print Summer 2019

Haim Steinbach

A poet of the everyday, Haim Steinbach has been resituating consumer and handcrafted objects on individualized laminated-shelf constructions for some forty years. Akin to Gertrude Stein’s poetry (repetitive, surprising, full of precisely calibrated connotations), Steinbach’s sculptural syntax remains relevant in its capacities to filter and compress the sensory data of the contemporary world. In his most recent works, that syntax is literally vocalized: The artist has added voice-activated devices—Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s and Harman Kardon’s smart speakers—to the dog Kongs and thrift-store tchotchkes

print May 2019

Faith Wilding

The twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen (known colloquially as St. Hildegard or the Sibyl of the Rhine) was a scientist, healer, composer, religious philosopher, and visionary mystic. She is perhaps best known for the last of these roles, having written down (or at least dictated) dozens of religious visions over the course of her life. Some of these visions articulate a cosmology or rehearse key moments of biblical mythology with new emphasis on the interconnectivity between the divine, the soul, and the world, offering a hermeneutics of relation. One recurring concept and

print April 2019

Corita Kent and Matt Keegan

Amid the swelling civil unrest that would culminate in the international protest movements of 1968, a nun in Los Angeles was wavering in her faith. “I’m really frightened to say this,” Sister Corita Kent (1912–1986) wrote in a letter to a friend, “but everything appears different to me, even God, and I’m so afraid that I’m losing the foundation of my belief.” Soon thereafter, Kent took a sabbatical from her chairship of art at her order’s college and absconded to Cape Cod for the summer; by the end of her time there, she had decided to leave the order and renounce her vows. During this soul-searching

picks March 08, 2019

Rona Pondick

For the better part of the still-young twenty-first century, Rona Pondick’s primary material has been steel, out of which she has fashioned fantastical human-plant-animal hybrids that seduce and disturb in equal measure. This modest installation of recent work shows her creatively plumbing a new set of media—resin, acrylic, and modeling compound—and all their formal possibilities.

One of her first works in these materials,Yellow Blue Black White, 2013–18, is a vibrant yellow cast of Pondick’s face attached to a “body,” a variegated mass covered with blue and black indentations. In its strategic

print March 2019

Sadie Barnette

In Sadie Barnette’s photographic collage Untitled (Pink Diamond/ Jump), 2016, the gleaming facets of a pink diamond adjoin the upper torso of a young black girl playing in a bounce house. Part of the artist’s recent solo presentation, evocatively titled “Black Sky,” this image contains references to stereotypical girl culture and class aspiration, both of which were consistently and vibrantly invoked throughout Barnette’s expansive, multiroom installation. The upper gallery featured paintings, photographs, collages, and light boxes, while the lower space, set up to function as a living room or

print February 2019

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley

In Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s collaborative and often funny works, historical events are rendered as featherlight webs of consequences. For this series of paintings, photographs, and sculptural installations (many of which featured the characters—some historical, some invented—that populate their video In the Body of the Sturgeon, 2017, also on display here), the duo struck a more restrained tone, knitting together histories of settler colonialism, the sociosexual politics of naval life, and President Harry S. Truman’s deployment of the atomic bomb. Similar to the pair’s previous

print January 2019

Guadalupe Rosales

On first encountering Guadalupe Rosales’s Untitled (all works 2018), a wall-based sculpture of a pager dangling from a string of pastel plastic raver beads, I felt the strange urge to look up the artist’s birth year. Here’s what I found: Rosales was born in 1980, two years before I was. While an artist’s age is often of trivial concern, it’s important here: As rough contemporaries, we have both seen telecommunications technologies shape and reshape our lived worlds, especially the experience of being a teenager in the 1990s. When we were in elementary school—she in Los Angeles, I in

picks December 05, 2018

Ricky Swallow

Following the tangle of rope comprising Ricky Swallow’s sculpture (0), 2016–18, is both a demanding and rewarding task. Twenty-six feet of the braided cotton material, cast in bronze and painted the light wheat color of ship rigging, functions like a portal onto Swallow’s meticulous process. Look in the tiny crevices of the twisting rope and sense (see would be too strong a word) the bronze underneath—a dark jumble under a light exterior. The work’s casting is as convincing as its disavowal: Rope? Nope. In Floor Sculpture with Pegs #1 and #2 (both 2018) cast bronze Shaker pegs are lined up

print December 2018

B. Wurtz

What of the everyday? When bombast becomes routine, the quotidian is crushed to pieces and caked into something dense and foul. No rest for the weary. No rest, period. Small pleasures (that recipe, that friend, that story) are no longer spiritually fulfilling in quite the same way. Microaggressions, nightmares, and traumas cycle through one’s head: She came up the stairs and he was waiting, with his friend, to attempt to rape her. They laughed because (and we don’t have to assume) it happens every day.

In four sculptures and ten wall-mounted assemblages on panels, B. Wurtz managed to make an

picks November 29, 2018

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

Located about an hour outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, near the banks of the Mississippi River, is the former site of the Angola plantation, named after the place where many of the enslaved Africans who worked and died there purportedly came from. Now it is a prison, and its consolidation with other nearby plantations has swelled its size beyond the square mileage of Manhattan. It is a place of sport—boasting a nine-hole golf course and a stadium for the annual prison rodeos—and a place of surveillance, where police officers patrol on horseback to maintain control over the approximately six

diary October 24, 2018

Pack Mentality

“I’M A LESBIAN RODEO CLOWN,” crowed Lex Vaughn. “My mom was a dick-puncher, and my dad was an ass-muncher.” Besides breaking biography as a genre, Vaughn, whose comic timing is only superseded by her charm, expertly played the part of emcee this week at Jonesy’s fashion-show-performance-cum-exhibition, titled “Jonesy’s Pack.” Like that of her Kander and Ebb cousin’s, Vaughn’s métier was utter perversity—one minute cat-calling the runway models and the next philandering with a fillet of beef jerky pinned to her vest. Gross, satisfying: tomato, tomahto.

