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“Tomorrow, the Flood” by Nat Meade
Where: M+B
When: Through Jan 25, 2025
Why It's Worth A Look: Brooklyn-based artist Nat Meade paints the unfiltered complexity of masculinity—awkward, tender, and evocatively human. In his first solo show with M+B, fathers cradle, recline, and strip away their armor—leaving moments of connection clinging to the surface like flotsam.
Know Before You Go: Meade’s figures evoke the human investigation of what it means to be a hero. Straying away from mainstream ideas of strength and stoicism, they are vulnerable, reflective, and caring.
“Chevy Chase Syndrome” by Cynthia Talmadge
Where: Marc Selwyn Fine Art
When: Through January 25, 2025
Why It’s Worth A Look: Cynthia Talmadge peels back the glossy veneer of Americana to reveal its darkly surreal core. The artist takes us deep into the unraveling mind of a 1970s diplomat’s wife, rendering her descent with a meticulous Pointillist touch.
Know Before You Go: Talmadge’s work is an optical spiral into paranoia, each dot and detail a fragment of her protagonist’s fraying world. Accompanied by drawings that map the decline from idealism into psychosis, the exhibition captures the flip side of American idealism with wit and precision.
“Paper Goods” by Kati Kirsch
Where: Cheremoya
When: Through February 8, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: In "Paper Goods," Kati Kirsch reimagines the detritus of everyday life—flashcards, calendars, towels—as vessels for mystery and memory. Her works are equal parts tender and unsettling, layering molten patinas, fragmented forms, and surreal geometries to reveal the strangeness simmering beneath the ordinary.
Know Before You Go: Kirsch doesn’t just collect objects; she dissects their logic, warping them into something alive and uncanny. Bridge tally cards become cryptic meditations, flashcards morph into strange maps of time, and glowing figures emerge from fractured compositions.
“Jorge Pardo”
Where: 1301PE
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth A Look: Layering 30 years of 1301PE’s exhibition posters into a kaleidoscopic collage of color and form, Jorge Pardo’s monumental canvas blurs the line between a painting and its environment. The result is a dizzying play of abstraction and representation, a work that refuses to be pinned down and demands you step closer to decode its mysteries.
Know Before You Go: Depending on where you stand, colors collide or dissolve, textures sharpen or soften, and the image shifts like a mirage. Pardo wants you lost in the middle of it all—caught between recognition and abstraction, where every angle reveals something new.
“Quiet Days” by Sarah Lee
Where: Anat Ebgi
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: "Quiet Days" plunges you into landscapes that feel more conjured than painted. Sarah Lee captures the eerie stillness of nature in its most enigmatic forms—comets cutting across silent skies, icy waters reflecting twin moons, horizons where earth and sky whisper to each other. Her work isn’t about nature’s grandeur but its quiet indifference, a reminder of how small we are in the vastness of it all.
Know Before You Go: Inspired by Han Kang’s poem "Quiet Days," these works embody the strange beauty of things that simply exist: seas, snowdrifts, and moonlit skies unbothered by our anxieties.
“Laugh, Cry, Fight… with the Guerilla Girls”
Where: Beyond the Streets
When: Through January 18, 2025
Why It's Worth A Look: The Guerrilla Girls’s first-ever solo show in Los Angeles is part art show, part rallying cry. "Laugh, Cry, Fight..." captures over 30 years of their fearless activism through iconic street posters, immersive installations, and new works created specifically for this exhibition. Known for blending biting humor with bold visuals, the Guerrilla Girls challenge the art world—and beyond—by reckoning with systemic injustices.
Know Before You Go: From satirical street posters to immersive installations, every corner of this show screams for attention and accountability. Prepare to laugh at their razor-sharp wit, gasp at the injustices they expose, and leave ready to take on the patriarchy—or at least buy a piece of their merch to wear while you do it.
“Animitas (Chili)” by Christian Boltanski
Where: Marian Goodman
When: Through January 18, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Christian Boltanski’s work is both haunting and hypnotic, a masterful meditation on the fragility of life and the persistence of memory. The video installation in this show documents Boltanski’s 2014 desert monument of 800 bronze bells, arranged to mirror the stars on the night of his birth. Set in Chile’s Atacama Desert—the driest place on Earth—the bells sing with the wind, their chiming echoing the “voices of floating souls.”
Know Before You Go: Boltanski, a self-proclaimed “sentimental minimalist,” creates a space where sound, texture, and time intertwine. The 13-hour video installation invites viewers to experience the music of the cosmos and contemplate the passage of time, life, and loss.
“CONUNDRUM” by Henry Belden
Where: Gaylord Fine Arts
When: Through February 1, 2025
Why It's Worth A Look: Henry Belden’s "CONUNDRUM" channels the haunting story of Phineas Gage to explore identity, trauma, and resilience. Through photogravures and mixed-media sculptures, Belden crafts a poignant meditation on rupture and recovery, where beauty emerges from the scars we carry.
Know Before You Go: Inspired by the 19th-century railroad worker who survived a catastrophic brain injury that radically altered his personality, the show explores the fractures between identity, trauma, and resilience. Gage’s catastrophe, where a tamping iron shot through his skull yet left him alive, becomes a metaphor for Belden’s works, which balance fragility and permanence.
“Babe” by Nevine Mahmoud
Where: Soft Opening at Paul Soto
When: Through January 25, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: Nevine Mahmoud’s "Babe" is a wild ride through the uncanny valley, where sleek marble fawns and ear-like shelves flirt with beauty, violence, and absurdity. These aren’t just sculptures—they’re “anti-trophies” that turn the idea of conquering nature inside out.
Know Before You Go: The gallery serves as a fleeting refuge for Mahmoud’s sculptures—part beast, part toy—compressed into clay, plastic, marble, and metal.
“Entropy” by Nancy Buchanan and Martha Rosler
Where: Charlie James Gallery
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: This exhibition marries the work of Nancy Buchanan and Martha Rosler in a riveting exploration of the chaos and continuity of late-stage capitalism. From Buchanan’s statements around public complacency to Rosler’s critique of consumption, the works on view poetically peel back the polished facade of the American dream, and in doing so, reveal the utter decay beneath.
Know Before You Go: Expect the exquisite tinged with unease. Buchanan’s intricate collages seduce and confront excess, while Rosler’s works, precise as ever, expose the consumerist mindsets driving it all.
