Articles

CHICAGO: Paola Cabal
THE WORK OF ATTENTION

It is 3:02 p.m. on February 26, and we are looking intently at the north wall of Paola Cabal’s studio while the Midwestern afternoon light streams in through her unobstructed west windows. Cabal is rapidly leafing through a Benjamin Moore paint-chip book, holding the color chips up to a patch of sunlight on her wall to identify the color she might use to replicate the light. “There it is:...

KANSAS CITY, MO: Linda Lighton
PSYCHO CERAMICS

by Elisabeth Kirsch

With their blend of surreal retro glamor, sociopolitical and personal commentary, Linda Lighton’s ceramic sculptures command a double take. This veteran artist can make clay do just about anything, and her art has unabashed palpable appeal. But Lighton is also fearless when combining the sensuousness of her materials with controversial subject matter, whether she’s taking aim at environmental...

RICHMOND, VA: Diego Sanchez
VISUAL INFORMATION

by Sarah Sargent

“One of the things I teach my kids is to be playful in their approach,” says painter and teacher Diego Sanchez. This freedom to experiment takes the pressure off and opens up the work in unexpected directions. It’s an attitude that has served Sanchez well in his own practice. Sanchez lives and works around Richmond, Virginia, a city with a vibrant art scene. His story is not just about becoming...

LINCOLN, NE: Santiago Cal
POLITICS ON PAPER

by Jonathan Orozco

Santiago Cal is a humble man with a demeanor that challenges traditional Western conceptions of artistic genius. His subtlety and humility are visible in his works, which are usually small or medium-sized carvings of fragile children. His visual narratives don’t hit you over the head. Cal lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, a long way—culturally and geographically—from his country of origin, Belize....

From Mortar To Metaverse
CONTEMPORARY COMMERCE

by Seth Hawkins

Eth, bit, sol, meta, block chain, bored apes, crypto punks, kitty litter squad, non-fungible, minting, mining, tokenizing, gas fee, hot wallet, cold wallet, generative NFT, destructive NFT, candy machines, early adopters—yes this is English—just not the English of our youth or even the English of a few years ago. This is the contemporary language of commerce and the new verbiage for the art...

Pioneering Petra Cortright
NFTs Are a No-Brainer

by Jody Zellen

Petra Cortright’s URL, www.petracortright.com, could be considered a work of net art. Practitioners of net art (beginning in the mid-1990s) often used the internet as their medium, sometimes populating their pages with images and data from other websites. Cortright’s home page is a montage of appropriated animated gifs that include twirling roses, dragons, smiley faces, twinkling and spinning...

Nancy Baker Cahill Challenges the Limits of Perception
Seeing the World Anew

by Tucker Neel

In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works articulating her long-standing interests in questions of physical embodiment. She made real drawings with real materials—like carbon,...

A Conversation with Casey Kauffmann
Hot Girl Sh*t

by Lauren Guilford

Casey Kauffmann is a hoarder of cyber content. Her image archive is a black hole of digital debris, infinitely consuming, tearing apart, and spitting out images—a spaghettification of visual culture. Kauffmann is known for her digital collages that populate her Instagram page, @uncannysfvalley. These assemblages are strange, fragmented manipulations of a visual language that Kauffmann...

Tabita Rezaire and the Materiality of The Digital
COMPLEX INTERACTION

by Eli Ståhl

The digital is an arbitrary category. In everyday speech, it is sometimes used as an opposition to the material: a digital copy, artwork or exhibition versus a material one. The digital is presented as something existing outside of the material realm and the history and politics thereof; an apolitical utopia that does not hold the same accountability as the “real world.” However, the line...

It’s All About Meme

by Anthony Ausgang

A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme reflects the biases of its creator and subsequent co-creator. Memes in their analog form were first identified in 1976 by the...

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Reviews

GALLERY ROUND: Pat Steir
Hauser & Wirth

The point of departure for Pat Steir's exhibition “Painted Rain” at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and...

Stephen Seemayer: Dark Side of Paradise
Bermudez Projects

The precarious balance of society and nature, and man’s place within the magnetism of both is the central theme of Stephen Seemayer’s “Dark Side of Paradise” at Bermudez Projects. The collection of 26 paintings and nine studies are an ode to the shadow self and the...

Editor’s Pick: Margaret Lazzari
USC Fisher Museum of Art

The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable”—Margaret Lazzari’s series of works devoted to her traumatic struggle with breast cancer, “The Cancer Series,” fits right into that category. More than 30 works of...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Marilyn Nance
Roberts Projects

The Marilyn Nance exhibition at Roberts Projects beautifully demonstrates the phenomenon known as six degrees of separation—the idea that all people are six or fewer connections away from each other. Nance was 21 when she was chosen to be the United States’ official...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Janet Olivia Henry
Stars

Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture. In Wrought:...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Carolyn Castaño
Walter Maciel Gallery

Carolyn Castaño's “Otros Seres” (Other Beings) exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery is an exhilarating eyeful of stealth environmental disaster. Castaño, of Colombian-American heritage, is well-known for her early extravagant and provocative Garden Heads...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Evangeline AdaLioryn
Sebastian Gladstone

Feathers, fur, gills, horns, tails (spiked and scaled), claws, talons, hooves, and forked tongues are some of the characteristics that adorn Evangeline AdaLioryn's strange amalgamations. The locust of the exhibition, "Her Labyrinth," presents an assemblage of...

GALLERY ROUNDS: June Edmonds
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Now known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing , written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson iterates the definition of resilience by stating: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Blood: Medieval/Modern
Getty Museum

Blood is unsightly in the flesh. Witnessing a bleeding person, one might turn away—or worse, be overcome with nausea and faint. For a substance essential to our functioning, to life itself, its image provokes extreme distress. If we were to trust our physiological...

PUBLISHER’S EYE: Yuji Ueda
BLUM

Appearing as if they are on the verge of moving, Yuji Ueda’s ceramic vessels are complex, layered and their own abstracted compositions, both planned through his methodical process yet a surprise from the firing process. Based in Shigaraki, Japan—a place famous for...

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