X-TRA → Online

X-TRA Online publishes articles and media that you won’t find in print. Here, we present more intimate and immediate content in the form of artist’s writing, writers reading, conversations and special projects—all commissioned for this Online platform.

eXhibitionsMatt Siegle, Kent Monkman

Licking the Sublime

“Painting literally goes through these two lenses (eyes), out this hand, and back through human lenses. That’s why I have so much belief in painting and in the power of painting. The humanity of it will always trump a photograph.” Kent Monkman in conversation with Matt Siegle.

DispatchesKareema Thomas

Things Fall Apart

Akinbola must contemplate the consequences of deliberate self-placement as he moves between distinct contexts: Black American life, Nigerian heritage, the artist’s studio, and the exhibition space. What identities might be gained? What might be sacrificed?

Ongoing

One often hears about the amazing transformation of somewhat homely cygnets (young swans) into beautiful adults, but a close second, in my opinion, are…

LivesSylvie Robinson

Headless Heritage

Heritage is always for sale and being sold, illicitly or not—something of which Rayyane Tabet is hyperaware.

DispatchesMarilena Borriello

Performance Dissidence

A newly expanded concept of video can enhance rather than compromise the medium’s essence, in particular through redefinitions of the artwork’s relationship with its beholder. The supposed reliability of technology to faithfully document reality—that is, technological indexicality—comes apart.

DispatchesJessi DiTillio

TV on Stage

This summer marked the twentieth edition of REDCAT’s annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival, a self-described “catalyst for creativity and new ideas.” These works, mostly untested, were selected via an open call that encourages emerging and early-career artists, then bolstered with an artist fee, technical support, and rehearsal space. This makes NOW a relatively rare platform for new experimental performance in Los Angeles.

DispatchesEmma Kemp

Memory Arcade Dream Space or Continuous Sidewalk

One segment of sidewalk swerves into another, portioning the ground into a riot of contrasting shapes. Their sudden alignment and dense textures are spellbinding. Clean white walls hem the urban composite: a world turned inside out.

DispatchesTravis Diehl

Displacement Child

Boettger doesn’t say Smithson was wrong to be “a visual artist and literary essayist; a vanguard artist who was covertly Catholic; an intellectual who privately read Jung, alchemy, and the occult; who was attracted to both women and men; and who felt himself to be existentially connected to an absent sibling.” Rather, his sin seems to be dissemblance.

LivesSierra Komar

A Few Fragments, Mid-Explosion

Most every figure that appears in Sibylle Ruppert’s work is multiple: an array of incomplete beings, momentarily but precariously fused.

Re:ResearchDavid Muenzer

Drawing Marketplace

When speaking publicly, I rarely connect the unwieldy variety of forms in my work that all go by “drawing” among friends. I gave it a stab once, with an unsatisfying text that moved too swiftly from Mantegna to the rise of the capacitive touch screen. I think there was a reflexivity issue.

DispatchesIkechúkwú Onyewuenyi

Temporary Privileges

The debt feels familiar—I’ve been here—and unfamiliar—I’m not there yet. I stress the yet as an acknowledgement of the façade of individualism celebrated in the refrain, “land of the free.” We all aren’t free. And the sooner we dispense with this myth, we may finally reckon with the boundless ghost of debt, echoed in Emily Barker’s refrain that “being able-bodied is a temporary privilege.”

DispatchesEzequiel Olvera

In the Wake of the War Machine

In LA’s socioeconomic extremes, art as a business is more often than not disconnected from its direct community, while those in the neighborhood come from cultural traditions of art embodied in rituals, architecture, and mythopoetic survival. Eurocentrism allows obliviousness to persist, even in the face of a bullet through the window.

Artist's ProjectsAstria Suparak

Ancient Sci-Fi

Science fiction is not a modern invention. Nor is it descendant from Frank Herbert, Jonathan Swift, or some other White Genius. This set of images highlights a sliver of the brilliance and beauty of Asian imagination and artistry across six centuries.

QxAEmann Odufu, Umar Rashid

The Frenglish are Coming

“The people who are the pioneers aren’t the pioneers. We’re all part of this collective energy that builds and builds and builds.” Umar Rashid in conversation with Emann Odufu.

DispatchesRyan S. Jeffery

In the Style Of

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, writer-director Noah Baumbach picked up Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise and decided it was time to film what many have deemed an “unfilmable” cornerstone of postmodern American literature. Why now?