News

In 2020/21, I was named a Cultural Trailblazer by The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The awards promote the arts through distinguishing regional innovators. DCA’s mission is to strengthen the quality of life in the City of Los Angeles by stimulating and supporting arts leaders. These peer-selected artists have been chosen for their contribution to the community and caliber of their work.

KEN EHRLICH’S “DYSFUNCTIONAL” FURNITURE DISRUPTS THE EXPERIENCE OF DOMESTIC SPACE
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“Titled “Dysfunctional Furniture”—a phrase that could qualify as an irreverent definition of sculpture—Ken Ehrlich’s exhibition at Human Resources welcomed a categorical fuzziness around form and utility, bringing together a series of sculptural furnishings designed with neither the pedestal nor the human user fully in mind. These objects function as furniture, but, as the “dys-” implies, badly. They aren’t very useful, nor are they ergonomic or performance-tested. Some are a bit fragile or liable to give you a sharp jab. They imply a set of enigmatic expectations that disregard casual use.”

 

Liz Hirsch  review in Art in America.

NEW ESSAY IN BLIND FIELD JOURNAL
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“A grainy video circulates and re-circulates on the internet, showing a shark casually swimming up to an underwater network cable and taking a bite. It’s somewhat anticlimactic: The shark moves along, in search of other meals, other pleasures, other underwater geographies. In the pixelated moving image of the shark’s seemingly unintended attempt at sabotage, lies a strange constellation of past and present, an eerie map of the places where capitalist infrastructure, networks, and logistics overlap. The moment actualizes a form of poetic knowledge, as if the fragility of the technologies that keep capitalism running is laid bare.”

 

Full essay is  here.  |  Video is here.

EAST OF BORNEO INTERVIEW
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Janet Sarbanes and I were recently  interviewed by East of Borneo  about Re-framing the House of Dust.

2017 CALIFORNIA-PACIFIC TRIENNIAL: BUILDING AS EVER’ AT OCMA BY DAVE BARTON

“All the work here is political in its recognition of intransigence and loss of history, of the things we try to remember and forget, but Ken Ehrlich’s collection of archival images of Iranian mosques are the most political with a capital P. Initially unremarkable black-and-white vintage photos upon closer viewing reveal CIA documents laser cut into each one. As the current administration circles Iran like rabid weasels, threatening war, it sent chills up my spine reading the unclassified details of the 1953 U.S. and British coup that overthrew that nation’s democratically elected prime minister and opened the country’s oil fields to foreign powers.”

 

Link to review here.

THE IMPERMANENT ARCHITECTURE AT CALIFORNIA-PACIFIC TRIENNIAL BY SUSAN MORGAN

“In Ken Ehrlich’s on-going project about Donald Wilber (1907-1997), a scholar of ancient Persian architecture and the CIA agent credited as the “architect” of the 1953 Iranian coup (a Cold War strategy designed to secure British and American oil interests in the region), the artist composes a dialogue between Wilber’s two linked but divergent professions through a series of drawings and laser-cut archival photographs. Where each letter of Wilber’s CIA report appears, the paper has been evaporated, leaving only hollowed out words atop images of Persian Gardens and ornate ruins.”

 

Link to review here.

REVIEW OF “HOLD UP”

Three of my drawings were recently featured in an exhibition at the Angels Gate Cultural Center.

 

Hyperallergic has a nice review  here.

CURIOUS EMERGENCES

I have work included in a group show at the Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside on view through October.

More information  here.

REVIEW OF AFTER “VICTOR PAPANEK: THE FUTURE IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE”

The L.A. Times published a nice review of After Victor Papanek: The Future is Not What It Used To Be on view at the Armory in Pasadena through September.