print July/August 2020

Julian Charrière

The earliest signs of nature gone awry in the classic 1954 black-and-white Godzilla are essentially moments of monochromatic abstraction: A glimmer of light roils the ocean’s surface from below, then a slick, rutted mound—ostensibly a reptilian back—emerges from the waterline. Towards No Earthly Pole (all works 2019)—the 104-minute video in Julian Charrière’s solo show at Sean Kelly Gallery—samples some of the cinematic language of this and other early creature features, using discomfitingly unrecognizable forms to evoke the sublime horror of untamed wilderness. But here, ambiguity never lets

print May/June 2020

Zoë Sheehan Saldaña

In 1968, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication famously marked by its countercultural ideals. As Brand explained, it confronted Americans with a call to action: “Ask not what your country can do for you; do it yourself!” Brand’s ethos animates much of artist Zoë Sheehan Saldaña’s solo show at the Aldrich. Titled “There Must Be Some Way Out of Here,” Sheehan’s exhibition prods at the relationship between artisanal craft and industrial production, and posits that the pairing might be uniquely American at heart. At first glance, the show seems like a nondescript gathering of

picks January 09, 2020

Odessa Straub

Is that a figure? An organism? An ecosystem? An organ? Odessa Straub’s latest show holds back answers, with gratifying results. The materials of the thirteen pieces on view—wall works and freestanding assemblages—include wooden armatures, swaths of fabric, and glass cloches containing filtered water and aquatic plants. Somehow, the show manages to merge an abstract painter’s interest in shapes, a botanist’s preoccupation with closed systems, and a teenager’s crush on sex itself. In Fostering Freedom of Filth (thong༄ƃuoɥʇ) (all works cited, 2019), for example, an LED grow light starts to look a

previews January 2020

“Cao Fei: Blueprints”

Curated by Joseph Constable

Plenty of artists have drawn inspiration from their studios. But Cao Fei’s atelier will become uniquely fascinating fodder for two new installations appearing in her first major solo exhibition in the UK. One will draw on her work space in a former Soviet-era Beijing cinema—its decor and multifaceted functionality alike embodying the zeitgeist of a rapidly urbanizing China in the 1950s and ’60s. In the other, her studio kitchen will serve as the model for a self-contained room that will allow visitors to encounter real objects while also interfacing with augmented and

print November 2019

Chris Bogia

Living coral, a “life-affirming” orangey-pink, is the color of the year, according to Pantone. Emerald dominated 2013, turquoise reigned over 2010, and 2016’s homecoming queen was rose quartz (also known, notoriously, as millennial pink). And while Pantone might not have explicitly been on Chris Bogia’s mind when he produced the sculptures for his first solo show in New York, variations of the aforementioned hues make bold appearances in several of the works on view.

His sculptures portray decorative trees (rendered semiabstractly via crescents, cylinders, and other basic geometric forms), but

previews September 2019

OTOBONG NKANGA

Curated by Anne Barlow

Otobong Nkanga prominently features materials in her artwork, and not just for their formal aspects: “The tangible makes it possible for you to believe your memory,” she noted in a 2014 interview. The Nigerian-born, Belgium-based artist uses everything from kola nuts to potted plants to trace the ways colonialism has intertwined the global flow of goods with the many fraught individual journeys that add up to mass displacement. One installation on view this autumn at Tate St. Ives, Tsumeb Fragments, 2015, is an assemblage of relics from Nkanga’s journey to the eponymous

print May 2019

Ian Cheng

There seems to be a long, tongue-in-cheek tradition of giving machines with artificial intelligence monosyllabic names that hover somewhere between the casual sobriquets of garden-party guests and the vanilla acronyms of corporate lingo. Consider HAL 9000, the murderous AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Or Tay, Microsoft’s ill-fated chatbot. Playing along, perhaps, Ian Cheng has dubbed his latest simulation Bag of Beliefs (BOB), 2018. A digital-age gargoyle with a catfish-like head and a spindly, segmented body textured like red coral, BOB was set loose in a beige-walled virtual vivarium, left

print October 2018

EVENING SHIFT

YOU CAN NOW PLAY Bill Viola’s languorous first-person video game, The Night Journey, in your living room, from your own sofa, with your own PlayStation controller. Set in a dreamlike, largely black-and-white outdoor world, The Night Journey sends its protagonist on an adventure with no clear objective. Players might find themselves moving through Seussian vegetation or drifting, injury-free, down a cliff; wading into an ocean’s depths or venturing into isolated buildings that mysteriously turn into ruins once they’ve been explored.

The Night Journey began in 2007 as a collaboration between Viola

print May 2018

Kishio Suga

“I constantly think about how to confuse or distort the typical order of things,” artist Kishio Suga wrote for a 2005 essay anthologized in Kishio Suga’s Work from a Zen Perspective (2008). “Viewers would be rendered speechless before an artwork of this kind. In a matter of seconds or minutes, their thoughts would shift from established orders to new ones.” One might expect such an endeavor to require the use of jarring force or violence—anything other than the sanguine grace that permeated Suga’s latest show at Blum & Poe. But like an expert tour guide, Suga led the way down various side

picks April 06, 2018

Jesse Chun

“Language is not transparent.” The reality of that dictum (which has appeared in Mel Bochner’s colorful pieces across several decades) is on full view in Jesse Chun’s latest show, here. Indebted to various text-driven Conceptual practices, Chun’s exhibition nonetheless also functions as a reminder: Often, the chosen medium of text art’s most visible pioneers wasn’t just any old language. It was English—a fact that can easily slip past the notice of native speakers.

Chun’s exhibition includes prints, drawings, sculpture, video, and an audio track of vowel sounds emanating from a waist-high, bulbous

print Summer 2017

Thiago Rocha Pitta

For those growing fatigued by contemporary art’s ongoing invocations of the Anthropocene and its attendant aesthetics of detritus and scorched-earth urban sprawl, Thiago Rocha Pitta’s show “The First Green” offered something of a reprieve. The sculpture, video, photograph, and series of paintings in this Brazilian artist’s second solo endeavor at Marianne Boesky Gallery together formed an arcadian vision starring an unlikely subject: cyanobacteria.

Before the Dawn, 2017, a video Rocha Pitta shot at Australia’s Hamelin Pool, features a sea of rock formations known as stromatolites, or layered

diary May 03, 2017

Just Between Friends

SOME FUND-RAISERS, you can tell, are held together by the type-A wrath of a corporate-events planner. But not the annual Friends of Artists Space dinner, which is sweeter and much more interesting. It is held at the beginning of Frieze Art Week at the Ukrainian National Home in the East Village. There is no assigned seating. Everything unfolds leisurely, under the grand Art Deco¬–esque, mirrored ceiling of a banquet hall above the main restaurant, where old New Yorkers decide if they want their pierogies boiled or fried.

Last night’s dinner honored, in absentia, the artist, philosopher, and yogi

Dawn Chan