Colby Chamberlain

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  print Summer 2023

  A.K. Burns

  In the art world, epics are necessarily parasitic. Like H. R. Giger’s xenomorphs in the Alien franchise, they assume the attributes of their host. Since 2015, A.K. Burns has been producing a cycle of video installations on ecological fragility called Negative Space, each concerned with a distinct physical system and supported by different institutions. A Smeary Spot (NS 0), 2015, which premiered at Participant Inc. in New York, evokes “the void” by juxtaposing scenes of genderqueer performers, identified in the credits as “Ob-surveyors” and “Free Radicals,” exploring the Utah desert with saxophone

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  print April 2023

  CULTURES

  AMERICA LOVES its unconscionable mash-ups. Since the 1990s, a fixture of Thanksgiving Day football coverage has been television anchors’ ritual consumption of a “turducken”: a chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey. Following that logic, what would be the apposite coinage for a manifesto slipped into a press release set inside the screenshot of a Gmail message? A manipresscreenmail, or a Gshotleasefesto? Either way, the announcement for “Nobodies New York,” a small group show organized by Josh Kline in 2009, a full one hundred years after the Futurist Manifesto appeared in Le Figaro,

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  print January 2023

  Anicka Yi

  Has the dialogue between art and science undergone a paradigm shift? Compare Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, 2003, and Anicka Yi’s In Love with the World, 2021–22, two commissions for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London, undertaken by artists known for treating their studios as research laboratories. The orchestration of mist, mirrors, and artificial light in The Weather Project entranced audiences—so much so that a generation of critics steeped in Guy Debord and Fredric Jameson immediately regarded it as the culmination of spectacle in the late-capitalist museum. Underneath all the whizbang

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  print November 2022

  STATE OF REPAIR

  LEARNING ABOUT A CITY through Zillow warps your sense of the landscape. Filtered searches dissolve the edges of neighborhoods and flatten monuments. When my partner and I visited Cleveland this past May, after endless hours of browsing real-estate listings, neither of us took notice of Terminal Tower, once the tallest building in North America outside New York, or knew where to locate the Guardians of Traffic, the stirring Art Deco colossi that stand watch over the Cuyahoga River. We did, however, immediately recognize Church + State, the boxy, checkerboard-colored development that anchors the

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  slant Summer 2022

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT

  FEW TITLES ENCAPSULATE an exhibition’s argument as succinctly as “by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022).” Curator Karen Moss borrows that “by” from a slim volume of the same name, a collection of the artist’s compositions issued through the “Great Bear” pamphlet series of Something Else Press in 1965. The preposition’s pliability is the point. Most obviously, “by” denotes authorship, as in a corpus of texts written by Alison Knowles, yet it also suggests facilitation, a process brought about by means of Alison Knowles, or proximity, i.e., close by Alison Knowles. In a work by Alison

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  print Summer 2022

  Mungo Thomson

  I remember seeing the films of Mungo Thomson in 2009 at John Connelly Presents, one of the NADA galleries that occupied a row of storefronts on the western end of Twenty-Seventh Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Derek Eller Gallery, Foxy Production, JCP, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, and Wallspace all used to coordinate their openings for the same evening, encouraging a block-party atmosphere that reliably spilled out onto the street—so much so that the NYPD caught on and started rolling through to issue tickets for outdoor drinking. (Once, as two of my friends were being written up, I heard

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  print May 2022

  Alina Tenser

  The work of Alina Tenser inhabits a notional space at the juncture of a Montessori school and the Container Store. Her sculptures, performances, and videos suggest playtime scenarios of experiential learning while evoking a distinctly grown-up predilection for organizing. Though children may view the “useful pot to put things in” that Winnie the Pooh presents to Eeyore as a lackluster birthday gift, the right storage device can excite the passions of adults (or at least “adulting” millennials) in ways that Marx’s theory of the commodity fails to fully comprehend. Tenser seeks to activate the

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  print January 2022

  Alvaro Barrington

  Is everything all right over at the New York Times arts desk? In the paper’s review of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1 this past October, Martha Schwendener devoted whole paragraphs to disparaging the acknowledgment of artists’ ethnic background on wall labels. Three weeks earlier, co-chief art critic Roberta Smith’s write-up on Alvaro Barrington’s recent solo exhibition told visitors to “ignore the overreaching news release at the front desk which ties the artist’s life to that of Marcus Garvey, because of ‘similarities in their migratory paths,’ and consider the work.” Smith then proceeded to

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  print October 2021

  Huguette Caland

  WE ARE GIVEN A BIOGRAPHY: At the age of thirty-nine, Huguette Caland leaves her husband and children to pursue a career as an artist in Paris. Years later, she moves to Venice, California, and establishes her “dream home.” Toward the end of her life, she returns to Beirut, the city of her birth. The present exhibition, we are told, “celebrates Caland’s love affair with line and its capacity to express the shared human desire for intimate connection.” So goes the opening wall text for “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête,” curated by Claire Gilman with Isabella

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  print October 2021

  Franklin Evans

  The titles for the paintings in Franklin Evans’s exhibition “fugitivemisreadings” were made up of lowercase letters jammed together into solid blocks, like the stream-of-consciousness “thunderwords” in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), or the file names of PDFs scattered over a Mac desktop. In one canvas, Evans paid tribute to Henri Matisse’s famous pastoral of 1905–1906, The Joy of Life, by hand copying the composition’s Fauvist figures and rearranging them as if he were using the cut-and-paste function in Photoshop. The work is called . . . wait for it . . . joysdivision (all works cited,

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  print September 2021

  Arghavan Khosravi

  You could see the rocket through the glass door. In the surreal setting of Arghavan Khosravi’s The Suspension, 2020, a dark-haired woman bows beneath a pointed silver projectile. Hung directly across from the gallery’s entrance, the painting conjured an image that comported with the talking points of hawkish cable-news pundits looking to cast Iran as a militaristic and misogynist theocratic regime. Yet just as quickly as Khosravi advanced this threatening caricature of her homeland, she undermined it as well. A second glance revealed that the woman wears a magenta athleisure jumpsuit—a getup

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  print Summer 2021

  Kevin Jerome Everson

  In North America, the formal rigor of avant-garde cinema has fostered the impression that its foremost practitioners disdain emotional expression. Yet this cannot be said of the movement’s nominal godfather, the late Jonas Mekas, whose films are saturated with plaintive meditations on his childhood in rural Lithuania, his years in DP camps following World War II, and his provisional reconstitution of a home in New York. This story of rupture and dislocation, critic David E. James has observed, follows the thematic arc of modernity itself, wherein the comforting rhythms of agrarian life are