“I’ve been going the wrong way for a long time … it’s sort of a reverse commute.” This is said by Todd Gray at the start of his 2010 performance, Caliban in the Mirror. This seemingly autobiographical, storytelling piece has Gray on stage with a few props—a camera, a...
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”
It would be negligent to discuss “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” at the newly opened Richard Taittinger Gallery without referring to the eponymous film. Both attempt to test and topple our expectations and assumptions. The film’s plot centers on Sidney Poitier’s John...
Can I Get a Witness
The early 20th-century’s turn towards modernism in painting was a decisive shift in interest away from artistic representation of acts of witnessing. Abstract art—which now seems to dominate many visual demesnes including the decorative and graphic design, and sets...
ALEC SOTH
“Songbook,” Alec Soth’s current exhibition of documentary-style black-and-white environmental and ensemble portraiture at Sean Kelly Gallery is compellingly complicated in the aggregate, ultimately pointing to a deeply American dilemma of how physical and social space...
Korea: Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh has a career that has yielded exhibitions at Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery, the Liverpool Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, a retrospective show at the Seattle Art Museum, and the Venice Biennale where he represented his native South Korea. His practice...
Charlotte Schulz
To write about Charlotte Schulz’ drawings requires a language equal to their elegant and surreal lyricism. The poet Jorie Graham comes close, describing a mythical space as consisting of “little whelps, vanquishings, discoveries, here under this / rock / no, over...
Adam Katseff
Throughout our evolution we’ve been afraid of the dark. As creatures primarily endowed with encephalic gifts, we aren’t well-equipped to vie with nocturnal animals, full of tooth and claw and with more finely attuned senses. They make quick work of us when we don’t...
Edmund De Waal
All indications are that Edmund de Waal is a polymath and a scholar. Deferring his place at Cambridge, he apprenticed himself for two years to study ceramics, then graduated with first class honors. In the ’90s he wrote a searching study on Bernard Leach, a prominent...
Adrián Villar Rojas
"La Inocencia de los Animales" is a staging of our anxiety regarding our continued survival as a species. The installation piece by Adrián Villar Rojas, one module of “Expo 1: New York” curated by Triple Canopy, is presented in a larger collection of work that...
Duron Jackson
Duron Jackson gives us a key to decipher his Blackboard Paintings (2010-2012), the most compelling parts of his installation “Rumination,” the latest of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Raw/Cooked” series. The wall text is that key, informing us that the enigmatic glyphs are...