“Painting Between the Lines”

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
1111 8th Street
October 4–December 17

View of “Painting Between the Lines,” 2011.

After organizing a trilogy of exhibitions inspired by iconic American novels (“The Wizard of Oz” in 2008, “Moby Dick” in 2009, and “Huckleberry Finn” in 2010), Wattis director Jens Hoffmann has now relayed the task of investigating the relationship between literature and art to fourteen artists. For “Painting Between the Lines,” they were each commissioned to create a work based on a description of painting from a book. While the curatorial premise of “reintroducing literature as a viable subject for painting” is straightforward, it also ambitiously engages the historical discourse regarding the inseparable nature of word and image by examining the role of narrative.

Excerpts from the books that discuss the imagined paintings are juxtaposed with the realized works. The gallery thus becomes a portal where the simultaneous transfer of the image into the text and the text into the image is possible. Ranging across many different styles, most of the works here stray from a direct translation of literary depiction. Fred Tomaselli’s Watt, 2011, for example, interprets a picture obsessively described in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel of the same name. Arranging numerous cutouts of pupils and painted eyes on a black and blue background, Tomaselli humorously transforms the narrator’s neurotic and absurd search for the relationship between “a point” and “a circle” into an intense and infinite radial pattern. Instead of revivifying a “realistic portrait of a young boy” in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002), Marcel Dzama offers a three-part work, metaphorically pointing to events in the book such as a war, a student riot, and a terrorist attack.

The standing wall structure that supports each pairing is elegantly designed to mimic an open book, foregrounding the direct connection between the two modes of representation. While the show successfully challenges the autonomy of painting, it still perhaps overly emphasizes the medium’s illustrative task and its interpretive duty, and therefore implies the risk of subordinating visual art to the power of words.

— Xiaoyu Weng

Leslie Shows

HAINES GALLERY
49 Geary Street, Suite 540
November 3–December 24

Leslie Shows, Face R, 2011, ink, acrylic, mica, paper, brass, Plexiglas, Mylar, aluminum, 82 x 48”.

Leslie Shows’s new body of work was inspired by two small chunks of pyrite, aka fool’s gold. In a sense, the material is richer in metaphor than actual value; neither precious nor revered, it has modest industrial utility and reflective qualities that dazzle deceptively in the ground. As a doppelgänger for a fourteen-carat commodity, it calls worth into question. A series of faceted paintings on shiny aluminum panels, some more than six feet tall, are based on scans of pyrite and are rendered in a polymorphous array of elements––Plexiglas, Mylar, crushed glass, metal dust, mica, acrylic paint. Shows coaxes alchemical effects from her complex admixtures––some of the works suggest light fragmented into rainbow spectrums. Engraving into the aluminum and Plexi surfaces, for example, yields a sense of spatial confusion. It’s difficult to discern whether the foundation of these angular abstractions extends or recedes. These paintings similarly waver between abstraction and a detailed sense of realism.

In previous works, Shows reveled in geological interests, creating mixed-media representations of arid salt mines, earthly locations formed over vast time frames. Her latest pieces spring from similar interests, yet reveal a notable shift in materiality, dimensionality, and sheen. Shows also commendably explores new modes and materials, particularly in a series of sculptures cast in sulfur (notably, pyrite is half-sulfur and half-iron). The sculptures, a flat yellow contrast to the metallic sheen of the paintings, emulate the shapes of minerals, computer hard drives, and dollar store trinkets. Displayed on the floor, the objects are rendered homely manufactured modules that can’t compete with the complex forces of nature and Shows’s ability to marshal them.

— Glen Helfand

Colby Bird

LORA REYNOLDS GALLERY
360 Nueces, Suite 50
September 9–November 26

View of “Dust Breeds Contempt,” 2011.

Parts of wooden chairs, small blocks of broken granite, brightly painted flattened cardboard boxes, a photograph of Easter eggs, and fruit, both real and plastic, are largely what Colby Bird’s current exhibition is made of. While all of these materials retain and assert their identities as everyday things in the world, Bird proposes that the object’s function as art is determined less by its media than by its proximity to other works and by the viewer’s own subjectivity.

Bird presents these objects in rigorously arranged tableaux that make them feel effortless and light in their relationship to one another. A group of three sculptures are placed on a large wooden plank in the center of the gallery. Each work is a meditation on balance: For instance, a looped metal sculpture sits atop a plastic pear, and a detached wooden chair leg rests precariously on an orange. The sculptures challenge the mind to make patterns as it registers the work. All of the components are distinguishable, but when viewed together, the effect is not unlike looking at a cubist collage. The objects may be changed by their placement, yet they always retain their “objectness.”

The exhibition has an interactive component as well; with the help of the gallery attendant, the viewer can rearrange a selection of works on a wooden table that juts out of the wall, which serves as a site for photographs to be placed and replaced. The viewer becomes a cocurator, as each photo activates the space in startlingly new ways. Through a constant consideration of placement and out of a wide range of materials, Bird has assembled an elegant and cohesive exhibition.

— Katie Geha

Buster Graybill

AUSTIN MUSEUM OF ART - LAGUNA GLORIA
3809 West 35th Street
November 22–February 19

Buster Graybill, Ramtastic, 2010, still from a color film, 2 minutes.

Buster Graybill’s exhibition “Progeny of Tush Hog” takes advantage of a symbiosis between Minimalist form and the importance of setting in a way that is both playful and smart. In his video Ramtastic, 2010, and a series of photographs, Graybill has animated several polyhedron forms with the intention of observing how the objects could exist in a setting that serves not merely as a backdrop but as an engaged space. His hollow sculptures are fabricated from diamond plate aluminum and other industrial materials, bored with holes that allow corn feed to spill out while various wild game––which populate the pastoral environment––jostle with them as captured on nocturnal cameras. This scenario speaks to the intrusion of urban development into rural settings in a way that is both absurd and poignant. The title comes from the Southern vernacular for a tusked feral hog, but “tush hog” can also refer to a rough-hewn individual who behaves like an animal.

The show presents objects that have been marred by the animal encounter. They silently rest amid the white walls of the gallery space like a gaggle of drunkards proud of their debauched bruises. Nocturnal photographs and video provide evidence of a sort of witches’ Sabbath––Aoudad sheep, for instance, slamming into the forms with juvenile and hedonistic delight.

Graybill is addressing environment in ways that are comical as well as serious, rather than pretentious. This work rides more comfortably in its surroundings than other Minimalist works. While perhaps missing some of the sublimity that that genre traditionally strives for, it conjures up a clever syntax that responds to contemporary issues such as suburban sprawl and “white cube gallery” displacement. His forms speak of an investigation of Minimalism's visual language that can be intimidating to the casual observer and also expand upon the awareness those who are familiar with the genre.

— Garland Fielder

Jean-Luc Moulène

DIA:BEACON
3 Beekman Street
December 1–December 31

Jean-Luc Moulène, Météo (Weather), 2009, plastic hoses, 14 x 25 1/2 x 10 1/4".

Jean-Luc Moulène’s yearlong exhibition “Opus + One” comprises three distinct modules dispersed throughout the vast building. The most beguiling of all is the large gallery of objects titled “Opus,” 1995–. Resting on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and placed on tables that are so delicate they nearly float in space, thirty-five sculptures––made across the span of sixteen years––fill the cavernous space. The materials, though crude, never quite give themselves away; Lycra resembles liquid glass, water hoses twist and torque into perfect ellipses, and fiberglass takes on the appearance of dehydrated cartilage. No bigger than the human body, or what the human body might be able to cradle, these opuses are propositions rather than determinations, each with its own unique set of terms and conditions. The +1 suffix in the exhibition’s title alludes to this endlessly additive equation, which not only begins at zero, but replicates at the most comprehensible pace possible.

The other galleries take on unique strategies. Two adjoined rooms house Moulène’s photographic series “La Vigie” (Lookout Man), 2004–11, in which two stacked rows (totaling nearly three hundred images) snake around the walls. They picture the same rogue weed––sprouted from a Parisian sidewalk in front of the country’s Ministry for the Economy, Industry, and Employment––as it blooms and retreats in a hostile environment over many years. In the back gallery, a large, opalescent aluminum sculpture, titled Body, 2011, stands alone. Built to order by Renault, the piece takes a smaller opus made by Moulène and enlarges it to the power of several hundred. While its leguminous figure and hyper-glossed surface are sexy, the overall slickness of the form is counterproductive to Moulène’s project: His art is most successful when the work teeters at the brink of potential and failure, as structural models that will never quite be realized.

— Carmen Winant

Laurel Nakadate

CARPENTER CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
24 Quincy Street, Harvard University
November 17–December 22

Laurel Nakadate, Exorcism 3 (Dancing in the Desert for Britney), 2009, still from an HD and digital video, 6 minutes 40 seconds.

Laurel Nakadate has a way with discomfort. The eight videos on view in her latest show find the artist impinging on the intimate, lived spaces of others, then drawing on the tension that ensues. Her subjects are maladroit and marginalized; more often than not they are unattractive middle-aged men who live alone. Entering their kitchens and living rooms, Nakadate stages scenarios that range from the ordinary (a birthday party) to the eccentric (an exorcism). Faced with her impromptu actions, some of the men remain reticent, as if trying to gauge the polite response; others break character, as in Beg for Your Life, 2006, where her titular command is met with giddy laughter. Nakadate’s work unsettles the lines between exploitation and compassion, and its occasional comic edge fails to annul the anxiety that ensues. Exorcism in January, 2009, captures Barry (a frequent star) gazing into the camera with watery eyes. When he speaks of his depression, his words, even if fed, inspire genuine pathos. The scene is difficult to square with the following shot of Barry writhing on a bare mattress, as Nakadate enjoins him to alternately shake, pull, and lick out his evil spirits.

