Chris Fite-Wassilak

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  picks October 09, 2008

  Auguste Orts

  English author Samuel Johnson once wrote, “The true characters of men may be found in their letters.” “Correspondence,” an exhibition featuring Auguste Orts—a Belgian collective specializing in the moving image—comprises an assemblage of books, videos, and written exchanges between the four members of the group: Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer, and Anouk De Clercq. Discussing one another’s work, they disclose influences, aspirations, and dicta. A figurative fifth character emerges from the dialogue: an obsessive, enthusiastic archivist, full of wide-eyed wonder mixed with a

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  picks July 02, 2008

  “Nowhere Is Here”

  Drawing is traditionally believed to catch a raw and relatively unmediated glimpse of the artist’s inner vision as it flows onto paper. However, in “Nowhere Is Here,” a group exhibition that explores the relationship between drawing and the natural environment, the psychological imprint moves in the opposite direction. Here, the activity of drawing is presented as an allographic gesture, where the artist is not the main actor but a liminal figure who traces outer spaces in order to shape inner worlds. Many of the works are executed in a photorealistic style but act in direct contrast to a

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  picks June 02, 2008

  David Adamo

  From the riot following the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the widespread demonstrations following Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten's “face of Mohammed” cartoons in 2005, if art doesn't have the ability to make a difference, at least it still can offend and outrage a waiting public. David Adamo's latest exhibition, “Untitled (The Rite of Spring),” takes as its starting point the potential energy after the artistic outburst, the quiet threat in the moment of unveiling. A wobbling, noisy stage of wooden baseball bats lines the floor, while two sharp arrows sit in

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  picks March 25, 2008

  Rivane Neuenschwander

  To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” But it was his follower, Cratylus, who, before renouncing speech altogether, amended this by noting that you can’t even step in the same river once. The Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander shares this laconic understanding of constant change. Her work is quietly transformative; and while previous readings have focused on such themes as digestion and cultural cannibalism, the artist’s latest exhibition is, literally, more global in perspective. In her time-lapse video Contingent, 2008, ants slowly but

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  picks March 20, 2008

  “Liveline: Comics Open”

  As with walking into an uncle’s cluttered, overcrowded basement full of ephemera long forgotten, “Liveline” produces a mixture of apprehension and delight. The survey—whose name is a play on the British pop-culture serial Deadline, which was produced between 1988 and 1995 and first featured Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl—features the work of more than thirty artists who self-publish comics in the UK and Ireland. The range of contributors is wide, but they are here placed into a historical narrative that seems to posit a nearly postapocalyptic scenario in which, following the fallout

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  picks February 25, 2008

  Dennis McNulty

  In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut introduced an alien race, the Tralfamadorians, whose members perceive the past, present, and future as a simultaneous chorus; one of them describes seeing all time as humans “might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.” Dennis McNulty’s exhibition “framework/rupture” suggests a similar topographical analogy, featuring as it does certain works that take Irish architect Sam Stephenson’s hulking design for the Central Bank in Dublin as a starting point for an exploration of urban architecture as a physical manifestation of time.

  McNulty effectively uses,

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  picks February 12, 2008

  Roman Signer

  Roman Signer assembles machines: water-spilling machines, trouser-blowing machines, bottle-swinging machines. Each has a limited set of materials, is simply constructed, and has a narrow range of seemingly likely consequences. But his systems quickly shed their utilitarian shrouds, revealing in their activation an open-ended interrogation. In the gallery’s main space, Chairs, 2007, is an absurd, introspective variation on the competitions featured on the television show Robot Wars. A small, cherry-red automated lawn mower whirs around the gallery floor among fifteen chairs; anytime it exceeds