What’s it all about? Queer lineage. For

picks October 08, 2018

Laub

Queer people are used to differentiating between two kinds of family—the chosen and the not chosen. The impetus to find supportive, caring, but still challenging communities often emerges from unpleasant or traumatizing experiences with relatives. In Laub’s show with the ecstatic title “The Act of Growing Up: Emanations of a Soul Nerve Revival,” these two kinds of family collapse into one; the artist ruminates on how a frayed quilt of familial relations might be mended.

Tapestries (embroidered and appliquéd) such as Ice Cream for Breakfast and Marilyn Takes Her Grandparents on a Walk (all works

print October 2018

Young Joo Lee

Paradise Limited, 2017, was the showstopper of Young Joo Lee’s recent exhibition. The three-channel animation dramatizes the sociopolitical tensions in the demilitarized zone separating North Korea and South Korea, informed by the artist’s research and interviews there. Lee’s approach to animation could be placed somewhere between Shahzia Sikander’s playful and sometimes acidic riffs on Indian and Persian miniature paintings and William Kentridge’s airless, political morality plays. Referencing Korean landscape scroll paintings (in fact, the video’s attendant eighty-two-foot scroll, In Search

picks August 03, 2018

Young Joon Kwak and Mutant Salon

Finding that the usual wall text has been placed on the ceiling is an early, cheeky indication that this confluence of sculptural and performance-based works is anything but typical. Two disparate collections open “CAVERNOUS”—a group of diminutive, anonymous genital sculptures borrowed from the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives (the world’s largest repository of LGBTQ material), and a trio of outrageous wigs from Hollywood Wigs, a store located just a few paces down Hollywood Boulevard. These objects cue the themes of Young Joon Kwak’s sculptures: sexual figuration and transformation. For

picks July 02, 2018

Fiona Connor

In the fifth century BCE, a Greek cult emerged that was dedicated to the demigod Asclepius, whose province was healing and medicine. Before retiring to the holiest chamber of his temple to engage in sacred sleep, adherents of the faith would pray to Mnemosyne—goddess of memory—in the hope that their dreams would not be forgotten. Instead of soliciting the facility to remember, Fiona Connor’s sculptural replicas of club doors, “Closed Down Clubs,” 2017–2018, point to the potential foreclosure of public memory. Connor is meticulous with her reproductions, which encompass everything from the

picks June 26, 2018

Lisa Davis

The world is full of worlds—crucibles of connection and affinity that can make the present bearable or, better yet, a whole lot of fun. One such world existed in Austin in the 1990s, a group of queer musicians (mostly women) committed to expanding and refining their art, moving their listeners, and unsettling the status quo of their surroundings. “We’ll Just Rock for Ourselves” is a small but deeply felt exhibition drawn from the archives of Lisa Davis, who was there the whole time, capturing it all on film.

Davis was, to crib a term from literary theory, a minor artist, working in the major

picks June 25, 2018

Kim Zumpfe

A few years ago, the cultural critic Roxane Gay argued for the necessity of safe spaces: “When you are marginalized and always unsafe,” she wrote, “your skin thins, leaving your blood and bone exposed. You live at the breaking point.” In her sensitive installation outside the length of a room | OR | diving into the blue sun, 2018, Kim Zumpfe has horizontally bisected a large gallery to create a space that is at once a retreat from the world and an engagement with its potential limits. A subterranean zone is filled with bedrolls and television monitors displaying the same slow-moving blue-tinted

print May 2018

“Stories of Almost Everyone”

A KIND OF POST-CONCEPTUAL malaise crept over me when, twenty minutes into viewing “Stories of Almost Everyone,” a group exhibition centered on the narratives that “accompany” objects, I found myself spending more time reading and rereading wall texts than looking at the works themselves. Of course, one could graft this overreliance on mostly dry, institutionally crafted text onto a critical argument about the further evacuation of art’s aura—and a concomitant call for further engagement with the discourse surrounding art’s production and reception—but I don’t think that’s what curators

previews May 2018

“Contemptorary: Deep-Time Construction”

Eunsong Kim (poet, translator, and writer) and Gelare Khoshgozaran (artist and writer) cofounded the online arts platform contemptorary.org in 2016, and have since published thoughtful, wild, and necessary writing focused on queer and women artists of color. Following a teaching residency at CCA’s graduate program in fine arts this past spring, the two will be extending the tendrils of their project with this exhibition of time-based works by artists such as NIC Kay and Asma Kazmi, and essays by Nazik Dakkach and Jennifer Tamayo, among others, addressing time as it relates

picks April 02, 2018

Maren Hassinger

Pink plastic bags, each puffed with breath and holding a small love note, cover every inch of a narrow hallway, resembling the internal linings of a body. This is Love, 2008/2018, an itinerant installation by Maren Hassinger, whose practice imbues everyday materials (wire, newspaper, bags) with the poetics of potentiality. The artist’s manipulations of both materials and space—as seen in her sculptures, installations, and choreographed works for live audiences (High Noon, 1976) or for a camera (Wind, 2013)—have been woefully understudied, and this exhibition marks an opportunity to

Andy Campbell