Activities are often pierced by interludes that have little to do with them. One’s reading, for instance, may be interrupted by thoughts, noise, a graphic on the opposite page, a text message. This sort of discontinuity is central to Paris-based Denis Darzacq and...
The air in Ecaterina Vrana's exhibition partakes heavily of oil odors. Like many other contemporary painters, she applies copious quantities of paint in various ways, slathering it like Spackle, squeezing it out in toothpaste-like ropes, engraving it, and stippling it...
Vestiges of the past can be found all over the West; dead and dying towns are replete with inklings of historic spirit in the forms of half-buried artifacts, wild animals and deserted buildings. Entering Catherine Fairbanks’ exhibition,” Two Chimneys” evoked the...
Visionary currents circulate around "The Ocular Bowl," a beautifully curated exhibition of paintings by Agnes Pelton, Linda Stark and Alex Olson. While each artist is separately well-known, this show illuminates their intersecting interests.Two paintings by Pelton...
Like fairy tales about to reach sinister climaxes, Laura London's new photographs present spuriously romanticized views of female youth. Each portrait's idealized setup is tempered by a portentous feeling that something is amiss.The show's title, "Relocation,"...
Inside American prisons, thousands of men sequestered in tiny, dim rooms spend their lives waiting to die. Outside, this marginal population is hardly considered, except as a seamy abstraction. SoCal-based artist Amy Elkins finds inspiration in prisoners’ hermetic...
Polly Apfelbaum and Dona Nelson's collaboration yields surprising relationships among artworks, viewers, and surrounding architecture.Each artist's celebrated inventiveness is amply represented. Collaged from dyed velvet, Apfelbaum's Blue Joni (2016) and Brown Sugar...
In Channing Hansen's solo gallery debut, which consists of nine large knitted works and one salon-style grid of smaller pieces, traditional stretcher bars are visible behind the gauzy woven materials. For these undeniably engaging works, Hansen acquires, dyes, and...
As a student, seeking respite from the relatively hidebound painting department, I often retreated to the sculpture studios. There, the critical gaze of teachers seemed less intense; sculpture students did as they pleased. Around that time about a decade ago, I took...
In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” film theorist André Bazin observed that image-making was “no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal...
Entering James Hyde's show at Luis De Jesus, one immediately wonders: What sort of pictures are these? At first glance, it is difficult to determine whether the expansive images are manual or mechanical, painterly or photographic.Materially, they are hybrids. Each...
During her childhood in provincial Nigeria, Shiri Mordechay recalls traversing roadways littered with human skulls, glimpsing live babies discarded in trash cans and being spellbound by a harrowing band of voodoo practitioners that surrounded her abode and pounded...
Gazing out of a window or peering into a painting: both imply curiosity, perhaps driven by a sense of longing, for what is beyond. John McAllister’s paintings self-reflexively allude to this, highlighting their own window-like rectangularity while presenting snapshots...
The ocean sometimes gets the best of those who love it most. The title of Alison Frey Andersson’s exhibition, “86’d” offers a surfer’s take on the hazards of that beguiling body. The Venice-based artist, who regularly succumbs to the pleasures of riding the waves on a...
It seems every traveler, on occasion, suffers a collapse of time and space. Careening down a hotel hallway late at night, carrying a suitcase whose weight amplifies the exhaustion from hours of cramped travel, one's head begins to spin. Doors, walls, and expanses of...
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