Taryn Simon

JOHN BERGGRUEN GALLERY
228 Grant Avenue
January 6–March 16

Taryn Simon, Folder: Abandoned Buildings, 2012, archival ink-jet print, 47 x 62”. From The Picture Collection, 2012.

Taryn Simon’s photographic practice is well known for mining time and place, as well as for challenging the confines of the frame while weaving complex narratives. Yet her recent piece The Picture Collection, 2012, is somewhat of a departure. Though Simon continues her selection-based process, The Picture Collection commences with one of the most daunting information banks: the New York Public Library’s circulating Picture Collection, which consists of 1.2 million images from books, magazines, newspapers, postcards, and photos. It’s physical archive that was famously utilized as a research tool by Diego Rivera and Andy Warhol. Simon has parsed the archive’s 12,000 different subject headings, isolated forty-four, and chosen about one hundred images from each of these. While her selection of categories varies drastically, her configurations of its images are relatively standardized. Simon’s large frames encompass three to four horizontal rows of images from a particular archival folder. The photos are laid atop one another, in most instances revealing only the picture farthest to the right in its entirety. In Folder: Abandoned Buildings, for example, some images appear twice, but their specifics or points of reference can barely be made out from their edges. In fact, only in the three photos to the far right of the frame do we see abandoned buildings shown in full.

While Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, 2008–11, was structured like a book, using photos to trace family histories and texts that functioned like footnotes, with The Picture Collection she instead paints a portrait. The kinds of details that informed the episodic sagas of A Living Man are left out here, permitting viewers to glean just a rough sketch alluding to the varied pasts buried within each of the archival photos as they are squished together to convey an abundance, rather than being examined individually. Although it is frustrating that most of the images cover each other, Simon’s concealment pays homage to the mystery of this massive archive, reminding us how rarely we find anything so enigmatic in our accessibility-driven age of online search engines.

— Courtney Malick

Alan Rath

HOSFELT GALLERY
260 Utah Street
March 30–May 18

Alan Rath, Forever, 2012, pheasant feathers, aluminum, polyethylene, fiberglass, custom electronics, motors, 90 x 60 x 12".

There’s a serious flirtation factor to Alan Rath’s recent mechanized sculptures. Composed of metal armatures and computer hardware that seemingly animate feathers, the works literally tickle the viewer who stands even a socially acceptable distance away. Working with robotic forms since the 1980s, Rath has always captured a dynamic confusion between electronics and human intimacy, utilizing standard tech-art hardware—video monitors, audio equipment—as stand-ins for the human body. At Hosfelt he doesn’t hide the tripods and consoles, but the addition of an organic material is a breakthrough, making the nine new works a different kind of animal, pun intended. The freestanding sculptures, triggered by motion sensors, enact mesmerizing, uncannily lifelike sequences that recall dance (the artist admits to being inspired by Chinese opera). Long brown pheasant feathers flutter and shimmy in circular formation in Absolutely, 2012, a tall piece that resembles a palm tree. The feather fronds undulate and wave; they stiffen like tails of frightened felines. Each work embodies a very different personality. Fa Fa Fa, 2013, is fitted with white ostrich feathers, a material that conjures a burlesque dancer’s fan routine. The feathers are configured in a tight formation and express a playful ambivalence, cramping together before splaying outward to coyly reveal a mechanical heart. Two circular armatures, each with a single long feather, mirror each other’s movements in Roto II, 2013. Rath implies a relationship between the objects, which, while mostly tracking each other, occasionally strike out on their own, managing some kind of dissonance as they express autonomy—a flamboyant, mating-dance version of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991. As Rath’s sculptures go through their paces, the electronic clicks and groans of gears in action add a sound element that is also strangely anthropomorphizing. Forever, 2012, is an almond-shaped wall work whose form suggests a tortoise. The feathers flap and the sculpture seemingly strains to take flight, while metaphorically it soars.

— Glen Helfand

“Without Reality There is No Utopia”

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS
701 Mission Street
February 15–June 9

Superflex, Financial Crisis, 2009, HD video, color, sound, 3 minutes, 30 seconds.

“You’re now arriving at your job. There is a letter on your desk…You have lost everything,” incants a hypnotist in Financial Crisis, 2009, in an attempt to use his powers to help viewers heal from the wreckage of the 2008 economic meltdown. Created by the Copenhagen-based collective Superflex, the video is an apt entrée into this massive exhibition, which culls together twenty-two artists and collectives from fifteen countries to meditate on the forces that drive economic and political regimes. At stake here is the media’s stunning capacity to shape public opinion and the artist’s role in dismantling sociopolitical mythologies.

See for example Secure Paradise, 2008, by Argentine-born, Brooklyn-based Judi Werthein. The video profiles an isolationist German immigrant community in southern Chile known as Dignity Colony, which was formed by Nazi fugitives following World War II. Footage picturing rolling hills, happy blond farmers, and state-of-the-art farming equipment is paired with somber voice-overs of neighboring Chileans noting their suspicions about the Germans’ activities. The video warns against nostalgic visual vernaculars when the voices reveal how this “utopia” for German implants served as a torture center following Pinochet’s coup d’état in the 1970s.

Daniel García Andújar reprinted some one hundred pictures taken from newspapers and magazines, assembling an eclectic mural of fashion icons and historic milestones. Although the images range widely in date, from the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall to the day before the collapse of the twin towers, Andújar’s archive feels more like a portrait of a singular moment than a chronology. The overwhelming volume of information locates the viewer in the present, absorbed in the familiar contemporary task of wading through endless streams of images. Here, and throughout the exhibition, history is presented as the jumbled, subjective experience of collective and individual memory, while the media’s linear portrayals are rendered deeply problematic.

— Liz Munsell

Etel Adnan

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
California College of the Arts, 360 Kansas Street
April 17–June 29

Etel Adnan, Five Senses for One Death, 1969, ink and watercolor on paper, 11 x 25".

“Words and Places: Etel Adnan,” organized by the graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, is an impeccably timed exhibition, a gift to those of us who wanted to learn more about Adnan after encountering her paintings and tapestry at last summer’s Documenta. Painting is only one of Adnan’s many talents, which have led to a storied career as a poet, novelist, playwright, and journalist. The Wattis exhibition argues for the imbrication of word and image in Adnan’s work, and includes many of the artist’s vibrantly colored, jewel-box landscapes and abstractions as well as prominently placed vitrines housing leporellos, accordion-like artists’ books across which word and image sprawl.

While the precise nature of the relationship between verbal and visual remains underdeveloped, place—in all its specificity and elusiveness—is established with sensitivity. For Adnan, there are primarily three places: Northern California (consolidated in the figure of the majestic Mount Tamalpais, which she calls the most important person in her life), Beirut, and Paris. Interspersed with Adnan’s work are videos by Chris Marker, Rabih Mroué, and the Otolith Group—documentary media set in contrast to painterly marks—that the curators chose to contextualize the artist’s practice. Each video occurs in one of Adnan’s formative places: Marker trains his camera on junk sculptures that formerly populated mudflats in the Bay Area, Mroué edits footage of a collapsing building in Beirut, and the Otolith Group films Adnan reading poems from her volume Sea and Fog (2012) in her Paris apartment. The Otolith Group only depicts Adnan from behind, her orange sweater and a caramel wooden table adding to the glow surrounding her light-flecked silvery bob. Like the places she paints and writes, Adnan herself is at once present and absent, the still center of the exhibition. She turned eighty-eight this year, but the vast majority of paintings, when dated, are relatively recent, from the 1980s to the present. Her paintings are vividly present, but so many are undated and progression is so emphatically denied that aligning them with a life’s work as an unfolding narrative is impossible.

— Tara McDowell

Andy Moon Wilson

GET THIS! GALLERY
662 11th Street NW
March 2–April 20

Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled (16), 2013, mixed media on paper, 10 x 10".

Andy Moon Wilson’s newest drawings are complex geometric designs that transfix the eye with depictions of the future. The twenty-two untitled works on paper in this exhibition, all roughly ten inches square, feature a diverse array of forms ranging from pixels to undulating pinwheels and intricate networks of laser beams, all rendered in the intense hues of gel pens. Though Moon Wilson employs some Op-art techniques, the impression of movement is carefully restrained; these drawings tease the eye with a hint of vibrating pattern, but they stop short of a fully disorienting effect. This forces the viewer to confront the physical surface of the works. The edges of the paper are torn, and the gel pens Moon Wilson uses are clumsy tools given the detail of his drawings; color bleeds over the lines. These intentional contrasts raise these works from mere pattern play to a new status as platforms of symbolic meaning, thus inviting a study of Moon Wilson’s source material.

Moon Wilson musters a clash of imagery, ranging from art-historical references like medieval architecture and the drawings of Simon Gouverneur to cinematic depictions of the future. The stained-glass windows of gothic cathedrals mix with air-borne superhighways and the computer code matrices of campy sci-fi classics. By combining these sources, Moon Wilson suggests they function similarly as visions of power and progress. Both stained glass and sci-fi depictions of the future aim to dazzle and impress viewers. Moon Wilson’s drawings, by combining these references with straight-from-the-tube colors and simple materials, emphasize that these are constructed visuals, not reality. This undermines their status as authoritative representations of possible realities, and celebrates aesthetic properties as their main achievement.

— Lilly Lampe

Bethany Springer

TWIN KITTENS
75 Bennett St., Suite K1
April 11–May 24

View of “Seismic Reflection,” 2013.

Most of the works in Bethany Springer’s solo exhibition “Seismic Reflection” emerged from her month spent at the Full Tilt Creative Centre in McIvers, Newfoundland, attempting to record the movement of icebergs. Instead of creating the intended recordings, however, Springer constructed a site-specific installation, Tidal, 2012, (here represented by documentary photos), using rope purchased from a local hardware store. Among other works on view is a sprawling floor-bound sculpture, Seismic Reflection, 2013, created after the artist’s return to Arkansas, where she works and teaches.

