interviews January 23, 2013

John Torreano

John Torreano is a New York–based artist and curator. He has taught in New York University’s studio art program since 1992. Torreano’s “Dark Matters Everywhere: Paintings, Prints & Sculpture” spans over twenty years of his gem-based works and is on view at Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati through March 23, 2013.

BEFORE THERE WERE GEMS ON MY PAINTINGS, there were dots. At the time I was working in the style of lyrical abstraction and wanted to push against Greenberg’s idea of painting’s essentialism. I was painting dots to create additional illusions of space, to emphasize contradictory aspects

picks December 03, 2012

Vaginal Davis

A warm rose light that softly illuminates a darkened realm: This, of course, characterizes the presence of Ms. Vaginal Crème Davis—artiste, raconteur, and grand dame of drag and gender rebellion. This also happens to describe the scene one encounters when entering Participant Inc. to view her solo exhibition titled “HAG—small, contemporary, haggard,” a recreation of the HAG Gallery Davis ran from her tiny Hollywood apartment throughout most of the 1980s.

The HAG simulacrum sits jewel-like near the end of Participant’s main floor, and is veiled in an artificial twilight haze by the assistance

picks October 24, 2012

Rachel Foullon

Thomas Hart Benton, Claire McCardell, John Ford, and Susan Howe, among many others, have reimagined America’s pioneering history as a romance of self-sustenance and hard work that carries an authenticity far greater than anything modern life could possibly allow. Rachel Foullon’s first solo exhibition at a museum, “Braided Sun,” which spans almost a decade’s worth of work, is a meditation on this cultural impulse, as she takes the emblems and materials of our hardscrabble agricultural past and transforms them into luminously beautiful, even fetishistic, sculptural objects.

Foullon’s “Cruel

Alex Jovanovich