Fritz Haeg

Fritz Haeg
Center for the Arts Eagle Rock
Through December 19

Known for his collaborative performances (like his 2008 Whitney Biennial project) and alternative educational approach, the Sundown Schoolhouse, Los Angeles-based artist Fritz Haeg presents a new series of happenings and events during his month-long residency at the local art center in L.A.’s Eagle Rock neighborhood. Visitors can join Haeg daily to participate in or guide movement sessions or visit the project headquarters, which aims to situate the participatory work in a larger discussion of dance, art making, architecture and community.

Tomoo Gokita

Tomoo Gokita
Honor Fraser
Through December 19

Tomoo Gokita’s newest series of paintings departs from his previous inclinations toward multi-layered cultural references: wrestlers, women in lingerie, found-photo like portraits, and bodies twisting into amorphous positions. As a follow up to the Japanese artist’s 2007 exhibition in Honor Fraser’s previous Venice gallery space, this show features a group of simple expansive canvases with subtly imbued abstract fields. It is an unexpected and exciting new direction for the artist.

Beth Campbell

Beth Campbell
Country Club
Through December 19

Architect, R.M. Schindler’s Buck House (1934)–out of which Country Club Projects has been operating since September–seems almost built to exhibit the conceptual installation work of Beth Campbell. Campbell is skilled at sculpturally rendering interior space through ambiguous, disorienting and uncanny moves. This new site-specific architectural intervention will both reconsider modernist architecture as well as a viewer’s perceptual experience of design.

Susan Mogul

Susan Mogul
Jancar Gallery
Through December 19

Throughout her over thirty-five year career, Susan Mogul has cleverly and effortlessly situated autobiography at the heart of her practice. Turning her video camera on her own life, she has asserted and strong and significant–but nevertheless lighthearted–voice into cannons of early West Coast video, performance and feminist art. This exhibition will include highlights from her early career and a long overdue return of her singular ideas and practice.

Dianna Molzan

Dianna Molzan
Overduin and Kite
Through January 9

Recent University of Southern California MFA graduate, Dianna Molzan paints non-figurative works that are inextricably related to figures, or more precisely, characters. Molzan asserts that each of her new small, abstract canvases “portrays” a different persona taken from a fictional mystery novel. In effect, these odd non-objective objects and images weave a genre of their own.

E.V. Day

E.V. Day
Otero Plassart
Through January 16

Among her more standard materials, New York artist E.V. Day has commonly employed nylon bridal thongs, silk crotchless panties, fox and raccoon tongues, cat skeletons, wet suits, a Chanel power suit, fishnet body suits, mummified Barbie dolls and a couture Barbie doll wedding dress in her distinctive and sultry sculptures. Dripping with resin or suspended by stainless steel hardware, her objects depict the thinly veiled tension between feminine fun and S&M anguish. Day’s exhibition with Otero Plassart will be the artist’s first West Coast solo show since her 2006 project at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum and should not be missed.

Dan Bayles

Dan Bayles
Francois Ghebaly
Through January 23
Formerly Chung King Project, Francois Ghebaly Gallery has re-opened under a new name and in a new Chinatown location, and Ghebaly’s international roster of emerging artists is still strong and impressive. Unlike the painted cityscapes and topographies of Dan Bayles 2007 show with the gallery, this exhibition moves the viewer into strangely abstract and structural interiors.

Barbara T Smith

Barbara T Smith
The Box
Through January 23

Two and a half years after the opening of her experimental and historically-minded space, Mara McCarthy presents the second show of longtime L.A. artist, Barbara T. Smith. Whereas the cornerstone of her 2007 Box show presented Smith’s larger-than-life sculptural installation Field Piece (1968/71), this new exhibition focuses on her more ephemeral production, offering a snapshot of the important performances Smith completed between 1968 and 1975.

Still from ‘Secret Life’ by Reynold Reynolds in ‘The Best of Loop’

The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing
The Pacific Design Center, galleries B230 & B487
Through February 5, 2010

The exhibition ‘The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing’ claims to “Take the pulse of the next generation of video art from Europe, the Middle East and Asia.” While that may sound like a tall order, curator Paul Young seems equipped for the challenge having spent the last two years visiting the Loop Video Festival in Barcelona and researching for this exhibition. The survey is installed at the Pacific Design Center, which recently opened two of its large empty storerooms for artists to use as free exhibition space.

The Cosmic Mind, Germany, 1400s

Migrations of the Mind
The Getty Research Institute
Through April 18

Amassing some of the most eccentric and intricately decorated texts from nearly two-thousand years of human civilization and thought (roughly 1400-1600 a.d.), ‘Migrations of the Mind’ presents a rich assortment of rare books and manuscripts from the notable Schoenberg collection. Including ancient medical diagrams, esoteric charts, linguistic graphs, maps, religious texts, and numerological schemas, these objects vividly illustrate a universal thirst for knowledge as well as the evolution and movement of ideas throughout the old world.