Hanksy

Weird Gal Yankovic

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying

Banksy is so 2010. Hanksy, the similarly secretive street artist and love child of Banksy and Tom Hanks, is reaching his own level of notoriety thanks to his celeb-inspired murals, the subject of Gallery 1988's upcoming exhibit, "How the West Was Pun," which opens May 24.

A couple of years ago, the Brooklyn-via-Midwest, 20-something law school dropout started spray painting Hanks' mug on stenciled images of Banksy in New York, which led to a couple of gallery shows. He's put up similar work in Chicago. (Dude even made it to the White House).

Earlier this year, Hanksy began lurking in our midst, creating street art inspired by Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Ellen DeGeneres, James Franco, Bradley Cooper and Christopher Walken, and accompanied by funny tag lines, in Hollywood along Melrose, Downtown and Culver City. You may have come across "Cage Against the Machine," "The Walken Dead" and our personal favorite, "Weird Gal Yankovic."

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Liz Ohanesian

HUSH presents "Unseen" at Corey Helford Gallery

There is no single process for HUSH. The U.K.-based artist mixes methods as he applies a combination of paint (acrylic and the spray can variety), screen print and ink techniques to his canvases. In the end, the results are exquisitely layered paintings that people sometimes confuse for collage work.

Saturday night, HUSH unveiled his latest show "Unseen" at Corey Helford Gallery. The effort involves 22 pieces, including large paintings and smaller studies. This was his first show with the Culver City gallery, which has come to prominence in the past few years for showcasing some of the brightest talents in the pop surrealism and street art world. HUSH himself falls into the latter camp, and he worked on a few street pieces while he in town.

HUSH's love of street art goes back to his youth. "I did a bit of graffiti," he says of his formative years. "I wasn't a big graffiti artist."

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Courtesy photo Venice Art Walk & Auctions

Google's Venice offices, in Frank Gehry's "binoculars" building

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying

Google...It's everywhere. And in late 2010, Google set up camp in Frank Gehry's cherished "binoculars" building in Venice Beach amidst the marijuana clinics, fire-eaters, and snake charmers.

Last year, Google reached out to the Venice Family Clinic and offered to sponsor the annual Venice Art Walk & Auctions benefit and host the silent auction at the landmark building. Many Venetians were wary of the corporate presence and its involvement, while others welcomed the imminent nouveau regime.

At this year's 34th annual event, on Sunday, May 19, Google has taken center stage, providing not only the gallery for the auction but also hosting the "family fun day." "The Venice area is home to a lot of Google employees who are happy to be involved for the second year in a row," says Thomas Williams, engineering director and Google L.A. site lead.

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MAK Center

Curator Sylvia Lavin introduces her exhibition to a packed Schindler House

This is the third installment of our Pacific Standard Time Presents diary, tracking modern architecture happenings all over the city. Check out our previous entries:
*The Getty's Big, New Exploration of L.A. Architecture
*SCI-Arc's Gala and a Concert at Jackie Treehorn's House

High temperatures might be bad for art, but they're great for museums. The past week's blistering heat wave drove many an Angeleno into the air-conditioned respite of their local cultural institution -- I spotted Getty curator Christopher Alexander leading a particularly large tour through "Overdrive" on a steamy Saturday. Even when it's not serving as an escape from the heat, the show is an excellent destination, and a few hours wandering the exhibition filled me with a renewed sense of civic pride. In fact, I had a hard time seeing the "thoroughgoing urban mess" as described by one bitter East Coast reviewer in his description of the show (or maybe L.A. in general?) last week.

On another night, it was the promise of warm spring air -- and not a lick of air conditioning -- that packed the Schindler House for the MAK Center's "Everything Loose Will Land" opening. The al fresco vibe extended to the art: Sylvia Lavin -- in a snappy molecular-looking statement necklace -- admitted that she rather enjoyed curating an exhibition outside of a traditional museum, even though mounting a show in the drafty duplex is "pretty much like installing an exhibition outdoors."

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Courtesy Michael Benevento

A still from Wu Tsang and Alexandro Segade's Mishima in Mexico (2012)

This week, an artist makes deadpan jokes in vintage photographs, whistlers convene in Glendale and a Japanese novelist's tragedy of frustrated love is re-staged in Mexico.

5. Crowd of copycats
It's not yet certain how many people will participate in artist Sara Roberts' Clump and Whistle, a group performance at Glendale's Civic Center, but it shouldn't be more than 100, the number Roberts chose as her cut-off point. Clump and Whistle will work in the way the wave works at a football game, only with whistles. One person blows out a quick tune on one of the multitone whistles Roberts has provided, then the person next to him or her mimics the tune and so on until this tune has spread -- like a wave -- through the crowd. Two rehearsals precede this weekend's event, which means the effect will be at least slightly honed. Glendale Civic Center Plaza, Broadway and Glendale Boulevard; Sun., May 19, 1 p.m.; RSVP requested. machineproject.org.

