NARCISSISM MAY BE AT THE CORE OF SOME ARTISTIC PRACTICE, but rarely is it flaunted so grandly as in the work of Cindy Sherman. She has denied that her photographs are self-portraiture, but despite her assumption of various guises—sometimes so laden with prosthetics and wigs and costumes that she is unrecognizable—we know it is Cindy Sherman underneath because that is her modus operandi. And we...
Laura London often channels celebrities through her photography, but not necessarily in ways that you’d expect. She doesn’t document musicians, models or actors onstage or off, or portray them in surreal situations like say, Annie Liebovitz does. Instead, she asks teens and young adults she knows to perform for the camera. By photographing them preening and vamping as an exploration of idealized...
A quivering grid of afternoon sunlight shifts across the polished hardwood floor of a long narrow room. But for the drowsy hum of the air conditioner, all is silence and stillness, an ambience ideally conducive to the reception and refinement of clear thought. Immersed in scholarly retreat, an owlish old man with a malodorous rucksack occupies an armchair. Students stretch out on sofas; others...
Nights CAN BE long in Moscow. But come spring, as the light fades ever more slowly, the evenings get off to a late start. Which may be why I inadvertently kept a driver waiting on the evening of April 3rd to ferry me and another journalist to the sprawling Artplay Design Center in the Kurskaya district of Moscow for the Seventh Annual Innovation Prize award ceremonies. In lieu of the press...
More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel, this is the world’s most important and enduring contemporary art show. Depending on the curatorial vision of the exhibition...
A point of reference for Renée Petropoulos' compelling and thought-provoking exhibition "Like a Street full of Friends: Studies for Speculative Monuments" at as-is.la is her 2014 public artwork installed in downtown Santa Monica: Bouquet (Between Egypt, India, Iraq,...
The works that make up Glen Wilson's exhibition "Slim Margins" are striking and unique. Wilson has an uncanny sense of materials and a keen ability to juxtapose incongruous elements to create the unexpected. Wilson sites the influence of documentary photographers like...
In 1839, the very first portrait photograph was captured of (and by) Robert Cornelius. It must have been a difficult – albeit likely humorous – process, as Cornelius set up his camera before hurriedly running to sit motionless in front of it, arms crossed and hair...
In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.” This two-edged sword of truth was unapologetically visible in the "Kangs" exhibition at Band of Vices, which includes four...
Sculpture is a medium of art with infinite possibilities. Unbounded by canvas or wall, a sculpture is only defined by the space itself. Yet despite the limitless potential definitions, there is only ever one realized in the moment that the iron is cast, the glass...