For Tidal, the artist wove a bright yellow net and attached one end to her Newfoundland residence and the other to an adjoining wooden fence on the property. By virtue of its setting in an area where cod fishing had been the major industry for five centuries, the frail, unmonumental net gestures at the industry’s collapse in the early 1990s and the political rancor that ensued. Meanwhile, the work Seismic Reflection, after which the show is named, consists of a rambling, buckled sheet of galvanized mesh, on and around which are two lawn chairs (one with chrome-plated slats) and a small cluster of wax-covered Styrofoam chunks that resemble ice.

These works evoke a sense of a dysfunctional landscape, icy and cold. But a few of the works also seem constricted by the artist’s initial concept. The video Signal-to-Noise Ratio, 2012, which depicts a glass of water containing ice cubes from an iceberg, a common practice in that part of the world, is a case in point. Using time-lapse photography, the ice cubes melt and then regenerate as the video runs in reverse. At one point an oil tanker passes by in the background. The video clearly functions as a comment on diminishing natural resources, but its generic visual quality unchanging across a fifteen-minute running time renders it a somewhat flat illustration of that single idea. “Seismic Reflection” taps into important contemporary ideas, but is most effective where the particulars of a work’s execution move well beyond the ideas that generated them.

— Cinqué Hicks

Jessica Halonen

AMOA-ARTHOUSE AT LAGUNA GLORIA
3809 W 35th Street
March 2–May 26

Jessica Halonen, Target 17 (detail), 2012, gouache on canvas, 19 1/2 x 17 1/2".

There is eeriness to the perfection of the works in Austin artist Jessica Halonen’s new show. At first glance the half-dozen canvases and drawings and five sculptures appear to be flawless investigations of color, shape, and material. From adjacent walls of the intimate gallery, two paintings pop like off-key color wheels composed of strips of pure hue on raw canvas (Target 20, 2013, and Target 17, 2012). In a nearby drawing (Tangle 5, 2013) and smaller canvas (Tangle 2, 2013) the strips reappear, but now they have fallen out of sequence, gained three-dimensionality, and landed like piles of pick-up sticks. In other drawings, delicate pencil marks somehow articulate the weight of a metal cage (Rupture, 2013) and an orb pulsating with energy (Tangle 3, 2013). The sculptures, which are grouped together on a low platform in the center of the room, toy further with perception. There is a brick-like form made of nothing but shredded paper (Untitled [Tangle 4], 2012), twigs bent and bound to create first a coil (Rx garden: Untitled [Coil], 2010) and then a ball (Sticky Ends 7, 2013), handcrafted pills (Untitled [Press], 2013), and another cage—this one actual (Untitled [Cage], 2013).

Pay close attention and Halonen’s formal play reveals its dark side. Two of the strips, which are paired like chromosomes, have abnormalities (one is bent and another tagged) and the twigs have been spliced and sutured. Then there are the pills, articulated in chalky medical pinks and blues. All this alludes to Halonen’s research into pharmaceuticals, particularly how the industry alters nature in its quest to make the perfect drug. Perfection—its fragility, its impossibility—seems to be the larger point. Holes in the drawn cage hint at an experiment gone awry, yet the actual cage is wired shut, and this is even more haunting. The trap is flawless, and frightening.

— Kate Green

Odili Donald Odita

BETA PICTORIS GALLERY / MAUS CONTEMPORARY
2411 Second Avenue North
March 15–April 19

Odili Donald Odita, X-Ray, 2013, gouache on paper, collage, 14 3/4 x 12 1/2”.

Odili Donald Odita is well known for large-scale, hardedge abstract paintings of syncopated shards of high-volume color. But for two decades, a different, more intimate body of work has woven through this output like a contrapuntal melody. For “Grey,” his first solo show in this relatively new gallery—which is already carving out a niche with its smart program in an unlikely southern city—Odita debuts nineteen small works on paper that have been made over the past ten years.

Several abstractions here evoke a Minimalist vocabulary that—unlike Odita’s sprawling paintings—mostly cleave to a modernist grid and employ a palette of primary colors. A single horizontal bar of saffron yellow against the white ground of Sword (all works cited, 2013) distills Mondrian into a meditative object. Meanwhile, the stacked black bars in Daylight invite the memory of Judd’s stacked boxes. But by altering the dimensions and color of the uppermost bar, Odita adds a directional vector and thus introduces the element of time. Some of the paintings are loose and expressionistic, such as X-Ray, with its central panel of rib-like marks over a solid red background. The rest of the show offers figurative works, many showing decorated faces naively drawn or clipped from news media. Emitting less vibratory energy than the abstract works, these latter pieces nevertheless touch on themes of cultural distance prevalent throughout Odita’s oeuvre.

One of the most important aspects of these small works is the great light they shed on Odita’s major paintings (not on view). The figurative works inoculate against claims that his work aims for a bland universalism. What’s more, the abstract works demonstrate how a heightened perception can produce narrative associations and experiential depth from the simplest artistic gestures.

— Cinqué Hicks

Mickalene Thomas

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART / BOSTON
100 Northern Avenue
December 12–April 7

Mickalene Thomas, Sandra: She’s a Beauty, 2009, rhinestone, acrylic, and enamel on wooden panel, 72 x 72".

Comprising five glittering, large-scale paintings, Mickalene Thomas’s latest exhibition flaunts both the presence and the absence of her African-American female subjects in boldly patterned domestic interiors. Sandra: She’s a Beauty, 2009, centralizes its sitter, the artist’s mother, whom she posed and photographed amid clashing fabrics and cushions; Thomas then cut and reassembled the photograph into a collage that served as the basis for the painting. Swarovski rhinestones affixed to the canvas accentuate the jewels on Sandra’s arms but also the skin of her neck and the shape of her makeup, adding color, shading, and texture to the surface of the painting. While Thomas’s figures have a commanding presence, so do the backgrounds she places them in, as suggested by the diptych Baby I Am Ready Now, 2007, one half of which depicts a woman and the other half an interior. In repose, legs apart, chin resting in hand, a female figure stares at the viewer, a single earring and arched foot carefully outlined with rhinestones. In the second half of the piece, Thomas accumulates a dizzying abundance of floral print fabrics, faux wood panels, zebra print, and jarring yellows, oranges, and pinks rendered in a mixture of beads, enamel, acrylic, and oil paint on a curved wooden support.

Even without a central figure, Thomas’s paintings remain primarily interested in a strong feminine presence, embodied by the deliberately cacophonous 1970s decor. Into works like Interior: Bedroom with Flowers, 2012, Thomas integrates scanned patterns from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement (1970). She inserts abstract geometries, messy surfaces, and swaths of flattened, unexpected colors into her collages, which fracture the composition and reorient the space. Such patterns are also protagonists in the work, as in I’ll Still Be True, 2010, which features a smiling subject who gazes at the viewer, with a mirror in hand. Rather than reflect the artist, spectator, or world beyond the piece, the mirror instead refracts unexpected bright, clashing prints, redirecting us back into the heady materiality of Thomas’s painting.

— Lori Cole

Kelly Richardson

ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY
1285 Elmwood Avenue
February 16–June 9

Kelly Richardson, Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006, HD video installation with audio, 29 minutes 51 seconds.

“Legion” is attitudinally split between room-size, seemingly earnest video installations and smaller, witty videos. This division might lead one to believe that Kelly Richardson loses her appreciation for humor and comic absurdity when working in large, multichannel formats: The relatively small and simple Ferman Drive, 2003–2005, by contrast shows a long tracking shot of suburban banality interrupted by a punch line—a house (the artist’s childhood home) spins like a top. Her descriptively titled A car stopped at a stop sign in the middle of nowhere, in front of a landscape, 2001, shows similar flippant absurdity. Richardson adds action in the form of drifting clouds and flying birds, but indefinitely suspends narrative.

Richardson’s larger and mostly later works similarly resist diegesis, but for these, biblical and dystopic interpretations abound. Indeed, this exhibition’s wall, Web, and catalogue texts teem with messages about bleak science-fiction settings and end-of-world scenarios. However, Richardson seems to play with, rather than into, millenarianist anxieties. For instance, with her overly phony, gently descending fireballs set against a picturesque lakeside, Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006, seems more Chicken Little than Book of Revelations. In both Mariner 9, 2012, and Leviathan, 2011, ominous bass sound tracks are overstated signifiers of doom in the face of marvelous, pixel-driven spectacles, respectively of a Martian landscape littered with quirky, animated space junk, and of outsize will-o’-the-wisps making a dank swamp resplendent. Given the artifice, the ponderous and panoramic seem to work against the profound. An earlier piece with similarly seductive, if understated, mediations, There’s a Lot There, 2001, shows mosquitoes alighting on a screen door, through which we can see a pretty sunset. Gorgeous moiré patterns announce her video vehicle, while piercing, electronic mosquito sounds turn the innocuous into the ominous. This particular video, along with her droll low-key works, suggest an impishness underlying Richardson’s face-value gravitas.

— William Ganis

Alex Jovanovich

ADDS DONNA
4223 W Lake Street
April 7–May 12

Alex Jovanovich, The Internal Constitution of Stars, 2010, 35-mm slide show, 6 minutes 18 seconds.

Life’s pacing—from past to future, until death, and maybe beyond—provides the rhythmic texture for “Some Poor Girls,” Alex Jovanovich’s exhibition of eight objects: three projector slide shows, four graphite and black-ink drawings, and one artifact. Cast in a mood that used to be called spleen, this writerly exhibition of the artist’s verses, confessions, and abstractions is so evocative the works could be spiritual if they weren’t so existential.

