Downtown.

Yes. I'm still posting about LA.

Wayne Coe

When I was visiting MOCA I walked over to see some of the Downtown galleries. It was interesting to see Wayne Coe's Pop Terrorism at Bert Green while having the TV ads for Oliver Stone's World Trade Center in my head. I don't care how good or true the movie might have been. He sold it with a reeking pop song. This one's for him and his ego. Speaking of which, it somehow seemed appropriate that I saw this the week after Mel Gibson's public display of self.

Wayne Coe


As an aside, if you were even remotely surprised by the behavior of said anti-semitic bore then you must have missed Hitch's deserved evisceration of Gibson's Christic hate-bomb when it came out.

Sebastian Lemm

But I digress. A couple blocks away from Bert Green was a really strong group show, SPRAWL at BANK gallery. At first I thought these C-prints by Sebastian Lemm were paintings. When I realized what they were, it didn't matter. Lemm finds the ghost in the machine of the natural, and exposes and explodes it's interiors. Another artist exploring the space of nature (or maybe the nature of space) is Keith Lord. He works with small scale in a way that I haven't felt since Tara Donovan's legendary show at ACE Gallery in 2003. "Felt" is the key word there. I'm not sure how Lord or Donovan do it, but when they create that moment of belief in their scale it stays in your body, and it forces you to question all the moments and perceptions around it. Deal me in.

Keith Lord