Articles

(BITTER) SWEET VIRGINIA
Navigating Monuments in the Cradle of the Confederacy

In March, an invitation to view ceramic work by New York–based artist Patrice Renee Washington brought me to Richmond, Virginia, for the very first time. A midsize Southern city often referred to being as far north as one can get until one is in the North, Richmond’s reputation preceded itself. When I informed friends about the impending trip, they were quick to remind me that it was once the...

LESSONS TO BE UNLEARNED
The 60th Venice Biennale is Less Art World and More Real World

by Patricia Watts

This year’s 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil, takes an in-depth look at the work of more than 300 artists and collectives who have experienced exile and colonialism. Pedrosa’s thoughtful selections for the main exhibition and strong representation of immigrant artists in the pavilions resulted in an inspiring gathering of...

CALIFORNIA GOLD
Hilbert Museum Expands its Space and Collection

by Liz Goldner

Millard Sheets’ glass mural Pleasures Along the Beach (1969) adorns the façade of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Its brightly colored California scene, portraying sunbathers, birds and sailboats, beckons visitors to the newly expanded 22,000-square-foot museum. While the Hilbert Museum has many art pieces on display and in its collection, museum...

DYSTOPIAN FILTERS
Ethel Lilienfeld Considers the Nuances of our Virtual Selves

by Annabel Keenan

Technology cannot be separated from the world we live in today. Indeed, post-pandemic, we are experiencing even more of our daily lives virtually. This phenomenon lies at the core of French multidisciplinary artist Ethel Lilienfeld’s work. Using video, installation and photography, Lilienfeld examines our relationships with technology and the virtual body—avatars we create to engage in digital...

SHATTERED
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme Find Meaning in Remembrance and Resistance

by Tara Anne Dalbow

In the 18th century, when the Iranian elite heard rumors of the grand mirrored halls of Europe, they sent merchants to procure as many sheets of brilliant reflective glass as their boats could carry. Still, the mirrors cracked in their elaborate frames somewhere between Venice and Tehran. Rather than attempt to reassemble the shattered glass, artisans inlaid the thousands of pieces in sweeping...

AS THE WORLD TURNS
Deborah Stratman Gazes Into the Abyss of Time

by Natasha Boyd

“I’m not sure satisfaction is a thing I feel while making art. I get satisfied from stuff like getting my laundry done or digging a trench or putting away my books,” mused director Deborah Stratman in a recent interview with Documentary magazine. Perhaps this questing, open-ended relationship to her practice is why, at age 57, Stratman has nearly two dozen films to her name. An associate...

REALM OF THE SENSES
Jónsi’s “VOX” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

by Emma Christ

Jónsi, artist and frontman of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, masterfully crafted a recent show titled “Vox” which challenges the definitions of visual, sonic and olfactory art, merging the mediums to form a multi-sensory exhibition that plays on the viewer’s mind and body. The entry point to the show is Var (safespace) (2023), a tapestry of hundreds of micro speakers draped over a rope...

LOST IN SPACE
The New Restoration of Franco Rossi's "Smog"

by Luca Celada

Franco Rossi’s restored Smog plays like a Nouvelle Vague travelogue, with protagonists seemingly lost in an urban landscape that amplifies their inner malaise. That backdrop is Los Angeles and the long-lost 1962 film (now finally available in a pristine 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and UCLA Film & Television Archives) is also a snapshot of the city in its modernist “adolescence.” At...

FIELD REPORT
Art For All: The Gilbert & George Centre, London

by William Moreno

Gilbert & George, the quintessentially British pioneering queer artist-duo have staked a clear position within the milieu in which they operate. They have scant tolerance for art-world conventions, yet it is precisely that peevishness and their enduring, long-term collaboration that created the context for the creation of their provocatively lurid and iconic works. On a recent trip to...

STAYING INSIDE THE LINES
Painting AI's Possible Future

by Bill Smith

Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage flipping coins or Jeff Koons exploiting labor? As AI ramps up from being a tool of human artists, could it become autonomously creative?...

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Reviews

Chase Hall
at David Kordansky

There is just something about Chase Hall’s mark-making. He covers the faces of his subjects in stylized patterns that resemble African masks before staining the cotton with coffee. The artist’s marks make a lifeguard’s flotation device resemble an African shield....

Haunting House
at Departure Lounge

The last time Jamison Edgar curated Matthew McGaughey was at Honor Fraser, where I had VR sex with the Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. I wore goggles with Chip’s POV and had an unforgettable sexual experience with a creepily uncanny version of Joanna through...

Shiva Ahmadi
at Shoshana Wayne

A welcome break from hordes of contemporary painters retreading 60’s rear-guard aesthetics, Shiva Ahmadi is instead reminiscent of her near-contemporary Wangechi Mutu. Here are the same flowing watercolor lines radiating thick tendrils of hair, the same cosmic mother...

Sabine Moritz
at Gagosian

Staggeringly reactionary paintings for a staggeringly reactionary world, Sabine Moritz serves up “lyrical abstractions” (this is a genre, not an assessment) with the warm Crayola-explosion palette of early Jasper Johns and the paint handling of a tamer and more...

Elise Rasmussen
at Night Gallery

The history of photographers capturing the West is as storied as the mythos of manifest destiny. Elise Rasmussen steps knowingly into this lineage and subtly pushes the contemporary momentum of turning towards the sculptural, beginning to break photography’s physical...

“Actions”
at Sarah Brook Gallery

While the connection between the works in Actions is as ambiguous as its title, the exhibition braids together three artists worth examining individually. Laurel Nakadate’s installation serves as a wall-sized shrine for bridging time and absence, with altered...

Beatrice Arraes
at Sea View

The song Kukukaya, which partly inspired Beatrice Arraes’s solo exhibition, speaks of a game meant for four, but “Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” feels purposely solitary, quiet—a slow reckoning with time, where winning was never the point. Her paintings, saturated in deep...

Rocky Morton
Shatto Gallery

These paintings feature drip-like tendrils of paint, blown by a leaf-blower and sprawled across the canvas at all angles. Areas of the surface are covered at random but, more or less, evenly, like static. The process-based stochasticism is all too predictable. This...

J. Parker Valentine
at Bel Ami

The one large abstract drawing here, wedged precisely in between the ceiling and floor, explores a relationship between geometric form and explorative mark-making. The light touch is enticing, but the sketchy linework feels too beholden to the diagonal lines and ovals...

Alexander Reben
at Charlie James Gallery

The central piece here is four split-flap displays showing AI-generated text and a large HD TV displaying images based on those texts. The problem is that AI images are already familiar enough to be corny. The upscale production values do not help, and the jokey...

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