NICODIM AT FRIEZE LOS ANGELES, BOOTH D16, FEBRUARY 26 – MARCH 1!

BOOTH D16

ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE / DEVIN B. JOHNSON / NICOLA SAMORÌ

February 26 – March 1 Santa Monica Airport

VIP Preview Thursday, February 26, 10 AM – 7 PM Friday, February 27, 11 AM – 1 PM Public Days Friday, February 27, 1 PM – 7 PM Saturday, February 28, 11 AM – 7 PM Sunday, March 1, 11 AM – 6 PM

Nicola Samorì, The Chemical Sanded Verse, 2026, oil on Travertine marble, 16 x 10 1/2 in (40 x 27 cm)

Frieze Los Angeles 2026: A Global Platform for Connection and Community

Photo by Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy of Frieze and CKA.

Over 100 local and international galleries will convene to spotlight California’s lasting influence on the global art scene Solo, dual and group presentations reflect the city’s multigenerational creative landscape Frieze Library’s inaugural Los Angeles edition will donate a permanent collection of artist publications to the newly reopened Pacific Palisades Library   Los Angeles, CA (February 12, 2026) – Frieze Los Angeles will take place from February 26 – March 1, 2026, bringing together leading international art galleries alongside a strong selection of Los Angeles-based spaces. This edition will highlight the city's dynamic creative landscape, featuring artists whose work continues to shape a contemporary practice across generations and communities. Returning to the Santa Monica Airport, the 2026 edition will present more than 100 galleries from 24 countries, including 17 first-time participants. Together with Deutsche Bank as Global Lead Partner, the fair reaffirms a shared commitment to celebrating artistic innovation and excellence worldwide. ‘Los Angeles thrives on experimentation and artist-led practice, yet its defining strength is the enduring, interconnected community of artists, curators, collectors and institutions who show up for one another across generations. Frieze Los Angeles 2026 captures this energy, from pioneering surveys to ambitious emerging voices, reflecting a city where engagement and creativity ripple outward, shaping the global contemporary art conversation and infusing Los Angeles with a distinctive vibrancy felt around the world.’ said Christine Messineo, Frieze’s Director of Americas.

Donald Grose, aka Utopian Cow, moving to New Mexico

Donald Grose, aka Utopian Cow, moving to New Mexico and building his own house slots neatly into a lineage that runs from punk rock to land art to Americana music. Like Robert Smithson’s earthworks, it treats land not as backdrop but as medium—an insistence that meaning can be carved directly into the ground, outside institutions and markets. There’s a strong HB punk rock ethic in it too: DIY to the core, suspicious of polish, grounded in doing rather than asking permission. Building your own shelter echoes the same refusal that powered hardcore scenes—if the system doesn’t serve you, you build something else, louder or quieter, but on your own terms. And threaded through it all is Americana’s long obsession with self-reliance, wide-open spaces, weather, waiting, and work—the idea that songs, houses, and lives are shaped by timing, land, and grit. Grose’s house becomes a kind of lived artwork and folk song at once: an earthwork you can sleep in, a punk gesture slowed down to desert time.

A man from elsewhere comes to New Mexico and builds his own house, and it’s easy—especially from the outside—to slot that gesture into a lineage of land art, punk refusal, Americana self-reliance. But from a New Mexican, Latinx perspective, the land has never been an empty medium waiting for inscription. It is already written on. It holds acequia routes, burial grounds, grazing paths, old grants broken by courts, fences that came later. The desert is not a blank canvas; it’s a palimpsest.

So when Donald Grose builds his own house, the act doesn’t begin with Smithson. It begins with adobe. With families who have been mixing mud and straw for centuries, raising walls with cousins and neighbors, not as an art gesture but because shelter had to be made by hand. DIY here isn’t rebellion; it’s inheritance. It’s what you do when banks don’t lend to you, when developers aren’t building for you, when survival depends on knowing how to fix a roof before the monsoon rolls in.

That shifts the meaning of the gesture.

The punk ethic—do it yourself, don’t ask permission—resonates, yes. But in New Mexico, permission has always been complicated. Whose permission? The state’s? The county’s? The land grant’s? The tribe’s? The family’s? Suspicion of institutions didn’t arrive with hardcore; it arrived with conquest, with broken treaties, with property lines drawn in distant offices. Self-building isn’t just aesthetic refusal. It can also be memory of exclusion.

And the land-art comparison feels different too. Smithson treated earth as material for concept. Here, earth is also ancestor. It feeds chile, it cracks in drought, it remembers footsteps. To “carve meaning into the ground” implies that meaning wasn’t already there. From this vantage point, building a house is less about inscribing and more about entering into relationship—accepting wind that never stops, light that bleaches everything honest, water that must be shared carefully.

The Americana thread—self-reliance, wide-open space, grit—also carries weight. Those mythologies often flatten the Southwest into backdrop for individual freedom. But wide-open spaces here are layered with labor: shepherding, railroad work, fieldwork, military bases, uranium mines. Weather and waiting aren’t romantic—they’re economic facts. Work is not a metaphor; it’s generational.

So Grose’s house, seen from here, becomes something slightly more complicated than a “punk gesture slowed to desert time.” It enters a landscape where slowness was already practiced, where building with your hands was never countercultural but ordinary. The difference may lie in intention. Is the house a retreat from systems, or a joining of place? Is it an artwork, or does it become accountable to community and land?

