picks December 28, 2020

Erdem Taşdelen

When researching history, it’s perhaps obvious that the concept of a “primary source” implies the existence of information that is secondary, tertiary, and onward, each forming a link in an interpretive chain growing farther and farther from the event where it all began. However, in Erdem Taşdelen’s solo exhibition here, “A Minaret for the General’s Wife”—co-commissioned by Mercer Union and the South Asian Visual Arts Centre—the presumed linearity of historical record is replaced with a dense network of fictions, rumors, and narrative fragments, accumulated with no clear beginning or end.

The

picks June 19, 2020

Marla Hlady and Christof Migone

The sound that emanates from Marla Hlady and Christof Migone’s exhibition “Swan Song” is a sustained jangling tone that gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, adjusts itself. The source of the music, audible before it is visible, is an eponymous kinetic sculpture, also titled Swan Song, featuring two curving tubes of worn copper that both widen at the mouth. They were originally functional parts at the Balvenie Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland, where Hlady and Migone were artists-in-residence last year through the neighboring and affiliated Glenfiddich Distillery. The audio was also “found” at the

picks January 10, 2020

Katie Bethune-Leamen

In “La douche écossaise,” Katie Bethune-Leamen's recent irregularly shaped porcelain sculptures are complemented by bronze casts of similarly lumpy forms. Embellished with imperfect pearls, these new blobs sit atop thin, brightly colored steel rods with wide bases, whose height gives the works a human scale. Indeed, the mushy abstractions of these objects make bodily associations hard to ignore—each piece could be an ear, a tongue, an internal organ, or a thing one ingests or expels—even as the luster of bronze and pearl creates an equally compelling sense of the ornamental.

The pearl, a hardened

Daniella Sanader