print April 2022

Shannon Ebner

One way to discern how something works is to take it apart, and Shannon Ebner does this dismantling well. For decades the artist has been exploring the materiality of language, but within very specific formal parameters across disciplines including photography and sculpture. Her variation on Conceptualism is both studied and subtle—her utilization of phrases, stanzas, or stand-alone letters situates us in the vicinity of content and asks us to take stock of its context and our own positioning. The torque is in the vagaries of meaning, and her show at Kaufman Repetto was a furthering of uncertainty.

print January 2022

Janice Nowinski

The world depicted by painter Janice Nowinski in her exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery was an alluring one, and not merely because of its fleshy, often naked characters—rendered as solitary figures or arranged into clumpy groupings—that were gleaned from the artist’s personal photographs, evoking works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, to name a few. For all their erudition, the twenty-two small-scale oils on view disavowed formal refinement in favor of gestural awkwardness and a rambunctious sense of ambiguity. The gallery walls were partially painted a cool,

print November 2021

Jennifer Carvalho

Jennifer Carvalho’s “Sign of the Times,” her exhibition of fifteen oil paintings at Helena Anrather, pulled the hefty weight of art history into the iffy present. The Canadian artist extracts details from well-known works of art—via cinema, antiquity, and the Renaissance—and reconstitutes them as a trove of murky reliquiae and amputations. She uses a uniformly dark palette, linking disparate eras and iconographies by filtering them through a very particular lens; her subjects are tightly cropped, close up, and dreamily out of focus. In Carvalho’s remakes, aqueous tones and daubed, bleedy lines

print Summer 2021

Shona McAndrew

Shona McAndrew’s solo exhibition “Haven” featured nine acrylic paintings and seven watercolor studies: all portraits of women who are personally known to the artist. The word haven says everything about these pictures, as McAndrew’s sitters seem at ease with themselves and one another. Each canvas is a safe space, and the models appear comfortable in their intimate surroundings: Docile pets, beds, cozy chairs, and muted palettes set the tone. McAndrew reworks eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European “conversation pieces,” paintings made by men that often showed women engaged in the stereotypically

print May 2021

Malia Jensen

Denaturation was implicit throughout Malia Jensen’s “Nearer Nature,” her solo exhibition at Cristin Tierney. The show featured five kiln-cast glass sculptures, four perched on reclaimed wooden blocks and one on a concrete block, set atop white pedestals. Each form represented a part of the body—a breast, hands, the stomach (interpreted here as stacks of doughnuts), a foot, and a Brancusi-inspired head. The objects are actually fabricated replicas of carved salt licks the artist placed in various habitats across Oregon as offerings or lures for the fauna—such as deer, elk, birds, and cows—that

print April 2021

Julia Haft-Candell

In “Carrier Bag of Fiction” at Candice Madey, Julia Haft-Candell’s ceramic sculptures were imbued with language; they read as origin stories in a state of revision. The show was named after and inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” a 1986 essay in which the author interrogates the trope of the heroic journey and argues for an antidote to “the killer story” of the hunter protagonist who slays all. In her text, Le Guin shakes up this male monomyth, insisting that “the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd.” The author’s stance was the starting point for the

print January/February 2021

Andrew LaMar Hopkins

Maximalist splendor was in full effect across the thirty-two paintings in Andrew LaMar Hopkins’s solo exhibition here, “Créolité,” which was organized by art historian and curator Alison M. Gingeras. Hopkins, who lives in Alabama, creates fictionalized tableaux of America’s antebellum years that “[celebrate] the cultural mixing of European, African, and mixed-race peoples’ lives and material cultures . . . based on the histories of Creoles living in the South,” per the show’s press release. His works, set primarily in New Orleans, do not deny the reality of white supremacy or chattel slavery,

print December 2020

Zach Bruder

Zach Bruder’s thirteen acrylic-and-Flashe paintings formed a phantasmagoric time capsule of human endeavor, riddled with rupture. No matter how tidy or idealized, Bruder’s places are more haunting than they are enlivened, as in the truncated colonial home of Decorum (all works cited, 2020), its dark innards at odds with the affable peachy hue of its exterior. In each of the canvas’s four corners is a clock that features a well-heeled old-timey man captured midstride and looking purposeful. Not a leaf is amiss outdoors, and a brick wall behind the dwelling furthers a sense of stringency. Coffer

print October/November 2020

Michelangelo Lovelace

The vulnerable are vital across twenty-two drawings by Cleveland-based artist Michelangelo Lovelace, who has worked as a nursing-home aide for more than three decades while maintaining a dedicated studio practice. The works in this online presentation for Fort Gansevoort, made between 1993 and 2008, felt especially resonant when viewed during the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected people of color and the elderly. The artist reminds us that our responsibility to one another has never been more urgent.

Lovelace’s portraits, mostly done in either ink or marker on paper, bring warmth

print September 2020

“EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood”

“EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood” presents a collection of anonymous amateur drawings of women from the first half of the twentieth century—an archive of unsolved mysteries from an estate-liquidation sale in Southern California. They are unsigned and undated (although the names of legendary actresses, such as Lucille Ball, Yvonne De Carlo, and Vivien Leigh, are written on some). Forty-seven of these headshot-like portraits, from a set of more than one hundred, are exhibited by Shelter online. Researchers at the gallery have begun the process of trying to identify each face. They have located some source

print July/August 2020

Benjamin Degen

The paintings and drawings of “In Waves,” Benjamin Degen’s solo exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery, are affecting reminders of those commonplace pleasures that we frequently take for granted but that are always deserving of reverence, especially in light of our alienating present: intimacy and human touch. Whether he is depicting two people watching a sunset, or bare feet stepping between seashells, Degen’s mark-making vibrates with an ardor that transforms quotidian experiences into extraordinary events. This is the fleeting stuff that life is made of, the gossamer threads that connect us to

print May/June 2020

Becky Suss

In a series of new oil paintings at Jack Shainman Gallery, Becky Suss furthers her search for lost time by excavating children’s literature, interior decoration, the chimera of memory, and fictional homes. The show’s title originated in the writings of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, a pioneer of early education, whose Here and Now Story Book (1921) promoted child-centered learning. Suss created fantasias of preservation, laboring to remake domiciles that echoed with the question Is anyone home? The answer was mostly no, but this body of work was concerned with lives lived, from the cradle to the grave.

Charity Coleman