Spanning the first decade of Nakadate’s production, the show covers now familiar thematic terrain. As in her recent MoMA PS1 survey, isolation and vulnerability are the orders of the day. Marked by power dichotomies and failed connections, the portrait of social life that results is bleak. In Darkest Evening of the Year, 2009, a sequence of suburban homes adorned with Christmas lights appear on screen while, in voice-over, a man pretends to arrange casual sex on the phone. Such dissonance taps into the callousness that subtends American culture—a recurring motif that Exorcism 3 (Dancing in the Desert for Britney), 2009, with its close-up of Nakadate crying alongside paparazzi footage of Britney Spears, condenses. Who merits empathy and who deserves blame are here pointed, though ultimately unanswerable, questions.

— Courtney Fiske

Hans Haacke

MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
20 Ames Street E15
October 21–December 31

View of “Hans Haacke 1967,” 2011.

While Hans Haacke’s work has seen great changes in the past forty years, this near-exact re-creation of his seminal 1967 solo exhibition, also at MIT, prefigures his subsequent interest in the sociological nature of art by revealing his early engagements with form, function, and the reliance of work on its physical and social context.

Curated by Caroline A. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967” is a veritable playground of his so-called systems that wield natural processes such as gravity, wind, water, plant growth, and condensation as media in their own right. Most of the pieces on view were refabricated for this exhibition. To classify these works as either kinetic sculpture or Conceptual art would subvert Haacke’s purpose entirely. Their dependence on physical transformation links this early and largely undocumented exhibition with his site-specific and politically engaged practice that would follow, including his demolishing of the floor of the German pavilion in the 1993 Venice Biennale as a destructive representation of his fragmented birthplace, which earned him the Golden Lion that year (an honor he shared with Nam June Paik).

Works like Wide White Flow, 1967/2006/2010, a sinuous seventeen-by-thirty-nine-foot steely-white tide of billowing silk fabric, are object lessons in the truths of natural form and function––ideas that were highly informed by his affiliation with the pan-European collective Zero, whose cofounder, Otto Piene, also has a concurrent solo exhibition here. Zero’s insistence on the metaphysical dimension of art is evident in Haacke’s early output, as in Condensation Cube, large version, 1963–67/2006, a moisture-filled Plexiglas box, in which the natural process is contained and exhibited as the work itself. The show reveals Haacke’s autopoietic tactic of demonstrating that living systems are inextricably bound with the environments in which they operate, and that much of what we know about our physical and social environment can be contextualized by simple, organic, and naturally occurring forces.

— Evan Garza

“Dance/Draw”

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART / BOSTON
100 Northern Avenue
October 7–January 16

Rashaad Newsome, Untitled (New Way), 2009, still from a color video, 6 minutes 48 seconds.

This fall, as Occupy Wall Street and kindred resistance movements sprouted up and accrued strength around the globe, the body in space increasingly became a site of renewed attention and possibility. The set of questions and explorations that unfold throughout “Dance/Draw” could not have come at a more apt time. Indeed, in an expansive thematic investigation of mark-making that begins on the page and then leaps into space as dance, the constraints of normative behavior—in the everyday as well as in the conventions surrounding art practice—are questioned, pushed at, toppled. What are the ways in which movement, whether it be of snails in sand or people in parking lots, can unsettle relations of power that write themselves in and on the body, coursing through space in the form of expectation? This exhibition, curated by Helen Molesworth, insists that viewers not exempt themselves from the embodied explorations they see before them. We too are bodies in three dimensions, passing through private space that has been opened to the public: How will we move?

In a dark room devoted exclusively to film and video, a small cubicle housing Klara Lidén’s 2003 video Paralyzed partakes in one of the show’s many moments of artful curation. If one sits up tall inside the dark viewing booth, the huge projection of Rashaad Newsome’s Untitled (New Way), 2009, is plainly visible above its edge. Lidén’s body jumps and writhes as if releasing something while onlookers stare inside a streetcar in Stockholm. Just above her the male dancer in Newsome’s video snaps precise poses within the walls of a white room while staring into the camera. These two bodies resonate with each other: They need to move, and through that movement, they undo the strictures of the spaces that enclose them—and so might we.

— Litia Perta

Victoria Sambunaris

ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY
1285 Elmwood Avenue
October 21–January 22

Victoria Sambunaris, Untitled (Tomato Pool, Yellowstone National Park), 2008, color photograph, 39 x 55".

A name like “Kodachrome Basin” for a Utah park speaks to epistemological troubles for the American landscape, many of which have been captured through iconic, lens-based imagery. But what of “actual” spaces not set aside to satisfy aesthetic yearnings—pipeline-traversed valleys or superhighway mountain passes? Victoria Sambunaris’s task, as seen in her current solo show, is to work around powerful photographic and cinematic precessions, and she does so partially by anchoring each landscape with built interventions—pipelines and train tracks give scale, social significance, and presentness to these spaces. People are conspicuously absent in her large color prints, but trucks and railcars mark human presence—they are intermediary machines shaping these landscapes one trailer or hopper at a time. Their impressions are found in most of the works shown here; images of homogeneous shipping containers and ore cars are accompanied by rails that barely fit a narrow canyon, and the truck-wide terraces of strip mines.

By showing the environment as neither pristine nor obviously devastated, Victoria Sambunaris avoids romanticizing it. She posits landscape elements that contradict expectations—a US-Mexico border fence has the formal presence of an Earthwork, natural pools look like Superfund sites, and uranium tailings masquerade as geologic phenomena.

At the heart of this exhibition is an “ephemera” gallery that includes maps, vintage tour books, geologic specimens, and Sambunaris’s journals. Hundreds of study photos give clues to her selective process while revealing what every tourist eventually learns—that snapshot images diminish the landscape and fail to capture its grandeur. It’s also difficult to take a “bad” picture of these dynamic spaces, but at this size, mesas, lakes, and skies become leveled and inadequate. This room’s artifacts and studies help the viewer to pinpoint the artist’s accomplishment in her grand prints; namely, that she grounds the “eternal,” or at least the “geologic,” in our specific time. This temporal scaling marks the work with a credibility that complements her alluring magnitudes and framings.

— William Ganis

Jonathan Baldock

PEREGRINE PROGRAM
3311 West Carroll Avenue, #119
October 9–November 6

View of “Pierrot,” 2011.

The clown—a source of laughter for some and of unease or even terror for others—is the central motif in Jonathan Baldock’s sculptural installation Pierrot, 2011, which takes its title and inspiration from Jean-Antoine Watteau’s 1718–19 painting of a commedia dell’arte fool. Standing alone above his fellow actors, Watteau’s Pierrot appears lost in thought, the expression on his unpainted face remote. In this moment, he seems unable to fully inhabit his persona—perhaps he is a man forced to play a part that stopped making sense long ago. Baldock’s version of the Pierrot figure evokes a similar sense of displacement, albeit in a comically literal fashion: The clown’s costumed body has been abstracted into a series of modular geometric forms that the artist can (and does) reconfigure at will. Baldock sculpts the individual components out of polysterene foam, then blanket-stitches sections of cream-colored felt directly onto the forms, forming a taut sheath over the entirety of each. On top of this are sewn additional fabric cutouts in the shape of tears, body parts, polka dots, and stripes.

When viewed as an installation, the sculptures yield a single, exquisitely balanced visual tableau. Seen as individual works, however, their affects career wildly from humorous to bawdy to downright creepy. A head placed atop a stack of cylindrical and rectangular forms evokes a clown in jauntily striped pantaloons, yet the bullet-size hole where one of his eyes should be, and the scarlike strip of black fabric running down the jawline, conjure far less comforting imagery. Comparisons to Frankenstein’s monster and his slasher-film offspring are inevitable, but equally resonant is David Wojnarowicz’s 1990 Silence = Death and its iconic image of a man with his mouth sewn shut, blood running from the sutures like tears. For the most part, Baldock avoids pinning any one cultural or art-historical reference to his sculptures, preferring instead to allow for a potentially infinite number of them. A torso with outstretched arms, for example, suggests the graceful leaps of a dancer en pointe, while the crudely suggestive smiley face appliquéd to its chest reminds us that “low” forms of culture offer modes of levity that are just as powerful as “high” culture. What is a clown, after all, if not a man who can show us the potential for transcendence that lies in both?

— Claudine Ise

Dianna Frid

DEVENING PROJECTS + EDITIONS
3039 West Carroll, 3rd Floor
October 16–December 3

Dianna Frid, I alone was to hear their voices/Their ravishing voices out across the air (the relative length of two Homeric lines as translated by Robert Fagles), 2011, cardboard, plaster, gesso, paper, graphite, powder dyes, fixative, dimensions variable.

