Annie Buckley

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  picks September 16, 2007

  “Sound & Motion”

  Group exhibitions can easily be uneven, but “Sound & Motion” is a notable exception: The five artists included here are primarily veteran users of electronics or technology in their art, and it shows. From Diane Landry’s updated and automated take on the old-fashioned flip book to Jim Campbell’s electronic translation of sound into light, the emphasis is not on showy display, but rather on thoughtful and highly skilled explorations of technology as a means of conceptualizing ideas. Campbell’s Portrait of Paul DeMarinis, 2003, encodes the subject’s voice as gradations of light to create a moving

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  picks August 24, 2007

  “Between People—Four Artists on Connecting”

  The artists in “Between People—Four Artists on Connecting” use a light touch to address the dense topic of human interaction; the result is a thoughtful exhibition that, like the works themselves, operates beyond the physical space of the gallery. With roots in Conceptual art, dance, and Fluxus, “Between People” demonstrates a surprising range and freshness. Adam Overton’s participation is perhaps the simplest: He makes himself available for conversation in untitled private encounter, Art as Excuse series (all works 2007), stripping the activity bare of any purpose other than communication.

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  picks August 15, 2007

  “Evidence of Movement”

  Electronic media and high-definition video are increasingly ubiquitous features of contemporary exhibitions, but the fate of numerous older videotapes and recordings remained something of a mystery until the Getty, not particularly renowned for its engagement with contemporary art, stepped in as an unlikely hero. Using its considerable resources, the Getty Research Institute (GRI) is conserving, archiving, and making available to the public recently acquired troves of audiovisual material otherwise left to the dustbin of technologies past. “Evidence of Movement,” curated by Glenn Phillips with

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  picks August 10, 2007

  Allan Sekula

  Part History Channel, part visual diary, and part mesmerizing abstraction, Allan Sekula’s newest video, A Short Film for Laos, 2006, takes the measure of day-to-day life in what the narrator describes as “the most bombed place on earth.” It begins in a hospital, where Sekula is having his leg stitched up, and proceeds next to a cave where four hundred villagers were killed during the Vietnam War. In describing the bombings, a Lao man casually mentions that Lao villages are filled with aluminum spoons forged from the debris of American Air Force planes that crashed on the tiny Asian nation when

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  picks July 17, 2007

  iona rozeal brown

  Is it possible, given the historical objectification of women’s bodies, to reclaim and recontextualize the female form? Or is this a conceptual dream that inevitably results in oxymoronic dead ends? Numerous recent exhibitions of feminist art have offered fresh consideration of these questions, and iona rozeal brown’s newest body of work, “the epidemic of excess, the detriment of denial,” takes this perspective as axiomatic. Brown’s polymorphic fusion of cultures, histories, identities, and politics is couched neatly in the flat surfaces of her sumptuous paintings. The deep bronzes and shimmering

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  picks June 11, 2007

  Jimmy Baker

  In Jimmy Baker’s highly romanticized future, men resemble rock stars and women (mostly) blue-eyed naïfs. Though dichotomies, not to mention gender stereotypes, abound, Baker’s startling paintings and ambitiously imagined dystopic future—where everyone looks somewhat like an android and either totes a shotgun or shields an iPod that blooms from the belly—are compelling. “Rapture” includes eight portraits, four of men set against dark backgrounds and four of women set against white, each rendered in a lush, hyperreal style. The Rembrandt-inspired images are smothered in thick coat of resin that

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  picks June 11, 2007

  Hirsch Perlman

  It’s hard to imagine anything new about cartoonlike cats or beachscapes, and yet, in Hirsch Perlman’s hands, the seemingly innocuous takes on a highly original and enigmatic cast. In previous exhibitions, the Los Angeles–based artist has found new meaning for cardboard and tape, pen lights and cameras, focusing intently on seemingly simple materials and infusing each endeavor with his particular vision. In “ergo despero,” large-scale prints of cats, each drawn with quick, descriptive lines in bright yellow, green, and orange, are interspersed evenly with surreal black-and-white photographs of

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  picks May 17, 2007

  Nancy Riegelman

  I once saw Baryshnikov dance to the beat of his own heart; the sound was mesmerizing more for its otherworldly quality than for its intimate familiarity, as if amplification transformed his heartbeat into something strange. Nancy Riegelman undertakes a similar project in her newest work, rendering each breath as graphite line. But unlike the dance, these lines track a more private performance. And while the result has a similarly odd familiarity, it is less ominous, perhaps made calmer by distance—conceptual and otherwise. When one enters the gallery out of the heat and traffic of the city, the

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  picks May 14, 2007

  “Poetics of the Handmade”

  Magdalena Atria’s chunky psychedelic painting-sculpture hybrid crawls along the wall like an orderly explosion of Play-Doh, while paper cannons spit flowers in Máximo González’s installation. As the title suggests, the eight artists included in “Poetics of the Handmade,” curated by Alma Ruiz, share a passion for obsessive processes; the works are also linked by a fascination with manufactured objects. The rainbow of reds in Livia Marin’s army of twenty-two-hundred tubes of lipstick, each pristinely carved, is echoed by Mónica Bengoa’s grid of drawings executed on paper napkins with neatly