Packed with variety and energy, ‘Insights’ makes art look simple

MATTHEW OHM’S ‘UNTITLED’
Pity the folks tasked with installing “Insights 2008,” the Cal State Long Beach Art Department’s annual juried exhibition at University Art Museum (UAM). This show seems to grow every year.
When I visited, the installers were still hard at work atop fiberglass ladders, and everywhere [...]

Painter Aaron Kraten remembers fixing Vespas, fooling pay phones and feeling out of place

AARON KRATEN’S ‘CALIBRATION’
Everyone knows Santa Ana multimedia painter Aaron Kraten for his signature sad-girl image. But Kraten, 34, has led a variegated life, doing everything from fixing motor scooters to running a thrift store to designing video games before becoming a full-time [...]

Gabriela Martinez puts her life on display

EL CALDO DE PATO by GABRIELA MARTINEZ
On average, Gabriela Martinez’s linocuts each take 30 hours of work, but “The World Never Let Us Down,” her MFA thesis exhibition that incorporates them, was a life in the making.
“I always wrote stories when I was young, in journals,” Martinez says. “I [...]

Gord Peteran redefines what it means to be a chair

GORD PETERAN’S “MUSICAL BOX”
Gord Peteran’s furniture sort of explains a lot of things, possibly even why Wickes just went bankrupt. The 34 creations in “Furniture Meets Its Maker,” now wrapping up a two-year traveling show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, include tables of junk [...]

What’s good at ‘California Visual Artists’? Decide for yourself

PAUL PITSKER’S “SUCKER”
Juried exhibitions are great if they don’t make a big deal about who won—and “California Visual Artists: An Open Exhibition” doesn’t. Comprising an open call for art, there’s something here to offend or appease almost anyone.
It’s an election year, so let’s quickly consider Tamara Carlin’s [...]

Freewheeling with painter Robert Maldonado

ROBERT MALDONADO’S “PUBLIC MASK”
I like artists before they’ve been hit with wealth and taste, before they’re, like Joni Mitchell, used to that clean white linen and fancy French cologne. I like artists when they’re maybe kind of silly, and everything, for them, is the shock of the new. This is especially [...]

‘Shudder’ showcases five nice celebrity photographers

JEREMY AND CLAIRE WEISS, “DAVID LYNCH”
These are not the ones who are killing Britney Spears. These are the ones who come with parabolic reflectors and light meters, and make Britney Spears look beautiful, or at least properly haunted. They do not show her vag stubble or her menses-stained panties, though [...]

‘California Video’ makes history out of art that Long Beach surrendered

“THE ETERNAL FRAME” LBMA, 1975-76
The Getty Center’s new “California Video” exhibition is as much about Long Beach’s art history as it is the state of the state. That’s because nearly half the works in this show were created at, then acquired by, the Long Beach [...]

Matthew Thomas looks within

It smells good at Angels Gate—eons from Long Beach, yet on the same port. It smells New Englandy, somehow, although without the chowder. Maybe it doesn’t smell New Englandy, now that I think on it. Maybe it’s just the rosemary bushes and Pedro’s omnipresent breeze. Maybe the New England sense comes from [...]

Artist Sara Ray’s sinister paintings draw from Long Beach’s underbelly

SARA RAY’S “THE TROUBLE WITH ZOMBIES”
“I’m not sure where the idea for this came from,” artist Sara Ray says as we regard Driven by Demons, one of about 20 of her oil paintings that you’ll see this March in “The Devil Lives in Long Beach,” her [...]