Aram Moshayedi

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  picks November 15, 2010

  Carter Mull

  Although the images found in Carter Mull’s latest exhibition are photographic in nature, the postcamera processes by which they come into being bear an indeterminate relationship to the medium’s conventions. Most often, the individual works in “Metemetrica” waver back and forth between reverence and irreverence for the cultural expectation that photographic images necessarily share some relationship with the world they represent. In Mull’s works that are framed on the gallery walls and that are used to line the floor, there is a visual density that revels in the residue and static that has

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  film October 04, 2010

  Looking Glass

  POINTS ON A LINE, the latest film by artist Sarah Morris, takes as its central focus two architectural subjects on the verge of critical exhaustion. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, have, both together and separately, been exposed to such thoroughly repetitive visual and textual analysis that it is surprising to find the two icons called on to be reconsidered anew. Morris’s cinematic portrait of these architectural landmarks, designed and constructed roughly within the same period of time by the German mentor

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  picks September 27, 2010

  Erika Vogt

  “Geometric Persecution,” the title of Erika Vogt’s exhibition, is a neologism. Even so, there is something that rings familiar and true when one considers how or why geometry—that fundamental system of knowledge inherited from Euclid—might be a subject worthy of retribution. Vogt’s title offers another way to describe the more or less timeless pursuit of pictorial representation and those tendencies toward abstraction that have historically sought to undermine the supremacy of geometric order as the frame through which all experience is shaped. Thus, the video, drawings, and sculptural objects

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  picks June 17, 2010

  “Support Group”

  In the two years of rotating exhibitions at Cottage Home, a converted movie theater shared by three nearby Chinatown galleries, there has been little to no effort made to deal with the location’s peculiar qualities. “Support Group,” curated by Michael Ned Holte, is surely one of the most ambitious attempts to engage the architecture’s particularly daunting scale and its expansive, uninterrupted gallery space. The understated interrelationships among the show’s components—the exhibition-within-an-exhibition Pauline (organized by Mateo Tannatt) and works by Kathryn Andrews and Gaylen Gerber—suggest

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  interviews March 23, 2010

  Karl Haendel

  The Los Angeles–based artist Karl Haendel has exhibited his precise graphite drawings, which often touch on American production, nationally and internationally over the past half decade. Here he talks about the conditions surrounding a recent commission by the Lever House Art Collection in New York and his show at the quintessential modernist skyscraper that opens on March 25. 

  THE LEVER HOUSE IS A GLASS BOX, and glass boxes don’t really do very well with two-dimensional art. There’s an obvious reason: no walls to hang work on. Other artists who have had exhibitions here have built walls at

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  picks January 06, 2010

  Drew Heitzler

  The analysis of Hollywood film as legitimate historical material is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has led to extensive methodological overhauls throughout the social sciences. Drew Heitzler’s interrogative look at the Babylonian underside of Hollywood, and its associations with the American oil industry, contributes to this approach. Perhaps more important, however, it also reflects an artistic shift from the handling of cultural material as a ready-made system of signifiers that can be emptied out and evacuated of their meanings at will.

  For this exhibition, Heitzler has rearranged the

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  interviews October 06, 2009

  Judy Radul

  Judy Radul is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist whose recent works investigate the relationship between performance and documentation. Here she discusses her new work World Rehearsal Court, which opens October 9 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.

  IN VANCOUVER, a high-security courtroom was built for the Air India trial, which was held between April 2003 and December 2004. When I saw images of the room in the newspaper, I realized that I was looking at a kind of theater but also a cheap video studio, one that, through wood panel and red

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  picks August 17, 2009

  Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi

  As the final presentation of a project dedicated to the political, economic, and cultural indeterminacy of Kish––a resort island fostering free trade and lax social restrictions off the coast of Iran—Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi’s The Isle, 2005–2009, offers an extensive body of research. Focused on the architectural pursuits that have defined Kish’s prolonged stasis between modernization and tradition, the artists’ fixation on this site is reminiscent of widespread preoccupations with modernity’s difficult birth throughout the Middle East. More often than not, these analyses, like

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  picks June 11, 2009

  Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon

  The centerpiece of Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon’s exhibition mines the mythic history of Los Angeles’s cultural past. Flanked on both sides by individual works by each artist, Hipnostasis, 2009, is a jointly produced six-channel video installation that provides an intimate glimpse into the interior lives of six anonymous beach bums as they silently consume steaks on the rocks of Venice Beach at daybreak. Pettibon and Okon’s practices merge here for the first time to form a quiet document of a bygone era of the Venice Beach vanguard. The portraits that make up Hipnostasis focus on individual