picks December 07, 2021

Sadie Barnette

Installed in the back corner of this space is Sadie Barnette’s large installation, Family Tree, 2021, a collection of framed photographs, collages, and drawings that visually map the artist’s lineage. From left to right, the work’s dominant colors shift to form a rainbow across two walls. Except for one childhood snapshot of Barnette, she is notably absent from all of the photos on display, which mostly feature birthday cakes, plates of food, domestic interiors or exteriors, and gatherings of kin. In the spray-painted drawings, however, the artist elusively positions herself in relation to

picks April 15, 2020

Eduardo Basualdo

Open the door to Scrap Metal Gallery and you will walk right into the first work, Estanque (pond) (all works 2020). Standing tall from floor to ceiling, the matte-black, obdurate mass resembles a meteorite. Skirting gingerly around its perimeter, you will find a slim opening that leads to the behemoth’s center. From here, the rock looks less substantial: Thousands of perforations form a galaxy of light. To create this and other works, Eduardo Basualdo manipulated large sheets of Cinefoil, a black aluminum foil used to block light in stage productions. The resulting objects borrow theatrical

picks February 11, 2020

Sean McFarland

A highlight of Sean McFarland’s latest body of work is the sole video he produced for the exhibition “4.5 billion years a lifetime.” Displayed alone in a small space next to the main gallery, Light, Space, Time Assemblage, 2019, frames a large rock off the California coast and the waves gently crashing around it. The work's three-minute loop is composed of a trio of superimposed single-color projections: The red, green, and blue versions overlap but never perfectly synchronize, giving the otherwise tranquil image a hallucinatory effect. As the individual projectors are turned on at the beginning

picks June 30, 2016

Richard T. Walker

In his photographs, Richard T. Walker is less interested in documenting landscapes than in transmitting their ineffable qualities: the sound a mountain makes or the way a rock refracts a beam of light. In the sculptural installations, video, and photographs on view here, Walker’s interaction with the landscape of the American West registers with the same sublime quality as Ansel Adams’s photographs of Yosemite or even Albert Bierstadt’s pristine paintings of the Sierra Nevada.

Walker takes several different approaches to capturing the vastness of the western environs. The consequences of everything

picks April 11, 2016

Serge Attukwei Clottey

Serge Attukwei Clottey’s plastic tapestries bring to light one of the paradoxes of environmental intervention: creating a new problem while attempting to fix an old one. To address the drought in Clottey’s native Ghana in the early 2000s, then-president John Kufuor had water dispersed across the country in brightly colored jugs that came to be known as Kufuor gallons. Since discarded, thousands of these plastic containers now pollute the Ghanaian landscape and serve as the artist’s primary sculptural material. After cutting the jugs into rectangles and arranging the pieces into a kind of patchwork

picks February 14, 2016

Noam Rappaport

There’s a bit of sneakiness at work in Noam Rappaport’s new paintings on view in “Dogleg” at Ratio 3. Each comprises two intersecting rectangles, merged at an oblique angle to create one large-scale, custom-built canvas. Riffing on this template in the four dogleg paintings in the exhibition, Rappaport focuses on how to resolve the moment of intersection, and this is where cunning comes into play in the artist’s process. Building up the surface of his canvases with acrylic modeling paste, Rappaport takes several approaches: excavating a smaller rectangle where the two larger ones overlap and

picks November 27, 2015

Julian Hoeber

Julian Hoeber’s exhibition “The Inward Turn” pivots around the idea of an imaginary airport terminal from which people take off only to return to the same point, as if traveling the length of a Mobius strip or circumnavigating a Klein bottle. In the paintings, sculptures, and drawings on view here, Hoeber’s metaphor of futile movement manifests in repeated forms, echoing back and forth across media.

The artist approached the making of these works with an eye informed by a childhood surrounded by architects and engineers. Clustered on the back wall of the gallery is a group of drawings, including

picks May 26, 2015

Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard began her ongoing “Sun Photographs” series in 2010, the year after finishing Analogue, 1998–2009, an exhaustive photographic archive (on view at MoMA this summer) that documents decaying bodegas and other stores fading from the urban landscape. Whereas Analogue is rooted in the elements of daily life, Leonard’s pictures of the sun mark a departure from the tangible for the ethereal. They also adapt Analogue’s approach of shooting a subject head on, and in this Leonard breaks a fundamental rule of photography. The results on view in this show capture the sun’s brightness, registered

Danica Sachs