Humanity’s often poignant reliance on language at the precise moments when it falls short—or fails altogether—is a subject of continual fascination for Dianna Frid. In her current solo exhibition, titled “Evidence of the Material World,” the works on view attempt to give form not to sublime or ineffable experience, but to the inevitable gaps and fissures that arise from our use of language to describe it. Frid’s Words from Obituary (#1) (all works cited, 2011) consists of four graphite-covered sheets of paper on which the text “The Fourth Word Spoken on the Moon” appears, each letter embroidered in various shades of pink and purple. These words straddle the uneven grid formed by the irregularly sized sheets, so that the letters in “spoken” are literally broken apart. Rather than the historic “first words” delivered during Apollo’s lunar touchdown, Frid’s text work points to the unmemorable (yet arguably no less significant) utterances that followed.

Frid builds her larger-scale collages by drawing, painting, and sewing on multiple sheets of paper, revising the resulting compositions by papering over previous iterations, whose outlines still remain faintly visible, like shadows, from beneath the works’ topmost layers. A similar subtlety animates two white sculptures, together titled I alone was to hear their voices/Their ravishing voices out across the air (the relative length of two Homeric lines as translated by Robert Fagles). Their smooth verticality conjures a pair of rocket boosters, but their title references two lines from Homer’s Odyssey that describe Odysseus’s encounter with the sirens. It bears noting that, in Homer’s epic, the sirens’ alluring song survives only as written text; fittingly, Frid based the proportionate height of each sculpture on the relative lengths of those two Homeric lines, as if to measure the immeasurable space between imagination and its mundane material manifestations.

— Claudine Ise

IAIN BAXTER&

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue
November 5–January 15

View of “IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958–2011,” 2011.

IAIN BAXTER& capitalized and added an ampersand to his name in 2005, in order, according to the press materials for this show, “to underscore his belief that art is about connectivity, contingency, and collaboration with a viewer.” This is something of an understatement. The work of BAXTER&, who formed the N. E. Thing Company in the mid-1960s as a sort of Conceptual art licensing group, was predicated on the increasingly corporate nature of both the art world and daily life. The proclamation “art is all over,” which simultaneously heralded the mass proliferation of the art world and the dissolution of artistic copyright, was part and parcel of BAXTER&’s five-decade-long attempt to throw a spanner in the art world’s works.

Standards 24, 1962, an Asger Jorn–derived Expressionist painting diagrammed to show its interchangeable stylistic parts, provides early evidence here of BAXTER&’s analogy between the art world and the world of factory production. In the mid-’60s, BAXTER& took up this theme again, focusing this time not on the product but the packaging. Where his New York Pop contemporaries were imitating the visual languages of industrial and commercial design, BAXTER& was doing them one better by offering bagged and vacuum-formed landscapes and miscellaneous masterpieces such as Inflated Blue Sky, 1970, Bagged Rothko, 1965, and Pneumatic Judd, 1965, some of the most interesting pieces in the current exhibition.

The central portion of the show is devoted to the N. E. Thing Co.’s series of “ACTs” (Aesthetically Claimed Things) and “ARTs” (Aesthetically Rejected Things); and although many of the former are artful found objects while the latter mostly reject reigning art-world deities, ACT # 74, 1968, is a stack of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. The exhibition closes with BAXTER&’s most recent photographs and installations, including a kitschy series of taxidermy-topped exhaust pipes and vintage TV sets painted with landscape scenes, which are switched on to reveal glimpses of static snow underneath. The manufacturing process has reached its final phase, it seems: recycling.

— Leslie Cozzi

Sharon Hayes

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
111 South Michigan Avenue
November 10–March 11

Sharon Hayes, Parole, 2010, still from HD single-channel video, 36 minutes.

Love, like politics, longs to speak through us, and we, reciprocally, long to be heard and to speak: to feel as though on some basic level our hopes, fears, and desires register somewhere amid the forces that bind us to history and to one another. Sharon Hayes’s work negotiates this territory while effectively disrupting the amalgamation of public and private identities. Her practice affords us a pause to reflect on the meaning of the classic feminist slogan “The personal is political”—both in a general sense and also, more specifically, in relation to LGBT rights today.

In Hayes’s solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, curated by Lisa Dorin, we are presented with a tripartite show that includes Parole, 2010, first exhibited in the Whitney Biennial; In the Near Future, 2005–2009; and An Ear to the Sounds of Our History, 2011. Together, the pieces are more than the sum of their parts, and they reveal an artist working through various modalities of publicness in order to find the self and selves, authentic or otherwise. In the four-channel video installation Parole, actress Becca Blackwell proffers a countenance that is a near-blank slate; equipped with a microphone, she performs the work of a quasi-psychoanalyst probing the world. Through vignettes of her listening in the street, a classroom, her apartment, and a dance studio, the viewer is left to ponder how these encounters affect or construct her and, by extension, ourselves.

Hayes’s references and source materials here include James Baldwin’s 1974 lecture at Berkeley, Lauren Berlant’s theorization of sentimentality, a 1904 Anna Rüling speech, a dancer rehearsing, and Hayes’s own declarations of love. Throughout this exhibition, the audience is made to feel privy to that which, taken collectively, might be best characterized as a type of prayer—one that is spoken against the odds that it will ever be answered but perseveres all the same, defiant in its resignation

— Zachary Cahill

Dion Johnson

MARTY WALKER GALLERY
2135 Farrington Street
October 15–November 12

Dion Johnson, Accelerator, 2011, acrylic and Flashe on canvas, 40 x 60”.

Dion Johnson’s colorful paintings are vivid and crisp, composed of tightly compressed contours that jostle each other in overlapping rows and long narrow layers. This sharply focused show consists of five works in acrylic and Flashe on canvas, all from 2011. In some, the forms hang down, like a rack of tools or pots; in others, the shapes stack up in ways reminiscent of layers of sedimentary rock. The colors are auto showroom–ready: phthalo blue and heliotrope purple, apple and lime green, gamboge and brilliant orange.
The works gain traction through three basic, generative forms. First is a dominant rectangle or parallelogram, modified with gently sweeping curved edges, which can take up as much as a third of the frame––for example, the bright amaranth red at the left of Accelerator, or the arctic blue at the upper middle of Aero. Second is a stylus shape with parallel edges that taper together toward a rounded tip. (This can be either solid, as in the rose and gray examples in Glider, or left in outline, as in the orange and cyan curves in Rave, which resemble Barnett Newman zips making hairpin turns.) The third is an elongated element made of two separate colors that join in the middle with an elliptical or S-curve interface: the light and dark cyan in Rave, or the violet and orchid in Aero. Each of these three forms sweeps across the surface, implying a range of motion continuing past the edge of the canvas that slices them off.

Compared with canonical LA hardedge painting circa 1959 (year of the landmark “Four Abstract Classicists” show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and reconsidered in the 2007 touring survey “Birth of the Cool”), Johnson’s work has a hectic, frenetic quality; it is in fact much more animated than cool. This sense of motion and energy leads me to think that for Johnson the time-based animations by Jeremy Blake, for instance, count as much toward the history of painting as any canvas does. Johnson’s paintings have a hybrid genealogy that invites novel connections.

— Benjamin Lima

Matias Faldbakken

THE POWER STATION
3816 Commerce Street
October 21–December 23

Matias Faldbakken, Mesh Container Sculpture, 2011, two mesh containers, lever straps, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In his current solo show, “Oslo, Texas,” Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken pursues a brand of relentless denial and disavowal, presenting one medium after another as exhausted to the point of self-parody. On the ground floor of this new exhibition venue (and former power station), 20,000 Gun Shells (all works 2011) are scattered across the concrete ground, perfectly treacherous for visitors in high heels. A series of eight framed cardboard “Flat Boxes” are presented on the wall with tape and marker applied; they extend Faldbakken’s previous explorations of quasi-alphabetical, quasi-gestural abstraction in a state of advanced degradation.

As one ascends the open-air exterior staircase to the mezzanine level, the Mesh Container Sculpture looms downward, cinched in an alarmingly off-kilter fashion to the platform above. Resembling a crushed shopping cart, it seems to destroy the link between demolition and expression asserted by John Chamberlain’s output. On the mezzanine level, the three hundred stacked cardboard cartons in Box Sculpture engage the majority of the space, but if one explores around all sides, one finds a haphazardly placed series of nine framed prints, some leaning against the sides of the large sculpture, which offer selected images of the artist’s earlier work. Puncturing and skewering every kind of visual idea that threatens to become inflated with significance, Faldbakken serves as a Marcel Broodthaers figure to the present generation of installation artists. His use of negation as a universal solvent of cultural values also recalls the work of novelist Michel Houellebecq, but with a less misanthropic flavor of nihilism.

— Benjamin Lima

Walter De Maria

THE MENIL COLLECTION
1515 Sul Ross Street
September 16–January 8

Walter De Maria, Bel Air Trilogy (detail), 2000–11, stainless steel rod, 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air two-tone hardtop, dimensions variable.

Walter De Maria’s first major US museum exhibition features just nine works, but it sheds an illuminating light on his nearly fifty-year career. The lesser-known objects on view suggest that this seminal artist has much more to offer than the 1970s Land art projects for which he is renowned, among them The Lightning Field and The New York Earth Room (both 1977). Unlike those permanent installations, the six sculptures and three paintings at the Menil are neither composed of the land nor site-specific. Nevertheless, they expand understandings of the artist’s formal and conceptual concerns through engaging other kinds of material interventions and even a political edge.

