Periodically, we hear complaints (or alternatively, sighs of gratitude) from one quarter or another that painting is dead; or sometimes more specifically, that abstract painting is dead. At this point it’s far more likely the planet will die before abstract painting....
There’s an enormous tension between the two shows currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museum; yet each resonates all the more powerfully for the juxtaposition. While Material As Metaphor is emphatically abstract, and Keepin’ It Clean explicitly grounded in...
We see the future differently in recent years, as the future presses relentlessly into the present – way beyond ‘future-shock,’ as termed by the futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, into a kind of ‘present shock.’ This manifests in any number of ways, including the way...
Not long ago, I recommended a show, entitled, Concrete Islands (plural), which, although it didn’t exactly shy from the allusion to J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of contemporary urban life, was more specifically inspired by Marcel Broodthaers and the concrete...
You might call Liz Young a conceptual artist. One would certainly address some of her earlier work in such terms; and on a certain level, she still is – except that in her hands, the ‘concept’ is really a kind of generative nucleus of ideas, assuming form organically,...
As its title implies, Amino Acids reaches towards a place elemental and foundational, and implicitly existential – the conditions and pre-conditions of life (or even before life), the processes that generate it; and the conditions of life’s mouldering remains – what...
It’s true what they say. You can’t go home again—even if home is a neon jungle. Even if you’ve remade that neon jungle into your own constantly morphing, expanding universe. Even if that jungle is based upon an ideal garden of your youth, into which you’ve sown every...
It is possibly the singular image of our time: the ‘walking’ glacier – or in this particular instance, the glacier that both ‘walks’ or extends forward towards the edge of a continent, yet has also begun what may eventually be a dramatic recession. It manages to both...
Setting aside its legal ‘term of art’ implications, ‘Indecent Exposure’ – the collective title of this mini-retrospective of Margie Schnibbe’s films and videos – could simply be a term for the tribulations (and occasional trials) of everyday life – random hazards...
Edward Burtynsky’s principal subject over the last decade or so has been the industrial landscape, or more specifically, large-scale, frequently aerial views of major industrial operations, grids, excavations, or industrial waste sites. The photographs in his current...
Ed Ruscha may have summed it up best in one of his little books of photographs, Thirtyfour Parking Lots – specifically the aerial photograph of that umbilicus carved into Chavez Ravine we know as Dodger Stadium (and its surrounding parking lots). (A little ironic that...
Uta Barth’s work has always dealt with the way images and perceptions are shaped through both the tools and conventions of image making. Much of that work has addressed more specifically divergences between those synthetically shaped and focused perceptions and...
‘Petrichor’ was a word I was unfamiliar with until Lisa Adams used it as the title of her current show at CB1. It apparently refers to the smells of drying earth, grasses, and atmosphere following the first rainstorms after a long period of warm or dry weather. I...
It is for some of us (the more fortunate among us) the first fear or horror we know – our first encounter with something at first glimpse familiar that upon extended gaze or lingering examination reveals itself as utterly transmogrified, and suddenly, quite...
Egan Frantz’s show, “The Oat Paintings,” provides a possible opening into a discussion of the nature of political art: how we distinguish it from among the myriad latent political aspects of most other art; how we recognize and define its characteristics; how it...
Like many artists who have spent most or a significant portion of their career outside the U.S. or U.K. or the major art capitals, Jimmie Durham may be less than familiar to many of us who (until now) have had only the most fleeting (or even anonymous) contact with...
Sometimes a powerful image is enough – not simply to focus and arrest attention, but to shift the narrative, move the world, or certainly the viewer’s perspective on it. A great image can re-make that world or deliver an entirely new one. The watch word at this moment...
If there is a single word that could sum up the the career of László Moholy-Nagy, it would probably be refraction. The refraction of light is an obvious key, both with respect to Moholy’s overall formal approach and technical approach to his preferred media (and not...
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