Collect: LA Fall Gallery Guide, Global Highlights, and CHERYL

Next up in our series of fall gallery guides: Los Angeles. And what a season for LA, with an unprecedented Southern California retrospective in the form of Pacific Standard Time, as well as a new art fair weekend with the first editions of PULSE LA and MMPI/Armory Fair’s Art Platform LA. For those of you elsewhere, browse our overview of shows selected from cities around the world, or just turn to our events calendar for the full listings. Look out for more fall guides to major cities, made possible by support from Société Perrier. The NYC edition is available here, in case you missed it.

We also talk to CHERYL, a collective throwing events that are not quite parties or performances, but that definitely involve lots of fake blood, cat masks, choreographed dances, and glitter. On the way down from CHERYL's manic high, we visit Nathan Vernau's debut in Chicago, where he depicts himself (and everyone else) struggling to escape isolation in neon-hued drawings full of nervous energy.

Image: Willem de Kooning, Untitled (The Cow Jumps Over the Moon), 1937 - 1938. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Artlog, in partnership with Société Perrier, has the guide to the best of the fall gallery season in neighborhoods across Los Angeles. You’ll find background information on the shows and recommendations for the city’s top museum exhibitions, fall events, and places to eat and drink along the way. READ MORE

The first round of fall shows are open in cities around the world – these are our highlights. Los Angeles is the place to experience the Light and Space movement, with solo shows for founding fathers Robert Irwin and James Turrell. New York’s Museum of Modern Art assembles the first museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of Willem de Kooning’s career. In London, Ryan Gander locks visitors out of his Locked Room Scenario, and in Paris, Aleksandra Mir shows her felt-tip pen drawings of LPs. These are just a few of the season’s events – check our exhibition calendar for the full list. READ MORE

CHERYL, the artist collective made up of Destiny Pierce, Stina Puotinen, Nick Shiarizzi, and Sarah Van Buren, sits somewhere on an axis that joins Mike Kelly and David Byrne, a mix of earnest absurdism and a regard for abjection that seems squarely a product of early-80s investigations into participatory dynamics and DIY spectacles. Lately, the crux of CHERYL’s production are obsessively orchestrated video works loosely composed around a theme that involve lots of fake blood, cat masks, choreographed dances, glitter, and gloopy food. As one part of the overall work, the videos are completed by chaotic dance parties held in a nightclub, gallery or museum. The entire affair comes off rather like the up-cycle of a bipolar swing, a manic rush to the top of the roller coaster hill fully aware of the drop to come. READ MORE

I met with Nathan Vernau at Small Bar, an apt name for the neighborhood hangout roughly equidistant from our respective apartments on Chicago’s Northwest Side. It was a few days before the opening of his first solo show in the city, and he had just finished the exhibition’s centerpiece. Titled Everything Will Be Okay, it took thirty consecutive nights of focused labor to complete, and was the largest and most complex work he’d ever undertaken. READ MORE