a store visit with Reform, Los Angeles

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"There are your good friends and I like them fine.
'Cause they are your past and your present time.
But would you even be the same if you left them behind?"

- Kathleeen Edwards

all photographs by Marco Annunziata

Gerard O'Brien's store Reform on Melrose in the heart of Los Angeles tells a specific story of craft & design. It is here in this store that I have been firsthand introduced to the works of J.B. Blunk, Howard Werner, David Cressey's ceramics, Gerald McCabe's sculptural furniture, Tanya Aguiniga's felted works, John Kapel, only to name a few.

For collectors or design geeks like myself, Reform is what I might call a "temple of the hands." A place where the lines are blurred between craft + art + design. Gerard's enormous collection of books in the back room is the best public archive of this sort that I know about here in L.A. I've spent many hours of the afternoon speaking with Gerard about the current state of craft in America , as well as attending the store's events. Last year he hosted Leslie Williamson for her book, Handcrafted Modern, and spoke recently at LACMA on The Legacy of California Design. Designers such as myself are extremely grateful for Gerard's dedication to telling the story of Southern California's design, and encouraging a new generation to work with their hands. Please take time to visit Reform. - David John

Pacific Standard Time since 2003.

a portion of the library at Reform....

It's All Good!...

large ceramic text based sculptural works....

Tanya Aguiniga's felted chairs

all photographs by Marco Annunziata

a store visit with Reform
6819 Melrose, Los Angeles





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"I like to think of my work as a threshold between
in and out, object and space, heavy and light."

- Peter Shelton





Peter Shelton: eyehand
Selected sculpture from 1975 - 2011 at L.A. Louver, Los Angeles
19 November - 30 December 2011


"A lot of my early work started off nominally geometric and constructed, but I would sneak in a reference to the body without depicting the body, which was a way of creating a kind of subversive connection. Desire, memory, humor, even wistfulness are powerful psychic qualities that I do not avoid. I wanted to enter the work directly and have its narrative understood as much in the body as the mind."

"I like to think of my work as a threshold between in and out, object and space, heavy and light. You can see a preoccupation with the piercing of a membrane as a theme in flattop, 1975, with its overhead plane extended endlessly by mobility of it wheels. holecan, 1980 is an anthropometric planetarium of perforations. And recently blackslot, 2008-10 pushes its elusive objectified inner out to its edges where its containing skin defuses into an indefinite surface bleeding off into space.

-- Peter Shelton


Born in 1951, Peter Shelton was a pre-medical student at Pomona College, studying sociology, anthropology and theatre, before he switched to major in fine art. Shelton went on to earn a trade certificate in welding from the Hobart School of Welding Technology in his hometown of Troy, Ohio, in 1974, and a MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 1979.

more here....