Juliana Halpert Surveys Los Angeles Fall Gallery Openings for Critics' Table LA

Critic Juliana Halpert toured Los Angeles galleries over a two-week span for her debut as Critics' Table LA editor, concluding that the city remains a painter's town. Her fall review covers four exhibitions. At the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, "Monica Majoli: Countervision" runs through November 21, facilitated by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division. Majoli's muted colored-pencil drawings of nude women, mounted on shelf end caps and in a flat file, stem from a year researching four lesbian photographers' archives and are modeled on their pictures, most taken at the Ovulars workshops held 1979–82 at Rootworks in southern Oregon. At Seasons, an artist-run space inside Fulcrum Press in Chinatown, Malerie Marder's show runs through October 17; Marder appeared in the 1999 exhibition "Another Girl, Another Planet" and was grouped by Roberta Smith with Yale classmates Justine Kurland and Katy Grannan as the "Beautiful Young Things." Alessandra Acierno's "Everything I See I Swallow" at Sea View in Hollywood runs through October 24, with paintings referencing Henri Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle and Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare. Adam Higgins's "Lollipop" at Chris Sharp Gallery runs through October 10, pairing semi-photorealistic scenes with giant screwdrivers. Halpert also notes David Rappeneau at Castle, Silke Otto-Knapp at Regen Projects, and "Hard Line Women" at Nonaka-Hill. She contrasts LA's confident, uniform fall shows with New York's renewed conceptualism.