Catherine Spencer

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  picks November 11, 2022

  Nashashibi/Skaer

  The exhibition “Chimera” unites three films by Nashashibi/Skaer—the collaborative practice of Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, developed alongside their individual careers since 2005—with related sculptures and paintings by each artist to create a softly melancholic, quietly surrealist environment that feels suspended outside time. Perhaps this is because Bear, the most recent film, was created during the 2021 lockdown. It builds directly on Lamb, 2019, a study of ewes undergoing labor, giving birth, and tending to their young within a lambing shed in the Scottish Hebrides. Despite the camera’s

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  print September 2021

  Emma Talbot

  Emma Talbot’s new work is haunted, filled with repeated figures rendered in concise black lines, their faces either blank or hidden by a wave of hair. Across painted silk hangings, drawings, a video, and textile sculptures, they acted both as avatars for the artist and as collectives of keeners—groups of women performing lamentations for the dead—while replication endowed them with an uncanny revenant-like quality in their own right. Talbot’s fascination with the mourning ritual of keening grew out of her research into Celtic history, and in preparing for “Ghost Calls” at Dundee Contemporary

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  picks March 23, 2020

  “Pine’s Eye”

  One possible translation of Pinocchio, the Italian children’s tale immortalized by Disney’s 1940 film, is “pine’s eye.” This animistic interpretation, with its evocation of nature looking back at—and judging—human activity, catalyzed the current group show here, which underscores the imbrication of ecological and decolonial thinking.

  Firelei Báez covers maps, diagrams, and book pages with intricate paintings that deconstruct the epistemological and material colonization of the Caribbean and celebrate resistant knowledge forms. A green-blue nebula partially blots out the floor plan for a sugar