Daniel Culpan

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  picks July 06, 2018

  “Land of Lads, Land of Lashes”

  At the margin of the margins, the three largely ignored female avant-garde artists of this exhibition carved out their own space of bold experimentalism in the 1960s and 1970s—in some cases, literally. Growing up in Poland in the twilight years of Stalin’s regime, Wanda Czelkowska began her career creating monumental Socialist sculptures. Though she later rejected this totalitarian aesthetic, its repressed energy teems beneath the surface of her raw Brutalist vision. Her “Heads” series, 1964–72, evokes a genderless Easter Island, contorted and amorphous. Some heads are cracked or bisected,

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  picks April 16, 2018

  “Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers”

  A butch wears a Stetson and boxy suit, her leg cocked raffishly over a table. A group of cross-dressers in 1950s Washington, DC, live out their fantasies of glamour—sheer dresses and Joan Crawford hair—in suburban living rooms. And a trans showgirl named Bambi is getting her hair fixed by a muscled dancer in a dark Dusty Springfield beehive wig. These works appear in “Under Cover,” an exhibition that untethers the fixed absolutes of male and female, revealing gender to be a rich and shifting spectrum.

  This trove of around three hundred found photographs, unearthed by French filmmaker Sébastien

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  picks February 01, 2018

  Paola Ciarska

  Paola Ciarska’s first solo exhibition in London is akin to a comic-strip reimagining of the British television game show Through the Keyhole. Her series of painstakingly intricate paintings—each not much larger than an A6 postcard—chronicles a series of rooms: the homes of friends, family, and acquaintances of the Polish-born, Newcastle, England–based artist.

  The miniature scale of these eight works from 2017—each one Untitled (Cześć, Pani Ciarska [Hi, Ms. Ciarska] Series)—demands close attention, and repeated looking unfolds strange new frissons and surprise details. One room, with garishly

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  picks January 11, 2018

  Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley

  In “We Are Ghosts,” Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley perform an antic kind of haunting: dark jokers leering from the unquiet slumbers of history. In their new video, In The Body of The Sturgeon, 2017, we’re plunged into the claustrophobia of the fictional USS Sturgeon at the end of World War II. The twelve-minute narrative is saturated with various fluids: You can almost smell the thwarted testosterone, the sweat, the ethanol swigged straight from the can by a desperate sailor. There’s even an ode to golden showers, in which Mary, with drawn-on chest hair and metal funnel bra, performs a