by abby hertz | November 25th, 2008
Camille Rose Garcia’s second solo exhibition at Jonathan LeVine, “Ambien Somnambulants,” just might be the perfect exhibition for adults who like their fairy tales served with a hefty dose of quasi-nihilistic sociopolitical observations.
by Jeff Edwards | November 23rd, 2008
Keith Tyson’s art is powered by the hidden forces that govern creation, whether that of an artist in the studio or of the universe at large. In “Fractal Dice,” his current show at Pace Wildenstein, he grapples with the former, with results radically different from last year’s more cosmologically-minded “Large Field Array.” While the prior show presented a visually dense, symbolism-laden grid of 230 slickly-fabricated figural sculptures in an homage to the myriad ways we strive to make sense of reality, “Fractal Dice” is an austere, aloof meditation on art as process. Full Text »
by Jeff Edwards | November 23rd, 2008
Mike Cloud characterizes his work as systematic painting, yet it looks more like the product of obsessive thrift store bricolage than the dry, inert products one usually associates with that term. In the recent work on display in “Agreement & Subjectivity” at Max Protetch, he puts the techniques of artistic and commercial screenprinting through a conceptual wringer, resulting in pieces that evoke the splatter and raggedness of Oldenberg’s soft sculptures or Rauschenberg’s Bed at the same time they stir up a desire to create wistful or haunting narratives explaining their odd symbolic flourishes. Full Text »
by abby hertz | November 3rd, 2008
Come one, come all and behold a real, live art movement, right now, in the 21st century!
It’s hard to believe that in the age of fissures and post-post modern indecisiveness, a cohesive art movement exists. The idea seems to belong in a sideshow theater, as an anomaly or a relic of the past, but there is proof at the Laguna Art Museum that the practice is not yet extinct. Full Text »
by aimee walleston | October 27th, 2008
As an artist whose work explores, in myriad mediums, an interest in “how sound is visualized,” Christian Marclay now seems newly compelled by how sound can be eulogized. For his current show at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, Marclay has created a group of large cyanotypes that act as gravestone etchings of popular music’s essentially moribund medium: the cassette tape. Full Text »
by Jeff Edwards | October 26th, 2008
Cut paper art has an immense history, going back as far as the 6th century in China and the 16th century in the West, yet despite its long existence stylistic developments have been rare. Even today, most papercutting tends to fall into two dusty categories: geometric decoration and bland narrative.
Kako Ueda is one of the medium’s rare innovators. While her works have the intricate, lacelike precision and obsessive detail of the best historical examples of the craft, Ueda also manages to imbue her pieces with a surprising amount of philosophical weight and formal inventiveness. In “Totem: New Paper Cut Outs” at George Adams, she presents a set of works examining the dense network of relationships that have developed between nature, mind and civilization over the centuries. Full Text »
by Christine Licata | February 15th, 2008
British artist Tris Vonna-Michell’s co-conspiratorial and dynamic performance Tall Tales and Short Stories took place in Dispatch’s compact storefront on Henry Street. Over a period of four days he told each visitor that stopped by a customized tale, redefining the tradition of storytelling with a Fluxus-inspired lexicon of deconstructivist semiotics and discontinuous, fragmented images. Full Text »
by Alyssa Timin | January 12th, 2008
Chris Marker is an acknowledged master of montage, and although still imagery has figured prominently in his films since 1963, when he directed the iconic science fiction parable, La Jeteé, his photographs have just been shown for the first time. These portraits and group shots crackle with the contrast between black and white, society and individual. Full Text »
by Sophie Landres | December 18th, 2007
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. Having repeated many of his early pieces with self-imposed rules to safeguard against tedium, Kaprow authorized a precise re-doing of his most time-sensitive creation mere weeks before he died. Despite writing, “Happenings should be performed once only” as the fifth decree in his 1965 manifesto, “Untitled Guidelines for Happenings,” he halted the fleeting motion of experience for the benefit of future audiences. Thus based on a bundle of scrupulously detailed notes, Kaprow’s 1959 magnum opus has been given another life, first at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in the Fall of 2006 and again in the Performa re-creation, Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing). The homage turned out to be a harsh debunking, for contrary to Kaprow’s entropic philosophy, it demonstrated that nothing past is gone forever, it just loses energy in the resurrection. Full Text »
by Kara Rooney | December 18th, 2007
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. Full Text »