not miss this amazing Flickr set that recreates classic photos using Legos. For instance the image posted here of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint Lazare. thanks wil.
  

• A new contemporary art magazine based in and on Los Angeles is launching shortly. It’s called THE Magazine.

• Galleries in Los Angeles are changing. Silver Lake’s Gallery Revisited is closing their current location and states to have a new direction soon. SCALO|GUYE Gallery will also be closing as of July 14 because Christophe Guye is becoming the Managing Director of Zurich, Switzerland-based Zur Stockeregg Gallery. Wilshire gallery Milo Gallery’s last show opened on June 7 and will be going private as of July. Of course you know I’m leaving and there are rumblings of Culver City and Chinatown galleries changing shape soon too. Interesting times.

• Karl Benjamin interview on Geoform.

• Not quite L.A. related but if I were going to be anywhere near Santa Fe in July I would be sure to see the keynote speech by Dean Sobel, the Director of the Clyfford Still Museum, as part of the annual international art fair ART Santa Fe 2008. How I love Clyfford Still.

Photo credit: Classics in Lego set on Flickr by Balakov.

• One of the most interesting people I know period, let alone in L.A., Meeno Peluce, just re-launched his Meeno Photo website. Be sure to check out the blog section.

• Speaking of interesting folk, the documentary on artist David Choe called “Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe” has its world premiere in Los Angeles on June 21. Check out the schedule on LA Film Fest and see the preview here on YouTube.

• Chinatown gallery Sister has a new addition to their website in the form of a “Feature Work” page that highlights the work of a gallery artists for several months. For the premiere month it’s stills of stills from Michele O’Marah’s Valley Girl.

Ed at I call it oranges saw a whole lot more into Soo Kim’s solo show at Sandroni Rey than I did:

I thought of the [Bob] Irwin piece when visiting Soo Kim’s new show at Sandroni Rey in Culver City — to be honest, I first thought about the Irwin at Kim’s show last year. In that show, Kim painted the walls in subtle shades of white, greys, soft browns in attempt to mimic, negotiate, and change the shadows and light that naturally play in the gallery through its two skylights. I thought at the time that the installation was quite beautiful and intuitive like that Irwin piece must have been, but at the time, I had the sense that Kim, unlike Irwin, works in a quasi-representational mode, that her variations on light and on “inside” and “outside” must be tied to symbol and metaphor, to pictures and the imagination, instead of a scientific experimentation with how one sees.

Read the rest of it here.

Collection exhibition fever spreads to Arizona with NOW: Selections from the Ovitz Family Collection opens June 7th at the Arizona State University Art Museum curated by Andrea Feller. In addition to the Ovitz’s obviously being based in L.A., you’ll find a lot of L.A. artists featured in the show.

NOW: Selections from the Ovitz Family Collection presents works by international contemporary artists. Dating from 2006 to 2008, the works illustrate recent trends in contemporary art that are fresh from the artists’ studios. These works are also recent acquisitions to the Ovitz Family Collection that highlights both established and emerging artists. Michael and Judy Ovitz began collecting art in the 1970s, and are listed among the world’s top collectors by publications such as ARTNews and Art & Antiquities.

Exhibition Artists
Artists featured in NOW include Mark Bradford, Rachel Harrison, Richard Hughes, Jamie Isenstein, Katy Moran, Anselm Reyle, Stephen G. Rhodes, Sterling Ruby, Andro Wekua, and Thomas Zipp.

The Ovitz Family Collection is no stranger to having their collection featured in highlighted exhibitions. See what PORT said about New Trajectories I: Relocations at Cooley Art Gallery, Reed College here and here (in 2006) as well as Past, Present, Future Perfect at the Kansas City Art Institute (in 2007).

Image: Anselm Reyle, Untitled, 2007. Mixed media on canvas with stainless steel frame, 89 ½ x 130 ¾ inches. Courtesy of the Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Matthias Kolb