Anthony Hawley

  • Annesas Appel, Metamorphosis Music Notation (detail), 2015, fifty piezo print strips with perforations, hand-cranked music box, each strip 89 × 3", overall dimensions variable. From “Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print.” Photo: Daria Tuminas.

    “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

  • Constance DeJong, Flame, 2019, spoken text and sound material on sensor-activated digital frame, 2 minutes 28 seconds, 9 3⁄4 × 11 7⁄8 × 6".

    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

  • Connor Marie, Vita, 2022, oil on canvas, 36 × 36".

    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

  • Itziar Barrio, Stella a Roma, 2021, 4K video, color, sound, 19 minutes 40 seconds.

    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

  • Michelangelo Frammartino, Il Buco, 2021, DCP, color, sound, 93 minutes.
    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

  • Pat O’Neill, The Decay of Fiction, 2002/2018, single-channel 35 mm and 35 mm transferred to digital, five-channel digital edit, color, sound, 11 minutes 30 seconds.

    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

  • Nicole Miller, The Borrowers, 2014, digital video, color, sound, 16 minutes 52 seconds.
    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,

  • View of “Patty Chang: Milk Debt,” 2021.
    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

  • Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, 2019, DCP, color, sound, 120 minutes.
    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,

  • Cory Arcangel, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD, 2017–21, custom-built high-performance-computer rig (AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor central-processing unit, Rog Crosshair Viii Dark Hero motherboard, G.SKILL 64GB [2 x 32GB] Trident Z Neo Series DDR4 PC4-21300 2666 MHz 288-Pin Desktop Memory Model F4-2666C18D-64GTZN random-access memory, [x2] EVGA 24G-P5-3975-KR GeForce RTX 3090 XC3 Ultra Gaming graphics-processing units and Corsair Professional Series AX 1200 Watt Digital ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Platinum [AX1200i] power supply, various peripherals), custom-built Deep-Q Learning RPG playing software bot with system sounds by Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never), Kim Kardashian: Hollywood casual free-to-play role-playing Android game, Android phone, amplifier, speakers, and various cables, dimensions variable.
    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

  • Jason Moran, Bathing the Room with Blues 2, 2020, pigment on gampi paper, 25 1/4 x 38".
    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

  • Roger White, May, 2020, oil on linen, 28 x 18".
    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.