How exactly to characterize Perihelion Arts? As a little shop of horrors, delights and complexities? That seems just about right. Not that this art gallery/bookstore and occasional music venue is teeny. The good-sized space with its pocked concrete floors and white-and-black interior adds heft to the oasis of art life…
I couldn’t help but scoff. A friend had forwarded me a notice about “Art & Society,” a new lecture series taking place at Arizona State University, and the kickoff event sounded too precious by half. For one thing, there was the setting: brunch at a posh resort, the Grayhawk Golf…
Edward Dominguez’s studio door was wide open. He was waiting for Chinese food, and had only just begun to survey his previous night’s work, large oil paints of his visions of Phoenix’s fifth tallest building, the Viad Tower. I called the former architect turned painter from the curb in front…
My father disliked comic books, even smart, deep ones, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. He just couldn’t get past the words-and-pictures-in-boxes thing. To him, the comic book was a crude, impoverished vehicle, and its content became less significant by virtue of its form. This frustrated me. After all, he liked art,…
I can’t help thinking about empire lately, as in the end of. Only that’s not Nero fiddling. It sounds more like the Charlie Daniels Band. In July, I went to see “The Surrealist Revolution” at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and I thought about how Surrealism often has been written…
If you read last month’s Art in America, you know that Studio LoDo (along with a lot of other deserving art spaces in the Scottsdale/Phoenix/Tempe megalopolitan area) is now officially “on the map.” Those of you who’ve been to this warehouse space with a loading-dock entrance don’t need to wonder…
On the first Friday night of every month, the art galleries in downtown Phoenix, big and small, as well as many artists’ studios and temporary art spaces, open their doors to the now thousands of people who come through on self-guided tours. Since the mid-’90s, nonprofit volunteer organization Artlink has…
If you were going to categorize the work of Adam Chodzko, whose first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. is now on view at Arizona State University, you’d have to resort to something like “participatory conceptual performance art,” a clumsy mouthful that doesn’t begin to convey the magic and humor…
One indication of the Valley art scene’s healthy pulse is the proliferation of small, worthwhile shows in unexpected places. Recently, the lower level of the Tempe Public Library has housed several such treats, the most recent of which features works by six artists participating in the city’s Studio Artist Program…
If you’d like to see some extraordinary art by someone whose name has all but vanished from the art world, go to Vanier Gallery and look into the paintings and drawings of Jochen Seidel. Seidel has been called “the German Jackson Pollock” and “a unique link between German and American…
This is a season of big ideas at the ASU Art Museum. Sex, self, gender, time — take your pick. If you don’t walk out of these shows thinking, you might need a box of mental floss. Begin with Janis Lewin’s “The Aftermath (9/11).” You may feel as if you’ve…
After 21 years in the business of printing art, Joe Segura has moved his inventory and his presses from Tempe, where they occupied a small, relatively isolated cinder-block building, into an airy, surprisingly quiet space along Mesa’s Main Street. Sandwiched between Shanghai Express on one side and the temporary home…
Jim Campbell’s advantage as an artist is that he wasn’t trained as one. Hatched as an electrical engineer, he made the leap from pragmatism to poetry on his own, bringing with him a wariness about the limitations of digital media. This caution has served him well. As the art world…
Greg Esser is a man who thinks in broad, connected strokes — a big-picture guy. “What we’re doing here,” he says, standing in the middle of a raw, modest space at 515 East Roosevelt, “is creating a synergy and an aggregate. A destination.” When he says “here,” Esser refers not…
Deborah Hopkins, curator of exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, likes art that “gets out of the frame and jumps off the pedestal” — an apt way to describe the works in “Thin Skin” (known to many of us as “the bubble show”), on view at the museum…
At a time when it feels like there are video news crawlers inching across the base of your brain, and so many images you’re subjected to take their meaning from war and austerity, there’s something to be said for seeing things at a standstill. Deborah Beresford is here to remind…
A six-inch seal — blue, shiny and cartoonish — is emerging from a miniature plastic toilet. With the pull of a cord, the marooned animal comes to life. A creepy melody starts to play — the music of some deranged jewelry box — and the seal’s head begins moving back…
My friend Paul is, among other things, a devoted Titanic enthusiast. While other little boys were playing kickball, Paul was playing “Capsize,” a game he’d invented about being trapped on a sinking luxury liner. As a teen, he spent his milk money on membership in the Titanic Historical Society; today,…
An artist usually has to be stone cold dead before his work is ever shown in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, however, has managed to escape the bureaucratic guillotine and now stands among the handful of living artists whose work has been deemed important enough to…
Nearly 35 years ago, Ernesto “Che” Guevara — radical Marxist revolutionary, trained medical doctor and severe asthmatic — was captured and killed in Bolivia by Bolivian military forces. Guevara had gone there to spread the political revolution he had successfully fomented in Cuba during the 1950s side by side with…
Long before the economy took its most recent nosedive, the state of the contemporary art scene in the Valley of the Sun could be labeled as pretty abysmal. Only a handful of decent contemporary galleries still open their doors, especially ones willing or financially able to show the work of…
“Stories and Souvenirs,” an exhibition of documentary and portrait photography now lining the walls of ASU’s Northlight Gallery, inspires confidence that classic film-based photography, as practiced by camera masters in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, still survives and thrives, despite the world’s present predisposition to All Things Deeply Digital.Located in…