A striking trio of massive monochrome paintings, each punctuated at center by a small steel plaque, hang in the museum’s foyer (“The Statement Series,” 1968/2011). The most absorbing work in this series is the earliest. Yellow Painting is a twenty-foot-long canvas made for Dwan Gallery’s 1968 “Earth Works” show. Its plaque is inscribed with the enigmatic words THE COLOR MEN CHOOSE WHEN THEY ATTACK THE EARTH. The statement is sometimes thought to refer to the yellow tractors that Land artists were using to dig into the earth. When considered within the work’s Vietnam War–era context, the aggressive tone suggests more.

Inside the show proper, three steel floor sculptures—a circle, square, and triangle (“Channel Series,” 1972)—lead to the most spectacular series in the exhibition: a trio of meticulously restored 1955 Chevrolet Bel Airs whose rear and front windows are each speared tail to hood with stainless steel rods (Bel Air Trilogy, 2000–11). Though such shafts appear in De Maria’s earlier Land art, here they cut through a different American symbol. The iconic machine’s gleaming chrome and red curves are irresistible; you will want to get much closer than the museum allows. The project, presented on Chevy’s hundredth anniversary, merges the futuristic with the retrograde to cause the kind of temporal confusion at play in De Maria’s most enduring works. The interventions in this exhibition show how, over the past five decades, the seventy-six-year-old artist has been provoking questions about what the US was, is, and would like to be.

— Kate Green

Donald Moffett

CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON
5216 Montrose Boulevard
October 1–January 8

Donald Moffett, Untitled (The Public), 2002, video projection, oil and enamel on linen, 45 x 60".

What Barbara Jordan wore was pink, a glorious fuschia, when she intoned her famous words at Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearing in 1972: “My faith in the constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.” A lawyer, congresswoman, and black woman from Texas, Barbara Jordan’s pink suit, and indeed her entire countenance, remains an important contra to the pale male club of politics. Video of her speech, asynchronously looped, is thrown onto three golden-hued paintings in What Barbara Jordan Wore, 2002, one of two works regarding impeachment that anchor and bookend Donald Moffett’s current retrospective, “The Extravagant Vein.” In the year of the Arab Spring, and in light of the rising unrest here at home, Moffett’s gesture toward the messiness of insurrection and deposition is a poetic reminder to the viewer of their own latent power. Whether Moffett is undercutting power—by reproducing lithographs of military figures with colorful pornostats added, calling one stoic officer a FIERCE BOTTOM, for example—or elegizing grassroots activism, as he does in the starkly lit installation of his aluminum “Hippie Shit” paintings (complete with schmaltzy harmonica music), the artist proves himself to be keenly aware of the slow-build and static-filled hum of revolutionary moments.

For those who don’t want to think about such things, there’s another intriguing connective thread in “The Extravagant Vein,” which is the formal way Moffett uses paint: It is extruded, woven, tangled, layered in ribbons or fashioned into shag carpets of spikes. But even these can become diagrammatic ways of thinking about social power. Formal elements, such as the positions of the speakers of IMPEACH, 2006, arranged circularly in a claustrophobic triangular space, facilitate an activated politics. In this sound work, the voice of Representative John Lewis gives a brief and affecting testimony in regard to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, comparing America to his own family bracing for an apocalyptic storm. The presiding gavel comes down in thunderous rhythms, moving like a poltergeist across the room alternately buried in and resonating from speakers. The man is shouting at the top of his lungs, wholly, completely and totally, in the most hallowed of halls. If the word impeach is an epic poem, as Donald Moffett has said, the sonic and visual reverberations of that strange word found in “The Extravagant Vein” are dissertations on elegance, novels on power.

— Andy Campbell

“The Great Poor Farm Experiment III”

THE POOR FARM
E6325 County Highway BB
August 15–August 15

Guillaume Leblon, Down, South (detail), 2011, 36 x 65 x 6”.

Something about summer grips the American psyche with an almost unbridled wanderlust, an urge to escape the familiar. The contemporary art set would be hard pressed to find a destination that requites this desire with such élan as the Poor Farm. Located in rural Manawa, Wisconsin, and initiated three years ago by artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, the project has opened up an alternative model for thinking about the way art is produced. The Poor Farm’s programming and exhibition strategies foster a unique type of camaraderie, mobilizing not simply a DIY approach but a deep investment in building community.

Yet rather than being an instance of relational aesthetics, the now often (and unfairly) scoffed-at term promulgated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the exhibition foregrounds ways in which art itself forms a locus for relationality. Duncan MacKenzie’s and Christian Kuras’s Diagram, 2011, is a delirious sculptural installation that maps everyday encounters and social structures by way of institutional bric-a-brac and architectural models. In contrast, Yvette Brackman’s contribution, The Catalyst, 2011, is a svelte sculpture made of colored fabric that doubles as a set for a participatory video performance dealing with global capitalism’s encroachment on Sami culture of northern Scandinavia, Finland, and northern Russia. Simultaneously functioning on its own and serving to inform his Summer School—an experimental discourse in contemporary art, theory, and practice held at the Poor Farm—is the video program, smartly curated by artist Aaron Van Dyke, that features Matthew Buckingham’s Within the Sound of Your Own Voice, 2007, an elegant meditation on the enigmatic nature of language and its bodily inscription.

The work that best epitomizes the ethos of the Poor Farm may be Guillaume Leblon’s Down, South, 2011. Into the ground around the premises of the gallery, Leblon cast concrete cubes that, once removed from their earthen molds, were left encrusted with thick deposits of soil. Witnessing these hulking works being ushered into the first-floor exhibition hall and aligned precisely by the artist and a number of helping hands on the morning of the opening, one sensed what is at stake in seeing our environs differently: To see dry dirt is to realize that there is no relationality without the aesthetic, and no art without its community.

— Zachary Cahill

“Don’t Get High on Your Own Supply”

DAVID CASTILLO GALLERY
2234 NW 2nd Avenue
November 12–December 31

Quisqueya Henriquez, 99 bad mirrors, 2011, one hundred color photographs, 50 x 70”.

This exhibition’s title references a well-known line from the 1981 film Scarface that foreshadows the self-destruction of Al Pacino’s character from cocaine abuse at the apogee of his power. Unlike the movie, the works on view have little to do with 1980s drug culture in Miami, but they do betray an obsessive-compulsive quality—usually in technique—that is nonetheless reined in, never becoming excessive, trivial, or superfluous. This show is tightly knit—literally, given the range of handwoven textiles here—and presents a refreshing mix of emerging and established artists.
 
Both of Jayson Musson’s untitled paintings from this year are laborious constructions that turn the mercerized cotton of scarves and other clothing from the hip-hop label Coogi into irresistible tactile fields of colorful abstraction; it is worth noting that Scarface has been embraced by the hip-hop community. Samantha Bittman’s paintings are as much optical experiences as Musson’s are embodied ones. Through a meticulous and almost imperceptible layering of acrylic onto her handwoven canvases, she creates dazzling Op art effects.
 
Not all of the works are textile-based. Quisqueya Henriquez’s 99 Bad Mirrors, 2011, is a grid of glossy prints, each one a serial digital reworking of a section of Blinky Palermo’s 1973 work Mirror Object from the Internet. Finally, a humorous highlight is Musson’s 2010 short video ART THOUGHTZ: Bruce Nauman, in which his hip-hop alter ego, Hennessy Youngman, explains that clowns, water, hands, and torture are all off-limits for today’s artists—they have been done before (and better) by Nauman, whose iconic works involving serial repetition could be genealogically linked to the works in this show.

— Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Blake Rayne

FORMALIST SIDEWALK POETRY CLUB
235 12th Street
December 1–January 12

View of “Blake Rayne,” 2011.

As if there wasn’t enough art to buy at Art Basel Miami Beach, this year’s edition marked an unprecedented move into retail. While several artists teamed up with luxury brands for limited edition purses (Anselm Reyle with Dior, Liam Gillick with Pringle of Scotland), Blake Rayne’s understocked exhibition at this gallery, with its three variations on one simple yet declarative sentence, took the whole fiasco to task. The piece, UNTITLED, 2011, features this single line replicated on two canvases displayed in a vertical column, and in an enlarged version projected onto the gallery’s back wall. In a font that brings to mind California (or at least its license plates), they each read: THIS IS NEW YORK CITY.

Rayne culled the text from New York’s first international advertising campaign, which began in 2007 with the sentence superimposed on stock images of the metropolis. The hurried, handwritten font extends Rayne’s previous work with typescripts, last seen with the giant serif a sliding off the wall at a 2010 show, titled “Folder and Application,” at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York. By marrying identity to a font, the advertising campaign seems like the corporate shadow of work like Josh Smith’s “Stage Paintings,” 2011, and Joshua Abelow’s “Call Me Abstract,” 2010, both faux-Expressionistic series made up solely of the letters in the artist’s name or phone number. As such, Rayne’s show tries to identify a dividing line between style and brand.

As Rayne’s new paintings were copied from the original advertisement, the projector here serves as an anthropomorphic representation of the artist engaged not in creation but in broadcasting. The projector itself, which remains in its Styrofoam packaging, is also trained on an empty wall. The packaging is a metonymic entrée into the exhibition as a whole. Like the aforementioned font issue, it lampoons a recent trend through reduction: in this case, the packaging versus storage meme set up by Seth Price with his Holes, 2003, and continued by Cory Arcangel’s Volume Management, 2011, both of which feature televisions still in their boxes. It also underscores the exhibition as a waypoint on the larger traffic of commodities, which could be defined as objects that require Styrofoam. Rayne updates David Joselit’s 2009 essay “Painting Beside Itself” for the holiday season; painting has now been put on layaway.