The transmission of emotion across time, over blank spaces, through ellipses: This narrative theme unfolds in the artifact—a love letter (on a piece of cardboard cut from an old cigarette box) received by the artist’s grandfather from his mistress. The handwriting is pretty, the sentiment is sweet, but looking at the memento feels like spying, like a pleasurable intrusion into someone else’s heart. The romantic melancholy carries through the show: I PUSHED MY HAND INTO HIS MOUTH TO FEEL HIS TINY HEART, read several slides in The Internal Constitution of Stars, 2010. I SNAPPED IT. LIKE A PLUM. Time turns pain into poetry, and memory into artworks.

Jovanovich’s typical medium is paper, a material that accepts and retains its history of touches with meticulousness. Even the slide shows are cast onto matte black aluminum foil pinned to the wall, each significantly manhandled. Three drawings composed primarily of black ink are presented horizontally, flat and exposed, each on its own beautiful shelf extended from the wall. They are coded pictures of orifices, prettied up with black flowers and leather straps, as if Christina Ramberg and Lee Bontecou had collaborated on a secret artwork. Titled Sisters, 2010–12, the three drawings of veiled orifices outline an inner landscape, perhaps a map to the heart. The feeling of private, personal truths coming to light pervades this exhibition. Just as love songs encode real feelings of loss, and love poems turn desires into diction, Jovanovich’s artworks are shockingly sensitive, slipped under a cover of politesse.

— Jason Foumberg

Jason Lazarus

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue
March 19–May 18

Jason Lazarus, Phase I/Live Archive, 2011–, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Jason Lazarus’s solo exhibition, installed in two separate areas of the museum, investigates the learning process and the various overlapping contexts—public and private, individual and collective—in which it happens. Strangely, Lazarus does so through displaying objects and images that are partially hidden from view and are thus not fully comprehensible. Snapshots are pinned to walls with their “backs” facing viewers, a board of photographs found in New Orleans is completely covered by a brown blanket, and a smallish “X” of white glow-in-the-dark tape is placed high on a wall. The works’ titles sometimes provide clues, but not enough information to deduce meaning beyond the hypothetical. The resulting state of contingency can be liberating—or maddening. For 73 Selected Narratives (March 10th), 2013, Lazarus cut a hole in the wall, buried seventy-three news articles from the title’s date inside, and then resealed it, leaving a scar-like strip of unpainted plaster. Although the artist confounds viewers with an information archive they cannot access, nothing stops them from researching that day’s events themselves and actively formulating their own conclusions about its significance. Indeed, that may be the point.

For Untitled, 2013, Lazarus asked a college piano student to learn Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 inside the museum over the course of the exhibition. Held several times a week, these practice sessions—ordinarily conducted privately—are here rendered visibly and vulnerably public. Several floors below hangs Phase 1/Live Archive, 2011–, a number of Occupy Wall Street signs that Lazarus’s students recreated from media images. Visitors are invited to select a sign, carry it around the museum, and share images of this microrally through Twitter. If visitors do so, their actions become part of the archive; if they decline, the signs’ disruptive potential (however limited) goes unrealized and the “live archive” becomes, instead, a crypt.

— Claudine Ise

“Model Studies”

GRAHAM FOUNDATION
4 W. Burton Pl.
March 21–June 1

Thomas Demand, Turner #31, 2011, pigment print, 53 1/8” x 35 1/5”.

“Model Studies” presents Thomas Demand’s photographs of three-dimensional models that he did not make himself, which is something Demand has never done before. If this move seems slight, consider the implications of the German artist’s usual process, which ends with the destruction of the life-size paper environments he meticulously replicates from media images and then photographs—actions that seem to fulfill Jean Baudrillard’s prophesy of a world where simulation is all. Given this, Demand’s choice of subject here is remarkably tangible—twelve fairly beat-up working models by the midcentury architect John Lautner, all bearing the marks of their own history and making, and none of which can (nor should) be destroyed.

Perhaps Demand was never that far from tangibility to begin with. At the Graham Foundation, his photographs appear beside larger groupings of other artists’ works, all curated by Demand and comprising yet another “model study,” this one looking at the different ways models can engender ideas along with forms. Among them are Francis Bruguière’s black-and-white photographs of his own cut-paper abstractions, as sensual as nudes; dozens of 1920s snapshots documenting exhibition projects (three-dimensional thought experiments, really) made by Russian students taking courses on space and volume at the postrevolutionary VKhUTEMAS school; and—few but powerful—Fernand Léger’s briskly executed battleground scenes, sketched as abstractions in situ.

For their part, Demand’s large-scale color photographs home in so closely on Lautner’s models that they could initially be mistaken for abstract paintings. Look again, and that illusion gives way to the insistent materiality of scratched and crumbling surfaces, and on occasion to Lautner’s graffiti-like notations. These may well be the most straightforward images Demand has ever made.

— Claudine Ise

Abigail DeVille

ICEBERG PROJECTS
7714 N Sheridan Road
April 13–June 1

Abigail DeVille, XXXXXXX, 2013, reclaimed lumber, accumulated debris, plastic tarps, tar paper, dirt, sand from Lake Michigan, skeleton, dimensions variable.

If “X” marks the spot, and three Xs mean “poison, do not drink,” the seven Xs that make up the title of Abigail DeVille’s exhibition suggest a marking of double the poison, plus one drop for location. The socioeconomics of place are at the heart of DeVille's site-specific detritus installations, which act as land art for the twenty-first century. In this installation at the intimate gallery on the far north side of Rogers Park, DeVille collects the remains from a disemboweled foreclosed home, and reinstalls them inside four white walls. Salvaged items include discarded wooden beams, a velvet-covered chair with broken legs, a loose, hanging doorknob lacking a door, and a collage of ripped-up black garbage bags. Installed in the shape of a circular maze, her work is like an inverse, small-scale Spiral Jetty, made of trash instead of earth and wrapped into a clean white space that induces claustrophobia rather than evoking the magnificence of sprawling nature. Walking through the path paved by broken strips of wood—navigating from margin to center—viewers narrowly avoid loose nails, trudge over sawdust gatherings, and traverse constantly cracking floorboards. A garbage-bag sky is punctured with slits and holes that create stars for this shanty-like enclosure. Apart from a single skeleton embedded in dirt, no traces of humanity, not a single discarded hairbrush or a loose doll head, ever exist in DeVille’s site-specific installations. Instead, these raw materials outline the social failings of cities and their propensity to displace inhabitants. The chaotic, overflowing space of excess is born from urban decay, and will one day end up back in the earth, with our own remains.

— Alicia Eler

William Pope.L

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall #418
April 28–June 23

View of “Forlesen,” 2013.

The day that “Forlesen” opened, the shiny black helium balloons of Ellipsis (all works 2013) bobbed in the rafters, moored to washers. A few weeks later, they had sunk to the ground and the worst of them looked like rotten grapes, molding with static dander. “Forlesen” rewards repeat viewings: William Pope.L’s riddle-like assortment of objects inhabits the space differently as the show ages. For instance, Curtain is composed of a pressboard wall facing the entrance and is covered in an orange-brown ketchup compound, buckling and cracking as it festers. Its acid waft, like some mysterious breath, animates the space between the objects in the gallery, but with no hint of a secure identity. “Forlesen” is also the title of a short story published in 1974 by the American science fiction author Gene Wolfe about a man who cannot construct a future.

Even if Wolfe’s prose weren’t itself symbolically coded and ultimately ambiguous, text would be no reliable legend. Pope.L’s “Skin Set” series (which began in 1997 and currently encompasses over a thousand drawings) is here represented by fifty-two works. The drawings portray the space between the lines of the first edition of Wolfe’s story and are made in an indecipherable bubble-script drawn in ballpoint pen. The area of the drawing only clips the letters’ edges; in one, the pate of an “e” crosses the lower threshold, and just a curve and a comma enter at upper left. In the interstices, paint, ink, correction fluid, and other substances signal a bodily presence: the evidence of fingerprints in some, applications that recall organic processes like bleeding in others. A few glued-on curly hairs comically answer the squiggle of Pope.L’s ballpoint pen drawing.

Throughout the show, the body, marked by race and available to stereotype, has been removed, but it breathes, coalesces, leaves traces, and disappears, often playfully. “Forlesen” is a homonym for the German word vorlesen or “to read aloud”: Distorted moans echo throughout the exhibition space from slowed-down spliced porn that flickers from a bank of video monitors within a wood and Masonite spaceship-like structure. When one gets enough distance from the structure to grasp its form or else gets the hint from its title—Quarter Structure (penis)— the absent body looms largest.

— Julia Langbein

“Light of Day”

TRANSFORMER STATION
1460 West 29 Street
February 1–May 4

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields, 128, 2009, gelatin silver print, 58 3/4 x 47”.

“Light of Day” offers the first presentation of Transformer Station founders Fred and Laura Bidwell’s photography collection and also marks the debut of this new space for contemporary art. The show’s title, however, points beyond these ceremonial unveilings to a meditation on the role of analog photography (“the pencil of nature”) in the digital age. While the former automatically and objectively allowed the sun’s light to draw an image of the empirical world, digital technology now allows man and machine to overwrite what nature dictates. Analog photography may have been pushed into the shadows, but “Light of Day” shows it coming back into view under the guise of the supernatural, the surreal, and the psychedelic.

