Charlotte Cotton

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  previews January 2017

  “Gwenneth Boelens: At Odds”

  This winter, the List presents the first solo museum exhibition of Dutch artist Gwenneth Boelens. The ten pieces on display—largely photograms the artist made in the past two years using chromogenic materials—range from the small and delicate to the large and unwieldy, creating a series of encounters in which photography is experienced as the result of the artist’s actions. Also present are sculptural elements in the form of an umbrella frame, yellow acoustic fabric wrapped around an aluminum rod, and a textile work adapted from a book about West African

• previews January 2017

  “Yuki Kimura: Inhuman Transformation of New Year’s Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2”

  This commissioned installation manifests Japanese artist Yuki Kimura’s subtle activation of subjective and multilayered encounters with the photographic. With Table Stella, 2016, Kimura presents two very similar found photographs printed on the surfaces of three pairs of tabletop-like Dibond supports laden with ashtrays. In a world of e-cigarettes and immaterial image-data files, her use of outmoded objects directs our attention away from the items’ original functions to suggest new, more playful operations determined by their very materiality. A pair

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  print February 2016

  Diana Thater

  “The Sympathetic Imagination”—a title taken from J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003)—aptly describes both the sensibility that runs through Diana Thater’s practice and the artist’s careful consideration of her viewer, as evidenced by this timely, generous, and thoughtfully curated survey. Divided between LACMA’s Art of the Americas galleries and those of its Broad Contemporary Art Museum (unaffiliated with the Broad museum several miles east), this exhibition, organized by Lynn Cooke, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim,

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  print May 2015

  Barbara Kasten

  IN AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT written for her 1982 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Barbara Kasten described her practice as “a specific personal photographic vision with the arrangement of objects as the source,” encapsulating her enduring method over five decades. But it is only with the opening of “Barbara Kasten: Stages” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that we are able to see all of her major series together—and understand the extent to which she has gone against the grain of contemporary photography, incorporating the craft and technological

• previews January 2015

  “Barbara Kasten: Stages”

  A good survey exhibition is both thoughtful in its assessment of an artist’s contribution and timed to a moment in which the public is primed to consider it. “Barbara Kasten: Stages” promises to be both, as Kasten’s measured engagement with photographic, sculptural, and architectural ideas since the 1970s is an undeniable precedent and prompt for contemporary postdisciplinary art practices. Tracking the artist’s remarkable trajectory through Bauhausian pedagogy and fiber art in the ’60s, the California Light and Space movement in the ’70s, and postmodernism in the ’80s, and