— Hunter Braithwaite

Laurent Grasso

BASS MUSEUM OF ART
2100 Collins Avenue
October 29–February 12

Lately, the Bass Museum of Art has been asking contemporary artists to produce exhibitions that incorporate the museum’s collection of Renaissance and Baroque art. In this iteration, “Portrait of a Young Man,” Laurent Grasso has taken up questions of authorship and lineage by hiring a group of art restorers to create compositions based on visual notes of Fra Angelico, Mantegna, and Botticelli. These new pieces are then tagged with elements from Grasso’s work. Studies into the Past, No. 2, 2011, for example, features a cloud engulfing a Flemish city identical to the one in Grasso’s Projection, 2003, while the title references a fifteenth-century Botticini oil on display in a room nearby.

Remarkably, the show isn’t self-serving: Grasso superimposes his work on the agreed-upon body of art history as a way of ridiculing larger institutional modes. One of his well-known videos, Les Oiseaux, 2008, is shown on a campy—aerodynamic, pea-soup green—television model from the 1960s. The work, which shows a flock of starlings weaving above the Vatican, usually outpaces the cynical viewer’s reaction to the trite subject matter through its cinematic grace. But on the small screen, it underwhelms, a nod toward inevitable curatorial missteps. That said, much of the show is concerned with scientific exploration: A drawing by Galileo is re-created in neon lights, and the microwave receiver used in 1964 to confirm the big bang theory is reconstructed with wood and foil to form the painfully analog piece Horn Antenna, 2011. By collapsing the contemporary and the archaic, Grasso imagines scientific inquiry not as a linear progression but as a recursive reinterpretation of previously held ideas. The museum similarly evolves from an eccentric nineteenth-century Wunderkammer to a tightly administered space and then to the nebulous halls of cyberspace.

Derrida argued that the archive, by being about the past, should “call into question the coming of the future.” Indeed, the Bass Museum begins to resemble Back to the Future as Grasso, like Marty McFly attempting to keep his parents together, fiddles with the past in order to secure his stature as an institution-friendly artist on the international circuit. Finally, it’s location that saves the show from the fate of the Ouroboros. Since Miami, a city with a population either on vacation or en exilio, is notoriously ahistorical, it’s only fitting to approach the Bass’s Renaissance art holdings by way of another South Beach standard: the remix.

— Hunter Braithwaite

Fernando Mastrangelo

CHAREST-WEINBERG
250 NW 23rd Street #408
November 29–February 29

Fernando Mastrangelo, Stella (2), 2011, gunpowder, 10' 1 1/2" x 7' 1" x 2".

Fernando Mastrangelo has spent the past few years condensing powders into bricks of social critique. He pressed corn meal pressed into an Aztec calendar criticizing NAFTA. Human ash became MS-13 gang tattoos in a blend of violence and religious iconography. Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine became a sculpture of life-size Colombian coca farmer Felix, 2009. All of these represent an exact pairing of content and meaning, and a direct relationship between the piece and how it should be understood. Now, in a look back at the cold war’s existential dread and ideological infighting, Mastrangelo presents “Black Sculpture”—three-dimensional renderings of work by Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt cast from compressed gunpowder.

The sculptures aren’t a precise chromatic black. A close look reveals subtle gradation and crystallization in the gunpowder, itself on the precipice of a bright flash and cloud of smoke. As such, Mastrangelo’s black hues primarily relate to their cultural connotation: negation. While not overly necrotic, they do present the act of painting today as a destructive, or at least disruptive, process. Is black the lack of information, as in a blackout, or is it the product of every piece of information ever, printed line upon line until the paper becomes a solid textual wall (everything) and a void (nothing)? Whereas with Wade Guyton, for instance, the black of an Epson printer is both painterly information and our ability to communicate it, Mastrangelo’s monochrome, in turn, connotes the height of modernist dogma—a complete flow of Greenbergian thought and the seizure of contrary opinion. His use of incendiary material only increases the tension between something and nothing.

One can easily compare the warring camps of modernity and cold war diplomacy, especially when one considers the role of CIA patronage in that chapter of American artmaking. As such, gunpowder is an apt medium to reflect this tumultuous period. If black signifies both everything and nothing, information and its transmission, it also represents historical lineage and its abdication. These sculptures are both in line with midcentury heroics (a virtue often found on the battlefield) and combatively at odds with the summoned past.

— Hunter Braithwaite

“Absentee Landlord”

WALKER ART CENTER
1750 Hennepin Avenue
June 11–July 29

View of “Absentee Landlord,” 2011. From left: Donald Moffett, Lot 091195.03, 1995/2003; Jack Pierson, Silver Jackie with Pink Spot, 1991; Jess Von der Ahe, Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, 2006; Willem de Kooning, Woman, ca. 1952.

If we consider the title “Absentee Landlord,” we might get the suspicion that this exhibition foregrounds its curator, John Waters. And in many ways it does. Invited by the Walker to rearrange its permanent collection, Waters works from the premise that “the entire museum-going experience is in need of intervention.”

The conceit of the show is that Waters is the landlord, the galleries are rental apartments, and the eighty or so artworks are the tenants. As a whole it stands as a witty iteration of institutional critique; the curatorial structuring is reflexive, and the architectural interventions are site-specific. Visitors who dial up the audio tour can listen to Waters describe the works on view in pig latin—his comic riposte to the obscurity of critical jargon. Such considered irreverence, the curator’s signature, is repeated throughout the exhibition in a series of low blows, as in the glory hole he drilled in the men’s bathroom, or in his decision to hang de Kooning’s Woman, ca. 1952, just inches off the ground. Above and to the left of it, at eye level, is the small painting by Jess von der Ahe titled Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, 2006, which depicts a passive-looking man, swooning in bed. The artist painted it with her own menstrual blood. Shot, reverse shot.

Counterpoints like this predominate, often with the display of works by Waters himself. As he does in his films, here too as an artist-curator he activates the low as a space from which to sully the profundity of others, to give us pause, to make us laugh. Posing saucy juxtapositions and offbeat questions, he encourages us to think about art history in novel ways, and leaves us with the provocation: “Can artworks sexually attract each other? Does Minimalism make Pop horny?”

— Jonathan Thomas

Tracey Snelling

FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
919 Broadway
September 9–February 5

Tracey Snelling, Woman on the Run, 2008–11, mixed media. Installation view.

Is she an innocent woman or a femme fatale? The question lies at the heart of Tracey Snelling’s elaborate multimedia installation Woman on the Run, 2008–11, which follows the fate of the fictional Veronica Hayden, wanted by the police for questioning after the disappearance of one rather shady husband. Perhaps to avoid detention, Veronica, played by Snelling, dons a blond wig, dark sunglasses, and a leopard-skin scarf, and makes a run for the US-Mexico border.

Snelling translates the classic 1940s whodunit of so many film noir classics into a three-dimensional fantasyland. Partly reverential, partly Disney kitschy, her sets, installed throughout the gallery, borrow freely from Hollywood tropes: Long vistas are nothing more than photographic wallpaper and buildings are just thinly constructed facades. Weaving around billboards and cut-out figures, and heading down make-believe streets, we see our heroine through the windows of dingy hotel rooms and darkened bars. Her visage, presented sometimes in short looped videos and at other times in still photo light boxes, is that of a fearful woman trying to exist in the shadows. Our final stop is in the “No-Tell Motel,” where we find Victoria’s suitcase resting on a rumpled bed, her signature blond wig spilling over the edge. Did she make a final dash to the border, leaving all evidence of her past behind? Or was she captured? We’ll never truly know.

— Rebecca Cochran

“Remembering 9/11”

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
1111 Chapel Street
September 1–November 27

Yvonne Jacquette, Southeast View from the World Trade Center II, 2001, oil on linen, 73 x 54".

Museum exhibitions across the country have been challenged with the task of commemorating the attacks of 9/11, but, in effort to do so responsibly, they have created something in addition: a catalogue of artistic production within the last decade. Made through an awareness of current events, if not in response to them, the works highlighted in such shows comprise a subset of contemporary art that feels particularly true to the name. “Remembering 9/11” presents the work of four artists as an examination of perspectives lost and gained during that time.

Romantic, oblique views of downtown Manhattan at sunset or aglow in nighttime lights, as in Yvonne Jacquette’s painting from within World Trade Center II, serve as examples of pre-9/11 imagery. As we were shaken out of our unconcern, the exhibition suggests, art responded in kind. All of the artists included here found themselves pursuing factuality in the wake of 9/11. Nathan Lyons traveled the country in order to capture a thorough record of the outpouring of patriotic memorabilia. Leo Rubinfien photographed people in terror-stricken cities in an attempt to convey their psychological wounds; however, the “unknowability” he perceived in photography’s veracity prompted him to write an expository text to accompany the portraits. Referring to sculpture as “mute” during an exhibition program, Judith Shea used photographs from the area around Ground Zero to contextualize her stoic mannequins. These artists seem newly wary of their respective media’s capacity to address the event.