Examples of post-photographic, sunless artifice—such as Hans Op de Beeck’s detail-less images of architectural simulacra and Beate Gütschow’s cut-and-paste pastoral landscapes—highlight the presence of both the artist and the machine in the new era of photography. Yet despite the presence of new techniques and technology in “Light of Day,” it is analog photography that emerges as uncanny and unfamiliar. Take, for instance, Abelardo Morell’s Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art East Entrance in Gallery with a de Chirico Painting, 2005, which employs a basic scientific principle behind photographic realism—that a pinhole of sunlight will project an upside-down image into a dark space—and renders it surreal: The facade of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is here inverted and overlaid upon de Chirico’s The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913, exposing analog photography as more dreamlike than any digital simulation.

Analog photography can be electrified without going digital: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields, 128, 2009, captures with fine detail an image of light itself: In the pitch blackness of a dark room, he applied a bolt of electricity directly to a sheet of film to record the branching structure of unharnessed energy. The digital and analog photographs in “Light of Day” picture the struggles and collaborations between humanity, nature, and machine, a drama well suited for this former electrical substation turned crucible of contemporary art.

— Kris Paulsen

Diana Al-Hadid

WEATHERSPOON ART MUSEUM
Spring Garden Street and Tate Street
February 9–May 5

Diana Al-Hadid, Trace of a Fictional Third, 2011, polymer gypsum, wood, steel, fiberglass, aluminum foil, paint, 10 x 20 x 13'.

Diana Al-Hadid’s first major museum survey, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, offers a rare opportunity to witness a dialogue among several works made over a five-year period. The exhibition of nine sculptures and seven drawings references Italian and Flemish Renaissance painting and gothic architecture, often avoiding these traditions’ religious content to focus on their formal qualities. At the Vanishing Point, 2012, realizes Jacopo Pontormo’s painting The Visitation, 1514–16, in three dimensions. Composed of steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, and other materials, the nearly monochromatic work presents an accumulation of abstract, fungal forms built on a series of plinths and steps that expose and reimagine the mechanics of the original work’s one-point perspective. But instead of rendering an illusion of solidity, the sculpture’s bases appear to disintegrate into a screen of shreds and ribbons; the structures above appear weightless. Pontormo’s figures have been eliminated, voiding the sculpture of its original religious narrative. Tomorrow’s Superstitions, 2008, performs a similar translation on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel, 1563, replacing the massive central building in the painting with a burned-out vortex of steel scaffolding and vertiginous architectural elements.

The exhibition includes drawings central to the artist’s practice. Vigorously executed in charcoal, conté, and other materials, they echo both the subtle coloration—mostly monochromatic with hints of aqua, pink, and blue—and the emphatic verticals of the sculptures.

Al-Hadid is well known for her virtuosic ability to scavenge the raw materials of art and architectural history and mine them for new expressive potential. However, even as the artist deemphasizes religious iconography, the works nevertheless evoke spiritual connotations. They are cathedrals of aesthetics, appearing to transubstantiate worldly matter into weightless, immaterial spiritual ideas.

— Cinqué Hicks

“The Progress of Love”

THE MENIL COLLECTION
1533 Sul Ross Street
December 2–March 27

Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (after Fragonard), 2001, mixed media, dimensions variable.

“The Progress of Love” is a set of three distinct, concurrent exhibitions—held at the Menil Collection in Houston; the Center for Contemporary Arts in Lagos, Nigeria; and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in Saint Louis—that investigate contemporary notions of love in Africa, Europe, and the United States. The project draws its name from an eighteenth-century painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard of a European couple in the throes of romance, in a garden; this painting has been reworked into a sculptural installation by Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (after Fragonard), 2001, which features a life-size, headless mannequin in African print textiles sitting on a swing in the midst of artificial foliage.

The Menil Collection supported a series of trips for lead curator and African scholar Kristin Van Dyke to travel to the continent, so that she could conduct research for her first contemporary show. After dialogue with curator Bisi Silva at the CCA in Lagos, Van Dyke’s thoughts about the exhibition turned to love and the various ways contemporary artists deal with cultural constructions of emotional and physical connection. When Van Dyke became director of the Pulitzer Foundation in 2011, its museum also joined the project. With twenty-two artists, Houston’s show is by far the largest, while the Lagos and Saint Louis sites feature seven and four artists respectively.

There is a huge array of media in the exhibit: photo, video, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and more, from diverse artists (not exclusively of African descent) in Africa, Europe, and the US. One particularly powerful piece is an installation by Romuald Hazoumé with video and reading materials in a cardboard structure documenting the NGO the artist founded: NGO for Beninois Solidarity with Endangered Westerners. The often humorous videos invert traditional logic surrounding notions of development economics prevalent in the West, as people on the street in Benin are asked to donate out of a sense of love—to help poor white people in Europe and America. Among a plethora of other compelling work in the show, particular standouts are photos by acclaimed artist Zanele Muholi of lesbian and transgender South Africans in intimate settings and public spaces, and textured, vibrant ink portraits by Toyin Odutola.

This exhibition is also on view at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Lagos until January 27, 2013, and at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis until April 20, 2013.

— John Pluecker

“Byzantine Things in the World”

THE MENIL COLLECTION
1533 Sul Ross Street
May 3–August 18

View of “Byzantine Things in the World,” 2013.

In this exhibition, Byzantine functions less as a historical or stylistic category than as a gambit for interacting with the material world: To be Byzantine is to allow things—not necessarily artworks, but all manner of objects—to be affecting in new ways, and to alter how one relates to things inside and outside the museum. The 159 works on view range broadly across time and media, and their presentation is resolutely eclectic and ahistorical. Each gallery houses items that date from various centuries and range in scale from miniature to larger than life size. This curatorial approach is meant to be transformative; by encountering the pieces divorced from their staid place in the Western art canon, a viewer may come to see these things anew.

No doubt the deliberately promiscuous curatorial choices will be frustrating for some viewers. For instance, it may feel necessary to shed otherwise crucial notions of historical specificity or cultural politics in order to contemplate the juxtaposition of Kiki Smith’s visceral 1992 intaglio print Sueño (Dream) with an animal-shaped Boli power object containing organic sacrificial materials, including possibly blood, and George Dawe’s 1810 oil on canvas rendering of A Negro Over-powering a Buffalo—A Fact Which Occurred in America in 1809. The implications of this particular passage in the exhibition seem hazy, but the visual, almost bodily impact of their combination here lingers. Easier to grasp are those items that offer aesthetic pleasure, and there are plenty of these. Shiny surfaces punctuate the galleries––from delicately gilded and stylized icons to the fabulously bejeweled Box No. 27, 1965, by Lucas Samaras. These, coupled with the more earthly, figurative objects, facilitate a viewing experience that wavers between transcendence and corporeality.

Perhaps such wavering is what makes this exhibition worthwhile. A Byzantine frame of mind embraces contradictions and ambivalence. These objects exist together here more to show us how our present time has trained us to think than to retrain us according to any specific ideology.

— Chelsea Weathers

“PAINT THINGS: Beyond the Stretcher”

DECORDOVA SCULPTURE PARK AND MUSEUM
51 Sandy Pond Road
January 27–April 21

Kate Gilmore, Like This, Before, 2013, video, wood, glass, paint. Installation view.

At what point can a painting become sculpture? The deCordova Sculpture Park addresses this question in “PAINT THINGS,” an exhibition that features work by eighteen artists who blur the boundaries between media by incorporating painting into expansive installations, videos, and performances. Jessica Stockholder’s [JS 492], 2009, anchors the show by imposing clashing décor on the gallery’s walls and floors. Loosely parodying a room, she includes a rug, shower curtain, table, and lamp covered in orange plastic, fake fur, copper foil, and daubs of colorful, garish paint, suggesting that paint is just another one of the work’s compositional elements.

Instead of using the gallery as her architectural constraint, Kate Gilmore, in Like This, Before, 2013, designed a six-foot-tall black wooden structure with an inclined plane divided into multiple sections. Video documentation of the work’s accompanying performance plays next to the resulting installation, wherein the artist, dressed in a skirt and red heels, places atop the scaffolding a number of glass vases filled with white paint. She then kicks over each of the vases, shattering them so that the liquid slides down the plane and pools into bowls below. The result is a chaotically created black-and-white sculpture. Paint also acts as a conduit between the female body and art production in Cheryl Donegan’s video, Head, 1993, which depicts the artist lapping and spitting up milk that spews from a green bottle to a rock sound track.

Alex Hubbard similarly privileges the artist’s messy process in his video The Border, The Ship, 2011. His ink-stained hands visibly manipulate objects such as skeleton bones, which he ties to a rope and lowers into a bucket of blue paint. Rather than producing a polished image, Hubbard, along with the many artists in this exhibition, reanimates paint as a generative, open-ended, and experimental material.

— Lori Cole

Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza

ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY
2630 NW 2nd. Avenue
February 7–March 28

View of “Drywood,” 2013.

“Drywood,” the title of this exhibition, refers to Cryptotermes brevis, a termite that can survive with barely any water, relying on six rectal glands to retain all moisture from digested matter. Endemic in Florida, it is an apt symbol in the hands of Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, who here use the insect to signify another tropical infestation—the tourist souvenir. Just like a termite gnaws through walls, a souvenir eliminates the distance between cities and undermines their autonomous identity by propagating a simplistic, generic reading of a place. For their first exhibition at this gallery, Moreno and Oroza have placed twelve cement balls—each fifteen inches in diameter—in two neat rows across the front space. Before the concrete was poured, the artists stuffed the molds for the balls with Florida-branded beach towels featuring dolphins and sunsets, and now the spheres hemorrhage patches of brightly colored terrycloth. In its raw materiality and its role as a protective shell, the concrete hints at both the manufacture and the transportation of these souvenir items. Moreover, the anonymous surfaces, crisp and unadorned save for the prints of sea turtles peeking through, underscore the inherent sameness of all tourist items—the tchotchke Platonic ideal.