There is still something admirable in choosing to build your own shelter. That kind of labor earns respect anywhere. But in New Mexico, the act sits inside a much older continuum of mud walls, vigas, tin roofs, and patched fences. It doesn’t begin the story; it joins it.

From a Latinx, non-gringo perspective, the most interesting question isn’t whether the house echoes punk or land art. It’s whether it listens. Whether it learns the rhythm of acequia cleanings, of vecinos helping raise a wall, of wind that sandblasts pride down to humility. In that sense, the house is not just an earthwork you can sleep in. It is a test of belonging.

And belonging here is not carved into the ground. It is grown, slowly, in the ground.

Sophie Calle: Overshare -- ART REVIEW by Alexander Laurence

Sophie Calle: Overshare

January 30, 2026 – May 24, 2026

@ UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

REVIEW by Alexander Laurence

Sophie Calle: Overshare
January 30 – May 24, 2026
UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art
Review by Alexander Laurence

 

I have been looking forward to this exhibition for ages. I first met Sophie Calle in the early 1990s, when she regularly showed work at Fraenkel Gallery and maintained a strong presence in the Bay Area. I remember encountering her at a lecture at Cameraworks, at a time when she had already produced Suite Vénitienne and The Sleepers. Both works are represented in this retrospective.

Calle was never really a photographer in the traditional sense. She is a conceptual artist who has consistently explored themes of voyeurism, surveillance, and intimacy—long before the digital age and the internet normalized these concerns. She is as much a writer as a visual artist, and language is central to her practice.

 

In the section titled The Spy, Calle follows strangers through the city. In one project she poses as a maid, photographing travelers in their hotel rooms. The Sleepers documents a series of strangers invited to sleep in her bed, recorded through photographs and diary entries. Cash Machine uses early digital video to capture people withdrawing money from ATMs. Seen now, these figures feel like ghosts from another era.

In The Shadow, Calle reverses the gaze by hiring a private detective to follow her. In Autobiographies, she sends her bed to a man in Northern California. Other works document encounters atop the Eiffel Tower, where Calle remained in bed and spent five minutes with each visitor. True Stories presents a collection of objects chosen by the artist, alongside brief, elliptical texts. There is also a tribute to Frank Gehry.

Toward the end of the exhibition, Calle turns to her parents. There is a video of her mother, who—like her father—has since died. In one poignant gesture, Calle brings her mother’s portrait and jewelry to the North Pole. Elsewhere, secrets are locked away in safes, withheld yet present.

The final work is a video filmed in Istanbul, showing people who have never seen the sea. They are taken to the North Sea, encountering water for the first time. It is a quietly powerful ending.

This exhibition is mysterious and deeply affecting. Sophie Calle invites us to reflect on human vulnerability—on surveillance, social media, identity, memory, and death. The question lingers: what does it all mean?

All photos taken by Alexander Laurence

Sophie Calle: Overshare and New Exhibitions Opening This Saturday! @ UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

Dear UC Irvine Langson Museum Community, Join us this weekend as we open two new exhibitions! We are excited to present Sophie Calle: Overshare, the first North American survey to examine the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and her extensive artistic practice over the past five decades. Comprising photography, text, video, and installation work, Overshare highlights Calle’s efforts to probe the boundaries between public and private, truth and fiction, control and chance. Overshare opens alongside Steve Roden: wandering, which focuses on Roden’s works on paper, presenting drawings and collages as forms of travel without a set destination. The exhibition explores how drawing can function like an act of wandering—meandering, pausing, and exploring through time and space. The museum will be closed to the public on Friday January 30. We look forward to welcoming you back on Saturday January 31 to experience new art and ideas! Warmly, Your friends at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art Programs and Events Bring Your Own Baby Tour & Tea Wednesday, February 4, 2026 11:00 AM Art & Play (Ages 0–2) Wednesday, February 11, 2026 11:00 AM–1:00 PM Weekend Studio Sunday, February 15, 2026 3:00 PM Art & Play (Ages 3–5) Wednesday, February 18, 2026 11:00 AM–1:00 PM

"The Benders Circuit" | Experimental music at LACDA | Thursday November 20, 8pm | Free

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 8-11pm FREE!

LACDA 2025 LIVE PERFORMANCE SERIES A/V Performances: A series of live performances by electronic artists pushing the boundaries of audio-visual experimentation.   "DISASTER AREA" performance series at LACDA Presented by The Benders Circuit & Sleep Dep Productions Los Angeles Center for Digital Art is set to host DISASTER AREA, a groundbreaking performance series featuring experimental electronic audio visual music. The Benders Circuit, is shooting a documentary set to be released on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video directed by Angela Izzo and Eric A. Zimmerman. The event provides an experience of the boundary-pushing work of The Benders Circuit and their collaborators, and is a must-see for fans of experimental art, electronic music, and avant-garde visuals. List of performing artists and full schedule on thebenderscircuit.com More information and schedule www.TheBendersCircuit.com About The Benders Circuit: The Benders Circuit is a creative collective and docuseries that celebrates the world of circuit bending, experimental music, and the avant-garde electronic arts. Their mission is to document and promote the underground innovators shaping the future of sound and art. About Sleep Dep Productions: Sleep Dep Productions is a multimedia production company known for its work in experimental electronic music and video, bringing together cutting-edge technology with innovative storytelling.

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