Is art less apposite today than it was a decade ago—or centuries ago? Across the hall, an unrelated exhibition of early American art titled “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” finds striking parallels in revolutionary bric-a-brac and veteran portraits modeled to express “psychological consequences.” It would be myopic to believe that the past decade goes without precedent artistically, socially, and politically. Art, including the work in “Remembering 9/11,” reminds us of that.

— Kelly Cannon

Rachel Jones

THE FRONT
4100 St. Claude Avenue
January 14–February 10

Rachel Jones, Memento Mori, 2012, oil on plastic, 25 x 23". Installation view.

Remember your mortality. Rachel Jones’s exhibition “Memento Mori” reworks the bulwark of art-historical iconography associated with this phrase into an absorbing display of postmodern devotion infused with reincarnations of romanticism. The show’s title painting reveals a funereal floral display of golden mums, pastel pink azaleas, and a variety of other flowers that incorporate areas of fuchsia, green, and taupe. Below the image, in altarlike fashion, sit several lit candles on a simple white shelf. The fleeting beauty of a bouquet underscored by the diminishing flames sets the tone for an exhibition of contemporary vanitas. In Nothing Will Be as Before, 2012, an animal pelt sprawled out on a sea of white is highly reminiscent of Courbet’s Fox in the Snow (another memento mori incarnation). Nature continues its course in This Will Go On Long After Us, 2011, as a singular bolt of lightning sets a tree afire in the foreground, illuminating the night sky.

With one exception, each piece instantiates the artist’s style of thickly painted oil on thin plastic affixed directly to the wall, providing a palpable surface tension between the highly charged painting and the void of the wall. The anomaly—Untitled, 2012—is a bold break that nonetheless pays tribute to past methods: A diamond-shaped piece of brightly painted plastic reverently rests atop a pile of blackened flowers. Nearby is We Are Free, 2011, a 6 x 6” square, one-third of it nicely bent at a right angle so that it straddles two adjacent walls forming a corner. Within its edges, galactic speckles sitting on a black background cleverly invert the void of the wall’s white expanse with its paradoxically tiny cosmic window.

As each piece contains intense narratives, worlds in and of themselves, Jones creates an altogether arresting and thoughtful assembly ardently reminding the viewer to live life deeply.

— Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

Irena Knezevic

UNIVERSITY GALLERIES OF ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY
Illinois State University, 110 Center for Visual Arts
October 29–December 18

Irena Knezevic, Various Instances of a Negligible Mistake: Garden 2, 2011, color photograph, 22 x 29 1/2”.

Could democracy be the cause of all the world’s misery? This is one of many provocative questions posed by Irena Knezevic’s “Here Comes the Darkness,” an unsettling, profoundly relevant exhibition whose metaphorical center is a thirty-two-minute video from which the show’s title derives. The video intercuts shots of far-flung locales—the Zagros Mountains bordering Iraq and Jordan, an apple orchard, the scenery from Hitler’s nature walks just outside Munich—with animated images of spinning stars and scenes of dancers performing movements choreographed by the artist. A slow-building tension is created in the work by the often joltingly discordant sound track: for instance, when a shot of dead fish is paired with an a capella version of Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil,” and when—in the video’s most chilling sequence—footage of an off-air television news station is paired with the terrified voices of American and British soldiers trapped by mortar fire.

The show’s sculptural and photographic works repeatedly reference the Labyrinth of Greek myth. In a mixed-media sculpture titled Infinity, the Answer to All Questions, 2011, one such maze is etched into a vinyl record’s grooves, just as it has been psychologically embedded into the brains of the traumatized Balkan War victims who are the subjects of the photographic series “Various Instances of a Negligible Mistake,” 2010–11. Knezevic has digitally altered their images so that each person appears only as a floating ball of hair and flesh. So profuse are the Serbian artist’s references to catastrophe—from Third Reich atrocities and the war on terror to modernism’s failed social and aesthetic utopias—that she risks affects akin to political melancholia. Yet glimmers of hope remain. At the exhibition’s center stands Minotaur, 2011, a huge black rectangle formed from suspended strands of audiotape. An electrostatic machine placed at the top of the structure emits blue sparks relative to the movement of bodies gathered inside—the more people, the more static generated. Perhaps therein lies our only way out.

— Claudine Ise

“The Workers”

MASSACHUSETTS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (MASS MOCA)
87 Marshall Street
May 29–March 15

Oded Hirsch, Tochka, 2010, still from a single-channel video, 14 minutes 20 seconds.

In Oded Hirsch’s fourteen-minute video Tochka, 2010, a dozen men build a rickety bridge across a shallow gorge in a lush green landscape. Dressed in blue workmen’s uniforms with white hats pulled low over their eyes and yellow buckets strung from their hips, the men toil with a ridiculous assortment of tools and materials––sticks, shovels, mud, rope, an enormous steel spool––to create a contraption that looks more like a medieval catapult than a practical overpass and which, in the end, nearly collapses when they cross. One of the more striking pieces in this ten-month-long exhibition on the pleasures, sorrows, and increasingly precarious conditions of work, Tochka also offers the most poetic interpretation of the show’s multiple and competing themes.

“The Workers” is an expanded version of an earlier show, “En cada instante, ruptura” (In Every Instant, Rupture), curated by Carla Herrera-Prats for the Sale de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City. While the previous project focused on the strategies to which artists are turning to render visible the devastating changes to the landscape of labor, the current exhibition, curated by Herrera-Prats and MASS MoCA’s Susan Cross, not only illustrates but also embodies how people work (piecemeal) today. With admirable modesty and impressive subtlety, “The Workers” narrows the gap between artists and workers who would otherwise eye each other suspiciously across a chasm of privilege, complicity, or purity of purpose. From the artists Emily Jacir and Mircea Cantor documenting ephemeral, high-stakes action to the day laborers in Adrian Paci’s Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Detention Center), 2007, and from the street vendors in Oliver Ressler’s Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?, 2010, to the factory workers who collaborated with Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre to create Maquilapolis, 2006, there is common cause among members of the new global “precariat,” whether they come from manufacturing, the knowledge economy, or the wageless workforce of contemporary art.

Hirsch’s bridge in Tochka––crafty, nostalgic, highly inefficient yet still somehow emancipatory and sublime––provides an apt metaphor for the exhibition, in which we see the confluence of the creative and collaborative process and the labor of art at large. More concretely, works by Mary Lum, Camel Collective, and Laboratorio 060 address the history of the site––down to the last labor contract negotiated there––and MASS MoCA’s ambiguous role in turning a former factory town into a tourist destination. Maybe because the exhibition is up for so long, it has created an interesting, albeit distant, echo chamber, coinciding with the New Museum’s exhibition “Ostalgia,” e-flux’s reader Are You Working Too Much?, and Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation, to say nothing of the convergence of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, all of which are rooted in unemployment and exploitation. In the exhibition’s forthcoming catalogue, the curators and the labor historian Andrew Ross issue tentative calls for greater political mobilization and collective action. They may see them answered sooner, and louder, than any of us thought.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

“New Document”

JOHANSSON PROJECTS
2300 Telegraph Ave
December 15–January 21

View of “New Document,” 2012. From left: Hunter Longe, Binary with Distortion, 2011; Hunter Longe and Matthew Draving, Open Screen Unit, 2011; Andrew Chapman, Notwithstanding (1), 2011.

Hunter Longe and Matthew Draving’s floor-bound sculpture Open Screen Unit (all works 2011) grounds many of the ideas afoot in this concise group show. Here, a projection of a mesh pattern shines through a sheet of mesh draped over a square frame, producing an ethereal illumination. The title indicates that this “screen” is not a surface for the serial, filmic play of images, but a site that responds to the simultaneous, software-enabled production of images. Indeed, throughout the exhibition screens are employed not as spaces of fixity or one-way transmission, but as sites open to fluidity and mutation by their environment and the user.

This notion, to some extent, is apparent in Andrew Chapman’s Hello, My Name Is Vector, a diptych on panel coated with green screen paint, making it receptive to video and software. Centered on the left-hand panel is a square box, smeared with wide swaths of gray paint, which appears to be a scaled-down version of the entire right side of the piece. Close inspection reveals vertical cylinders under the layers of gray. Viewers “zoom” in to see the cylinders, just as the artist “zooms” in on the right side of the painting, soliciting a response that recalls both digital tools and the camera’s lens.

Longe and Draving’s installation I/O Glyphics similarly folds in methods from video and software, offering the illusion of a computer-animated image. Behind a wall in the gallery, the artists have suspended a slowly rotating replica of the Rosetta stone in a studio with professional lighting, and then captured it with a video camera. The live feed is displayed on a monitor near the gallery’s entrance. At first the image seems to be a 3-D computer animation, but once the visitor walks around the wall toward the studio, its origin as a sculpture becomes apparent. While I/O Glyphics cleverly toys with one’s expectations, Hugh Zeigler’s series “LONGHANDLONGHAND” enacts change through continuity. The same colorful, geometric composition is instantiated several times, as a large painting, two photographs, and an animated GIF. In its repetition, the work seems to perform software’s potential for limitless duplication and versioning.

— Ceci Moss

Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken

ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS
145 N. Raymond Ave.
October 2–January 22

Robert Heinecken, Time (1st Group), 1969, magazine with offset lithograph, 11 x 8”.