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Kevin Scanlon

Heather Shaw

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Here's how Heather Shaw spent 2012: She was production designer on her first TV show, a little singing competition called American Idol. She had three installations on various stages at Coachella. She designed and fabricated a "water chandelier" for the poolside club at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. She created and built an 80-foot-tall, 30,000-capacity "dance temple," graceful and neon-colored like a raver's Angkor Wat, for a music festival in Portugal. And she took her parents to their first Burning Man. ("They loved it," she's happy to report.)

So what does she do in her free time?

"I don't have any," the 35-year-old CEO of Vita Motus Design Studio admits with a laugh. It's early evening and she's sipping coffee at Swork near her home in Eagle Rock, fueling up for the latest in a never-ending series of late nights with her CAD software. "If something comes across my table, I want to do it."

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Kevin Scanlon

Rita Gonzalez

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Five months after a 340-ton rock officially became part of Michael Heizer's massive Levitated Mass sculpture on the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curator Rita Gonzalez installed the much smaller Lost Line sculpture on the third floor of the museum's Broad Contemporary building.

Made by artist Gabriel Orozco out of string and Plasticine, a claylike material that never completely dries, the sculpture was a gray, small, imperfectly shaped ball set in a corner, an antidote to Heizer's boulder. Gonzalez also titled the exhibition it appeared in "Lost Line" and installed other artworks from LACMA's collection that made similarly modest gestures. In Analia Saban's painting Erosion, the canvas looks like it's delicately decaying. In Amalia Pica's photocopied self-portrait, the artist looks out at a landscape much bigger than herself.

"We were thinking, what's the opposite of monumentalism?" says Gonzalez, the only curator in LACMA's contemporary art department who worked at the museum prior to the 2006 appointment of game-changing director Michael Govan.

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
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Kevin Scanlon

Laura Owens

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

On a balmy Saturday morning in March, a smattering of popcorn decorates the cement floor of a large warehouse in Boyle Heights, currently the studio, exhibition and event space of L.A.-based painter Laura Owens. The night before, the attached art-book and music store, Ooga Booga #2, hosted Asha Schechter's book launch and a screening of what Owens describes as a "really weird Peanuts movie." Soon, the kernels will be replaced by rainbow sprinkles and sequins from Owens' free cookie-making and painting day for kids.

Owens, 42, isn't around, but it's doubtful she'd apologize for the mess. The merging of traditional private studio and public exhibition/event space has allowed her to participate in her indefinite show, "12 Paintings by Laura Owens," beyond the opening, allowing both artist and audience to spend more time than usual with each other and with the work. It also sometimes means dealing with people "dissing me to my face," she says.

Owens recalls critic Peter Schjeldahl's perspective on L.A. as a city with relatively few public spaces, where "there are only private spaces — fenced haciendas of self-maintenance and self-invention — surrounded with the soft, dreamy, zinging-with-light nowhere in particular." "He sees this as a problem," she says, "while I think that it generates really interesting art."

In New York, Owens says, "Everyone wants to figure out where in history their work is going to get slotted into, and really people are almost working to justify why they're taking up space on that island. Here, there are almost these secret pockets of space that you open up into."

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Kevin Scanlon

Tony Dominguez

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

The piñata king likes big. His royal highness, known in less formal circles as 43-year-old Tony Dominguez, makes 12-foot-tall Virgenes de Guadalupe out of papier-mâché (the ones at the Century City restaurant Pink Taco are his). He makes 2-story-tall skeletons and massive cacti and frogs and grinning suns and devils.

Those giant puppets are a form of traditional Mexican folk art called judas. For a long time, the art of making judas was lost in the United States. As demand for them died, knowledge of how to make them faded. Contemporary artisans would try, but once the puppets got to a certain size, they'd collapse.

Dominguez, however, brought the art back. His uncle was in the construction business, and Dominguez learned from him. Basic framing and building techniques that work for houses also work for giant papier-mâché puppets, apparently.

"A lot of people can't work in this scale," Dominguez says. They don't understand how to reinforce a structure, or they'd use the wrong grade of cardboard. It's also a lot more strenuous. And expensive — one of Dominguez's pieces is insured for $250,000.

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Kevin Scanlon

Heather Taylor

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

To gallery owner, blogger, fashionista, lifestyle maven and all-around It girl Heather Taylor, life consists of "little moments of making things pretty." Sitting barefoot and cross-legged in her living room, she looks around at the colorful throws, the Moroccan table, the moss-green velvet settee, the neatly stacked art monographs. She has dark eyes, dark hair, red lips and an effortless, eclectic sense of style — like Frida Kahlo, without the misery.

She can't put a precise name to her style, she says, except to note that it is cozy and classic, with elements of "the indoor-outdoor L.A. thing." Whatever it is, people want to be around her — if not outright be her — because Taylor is the epitome of a certain kind of Southern California living: casual, elegant, playful and creative.

The spine of her business is Taylor De Cordoba Gallery, which she and her husband opened in Culver City in 2006, when the neighborhood "was just starting to become fun." She was 26 then. She has since made the gallery a warm, welcoming place for both emerging artists and the public.

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