David Everitt Howe

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  picks October 04, 2019

  Sam Ekwurtzel

  East River–adjacent ferry queens like myself, who take New York City’s commuter boats up and down the coastlines, will recognize the fat mooring bollards—posts that ships get tied to when docked—in Sam Ekwurtzel’s solo exhibition, “Renderings.” They stand like rigid sentinels here, but looks are deceiving, as what appears in the gallery are actually husks—or perhaps even ghosts—of the original bollards that were created through clever acts of destruction.

  The artist has coated eight of these squat columns, made from aluminum, with layers of a white, high-temperature ceramic material that’s

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  picks June 25, 2019

  Ida Ekblad

  Ida Ekblad makes curious bedfellows of the most random things. For this exhibition, she scoured the streets of Mexico City for debris—such as a beat-up, yellow metal chair; a piece of wall framing; a porcelain bowl—and mashed them together in slabs of wet concrete, letting the assemblage dry poetically ad hoc. That motley assortment, Gold Bug Drift Sculpture (Tepito and Ecatepec), Amor, 2019, alongside other “drift” jumbles, is perhaps the highlight of “Blood Optics,” Ekblad’s first institutional solo show in Mexico City. Arrayed like an obstacle course in an open-air gallery, Ekblad’s blocky

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  picks May 20, 2019

  Shahryar Nashat

  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari once described desire as a machine. The way Shahryar Nashat grapples with it, especially in the face of death, is compulsively machinic.

  In the artist’s first institutional solo show in New York, coldly lit and antiseptic spaces—some of which have windows tinted a sickly pink—feature a suite of sculptures called Bone In, 2019, which look like chunks of red meat Saran-wrapped around stiff boards. The works are appended with little printouts of statements to a theoretical lover: “Since I met you I’ve been trippin,” “Why you acting like you don’t know me?” Directly

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  picks March 25, 2019

  Nolan Simon

  In “Other People,” painter Nolan Simon presents figurative, nearly photorealistic portraits of the most economical kind, zooming in on feet, chests, hands, and other appendages and objects instead of on a full body or face. Hung sparely, the modest canvases are surrounded by swaths of white wall, giving them an almost religious aura. Two ankle sock–clad feet rest butterfly-style on the floor in Ankle Socks, Pre-Owned (all works 2019). Small in scale, the painting is hung alone on its wall, giving it the appearance of a tender, fetishistic devotional. Adjacent to it we see Dark Droste, Black