“Chin Music” by Ben Sakoguchi
When: Through December 23
Where: Marc Selwyn Fine Art
Why It’s Worth a Look: Ben Sakoguchi’s crisp paintings use the motifs of historic advertisements to animate history, both recent and distant. He’s distinctly American in his iconography: California oranges, baseball cards, and Old Westerns mingle with ripped-from-the-headlines verbiage and imagery like MAGA hats and Colin Kaepernick.
Know Before You Go: On display are over 50 canvases from the artist’s “Orange Crate Label” series, which take the colorful labels of the family San Bernardino grocery store of his childhood, and use them to advertise such “products” as the dodo bird and Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Other series are deeply personal, such as “Postcards from Camp,” which takes Japanese internment during WWII as its subject. Sakoguchi himself was imprisoned during this period as a child.