David C. Shuford

  • Walid Raad, Epilogue II: The Constables, 2021, 7 pigmented ink-jet prints, overall: 6'9 1/2“ x 17'8 3/4”.
    picks March 30, 2022

    Walid Raad

    Walid Raad continues his sly and destabilizing interventions within the exhibition space at Paula Cooper Gallery. Via wall texts, the artist created fictional personages and histories to direct the viewer’s thinking about the various pieces on display, fundamentally shaping how the images will be read. As always, Raad reminds us that grand narratives are frequently subjective, and often veer more closely to fantasy or outright fabrication than we are willing to admit.

    Epilogue II: The Constables, 2021, presents a suite of photographs depicting the backs of paintings that we are told were discovered

  • Chris Marker, Untitled #104, 2011, color photograph mounted on white Sintra, 13 1/4 x 16 3/8". From the series “PASSENGERS,” 2009–11.
    picks December 13, 2021

    Chris Marker

    Even in 2021, one hundred years after the birth of artist and cineast Chris Marker, his work continues to be pertinent and powerful. Notoriously creating a film from long takes of still pictures (La Jetée, 1962), Marker sometimes reversed that process to generate his photographic pieces—solitary frames that were originally captured as moving images. In this exhibition, many of the works have been altered digitally, which shifts them away from exactitude and clear focus, evoking the hazy realm of memory. “We do not remember; we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten,” Marker, who passed in

  • Ron Nagle, Silent Witness, 2021, ceramic, catalyzed polyurethane, and epoxy resin, 4 3/4 x 3 1/2 x 5 1/4".
    picks September 24, 2021

    Ron Nagle

    For more than fifty-five years, Ron Nagle has asserted his quixotic mind and humor throughout a wildly creative life in both sculpture and, perhaps lesser known to art audiences, music. His latest exhibition, “Necessary Obstacles,” presents eighteen new characteristically small objects fashioned from clay, epoxy resin, and catalyzed polyurethane, along with six drawings. Having investigated the cup form’s possibilities for decades, Nagle constructs grotto-like microarchitectures less than six inches high in these recent works, which delineate exterior/interior divides.

    Some sculptures evoke