“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 large afro wig, a blackboard, a drum set—verbally leading the audience through his discovery of the right way to go with his...
Two hundred years ago, the hierarchy of subjects taught to academic painters placed history and mythology at the top, with landscape and still life at the bottom. This ranking followed the scala naturae, the ladder or scale of nature derived from Plato: God, followed by angels, demons, stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, wild animals, domesticated animals, trees, other plants,...
The first to grow up in an image-centric world where the mass-dissemination of images via film, print and television started to infiltrate American culture on scales never before seen, those of the Pictures Generation found themselves grappling with notions concerning authenticity and authorship. Immersed within a world where the affluence of representation was starting to reveal its impact upon...
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 introspections. Through her vividly evocative photographic series, “Black is the Day, Black is the Night” (2009–14) and “Parting...
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years, the gallery was packed. I turned to the only piece in the first room that offered an unobstructed view: photographer Natalie...
We are supposed to wish upon them when we see them fall. But however sentimentalized shooting stars may be, they are merely rocky debris skimming the atmosphere — all their mythology is manufactured by those of us watching in awe from our Earthly confines. In the five...
Jonas Wood’s highly patterned and flattened paintings take up all four gallery rooms at David Kordansky Gallery. Evoking the decorative arts, their inherently “attractive” quality reminds one of a painted mosaic. Wood created this affect by using deliberate linear...
It’s rare to encounter a Warhol exhibition with something genuinely new to say, but somehow Lifetimes (a co-production of Tate Modern, Museum Ludwig, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Aspen Art Museum — its only U.S. venue) accomplishes it. Thanks to both the thoughtful...
Deceptively clean, simple, and filled with Southern California light, Ed Templeton’s new exhibition “The Spring Cycle” explores life in a suburban Southern California beach. And it has a deeper context: a critique of the banal isolation that often permeates suburbia....
Be careful not to break a mirror, or it’s seven years of bad luck. Don’t hang a horseshoe upside down unless you want the luck it holds to trickle out the ends. Step on a crack, break your mama’s back. Though they are most often recalled trivially and half-jokingly,...