But the cracking face of the spheres realizes a breakdown of the logical dissemination of the souvenir and similar consumer items, a crisis that is examined in the rest of the show. Stapled to the walls in ordered repetition are twenty-four issues of Tabloid, Moreno and Oroza’s single-page newsprint journal, at once a record of their practice and an ongoing critique of mass production. A bootleg copy of Glauber Rocha’s 1972 Brazilian film Cancer plays in the back room. The visceral memory of the Brazilian avant-garde is evoked by Rocha’s self-proclaimed experiment in minimal editing, and within this streamlined world of the spheres and the newspapers, it is a rambling, amorphous intrusion. Like the termite, the film burrows through the traditional borders of shot and scene by actively ignoring editing. Here is the crux of Moreno and Orozas’s argument—an attempt to unite the production and distribution of souvenirs through the strange biology of termites. Throughout the show, the uneasy placement of the objects foreshadows future rupture. The artists have set the spheres on the cracks between the floorboards and one, set off by the crack, seems to be threatening to tunnel—not unlike Cryptotermes brevis—right through the drywall.

— Hunter Braithwaite

“Plaisance”

MIDWAY CONTEMPORARY ART
527 2nd Ave SE
April 19–June 22

View of “Plaisance,” 2013. Foreground: Willem De Rooij, Bouquet VI, 2010. Background: Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, 2008.

Contrary to its pleasant title, this exhibition presents an array of troubling histories. For example, the legacies of Belgium’s colonial past feature prominently in Sven Augustijnen’s series of photographs “Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles,” 2008, while Henrik Olesen’s A.T., 2012, engages with the life and suicide of Alan Turing, whose homosexuality, once discovered by authorities in 1952, precipitated a fall from war-hero fame to government-controlled “treatment.” Riddled with demonized desires and illicit pleasures, these histories revolve around power: the power to control resources and bodies, representations and collective memory.

Curated by Fionn Meade, the show also compellingly questions how visual modes of representation have served as means to construct difference and to legitimate abuses of authority. From the roots of phrenology, poignantly pictured in eighty 35-mm slides of Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century drawings of human faces resembling those of animals, to appropriations of August Sander’s 1929 photographs of German people in Florian Zeyfang’s single-channel video Introduction of a Small History of Photography—Formalist Heady Pattern Version, 2008, “Plaisance” looks at the problematic nexus of authority, power, and visual representations. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s The Microscope, 2006, locates this line of inquiry in biology, ostensibly the most objective of sciences. The modified microscope emits an oddly ominous vocoder version of “Every Breath You Take” and is paired with a brochure featuring an interview with science historian Evelyn Fox Keller, who explains the danger of “dead metaphors”: words that no longer register as figurative language but effectively masquerade as factual.

“Plaisance” suggests that when we mistake mere representations for facts we not only deceive ourselves but court disaster. Looking is never innocent, representation always an intervention. Gareth James’s untitled prints from 2011 underscore this point: Here, geometric patterns interrupt black-and-white portraits of Edward Curtis and Claude Levi-Strauss, arguing against any conflation of figurative and factual. Yet “Plaisance” does not get lost in purely intellectual pursuits; the show has a heart. Willem De Rooij’s Bouquet VI, 2010, a black vase on a white pedestal holding one hundred white and one hundred black tulips, installed adjacent to Olesen’s A.T., suggests a tribute to Turing. Such gestures imbue “Plaisance” with an affective charge that situates the very act of looking at art in the history of representation the show investigates.

— Christina Schmid

“Painter Painter”

WALKER ART CENTER
1750 Hennepin Avenue
February 2–October 27

Sarah Crowner, Ciseaux Rideaux, 2012, oil and gouache on canvas, fabric, and linen, 60 x 44 x 2”.

Modesty is not a word commonly associated with the history of abstraction, but in this exhibition, curators Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan have gathered work by a group of up-and-coming artists—nearly all born in the 1970s—who largely eschew grand gestures, illuminating their own painterly processes in a manner so humble that it sometimes borders on self-deprecation. In Charles Mayton’s diptych Blind Ventriloquist, 2012, for example, a rough roller-made painting is paired with a more delicately painted canvas that’s almost entirely obscured by a stained rag and a silkscreened image of the artist’s accidentally painted studio wall. In We lead healthy lives to keep filthy minds, 2013, the multimedia artist Jay Heikes shows an eclectic wall-mounted array of sculpted tools—sticks, paddles, scrapers—that might conceivably have been used for the application of paint in his studio, though in this piece they weren't.

Other objects—treated somewhat more violently—also appear in The Failure of Contingency, 2012, by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, in which a long spaghetti-cut drop cloth is strewn over the floor, with one end culminating in a matte black globe under two foldable chairs. Part of the globe’s northern hemisphere has been scalped, and its convex skin is incorporated in an entirely different work (The Impossible, 2012) installed on a nearby wall. Here, the radial detritus of one work becomes the genesis of another.

While most of the pieces in this show suggest an inward (or even downward) gaze, the work of Sarah Crowner is an exception. The boldly colored blocks of canvas in Ciseaux Rideaux, 2012, were stitched together by the artist in a manner that takes inspiration both in method and in composition from the worlds of fashion and design. Crowner implicitly suggests that an occasional glance beyond the confines of the studio walls is liberating and does painters—and painting—a world of good.

— Jay Gabler

“Oh, Canada”

MASS MOCA (MASSACHUSETTS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART)
87 Marshall Street
May 27–April 8

Diane Landry, Knight of Infinite Resignation, 2009, 237 plastic bottles, sand, LED lights, bicycle wheels, steel stands, belt motor, speakers, 9 x 14 x 10'.

The Cedar Tavern Singers aka Les Phonoréalistes, a folk group formed by Daniel Wong and Mary-Anne McTrowe, wondered what the largest survey of contemporary Canadian art since 1989 might have in store. “Oh, Canada,” organized by Denise Markonish and three years in the making, doesn’t quite harmonize with the wry speculations in the duo’s 2012 music video Oh Canada, Oh Canada—in which they sing of an “interactive Mountie installation,” “neolumberjack abstraction,” and “postpainterly hockey”—but nevertheless, the exhibition delivers an abundance of works exploring familiar themes north of the US border: the natural environment, First Nations, colonialist legacies, national identity (or lack thereof), and humor. At the same time, the show provides considerable space for the sixty-two emerging and established, but still relatively little-known, artists to play with and contest stereotypical subjects—or to do something else entirely.

The severe geometric forms rendered in dirty shades of gray in two paintings of arctic scenes by Douglas Coupland, author and an exhibiting artist since 2000, view the traditionally romanticized landscape of Canada—considered by many to be the nation’s defining characteristic—with an uncharacteristically Canadian detachment. A more contemplative approach comes from Michael Snow’s Solar Breath (North Caryatids), 2002, an hour-long video of curtains flapping wistfully in front of the open window of a Maritime cabin.

Like many large group shows and biennials, “Oh, Canada” presents work that is cosmopolitan, serious, and sophisticated alongside the whimsical, humble, and earnest. Annie Pootoogook’s and Shuvinai Ashoona’s pencil crayon drawings of their Inuit communities have a touching immediacy, and Diane Landry’s illuminated plastic bottles spinning on bicycle wheels in a dark room elevate their demure everyday materials. Around the corner, though, Nicolas Baier’s glimmering Vanité/Vanitas, 2012, immortalizes the modern creative professional’s workspace by plating its physical signifiers—desk and chair, iMac, scanner, lamp, Moleskine notebook, half-eaten toast on a plate, and a thicket of tangled cords—with mirrored metal, entombing them in a large glass-enclosed vitrine. Though seemingly cold and sterile, Baier’s environment might point to, in an oddly deadpan way, the importance of transparency and reflection for life in a progressive sovereign state.

— Christopher Howard

Tacita Dean

ARCADIA UNIVERSITY GALLERY
450 South Easton Road
February 7–April 21

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013, anamorphic 35 mm, black-and-white and color, optical sound, 26 minutes 30 seconds.

If film time offers a temporal alternative to real time, then Tacita Dean’s JG, 2013, returns film to its phenomenological density in order to pose a metaphysical question: How do our interventions into the natural landscape shape us in turn? In the spirit of its namesake, JG approaches the question with a Ballardian appreciation for the issue’s technical and metaphorical intricacies.

Commissioned by Arcadia University, the film places J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Voices of Time” (1960) in conversation with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970. Returning to the salt lakes of Utah and Southern California that inspired Smithson’s iconic Earthwork, Dean’s 35-mm film unfolds in extreme close-ups of salt crystals and long shots of briny sandscapes. These images are overlaid with stenciled shapes produced via Dean’s recently patented masking technique (which debuted in her FILM at Tate Modern in 2011). To achieve the effect, differently shaped masks are placed over the aperture gate of the camera. Once a frame has been shot, the film is rewound and run through the aperture again, layering differently exposed images atop one another to form a collage of variously stamped indices.

In this way, each layered frame mirrors the astonishing geology of the landscape, in a trick internal to the chamber of the camera itself. A moonfaced clock hovers in an aqueous field of salt; emerald water stenciled into the shape of Smithson’s Jetty rests on the surface of the Great Salt Lake precisely where the iconic spiral ought to twirl; and the spiral itself fluctuates wildly, invoking a spool of film in one frame and the spinning arms of our galaxy in another. Shifting conceptions of scale through the juxtaposition of asynchronous imagery, JG therefore insists on 35 mm’s experimental potential even in the moment of celluloid’s digital eclipse.

— Katherine Rochester

“Outsiderism”

FLEISHER/OLLMAN GALLERY
1216 Arch Street, 5A
April 16–June 8

Alan Constable, Untitled (White Concertina Camera), 2012, ceramic, 6 1/4 x 7 x 9 1/2".