“Speaking in Tongues,” curated by Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, pairs Wallace Berman, a spiritual father to LA’s “Cool School” of the 1960s and ’70s, with Robert Heinecken, who shared with Berman an interest in pushing the boundaries of photography as well as a close friendship. The exhibition covers the years 1961 to 1976, a time when photographic innovation meant something entirely different from the myriad forms of digital manipulation it often implies today. One fascinating aspect of seeing these artists’ works side by side is how, together, they signal both the durability and the demise of the photographic image. Berman’s Verifax collages—of which several are on view—provide the fulcrum for this paradoxical simultaneity, while Heinecken’s layered lithographs reflect the materiality and tactility of a medium that is increasingly fluid and ephemeral.

Berman created these collages by attaching small photographs—of people, animals, buildings, and the like—onto a copy (made with a Verifax machine) of an advertisement for a transistor radio cut from a magazine. Though viewing small photographs on a handheld gadget is ubiquitous today, Berman’s impulse (and prescience) with this body of work provides an active counterpoint to Heinecken’s lithographs, which are derived from pornographic imagery, also taken from magazines. Heinecken’s large and evocative images transform the source material—nude women—from objectified to eroticized, from sexual to sensual. Though Heinecken’s work explores the differential between real and mediated experience, the layering of imagery coupled with the drips and splotches left from the process lends his works a twin sense of corporeality and mystery, continually tipping the balance of interpretation toward the personal and idiosyncratic. It’s impossible to return to a time when the procedural residue that lends such charge to Heinecken’s work could not be rendered using computer software. If this constitutes a form of loss, Berman’s visionary collages do the opposite, reflecting the ever-expanding possibilities remaining in this continually shifting media.

— Annie Buckley

“here.”

THE PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS
118-128 North Broad Street
October 22–December 31

Erika Nelson, World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things, 2001–, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Detroit’s drastic population decrease; Phoenix’s vibrant Native American community; Raleigh-Durham’s legacy of Big Tobacco: These historical and social forces are bound to shape local artistic practices, or such is the reasonable claim of “here.”. Selected by six curators based in Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Phoenix-Scottsdale, and Raleigh-Durham, the works in this exhibition present twenty-four artists and collectives invested in the topoi of their regional situations. Kansas City’s Whoop Dee Doo blasts forth with Untitleed, 2011, an installation abuzz with the irrepressible optimism of their community talent shows whose plenitude echoes off Scott Hocking’s bleaker scenes of urban decay in Detroit. The roughly Arizona-based group Postcommodity protests the desecration of land used for tribal rituals by developers in Na’nizhoozhi da’ nijahigi na’ a’ahi (Gallup Motel Butchering), 2011, their four-channel film of a motel sheep slaughter, while Jennifer Levonian’s hand-drawn animation in The Oven Sky, 2011, opts for a lighter touch in order to problematize the hasty gentrification sweeping neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

In fact, the show’s most vibrant resonance may be here, in Philadelphia. Pondering Abigail Anne Newbold’s meticulously designed disaster survival kits in “Homemaker Series,” 2010–11, cocurator Rebecca Ruth Hart asks this timely question in her catalogue essay: “Could we use a kit to make a pop-up settlement anywhere within the urban setting?” The answer, it seems, can be found a block away from PAFA, at City Hall. Camping in tents, rigged tarps, and lean-tos, the protesters at Occupy Philly answer Hart’s query with a resounding affirmative. As a project realized by Julien Robson, PAFA’s first curator of contemporary art, “here.” bucks the Enlightenment charter of the country’s oldest art school in order to acknowledge the urgency of local politics. Perhaps unwittingly, but no doubt wholeheartedly, the exhibition joins the chorus of the Occupy movements in asserting that cities are peculiar places with specific concerns best articulated by local residents. As Kansas-based Erika Nelson suggests in her trunk road show, “World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things,” 2001–, the smaller the scale, the higher the stakes may be.

— Katherine Rochester

Harmony Hammond

DWIGHT HACKETT PROJECTS
2879 All Trades Road
October 15–November 26

Harmony Hammond, Sienna, 2010,
oil and mixed media on canvas,
68 1/8 x 60 3/4”.

Seething with bumps and snags, Harmony Hammond’s new paintings collapse many divergent qualities onto one profoundly built-up surface. Flap 2008-11, for instance, features a taut seam running horizontally across the width of the canvas. Taken by itself, the seam mimics any number of gendered phenomena in the world that we tend to read as having sexed characteristics: the envelope-style closure of throw pillow covers, or the opening of a dress shirt. This combined with the thick, spackled, golden veneer (and the additional layers of hue that viewers can discern if they inspect the side of the canvas) gives the work an air of accreted gender performance: it’s an object dressed and re-dressed in drag a thousand times, resulting in a pebbly surface that’s readable as neither.

Sienna, 2010, has the same back-and-forth conversation but with sentience instead of gender. Flaps of canvas wrap around a frame and are fixed in place by a layer of sienna paint, the work’s most discernible aesthetic feature. The material tension beneath the paint creates a congealed immanence. Are the straps about to rumble and burst through the color, or does the paint act as a sealant that also permeates the cloth and chokes it off completely from motion and life? Here Hammond demonstrates her fluency in painting: in Alberto Burri’s “Sacchi” (Sacks) series of the 1950s, for instance, viewers couldn’t tell if the materials were rising up or being embalmed or both. Hammond’s joke on the “bound” state of painting, however, is her own much-welcomed innovation.

— Katie Anania

Juan Downey

ASU ART MUSEUM
51 East 10th Street
September 24–December 31

Juan Downey, Anaconda Map of Chile, 1973, wood, live anaconda, water receptacle, ink on paper, Plexiglas, 66 x 83 x 19".

Juan Downey’s first US museum retrospective offers a sampling of work he produced between 1968 and 1991. This venue is the second stop for the survey (it originated last May at the List Visual Arts Center and will travel to the Bronx Museum in February 2012), but this is the only show that features a reconstruction of the Chilean-born artist’s important and controversial Anaconda Map of Chile, 1973, in which a live anaconda slithers over hand-colored maps of the country that line the bottom of a Plexiglas-enclosed box. The snake evokes the Anaconda Copper Mining Company that was financially involved in the 1973 overthrow of President Allende’s democratic government. The original piece debuted at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York, a space funded by the Rockefeller family, and was immediately censored for its allusion to the mining company whose shares were previously owned by the Rockefellers.

Among the seventy-five works on view are preparatory drawings of Downey’s electronic sculptures from the late 1960s and his pioneering early videos of the ’70s, in which subjects are offered immediate feedback, enabling the artist, in his own words, to multiply space and time. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the 1976 installation Video Trans Americas—a part anthropological, part autobiographical record of Downey’s trips across Central and South America.

The show succeeds in presenting the artist as a protean figure. From his bi-cultural origins to his interdisciplinary interests in architecture (he trained as an architect), anthropology, politics, and art history, Downey’s work comes across as both multifarious and synthesizing. It brings to mind the “liminal entity” described by the eminent British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner––a space that is “neither here nor there [but] betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” The question that remains is whether Downey’s insistence on remaining “betwixt and between” media, styles, and cultures signaled his desire to extend the borders of the accepted, thus moving toward a culturally more centrist position, or whether he was content to remain in the liminal cultural space where he could be at once an actor, an observer, and a commentator.

— Julia Friedman

Jerzy Janiszewski

CHARLES KRAUSE | REPORTING FINE ART
1300 13th Street NW, Suite 105
December 9–February 14

Jerzy Janiszewski, Sequence4: collage, 2009, Marlboro cigarette packaging, 39 5/8 x 27 3/4”.

Three of the twenty-five works in Jerzy Janiszewski’s first solo exhibition feature the logo he designed for the Solidarity trade union movement in 1980, which ignited opposition against the Polish communist government and eventually led to its downfall. Inspired by graffiti from the Gdansk shipyards and written in a font Janiszewski devised specially for the movement, with a Polish flag rising from the N, the sign’s rawly drawn red lettering has lost none of its capacity to strike. On view is the first imprint of the design, signed by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, as well as a poster from the movement’s first national protest—which Janiszewski had a friend bury in the ground for seven years to protect it from the police—and a painted version of the logo that the artist made in the 1990s.

Equally compelling are the mixed-media collages from Janiszewski’s thirty-year exile working as a graphic designer in Paris and Barcelona that make up the bulk of the show. The works consist of paper bric-a-brac Janiszewski accumulated in his studio and arranged in intricate patterns; it should be noted that he had no intention of showing the works until this exhibition. Altogether, 2008, and the two series “Sequence,” 2008–2009, and “Parallels,” 2008, are made of carefully torn pieces of Marlboro cigarette packets, while Gazeta, 1996, and Secret Message, 1994, make semiabstractions from newspapers and other discarded printed material. It’s curious that an artist famous for giving a word visual resonance should be interested in pure abstraction and divorcing graphic letters from their meaning, but the paradox holds. Janiszewski never stagnated in the communist-specific tropes that plagued so many Soviet bloc émigré artists, reveling instead in the purely visual sensibility that made his logo a success. His collages are underscored by the same verve for color—red above all—and illusory kinetic qualities that drive his graphic work. Their origins are just as prosaic: The materials were all Janiszewski could afford at the time, and he made of them what he could.

— Max Seddon

Harry Callahan

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
October 2–March 4

Harry Callahan, Detroit, 1943, black-and-white photograph, 3 1/4 x 4 5/16".

