Charlie Markbreiter

• 

  film July 08, 2019

  Class Canceled

  WHAT IF YOU COLLECTED SOME SEXY RICH KIDS and abolished not just their trust funds but money itself? The Society, Netflix’s ten-episode YA drama, spins off this premise. Set in a Greenwich, Connecticut, mock-up called West Ham, The Society begins with a smell. The town reeks. It’s TV, so the smell is maybe symbolic, the sins of derivatives-trading, pipeline-investing parents karmically rerouted to their own homes. No worries: The teens, bratty and smoldering, will be sent on a camping trip until the aroma is gone. But after a rockslide forces the bus to turn around, they’re dropped back in West

• 

  film November 09, 2018

  Table Talk

  IN 1983, Chris Marker released a movie called Sans Soleil (Sunless). Filmed mostly between Tokyo and Guinea-Bissau, Sans Soleil looks at memory and history; for Marker, both were a form of amnesia. “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining,” says Sans Soleil’s narrator, voiced in the French version by Florence Delay. “We do not remember; we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?” Her voice—an elliptical coo—glides through shots of desert, then ocean, or

• 

  picks June 18, 2018

  André Filipek and Cole Lu

  “While Removing the Garbage or Paying the Cleaner,” André Filipek and Cole Lu’s two-person show here, curated by Eileen Isagon Skyers, features sculptures of chubby, hairless dogs based on Aztec effigy vessels from the western Mexican state of Colima. Filipek, whose family is originally from Colima, merges these dogs with Rotoplas water-storage containers, a reference to the aging and increasingly privatized infrastructure of Mexico’s water system. Privatization will, predictably, decrease water access and quality while enriching corporations, further proof that the state no longer exists—if it

• 

  picks February 23, 2018

  Jesse Darling

  If the post-internet era uses new technology to position itself as a unique, irreparable break from the past, Jesse Darling’s practice situates this move within modernism’s theological underpinnings and legacy of progress. Instead of focusing on particular trend cycles, Darling investigates how the radically new became a market demand. “Atrophilia,” the artist’s 2016 show with Phoebe Collings-James at Company Gallery, interrogated the “desire for collapse or stasis,” according to the press release. In that exhibition, a candle and a toy airplane became a fleeting shrine; two blue busts of St.

• 

  picks October 06, 2017

  Barbara Kasten

  “My underlying question,” said Barbara Kasten in a 2012 interview, “is whether it is possible to make an abstract photograph.” Influenced by Bauhausian interdisciplinarity, which sought to combine all visual mediums into “total artworks,” the eighty-one-year-old Chicago-based artist trained as a painter before shifting to photograms, painted with liquid developing chemicals or the photo’s emulsion. For her first studio photography pieces, Kasten made sculptures of found industrial materials such as mirrors, Plexiglas, and sheet metal. These temporary “constructs,” as the artist calls them, were

• 

  picks July 21, 2017

  Gogo Graham

  Gogo Graham studied evolutionary biology before switching to fashion and starting her own line exclusively for trans women. Because most clothes aren’t made for trans women’s bodies, Graham’s one-off pieces are fitted to the person who wears them. The clothes are gifted to the models post-show. Two weeks prior to the opening of the artist’s exhibition here, Graham presented “Dragon Lady,” a one-night sculpture show at Romeo Gallery. Pushing against her experiences of being exoticized as a “dragon lady”—a white Western stereotype of Asian women as stubborn and manipulative—Graham presented drywall

• 

  picks May 26, 2017

  Sylvia Plimack Mangold

  In a kind of durational performance, Sylvia Plimack Mangold has painted the trees surrounding her home in Washingtonville, New York, for the past thirty years. Her painting routine, like tree growth, is seasonal. In winter, she paints from inside her studio; otherwise, she paints outdoors. Not merely relying on shadow and sunlight, Mangold creates depth and volume through variations in leaf color and multiple vanishing points. The artist enters her paintings, she declares, as if she were a “flying creature,” perhaps a hummingbird or a gnat. Early in her career, Plimack Mangold painted deadpan