Corrine Fitzpatrick

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  slant June 12, 2020

  Teach-Out

  THIS PAST APRIL, during a fractious Zoom meeting between the faculty and trustees of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), the phrase “the house is on fire” was uttered multiple times. SFAI has faced existential threats more than once in its 149-year history: In the fires that ravaged San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake, the school literally burned to the ground. Although no act of God, the slow-moving crisis that has left the college too precarious to weather the current pandemic is no less intractable. At an institution where tuition and student fees reportedly account for 85 percent

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  previews May 2019

  “BARBARA HAMMER: IN THIS BODY”

  Curated by Jennifer Lange

  “The light of the body shocks me—that I’m able to live without weight,” wrote Barbara Hammer in a recent email. She marveled at watching herself wane. Hammer—renowned visionary and maverick of experimental and lesbian cinema—died this past March at the age of seventy-nine, from endometrioid ovarian cancer. Inspired by dying, and admirably concerned with her legacy, she worked until the end to fine-tune what she knew would be her posthumous retrospective. More than a dozen of her films, dating from 1968 to 2008, will screen during the exhibition’s run, as will new

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  diary October 22, 2018

  A More Daring Pleasure

  AT THE END OF Barbara Hammer’s performance a few weeks ago at the Whitney Museum, after a minutes-long standing ovation, Nicole Eisenman said, almost as if it were a thought slipped aloud, “Barbara just invented a new genre. This was a reverse funeral, and it was amazing.” I relayed this half a week later, sitting by the window in Hammer’s studio just blocks down the Hudson from where two hundred or so of her fans, friends, and loved ones had gathered the Wednesday before. “I love her!” Barbara howled, laughing and clapping so excitedly that her dog, Dandy, came rushing to her side. “That’s

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  interviews February 24, 2015

  Lucy Raven

  Lucy Raven is an artist living in New York. Her site-specific installation Tales of Love and Fear—which consists of a custom-built rig of rotating platforms, a stereoscopic photograph split between two projectors, and sound based on field recordings made in India—was commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and will be presented there on Friday, February 27, 2015 at 8 PM.

  TALES OF LOVE AND FEAR is a cousin of Curtains, a work I finished a couple of months ago that uses a similar anaglyph technique of

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  performance December 11, 2014

  Corrine Fitzpatrick

  LAST APRIL, Cleopatra’s housed “Which arbitrary thing are you,” (April 6 to May 4, 2014) a two-person exhibition of sculpture and video by Sara Magenheimer and paintings by Sadie Laska. All of the works were from 2014, with the exception of Magenheimer’s seven-minute video, One Vast Focus, 2011, in which footage of a woman playing tuba before a grove of trees opens onto a quaalude-paced concert scene overlaid with text from Ada Lovelace’s megalomaniacal-Romantic musings to her mother—“I can throw rays from every corner of the universe into one vast focus”—which is then read aloud by the

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  picks April 27, 2014

  Urs Fischer

  Have you seen the Urs Fischer in the old Chase? That is what my friend asked as we walked up Delancey toward the bridge. No, I had not. We crossed over and entered the former bank through spray-painted doors. For the next twenty minutes, we proceeded (under the amiable gaze of two suited guards) to traipse through the branch like happy kids. The space still bears corporate insignia, institutional carpet, ghastly lighting, and the basic architectural skeleton of its past self.

  Into this capitalist graveyard—temporarily operated by Gagosian Gallery—Urs Fischer has deposited mermaid pig bro w/ hat,

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  picks March 20, 2014

  Moyra Davey

  In Moyra Davey’s new exhibition, “Ornament and Reproach,” two paintings bearing the artist’s name and the show’s title hang amid predominately photographic work. In lieu of standard opening and closing information is the curious timespan, “June 5 1647 to April 14 1730.” Funerary and historical, this modest preamble signals a layering of effects that requests an active reading.

  Vestiges of the artist’s earlier works populate the space; time—as subject and as tempo—is inferred and occurs in their re-configurations. Black-and-white prints from Davey’s “Bottle Grid” series, 1996-2000, portray empty

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  picks June 14, 2013

  Mathieu Lefevre

  “Irony as method” is how Mathieu Lefevre, the Canadian artist who passed away in 2011 at the age of thirty, once described his work. The ten pieces—indeed a litany of wisecracks and one-liners—included in his first posthumous solo exhibition, “The Stuff Things Are Made Of,” surefootedly pronounce the clear-sighted diligence of a skilled maker who consistently infused his own mischief and pluck into the structure, surface, and content of his artworks.

  Wash Me, 2009, spells its title out in the perfect layer of dust Lefevre applied over acrylic paint on canvas, evoking the obvious simile of one

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  interviews November 05, 2012

  YES! Association/Föreningen JA!

  The YES! Association/Föreningen JA! is an institution, an art worker, and a group of people working to overthrow heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, and capitalist power structures by redistributing access to financial resources, space, and time within the art world. The collective’s first aim was to help Sweden’s public art organizations tackle their inequality problems by offering the chance to sign an Equal Opportunities Agreement. Their new multipart work SMOKING AREA is on view through December 21 in the exhibition “Anti-Establishment,” at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson,

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  picks October 04, 2012

  Zoe Leonard

  The checklist for Zoe Leonard’s current solo exhibition lists the materials composing her twenty-three-by-twenty-nine-foot camera obscura, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, as “lens and darkened room.” As with the installation’s previous iterations in Cologne, London, and Venice, the inventory could very well extend to include sunlight, subjective time, bodies, optics, perception, and the outside world, offering its view. Here, just east of Tenth Avenue, Manhattan is the source of sight and sound. Footsteps on the floor above, honking cars, voices drifting from the High Line and street below—Leonard

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  interviews May 21, 2012

  Ulrike Müller

  Ulrike Müller is an Austrian-born, New York–based artist whose work investigates form as a mode of critical engagement. In 2007, Müller found an inventory list describing a collection of feminist T-shirts at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She distributed individual image descriptions from this list to 100 artists, inviting them to translate the texts into drawings. The result, Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists, is a collaborative rethinking of the queer, feminist archive. The project’s debut exhibition is at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria through

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  picks November 23, 2011

  Deville Cohen

  The five aluminum-mounted ink-jet prints on view in Deville Cohen’s first New York solo exhibition seem like souvenirs from the main event: a nineteen-minute video playing on a large screen in the gallery’s basement. Combining photographs of set pieces from the video with stock images of outer space, the decontextualized photomontages fall flat as isolated works. Within the first thirty seconds of Poison (all works 2011), a pair of hands reaches across what appears to be a book. The “book” is pried open to reveal a pop-up paper sculpture depicting rows of parking meters. One seamless edit later,