“Outsiderism,” organized by Alex Baker to coincide with a historical survey at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of self-taught artists, both complements and provides a contrast to the larger exhibition. “Great and Mighty Things” presents canonical figures such as James Castle, Martín Ramírez, and Purvis Young, among others, “each with a moving personal story, many from disadvantaged, rural backgrounds far removed from the mainstream art world,” according to the museum’s news release. “Outsiderism” rebuffs the loner perception by framing its nine artists as engaged practitioners addressing complex issues of identity, sexuality, politics, technology, popular culture, and imagemaking while working within the framework of commercial galleries and charity organizations.

Despite the shift from outsider to insider, the artists’ distinctive biographies still inform their work. The prodigious output of Gregory Blackstock, a retired dishwasher who categorizes and draws related objects—such as the sixteen variations of fireworks in 2-Shot Repeater Aerial Bomb Color Perspectives, 2008—derives in part from incredible memorization skills endowed by his autism. The painted and glazed ceramics of photographic devices—a white concertina camera, a green digital point-and-shoot, and a Canon blue 110—by the legally blind Alan Constable illuminate how visual art can be created, translated, and experienced through other senses. And David Jarvey copes with Down syndrome through a Star Trek fan fiction video, The Forbidden Zone, 2000, made in collaboration with Harrell Fletcher and others, in which Jarvey plays a Starfleet captain who, after becoming disfigured and paralyzed, returns to a planet whose inhabitants can restore him to perfect health through illusion.

Michael Patterson-Carver’s drawings of demonstrations reflect on partisan American politics: Pink-faced Tea Partiers cheer the closure of a Planned Parenthood center in Women’s Rights in Kansas, 2011, and women challenge Walmart in Equal Pay for Equal Work, 2011. Representations of women elsewhere are ambiguous, if not problematic, especially since only one artist in “Outsiderism,” Lisa Reid, is female. How do Knicoma Frederick’s lusty depictions relate to his stated pursuit of justice, equality, and truth? Do ceramics of full-figured women by Christopher Mason reference fertility goddess figurines or do they indulge a preference for BBWs? The curatorial selection raises interesting questions about liberties taken by artists, outsider or otherwise.

— Christopher Howard

Lynda Benglis

LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South
May 16–June 29

Lynda Benglis, Pink Lady, 2013, tinted polyurethane fountain, 95 x 30 x 27".

“Everything Flows (1980–2013)” is a small but dramatically staged exhibition that traces Lynda Benglis’s exploration of form via seventeen of her human-scale metal, ceramic, and polyurethane works made over the past four decades. Folded, ripped, and cast works are positioned on the ground and walls of this gallery as well as on plinths the height of cocktail tables. The exhibition’s limited palette of metallics, earth tones, and pale yellows encourages a focus on Benglis’s wide variety of surface textures and the works’ close parameters leave each with less space to breathe, effectively emphasizing their dynamism, which is further teased out with careful lighting. Megisti II, 1984, is a pleated bronze and aluminum knot measuring just over six feet that appears ready to take flight from the wall. Across the room, five smaller ceramic works have been placed atop a rectangular table. A pewter-glazed ceramic Querechos Knot Hat, 1993, looks like it has been scorched by a waffle iron and the blistered exterior of Terracotta Helmet, 1993, contrasts with its smooth, round core. Positioned so closely to one another, these works seem to jostle and fight for space.

On the floor sit Nugget I and Nugget II, both 2010–11, which seem utterly fetishistic and feculent. They comprise dull patinated bronze mounds of wormlike curls topped with polished squirts of silver and gold. Amidst the gallery’s towering columns, high-top plinths, and wall-bound sculptures, these works feel especially low-lying, not only in physicality but also in status. Small plastic hoses poke out underneath each Nugget sculpture, indicating that they potentially are fountains, though not the spectacular sort. Outside, a fountain of the spectacular sort, Pink Lady, 2013, gleams atop the gallery’s roof, water cascading down fuchsia-flushed polyurethane. Reaching nearly eight feet into the air and given a space all to itself, it seems the most exuberant celebration of action.

— Becky Huff Hunter

Carrie Mae Weems

PORTLAND ART MUSEUM
1219 SW Park Avenue
February 2–May 19

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled, 1990, gelatin silver print, dimensions variable. From the “Kitchen Table Series,” 1990.

The likeness of Portland, Oregon native Carrie Mae Weems is often at the center of her work. This spectacular retrospective, aptly taking place in her hometown, reveals the diverse ways in which Weems combines photography’s documentary, portrait, and pictorial traditions in dramatic multi-image serial narratives exploring history, family, community, and place. For instance, in the “Kitchen Table Series,” 1990, Weems casts herself as a woman who begins and ends a romantic relationship, then weathers its dissolution in the company of friends and family, and, in the last few images of the twenty-part work, “finds” herself through the empowerment of self-representation. In the most powerful of these images, we see Weems adorned in a plain black shirt standing at the head of the table, palms flat on the table and elbows extended in a gesture of resolve, staring straight-on into the camera confronting the gaze of the viewer. Weems describes the “Kitchen Table Series” as the locus of her transformation into a performer. However, Weems’s representational agenda expands far beyond self-identity: “I use myself simply as a vehicle for approaching the question of power. It’s never about me; it’s always about something larger.”

Weems’s broader, humanistic concerns are also exemplified by her use of image, audio, text, and, occasionally, moving image, to create what seems like a reparative and holistic vision of overlooked people and their histories. Her subjects include: families of color (Family Pictures and Stories, 1978–84); black women artists (Slow Fade to Black, 2010); and political activism (May Days Long Forgotten, 2002). In Slow Fade to Black, Weems enlarges and blurs historic publicity photographs of black women singers, hanging them, like much of her work, in staggered grids and rows that transform the walls of the museum into a new territory of the artist’s making.

— Stephanie Snyder

Alejandro Diaz

MUSEUM OF ART - RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN (RISD)
224 Benefit Street
November 16–June 9

Alejandro Diaz, Diaz Art Foundation, 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Appearing to be made of cardboard and permanent marker, Alejandro Diaz’s cast resin and hand-painted signs, as well as his upcycled and “off-the-shelf” sculpture and a selection of objects from his eclectic art collection populate this exhibition. While many of the works reference movements and artists who famously fused “high” with “low”—Arte Povera, Warhol, Koons—the show smartly refutes that now haggard binary. Instead, Diaz seems to argue that today such hodgepodging is no longer deviant, but rather suggests a framework for “progress” within free enterprise’s cycles of appropriation and assimilation. It also shows how the collapse of such binaries in art has done little to unite respective social classes: As the biting neon sign No Shoes / No Shirt – You’re Probably Rich, 2009, implies the selective consumption of “the low” is a privilege of the few that is not reciprocally enjoyed.

“RISD Business: Sassy Signs & Sculptures” offers a contemporary counterpoint within the context of an academic institution whose collection spans centuries. Cassandra, 2012 is an eighteenth-century marble statue that tows plaid red market bags brimming with Diaz’s cardboard signs. The work puts into question institutional practices of denominating treasures and ruins, and calls for a reexamination based on inclusive values. Meanwhile, a storefront window facade houses the site-specific installation Diaz Art Foundation, 2012. Its title puns on Dia, an organization that Diaz claims has done little to support Chicano/a artists despite its Texan roots. The artist-curated display of objects ranging from ca. 1500 to 2012 pairs ceramics and saints by “unknown Mexican artisans” with Carolee Schneemann and Roy Lichtenstein works on paper. Diaz’s inclusion of a stoneware plate made by curator Judith Tannenbaum is yet another taboo breaker tied neatly into the arrangement, perhaps also serving as a salute to Tannenbaum’s many years of service at the RISD Museum: This show is one of her last exhibitions as a full-time curator here.

— Liz Munsell

Scoli Acosta

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO, DOWNTOWN
1100 and 1001 Kettner Boulevard
February 3–June 23

View of “ELEMENTALISTHMUS,” 2013.

“ELEMENTALISTHMUS” is a paean to geography. Amalgamating film, percussive instruments, and atmosphere, Scoli Acosta’s audile sculptures depict landscapes of unworldly places. In Field recording (elements), 2012, a media assemblage trails the artist’s trek through Morocco as he captures winds, murmurs, and music on 45 rpm. In an accompanying video, a kite glides amidst rugged hills; tethered to the needle of a portable recorder, its towline transfers vibrations caused by wind onto vinyl, yielding the breezy sonance heard echoing through the gallery. In concert, an overhead speaker emits traditional North African melodies with interrupting clamors of a busy bazaar and 1930s tunes adverting to exotic travel. From this auditory affray, a lurid portrayal of scenography emerges.

The constellation of five-sided Moroccan tambourines in Mars Triptych, 2012, models the solar system; the instruments also evoke a 1967 protest at the Pentagon wherein Yippee leader Abbie Hoffman aimed to telepathically vibrate the building with drum beats and psychic force in order to end the Vietnam War and shake its occupants out of what seemed to be a hypnotic penchant for endless war and ecological decimation. During Sissyeyes, 2006, a video compilation, bucolic clips from Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands flash between close-ups of Sissy Spacek, whose doe eyes peer out from an Islamic headdress. A fuzzy score again serves as accompaniment. Drawn from deep-space probe Cassini-Huygens’s radio transmissions, the track reveals an unbroken chain of particles around Saturn, exposing the planet’s trompe l’oeil rings as extensive dust fields.

— James Eischen

“Your Content Will Return Shortly”

FRANKLIN STREET WORKS
41 Franklin Street
January 24–March 24

View of “Your Content Will Return Shortly,” 2013.

