Articles
Keeping the Animal Alive Chasing the Ephemeral with Samuelle Richardson
Samuelle Richardson is a sculptural textile artist who began her career as a painter. Her painting itself evolved from studies in anatomy, for which she made 3D skeletal models. But by chance—or fate, when her painting studio became unavailable 10 years ago—she switched to her current technique in sculpture. “You might say that my work has come full circle,” she says. While her fabric sculptures emphasize the handmade quality of her creations, her classical art training is also quite evident, as she builds her figures from the inside out, from skeleton, to muscle, to skin. Her art has a strong ecological bent, focusing on shaping animals...
More Women Six Profiles
We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more. Gala Porras-Kim The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical poetics used to describe Los Angeles are evoked in the work of Gala Porras-Kim, each bubbling with alternatives ripe for excavation. Porras-Kim rearranges and reframes cultural artifacts, objects and documents to unhinge and de-center the heterogeneous modernist subjects that have long dominated museum practices and shape the so-called “cultural mainstream.” While her work is not...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VII Sex, Drugs and Bad Writing
I hadn’t sent the novel out in a while. In fact, I hadn’t sent it out in months. What was the point? Even if they loved it, they didn’t want it. At this point I was too dispirited to send the work out or describe the ensuing demoralization. But I needed to send it out in order to have some fresh rejection to write about. Otherwise I had nothing to say, and with these exaggerations and fabrications, I was only perpetuating frustration, laying a false trail across the visceral ether. I sent the same fifty-page section that Melinda Waterform had ignored to Jim Brooklinen, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review. I had enjoyed a warm...
OUTSIDE LA: Nicole Eisenman Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
It’s one thing to engage in a discourse about the influence of art historical movements on contemporary painters, and another still to analyze a particular artist’s specific set of influences, such as Nicole Eisenman’s robust relationship with the European Impressionists at the advance of the 20th century. But leave it to an art museum in Arles to organize an extensive embodiment of this discourse in the flesh. "Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns: Heads, Kisses, Battles" was organized in close collaboration with the artist—a salient fact which renders its premises all the more solid; no expert conjecture here, this is basically an...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part V A Tiresome Outpouring of Fribbling Expatiations
I don’t know how to create the impression of time passing. But it passed, weeks passed by, during which nothing much happened. The sense of futility engendered by these dealings with the literary establishment hung over other potential undertakings. There didn’t seem to be much justification for this ongoing expenditure of waste, otherwise known as literary endeavor. More than four years were spent writing a novel that remains unpublished. It’s unlikely that I will ever do anything better. I’m not getting any younger, and I may not even get much older. Under the circumstances there doesn’t seem to be much point in transcribing or describing...