Harry Callahan began making photographs in 1938, at the age of twenty-six, teaching himself to use a camera while working as an accounting clerk for General Motors in Detroit. The one hundred–some photographs brought together in honor of the upcoming centenary of his birth (in 1912) represent six decades of informal, yet iconic, portraits of America. Despite the unavoidably nostalgic imagery of Callahan’s early streetscapes and quotidian scenes (ladies in gloves, men in hats, classic cars), his photographs are remarkably timeless. Their freshness owes to Callahan’s consistent experimentation, both technically (the ways he manipulated film in the camera and darkroom) and conceptually (the subjects he chose and how he depicted them.) Throughout his career Callahan toggled between realism and abstraction, integrating elements of both genres in his most arresting photographs.

Callahan’s earliest works reveal the combined impact of two major influences: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who eventually hired Callahan to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago) and Ansel Adams. Like Moholy-Nagy, Callahan experimented with multiple exposures to create surrealist cinematic effects. In a more extreme example of abstraction, Camera Movement on Flashlight, 1946–47, Callahan uses pure light to achieve painterly streaks. Adams’s influence, on the other hand, comes across in Callahan’s near-religious reverence for nature’s perfection. In Grasses, 1950, which depicts a snow-covered lawn, Callahan celebrates the graceful form of individual blades of grass. Here Callahan also plays with scale and composition, making it initially hard to identify the black spears that starkly contrast the bright white field.

The heart and soul of this show (and arguably of Callahan’s oeuvre) are the portraits of his wife and unfailing muse, Eleanor. In Callahan’s photographs she appears posed and candid; up close and from afar; nude at home and in her street clothes shopping in downtown Chicago. The gallery dedicated to Eleanor is a love letter to the artist’s domestic life and also represents the apogee of his hybrid abstract-surrealist-realist style. From straightforward head shots to ghostly double exposures to abstract formal studies of light, shadow, and line, Callahan captures not only his wife’s physical likeness but her spiritual essence.

— Mara Hoberman

Heyd Fontenot

CORNELL FINE ARTS MUSEUM
1000 Holt Avenue
October 22–January 8

Heyd Fontenot, Angry Johnny, 2007, oil on canvas, 53 x 29”.

Nearly everyone in Heyd Fontenot’s portraits is naked. Most are touching themselves, and no, not in that way. Rather, after shedding their clothes, the subjects of this Texan artist’s intimate paintings and drawings instinctively reach for their own bodies, posing with a hand on a hip or caressing a cheek, or with an arm draped across a thigh. Occasionally one model will embrace another’s shoulder. Self-assured and at ease, these people are, quite literally, in touch with themselves. It’s puzzling, then, to have encountered a warning sign and curtained-off galleries alerting visitors to the exhibition’s “mature” content. Perhaps the show’s title, “The Very Queer Portraits of Heyd Fontenot,” sounds potentially threatening to selected audiences. The work certainly is not. Fontenot’s elegant, distinctive style of caricatured bobbleheads with doe eyes sprouting from scaled-down, black-outlined bodies easily cancels out the shock of the nude—everyone is just too cute to be scandalous.

Fontenot’s formal approach, though, is not without bite. Take the seven small paintings collected in “It Takes One to Know One,” 2002–2003, in which the artist, who is gay, seems to provocatively ask viewers if it’s possible to identify sexual orientation—or any other personality trait—by visual means only. What, for example, is the significance of the stuffed bear clutched by the man in Atila with Toy, 2003? Across the exhibition the artist keenly offers guessing games about dichotomies of all sorts: surface and depth, revealing and concealing, and normalization and difference, not to mention the alleged divide between fine art and illustration.

Fontenot’s group compositions on panels, with oil paint playing off beautiful grain patterning, are the most accomplished, but a cluster of thirty-two ink and watercolor sketches on paper captures the full range of the artist’s expressive powers. A serious self-portrait with cat; a pink-skinned girl with tan lines, three sensitive, bearded hipsters—these idiosyncratic works feel sincere. They’re also inexplicably queer in that other sense: How is that naked woman standing on a galloping racehorse, and why?

— Christopher Howard

Didier Courbot

SUSAN HOBBS GALLERY
137 Tecumseth Street
October 27–December 3

Didier Courbot, Hylla, 2011, color photograph, 33 x 45".

A relentless but fraught optimism informs Didier Courbot’s works. In his latest suite of eight large-scale color photographs, the French artist documents a series of actions he carried out in Parisian streets. On encountering discarded furniture, the artist used the items’ constituent parts to create site-specific temporary objects that take on personalities all their own. In Oh No! (all works 2011), for instance, the metal base of an office chair has been twisted into the form of a human figure falling into, or hurling itself against, a stone wall. French Thonet reworks a coatrack designed by famed German-Austrian cabinetmaker Michael Thonet into a small and delicate form reminiscent of a bird.

These interventions evince an attunement to the sculptural possibilities of the urban environment and reveal a lyrical, nearly romantic attachment to the detritus of modern living. It is telling, for instance, that Hylla, a star-shaped wreath of white laminated shelves, is titled after the IKEA bookshelf it is made from. Similarly, Adirondack Line shows an awe-inspiring arc constructed from the remnants of the titular chairs propped up against the façade of an apartment.

Also on view is 8 Memos, which consists of eight found objects—including bricks, twigs, Styrofoam pieces, and a ball of elastic bands—individually placed in white paper bags that act as framing devices for the viewer’s contemplation. Like a manic Good Samaritan of objects, Courbot displays an overinvestment in other people’s belongings that brings a wry poetics to the strange logic of contemporary capitalism.

— Gabrielle Moser

“Coming After”

THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
231 Queens Quay West
December 10–March 4

Glen Fogel, Glen from Colorado, 2009, fluorescent lights on powder-coated steel, MP3 player, motion detector, solid state relay, variac, amplifier, speaker, powder-coated steel chair, 100 x 48”.

Spanning installation, drawing, photography, performance, and video, this ambitious exhibition brings together sixteen artists—almost all of whom were born after 1970—whose works reflect on the period of queer radicalism witnessed in North America from the 1980s through the ’90s. Meditating on themes of nostalgia, loss, and latency, the show consistently evokes a feeling of having arrived too late to directly participate in this traumatic but galvanizing political moment.

Curator Jon Davies opens the show with a smartly selected group of video works that link past cultural icons with contemporary queer politics. Aleesa Cohene’s video installation Yes, Angel, 2011, presents a carefully constructed narrative of two intergenerational queer relationships using clips culled from melodramatic films of the 1980s; mobilizing metaphors of contagion that circulated during the AIDS crisis, the piece hints at ways in which complex emotional states are transferred from older queer generations to younger ones, suggesting that affects, like diseases, might be spread through contact transmission. Other works take a queer look at the art history canon; James Richards’s Untitled merchandise (lovers and dealers), 2007, for instance, is a collection of six knitted blankets that depict the names of Keith Haring’s lovers (in pink and blue) and art dealers (in red and yellow). See also Jonathan VanDyke’s performance Obstructed View, 2011, which makes the implicit homoeroticism of much AbEx painting into a blatantly sexual but surprisingly poetic encounter between two men on a locker room bench.

Operating as a coda to these works, which explicitly reflect on the past, the second floor of the exhibition offers a more lyrical take on present queer relationships. Among them is Glen Fogel’s 2009 installation Glen from Colorado, which features a minimalist fluorescent light sculpture in the shape of the name “Glen” that pulses with light in time with the intonations of a robotic voice that dispassionately reads excerpts from letters the artist has received from friends and lovers, at times laudatory and at others, accusatory and cold.

— Gabrielle Moser

Damian Moppett

RENNIE COLLECTION
51 East Pender Street
November 26–April 21

Damian Moppett, Artforum with Mike Kelley's 'Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature', 2003, graphite on paper, 10 x 10".

Call it a hometown coup for Damian Moppett. In the fall of 2009, Bob Rennie, a Vancouver-based collector, real estate marketer, and chair of the North American acquisitions committee for the Tate, opened the eponymous Rennie Collection in Vancouver’s Chinatown to display his private collection, one of the largest in North America. This fall, of the forty artists Rennie collects in depth, Moppett became the first Canadian artist to have an exhibition in the gallery.

Moppett’s representational drawings and paintings are deceptive because the subject of his work is not what is depicted. Viewed all together, these images suggest a meaning that develops through the juxtaposition of the various people and places. In one room, for example, the walls are cluttered with small-scale paintings and drawings, salon style. Their subjects differ: portraits of artists, such as Calder with Maquette of Public Sculpture (all works cited 2005), or Hollis Frampton in His Wittgenstein T-Shirt; scenes of bands performing; vignettes of the Gulf Islands; studies of sculptures in an artist’s studio, like Studio in Basement. What seems to develop, at first, is a portrait of the artist, a mixture of influences and autobiography, all removed from context. However, if this is self-hagiography, there is a certain humor to it. In the middle of the same room in the Rennie Collection appears one of Moppett’s “Stabiles,” reworkings of Alexander Calder and Anthony Caro sculptures that serve as platforms on which Moppett displays his intentionally bad pottery. Further, one notices that some of paintings depict the objects in the gallery. As such, Moppett’s work often refers to its own making, but the absurdity of presenting high modernist sculpture next to amateur craft also suggests parody, or at least humor. Whether the work mythologizes or criticizes the autonomous artist is left ambiguous; it’s never funny enough to be just a joke.

— Aaron Peck