What has become of television, that ugly box that once sat in our living rooms, satiating our appetites for information and inanities with its one-way stream of content? This group show, including ten artists—Christopher DeLaurenti, Eric Gottesman, Jonathan Horowitz, Sophy Naess, Jeff Ostergren, Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, Catherine Ross, Carmelle Safdie, Siebren Versteeg, and Emily Roz—asks us to reconsider the broadcast medium that was once almost entirely privatized and thoroughly centralized and yet pervades the American cultural landscape, a landscape now going through a period of enormous redefinition in light of burgeoning new technologies.

Lucy Raven’s video 4:3, 2008, shown on an old faux-wood-veneered box complete with its own easy chair, offers a succinct explanation of how the medium functions and profits from our passive consumption—or, more precisely, used to function and profit—set in scrolling white text on a black background. The piece began as PSA broadcast by a public access station in Tivoli, New York, at the advent of television’s shift from analog to digital. The rest of the featured artists deconstruct TV’s amusing facade, instantiating everything Raven elucidates by astutely manipulating content delivered via a medium—in most cases the TV itself—that remains more or less intact.

Take Catherine Ross’s video Trilling, 2006, which casts its critical eye on Three’s Company, capturing similar scenes of actors shot mainly in midframe and cropping them further so that only the performer’s midsection and hands are seen. Where they were once performing only secondary gestures, the hands now star in their own narrative-less drama, which unfolds from right to left as each shot scrolls steadily across the screen in concert with a fluttery trumpet score. The music responds directly to the hand movements, increasing or decreasing in pitch and pace with the gestures. Whatever silly, melodramatic appeal Three’s Company made to our emotions—and, by keeping us watching through commercial breaks, to our pocketbooks—is now simply appealing, even perhaps (in its own simple way) subversive.

— Nathaniel Lee

Cordy Ryman

VISUAL ARTS CENTER OF NEW JERSEY
68 Elm Street
January 11–March 24

Cordy Ryman, Windowboxing, 2010/2013, acrylic and enamel on wood, dimensions variable.

The twelve works in this exhibition hew to methods familiar to Cordy Ryman’s 2010 solo show at DCKT Contemporary in New York—though in the present gathering, greater success is achieved both by the installation as a whole and in the individual pieces, showing Ryman to be really hitting his stride. His fluent constructions are built, cut, painted, dismantled, and reassembled out of scraps of material including wood, glue, staples, sawdust, Velcro, and reused unsuccessful or even completed work; the result is painting made with a sculptor’s desire. Within only two years it has become possible to speak of a signature style in his work, and one within which, it is important to add, there is ample freedom for nuance, development, and change.

Utilizing the eccentricities of the Visual Arts Center’s large first-floor space—where there are few right angles and only two parallel walls, not to mention sloping floor-to-ceiling windows—Ryman positions the largest work, Windowboxing, 2010/2013, on either side of a vertical column (an architectural feature of the gallery). Here a stack of frames pegged to the wall form a ragged pyramid. Directly across from this painting-sculpture hybrid is a row of variously sized small paintings, the biggest of which is in the middle, creating a centered asymmetry echoing the structure of Windowboxing. Constant attention is paid by the artist to the edges of his works, as every surface is active. The change of perspective available to a viewer by simply walking by a work is integrated, for example, in Windowboxing: The inside edges are painted fluorescent pink, blue, yellow, orange, and purple, the facing edge white. Seen from an acute angle, the various hues create a color field, but when viewed from the front, the color is visible as ambient reflected light, on the wall itself, as the visual emphasis shifts onto the physical structure of the frames.

In No Crossing 2, 2009, the upper half of a wooden construction is painted with a broad red-orange horizontal “V,” which is several inches forward of the lower half, so that the resulting shadow becomes an essential element of the composition. When Ryman’s affinities for material and color converse, whether with deliberation or by happenstance, these painted constructions are at their best—and they call to mind a more vibrant and emotional version of the architecturally relational assemblages in Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau.

— David Rhodes

David Askevold

ART GALLERY OF NOVA SCOTIA
1723 Hollis Street
April 13–June 23

David Askevold, Two Beasts, 2007–10, digital video, color, 14 minutes, 7 seconds.

If there remains any doubt that a goofy sense of humor and amateurish enthusiasm—alongside a reliance on rational systems and a dry self-referentiality—underpinned much of the conceptual art produced in the 1960s and ’70s, this retrospective of work by the late Halifax-based artist David Askevold should convince even the most committed skeptics. Curated by David Diviney, “Once Upon a Time in the East” brings together sculptures, installations, films, photographs, and computer-generated images made by Askevold over his forty-year career, offering a portrait of an artist whose work seems to knowingly wink at both his collaborators and viewers.

Askevold is perhaps best known for his pioneering work as a teacher at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he initiated the Projects Class in 1969, inviting artists such as Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, and Lawrence Weiner to send textual instructions for his students to execute. A set of vitrines near the entrance to the exhibition highlights the cue card–size “lessons” submitted by these guest instructors, including an assignment telexed by Robert Barry that wryly asks students to develop a project in secret, with the caveat that “the piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group.” With no documentation of the finished project, the viewer is left to speculate on how students would have realized this invisible and perhaps impossible artwork.

This interplay between appearance and disappearance is echoed in two of Askevold’s later works. “The Poltergeist,” 1974–79, a suite of seven photo- and text-based works produced in collaboration with Mike Kelley, meditates on the hokey yet haunting characteristics of both nineteenth-century spirit photography and the use of the medium by conceptual artists. “The Nova Scotia Project: Once Upon a Time in the East,” 1993, on the other hand, presents a Becher-like typology of 293 aerial photographs of the region’s small-craft harbors, creating a massive archive of a vanishing fishing industry that had long shaped the economy and mythology of the artist’s hometown.

— Gabrielle Moser

Jon Sasaki

JESSICA BRADLEY
1450 Dundas Street West
January 12–March 16

Jon Sasaki, Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by Tom Thomson, 2013, digital print, 38 1/4 x 38 1/4”.

Jon Sasaki has perfected the persona of the eternally optimistic everyman in his video and performance works over the past several years. In his latest exhibition, he turns his conceptually inflected wit to the messy particulate matter that underpins the Canadian obsession with the landscape, unearthing both its lyricism and its bathos.

A suite of three large-scale photographs anchors the exhibition, which comprises painting, photography, sculpture, and video projects. Documenting bacterial cultures that the artist grew in petri dishes from swabs of the palettes once used by Group of Seven painters, the images materialize the otherwise invisible life forms that cling to these historical artifacts. The shapes that result from Sasaki’s simple experiment—in mossy greens, milky whites, and buttercup yellows—uncannily resemble the same forms and hues favored by those twentieth-century painters. Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by Tom Thomson, 2013, evokes the delicate, crystalline structure of a snowflake, for instance, while at the center of Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by Frederick Varley, 2013, is the unmistakable form of an elongated leaf.

This tension between idealized natural forms and their gritty materiality continues in a pair of works in the center of the gallery. In We Are Made of Star Stuff, 2012, Sasaki re-creates the night sky by lobbing “spitballs” of white confetti onto a black swatch of the ceiling, bits of which come loose and flutter to the ground throughout the course of the exhibition. On the floor nearby, displayed on an old tube television tilted so that it “looks” up at the stars overhead, the video Interactions, 2013, documents the artist overturning rocks on a recent trip to Tasmania, tracking the reactions of insects and worms as they respond to the sudden change in their environment. Like the bacterial cultures, these miniature versions of the cosmos are the products of human intervention and biological chance, recalling a sense of awe and bodily familiarity.

— Gabrielle Moser

Elizabeth Zvonar

DANIEL FARIA GALLERY
188 St Helens Avenue
May 15–June 15

Elizabeth Zvonar, Marcel Meets Judy, 2013, ceramic candy dish, 10 x 5”.

“Banal Baroque,” Elizabeth Zvonar’s current exhibition of sculpture and collage, riffs on themes of bodily and sexual excess, recontextualizing mass-produced objects, magazine advertisements, and mannequin parts to animate the uncanny treatment of the human figure that lies dormant in this source material. While her juxtapositions might recall the psychically charged scenes of Surrealist and Dadaist collage (particularly Hannah Höch), in Zvonar’s work the human body is truncated and interrupted, broken down into a series of useless but fascinating objects for visual consumption.

Marcel Meets Judy, 2013, for instance, features a mass-produced pink seashell candy dish. Turned upright so it is no longer functional, and mounted to the wall, the work is a cheeky homage both to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and to Judy Chicago’s porcelain vagina-flowers in The Dinner Party, 1974–79. The fictional meeting of these two art-historical figures suggests a sexual undertone to this banal form of domestic decoration.

In Zvonar’s series of collage works, the artist manipulates imagery from art history textbooks, contemporary fashion magazines, and Conaissance des arts, an antiques and luxury goods magazine produced in Paris in the 1970s. In one of these large-scale collages, The Spectre, The Serpent, The Ghost, The Thing, 2012, body parts act as supplements, functioning as literal supports for the two-dimensional image. Featuring a reclining female figure being eerily surveyed by a ghostly creature, Zvonar’s handmade collage is made stranger by its frame: A pair of gold-plated high-heeled shoes, fused with casts of two human thumbs, physically holds the image upright, leaning it against the gallery wall. Here, as in the rest of the exhibition, body parts are always at risk of being transformed into the kind of kitsch consumer objects that the artists uses as her sources.

— Gabrielle Moser

Esther Shalev-Gerz

MORRIS AND HELEN BELKIN ART GALLERY
University of British Columbia, 1825 Main Mall
January 11–April 14

Esther Shalev-Gerz
, Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz, 1945-2005, 2005, 
three-channel video
, color, 40 minutes.

