Art Criticism and Writing | MFA Program

Thursday December 13th, 2007
Filed under Fall 2007

Soo Sunny Park at Reeves Contemporary

Soo Sunny Park, “Fractal Immersions,” 2007, Sheetrock, egg crate and air conditioning filters, installation-dimension variable, courtesy Reeves Contemporary

Soo Sunny Park, a Korean-born artist, took up half of the space at Reeves Contemporary with her most recent site-specific installation, Fractal Immersion. Park moved to the U.S. at the age of nine and received her BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Fractal Immersion occupied two walls in the back half of the gallery and all the space between them, leaving just enough room in the front for Beth Ganz’s show of landscape photographs. The work consisted of several layers of perforated roughly 6-foot-high sheetrock walls and some scattered organic-looking elements made of egg crates and air conditioning filters. The egg crates were dismantled and put back together in a modular structure that resembled a giant beehive.

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Saturday December 15th, 2007
Filed under Fall 2007

Ei Arakawa and Amy Sillman at the Japan Society

BYOF-Bring Your Own Flowers, Japanese artist Ei Arakawa’s latest elaborate performance incorporating high-speed construction and deconstruction was as unpredictable, complex and provocative as the subject it was built around: art and artist. Arakawa created an interpretative, live-action experience of New York painter Amy Sillman’s conceptual process and work. Incorporating the flowers audience members were asked to bring with them, building materials (such as wood, drills, etc.), multimedia and music, he reconstructed the look, feel and process of Sillman’s abstract, psychologically-charged paintings. Along with the physical materials, the performance included the underlying framework of two Japanese traditions-the 600-year-old Ikebana art of flower arranging and the nearly 60 year-old Gutai movement of performance oriented art-actions.

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Tuesday December 18th, 2007
Filed under Fall 2007

Kent Henricksen at John Connelly Presents

History was suspended and irony reigned at Kent Henricksen’s second solo show at John Connelly Presents. Cherubs, angels and romantically etched figures floated and fell amongst a wall-papered background of peach and purple while nine large-scale paintings emerged from the Baroque patterned fields that lined the walls of the gallery. The result conjured a surrealistic inner sanctum where fantasy and reality combined to evoke a guise of childlike naïveté. Upon closer inspection, however, one found that these meticulously constructed pieces, most often comprised of embroidery on printed fabric, dealt with a much darker side of the human psyche.

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Tuesday December 18th, 2007
Filed under Fall 2007

Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing) at Deitch Studios

Noémie Solomon performing in Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing), 2007. Photo copyright Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA, Allan Kaprow Estate, and Hauser & Wirth Zurich / London.

The venerable, self-proclaimed “un-artist” Allan Kaprow passed away last year and the art world hasn’t been able to let go. Just as history needs its stories, art needs its artifacts and though the “Happenings” Kaprow coined and created were meant to slip from gerund to past tense, posterity must have spooked Kaprow from his deathbed.

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