Since the 1990s Amy Adler has used film stills and photographs (her own as well as found) as the basis for her work, methodically drawing the existing images, most often in pastel. In the careful construction of her compositions, she stages scenes that buzz with a dynamic charge, even when depicting only a single figure. Jordan Karney Chaim examines Adler’s career, and its evolving relationship with images over decades.

This interview took place in the kitchen of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on a July day near the end of the run of Andrea Bowers’s exhibition "The Political Landscape." The show consisted of two large projects and a suite of small drawings. The first project, which one encountered upon entering the gallery, was No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), a mural-like drawing consisting of 23 ten-foot-high panels that listed the names of people who have died in the attempt to cross the Mexican-American border. The second was a single-channel video projection, The United States v. Tim DeChristopher, which examines DeChristopher’s disruption of a government auction of wilderness land for oil and gas exploration.

Coefficient of friction: Photographer James Welling talks with Ingrid Calame about her large scale drawings and paintings, one-to-one-scale tracings taken from the Indianapolis Speedway racetrack, the floor of the Stock Exchange, and the bottom of the Los Angeles River.

Artist Don Bachardy, who was born in Los Angeles in 1934, has remarked that LA was the best place to live because it’s where movies are made. “I’m convinced,” he wrote in 2000, “that my interest in looking at people came directly from gazing, when I was very young and impressionable, at close-ups of movie actors several hundred times larger than life.”