Over the past three decades, Esther Shalev-Gerz has developed a compelling body of work that examines the relationship between markers of experience and our recounting of them. Building on a touring exhibition organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery, the multimedia works in this exhibition are connected by their spatial navigations. Here, memory has an insistent yet spectral presence; it is never directly represented but rather is always approached or traveled towards—across spans of time, space, and language barriers. In Still/Film, 2009, for instance, the distance between the experience of mother and daughter is suggested by shadowy photographs of a forest path connecting two towns. In Inseparable Angels: The Imaginary House for Walter Benjamin, 2000/2012, a video traces a taxi trip from the town of Weimar, Germany—the home of Goethe and the German Enlightenment—to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Narrated by a dialogue between the artist, driver, and a third disembodied voice that reads quotes from Kafka, Benjamin, and others, this journey is merely five miles, yet the distance between the two sites is immeasurable. Like our experience of memory itself, the video images freeze and stutter.

The most powerful piece in the show is the large-scale, three-channel video installation Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz, 1945-2005, 2005. For this project, Shalev-Gerz interviewed sixty survivors of Auschwitz about their experiences during and after the war. Rather than revealing the spoken testimonies themselves, the work consists of the moments before participants speak, as they gather themselves and search for words. Silence here becomes a communicative gesture that stretches across a gulf of untranslatable experience. As fellow artist Ian Wallace writes in the exhibition catalogue, Shalev-Gerz strives to “contribute to our knowledge of the world, to enhance our sensitivity to human experience.” She represents that which cannot be narrated, but is nevertheless felt and communicated.

— Kimberly Phillips

“After Finitude”

OR GALLERY
555 Hamilton Street
February 23–April 20

Nicole Ondre, Cadmium Yellow Window, 2013, oil paint on wall, oil paint on paper monoprint, dimensions variable.

Artist Eli Bornowksy, who curated “After Finitude,” claimed that he approached the exhibition in the same way he would paint a picture. As a result, the viewer can consider the work of all four artists separately or as part of a larger compositional unit, which creates tension between each piece and its participation in an ensemble. Ensemble seems a particularly apt term since the work by three paint-based artists, Neil Campbell, Nicole Ondre, and Cheyney Thompson, is accompanied by selections from Hanne Darboven’s musical compositions.

Thompson’s paintings, which at first glance appear expressionist, are composed of a predetermined amount of paint applied in certain colors. His titles, such as P31.55-YG31.55-r1.31-b1.31-bg1.31-yr1.31 (65.72ml), 2013, much like those of Christopher Williams’s photographs, list the information for each picture’s production, detailing the amount and color of paint used. The title thus no longer functions only as the denomination of an object but also as an integral part of the work, a concept as much as a label. In unexpected ways, this echoes Ondre’s painting installation Cadmium Yellow Window, 2013, also process-based but less conceptually driven, comprised of a wall painting facing a monoprint made from pressing a large sheet of paper onto the adjacent paint. Ondre’s work, like Thompson’s, examines its own making, the print indexing the paint on the facing wall. Campbell’s two paintings, Probe and Hangdown, both 2013, however, seem less interested in process and more concerned with visual effect, which saves the exhibition from feeling monotone. That said, similar to Ondre’s work, Campbell’s also occupies opposite walls, so that when standing in the direct center of the gallery, as if in the center of an axis, the relationship between Ondre and Campbell resonates.

These visual and conceptual relationships encourage the viewer to feel as if they are simultaneously inside a singular work while looking at each piece separately. This approach to curation thus creates tension between the work of each artist and the way in which those works become material for Bornowsky’s own kind of composition—the exhibition itself—a dynamic that is thankfully left unresolved, all the while Darboven’s music plays.

— Aaron Peck

“Algunas Lagunas”

PROYECTO PARALELO
Alfonso Reyes 58, Col. Condesa
January 26–March 23

Alfredo Mora, Tlateloco, 2012–13, color photographs mounted on cotton paper, 24 x 24".

Those alarmed by the narrowing gap between curatorial and artistic agency can perhaps rest assured that artists can still get away with murder, at least where curating is concerned. For what would most likely get a curator summarily skewered achieves a cogent if lawless coherence in this captivating group exhibition organized by Mexican artist Jonathan Hernandez. How does he accomplish this? Simply by assembling a provisional constellation of influences and affinities, of which his practice is the ostensible center. That said, familiarity with Hernandez’s work is not required to appreciate this idiosyncratic grouping, which cumulatively tends toward a politics of poetic understatement.

Works by influences significantly include Chris Marker’s 1975 video L’Ambassade (The Ambassador), two typically discreet sculptural interventions by Jiří Kovanda, a photo of a public performance from 1975 by the Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky, and a rare architectural drawing by the elusive Spanish Conceptualist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, titled Torre para suicidas (Suicide Tower), 1984. A number of younger Mexican artists are represented largely through documentary pieces, such as Alfredo Mora’s photos of Tlatelolco Square—the site of Mexico’s enduring historical trauma of the army firing on student protesters in 1968—as well as Santiago Borja’s sfumato photographic triptych of Trotsky’s studio. Meanwhile, a handful of Hernandez’s contemporaries offer intriguing contributions, such as the Colombian artist Alberto Baraya’s El domador de letras (The Tamer of Lyrics), 2013, a stack of identical pages of text—each seemingly torn from a book—written by Baraya about his grandfather Vicente Guy, the first Spanish translator of Trotsky, as if someone had gone around surreptitiously crippling the entire edition. But the real standouts here were contributed by French former artist turned bar owner Philippe Hernandez. One work consists of a makeshift urban gambling stand fashioned out of cardboard boxes on top of which lie three lettered playing cards which, spread out side by side, can spell GOD (or alternatively, when rearranged, DOG), and the other is a miniaturized white triple podium (think Olympic award ceremony), with its center uniformly covered with quail eggs. Such strange, simple, and arresting sculptures intimate considerable artistic talent.

— Chris Sharp

Cécile Bart

GALERÍA DESIRÉ SAINT PHALLE
Colima 25A, entre Cuauthémoc y Morelia, Col. Roma
April 9–July 27

View of “Interferencias” (Interferences), 2013.

Cécile Bart’s “Interferencias” (Interferences) offers a seductive spin on post-painterly abstraction. For her first exhibition in Mexico City, the French artist presents a series of in situ wall paintings overlaid and interspersed with semitransparent paintings on metal stretchers. Framed between columns within the space, these four mural works consist of broad hard-edge bands of perfectly uninflected blue, yellow, orange, and mauve meeting and crossing at irregular angles and intervals.

If the slants of these bands of color were not sufficiently odd, their surfaces are complicated by the stretcher-based paintings, reminiscent of used silk screens and which bear similar cross-hatchings that hover in the center of the wall works. If we view them directly, the palimpsest-like conjunction of the two paintings creates a geometric imbrication of abstraction in which it is hard to say what frames what. Indeed, effectively interfering with and complementing one another, the two planes engender a scenario that is at once strangely harmonious and aggravating—a paradox that is also reflected in the warm creaminess of their coolly explosive palette. It is as if the elusive but palpable tension of these works has been sublimated into the paint’s strict, nonexpressive application and unusual spectrum. Ostensibly full of the so-called openness and clarity of Clement Greenberg’s post-painterly abstraction, Bart’s works nevertheless refuse to completely reveal themselves. They do so by being so taut with tension and by eschewing the mappable logic of Sol LeWitt’s wall paintings, their most immediate art-historical antecedent. It is precisely this virtuosic penchant for paradox that begins to account for and justify the voluptuous beauty of this exhibition.

— Chris Sharp

“Las apariencias engañan: los vestidos de Frida Kahlo”

MUSEO FRIDA KAHLO
London 247, Del Carmen
November 30–November 15

View of “Las apariencias engañan: Los vestidos de Frida Kahlo” (Appearances Are Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo), 2013.

Given the never-ending interest in Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her work, it would seem almost impossible to come up with anything new and meaningful to add to the interpretation of her oeuvre. On the other hand, devising an exhibition that focuses exclusively on the striking wardrobe that formed the basis for her exotic image, while disregarding her highly recognized pictorial work, would almost seem an act of curatorial suicide. Nonetheless, the exhibition “Las apariencias engañan: Los vestidos de Frida Kahlo” (Appearances Are Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo), curated by Circe Henestrosa, is a revealing attempt to unravel what lay behind Frida Kahlo’s exuberant way of dressing and of literally turning herself into art.

The exhibition is structured around two themes, or more accurately, biographical narrative clusters—“disability” and “ethnicity”—that shed light on the consistent and seductive public image that Kahlo built alongside her artwork, an image that enshrouded her more intimate reality: a mutilated and chronically ill body.

It has often been thought that Kahlo’s wardrobe—which was largely based on combinations of items taken from traditional Zapotec attire—was a bold act of ideological-aesthetic appropriation designed to heighten the visibility of the celebrated couple that she and Diego Rivera formed. The selection of never-before-exhibited objects and garments in this exhibition, however, is evidence that Kahlo, in her attire, was attempting to meet a much more basic and practical need. The exhibition shows us, for instance, that Kahlo adopted the structure of indigenous Oaxacan clothing—her mother was of Tehuanan descent—because it enabled her to cover, in a manner both efficacious and beautiful, her wounded body (broken pelvis; uterus and spine that required countless operations; right leg mangled by polio and an accident). The huipil with its elaborately embroidered geometrical front, along with striking jewelry, drew attention to the upper half of her body while hiding the rest. The exhibition offers interconnected and precious clues about the different ways that, in her attempt to keep herself in one piece, Kahlo became an enduring point of reference in fashion history. Indeed, her influence has proved so great that the exhibition ends with an impeccable selection of garments inspired by the “Kahlo aesthetic,” by major designers like Rei Kawakubo, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Riccardo Tisci.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.

— Marcela Quiroz