Articles
CALIFORNIA GOLD Hilbert Museum Expands its Space and Collection
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 co-founder Mark Hilbert is always “on the hunt” for new works. Recent acquisitions include paintings by Chicano artist Alfredo Ramos Martínez, early drawings by Richard Diebenkorn and Diego Rivera and a 2012 drawing of a woman wearing a Luchadora (Mexican...
DYSTOPIAN FILTERS Ethel Lilienfeld Considers the Nuances of our Virtual Selves
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 realms. In recent years, she has considered self-image and the filters that augment—or completely change—our appearances. “I am interested in exploring the codes of representing femininity throughout art history and examining how these codes have...
SHATTERED Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme Find Meaning in Remembrance and Resistance
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 geometrical patterns along walls and across ceilings. The mesmerizing designs accentuated these tesserae pieces but also distorted the surface reflection, fragmenting the viewer’s image and intermixing it with that of peripheral objects and other...
AS THE WORLD TURNS Deborah Stratman Gazes Into the Abyss of Time
“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 professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where she’s based, Stratman has exhibited work as far and wide as the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, ICA London and pretty much every international film festival circuit. By some...
REALM OF THE SENSES Jónsi’s “VOX” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
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 strung diagonally from one corner of the room to the other. Reminiscent of a rudimentary tent, the speakers emanate a mixture of bubbling water, faint whistling, ambient techno and other sounds that swirl together in a surprisingly gentle cacophony. The...
