picks September 18, 2019

Didi Rojas

“You’re doing amazing sweetie!” said notorious momager Kris Jenner to her most famous little dividend, Kim Kardashian, during her daughter’s 2007 photo shoot for Playboy. Kris’s croon serves as the title for Didi Rojas’s first solo show in New York, which features forty-two single shoes (right foot only!) on a low pedestal in the center of the petite gallery. The footwear is diverse, ranging from a vertiginous Nike platform and a leopard-print brothel creeper to a Gucci slipper and a skyscraper-y go-go boot. But don’t even think about slipping one on. They’re all ceramic—your comfort is not up

picks July 11, 2019

Oskar Schmidt

The five portraits in Oskar Schmidt’s exhibition “Centro” face one another in uneasy reciprocation, severing the gallery space with a taciturn exchange of gazes. Each sitter, unmoored against a digitally processed earth-toned backdrop, occupies their frame perfectly unblemished as the viewer’s eye traverses the image’s antiseptic solace.

For John Berger, the tradition of oil painting is historically inextricable from the desire to possess. Tactile solidity flattens subjects into objects of exchange; the tangible is conflated with the real, and ownership is the final destination. What, then, is

picks April 26, 2019

Brendan Earley

A rare sunny morning in London: This would be pleasant if it weren’t a reminder of hastening climate apocalypse. In this diffused light, the pastel palette and minimal sculptures of Brendan Earley’s “Elsewhere and Other Things” at first seem cynically palliative—an injection of millennial pink, a meditation retreat amid alarm bells. Under closer scrutiny, the soothing sentiment starts to decay. Take the A Train, 2018, involves two baby-blue aluminum rings, lonely in their separate orbits. In The Runner, also 2018, an aluminum arch flirts with anthropomorphism, one “foot” caught in a metal cast

picks February 06, 2019

Ryan Sullivan

Ryan Sullivan’s name doesn’t manage to crop up in the 1,400-word press release for “one minute’s music, one minute’s time,” his third solo exhibition here. To the uninitiated, the text accompanying the show echoes a dissertation on the history of jazz. But as is so often the case, in saying nothing about his practice, the press release says everything: Bill Evans’s “Jazz-Process,” the subject of this theoretical treatise, is given visual form across Sullivan’s fluid, shambolic surfaces.

Several of these cast-resin pieces stretch nearly from floor to ceiling, morphing and divulging greater detail

Adina Glickstein