Anthony Hawley

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  print March 2023

  “Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print”

  As one walked into this inaugural exhibition at the New York Print Center’s new location on West Twenty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, one heard ambient murmurs ricocheting throughout the gallery. To the east one picked up something like the echoes of faint brushing sounds interjected with exhalations, while to the north one felt the muted vibrations of what could have been clay or wooden pipes. These hushed sonorities made it seem as though one was standing inside a vast cavern, deep underground. The effect made perfect sense for “Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print,” a show built

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  print January 2023

  Constance DeJong

  Where do words situate us? The ongoing clusterfuck of self-perpetuating post-truth doublespeak—intensified by dispatches from the nether regions of influencer live streams, conspiracy-theorist podcasts, how-to videos, hot-take pieces, and more—forces us to gird ourselves against the endless waves of stupid, suffocating chatter. How does one not feel marooned, adrift?

  Thankfully we have Constance DeJong, who for more than four decades has expanded the material parameters of narrative by hybridizing performance art, radio theater, sonic composition, writing, drawing, and sculpture to highlight the

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  print October 2022

  Connor Marie

  Each of Connor Marie’s slick quadrangular canvases here showcased a young female face, closely cropped, the surfaces of the paintings pressurized by the subjects’ glazed-over eyes, their expressions at turns kittenish, vengeful, or Vecna-afflicted. Some of her femmes exhibited facial features reminiscent of prefab anime action girls. Others evinced a prepubescent softness, à la Nabokov’s Lolita. Together, the brood stood guard over an aquamarine fiberglass slab at the gallery’s center: the sarcophagic sculpture Cavity (all works 2022), inside of which rested a hollowed-out cast of a doll-like

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  print Summer 2022

  Itziar Barrio

  An assemblage of three IKEA chairs rises up from a stark-white cement plinth. Rubber cuffs bind the folding furniture’s legs, suspending the trio in a tilted balletic pose. Swaths of buttery stygian latex cover each end of the metallic structure, evoking something between soaking-wet laundry hung out to dry and s/m garb in shiny sumptuous black.

  The closing iteration of Itziar Barrio’s twelve-year project THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE, 2010–22, was all about the dialectics of sex, labor, and style. Visitors experienced this interplay throughout the gallery with a selection of photo-based works, sculptures

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  film May 12, 2022

  Descent Proposal

  LISTEN CAREFULLY inside the cavernous dark of the theater and you’ll hear the gossamer symphony accompanying the opening sequence of Michelangelo Frammartino’s newest feature, Il Buco: interstitial beads of water echoing softly as they fall into pools; the hushed stridulation of crickets; a crescendo of insects buzzing about as night yields to nautical dawn; and, eventually, a chorus of cowbells, followed by something like a distant cry. Only as the sun rises does it become apparent where the camera rests: nestled inside a hole in the ground, peering up at the sky, rocks, and weeds, and then at

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  print January 2022

  Pat O’Neill

  How does one capture a sense of time bedeviling itself? Experimental filmmaker and artist Pat O’Neill’s show here, “The Decay of Fiction,” interrogated this notion. The first time I visited, I felt as if I were witnessing a palimpsest of hauntings—decades of ghosts sealed inside a building’s many surfaces roaming freely. Yet the second time around I experienced an additional sensation: a sustained feeling of displacement caused less by the spooks’ presence than by an uncanny sense of their being both stuck inside a specific historical moment and forever pushed outside it.

  For The Decay of Fiction

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  picks July 16, 2021

  “Density Betrays Us”

  Gnarled somatic terra and chimeric aberrations fill “Density Betrays Us,” this deeply felt group exhibition. Didier Williams’s painting Koupe Tet, Boule Kay, 2021, features a weightless being ablaze with fluorescent color, while Yasue Maetake’s sculptural fusions of barnacle, bone, metal, and crystal are displayed as if they were interspecies fossils. Elsewhere, the phantoms are less speculative, though just as menacing: In Nicole Miller’s video The Borrowers, 2014, a man describes how he lost his left arm during a violent confrontation. In this harrowing scene, we see parts of his other,

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  picks May 07, 2021

  Patty Chang

  Perhaps our ability to be consumed by fears that are, all at once, deeply felt, minute, planetary, violent, and occasionally absurd is what genuinely separates us Homo sapiens from other species. And few artworks possess the ability to reflect this aggregation of terror as poignantly and forcefully as Patty Chang’s ongoing, multichannel video installation, Milk Debt, 2018–. In this work, the artist compiled a list of anxieties from a diverse group of women and turned them into a script for female actors to recite on camera while pumping breast milk. The performers discuss a range of worries in

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  film March 31, 2021

  Terra Infirma

  “TODAY WE ARE KNOCKING at the door of the modern world,” says the politician to the villagers of Nazaretha, bloviating into a megaphone’s detachable mic. “Your voice has been heard,” he reassures them, as if they’d asked for this, as if he, this bloated hype-man, their elected official, were doing them a favor. But representation is tricky when you stand out from the masses, clad in a sports coat, button-down shirt, and shiny gold belt buckle. “I assure you it will be worth it.” His constituents gaze at him silently. Meanwhile, throughout this bombast, the camera tracks a petite elderly woman,

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  picks March 30, 2021

  Cory Arcangel

  Stand in front of Cory Arcangel’s giant video wall long enough and you’ll get spammed with an array of offers: “Seven day free VIP trial,” the opportunity to “turn up your jam,” invitations to connect with a virtual “celebrity psychologist,” online-sofa-sale coupons. You’ll even get to go to the executive lounge at LAX with a skinny-jeaned Brat Pitt wannabe forever styling his hair. But all of this is filtered through a complex machine clunkily reading the screen area. After all, Arcangel’s work /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD, 2017–21, is actually a live feed of a custom computer navigating

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  picks February 09, 2021

  Jason Moran

  Jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran’s new pigment-on-paper abstractions in this show, created during the pandemic, greatly broaden the relationship between the body and sound. The impressions captured by the artist in these images are, in some sense, acoustic: Moran made these works by laying sheets of paper on a piano keyboard, coating his hands with color, and then playing the instrument, producing a frottage of mechanical and musical activity. These indexical, machinic imprints function as several things at once: a performance record, a sensory stamp, and perhaps even an ex post facto

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  picks December 28, 2020

  Roger White

  I could have stayed inside Roger White’s new solo show here until 2038. Or 2086. Or 2021. From canvas to canvas, time and how we contain, categorize, and dwell within it suffuse this stellar exhibition. There are paintings of lists; paintings of disposable food containers; a portrait of a pigeon; and one glorious fusion of moods that features a Decameron-era figure writing out what appears to be sex-room bot chat in a Late Middle Ages script. All of the works are modest in scale, unassuming.

  Three rectangular and vertically oriented pieces have been made to look like mass-produced flip calendars.