Dawn Chan

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  picks April 07, 2012

  Jimmie Durham

  In 1984, Jimmie Durham described himself as “a Cherokee artist who strives to make Cherokee art that is considered just as universal and without limits as the art of any white man.” This challenge—to make work that reads as both personal and universal—has long been familiar to artists who’ve watched themselves or their work get marginalized. In his current show, Durham has found yet another sly, inspired solution to that very conundrum he pinpointed nearly twenty years ago and has continued to address ever since.

  “Maquette for a Museum of Switzerland” takes a playful look at the nation that gave

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  interviews December 27, 2011

  Thomas Chen and Adele Röder

  As one half of the collective DAS INSTITUT, Adele Röder has often employed printed textiles in the multimedia exhibitions she stages with Kerstin Brätsch. Thomas Chen, designer of the women’s clothing label Emmanuelle, developed his own line after working for a number of other designers, including Thakoon; his designs are currently stocked at Creatures of Comfort in New York and Colette in Paris, among other stores. Röder and Chen recently decided to collaborate on a print for Emmanuelle’s Spring 2012 collection. Here, they talk about the process that led them to the final product.

  OUR IDEA was

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  diary September 24, 2011

  Getting Real

  DRUNKEN ELK SAVED FROM APPLE TREE, read a recent Swedish newspaper headline. The elk, as it turned out, had gotten sloshed on fermented apples. Meanwhile, it was on account of vodka that I headed to Stockholm, where several dozen curators, artists, and journalists converged this past Friday to attend Absolut’s award ceremony and gala dinner honoring artist Anri Sala. The passengers on my flight to Arlanda airport, on disembarking, found themselves face to face with a group of screaming girls who’d gathered (as one explained to me) to greet Eurovision-winning pop duo Jedward, rumored to be arriving

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  interviews August 18, 2011

  Kellie Jones

  Kellie Jones is an associate professor in the art history department at Columbia University. Her book EyeMinded: Living And Writing Contemporary Art, was recently published by Duke University Press and offers a selection of her essays and art writing from 1985–2006. In addition to an introduction in which Jones recounts growing up around artists and art on the Lower East Side, EyeMinded includes commissioned texts from Jones’s parents—poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones—her sister, Lisa Jones, and her husband, Guthrie Ramsey. Kellie Jones is also the curator of “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los

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  interviews December 18, 2010

  Ohad Meromi

  The Israeli-born, New York–based artist Ohad Meromi was recently commissioned by Art in General to create an installation in its sixth-floor galleries. In response, he has constructed an evolving rehearsal or workshop space in which participants can gather to create what he terms “ad-hoc group sculpture.” The show is on view until March 5, 2011.

  IN THE PAST, I’ve worked a lot with architecture and based my installations on all sorts of dystopian sites: a border crossing, a classroom, a clinic. Eventually, a particular place began to stick with me: the stage—the place that can shift into all those

• print December 2010

  “Make Yourself at Home”

  “Make Yourself at Home” set out to explore notions of hospitality in a world marked by globalization, mass displacement, and growing xenophobia. Curators Charlotte Bagger Brandt and Koyo Kouoh invoked everything from the writings of Jacques Derrida to the Danish term hygge, a word akin to “coziness,” in the text accompanying their exhibition of ten artists’ work, which included painting, video, photography, installation, and performance. Unexpectedly, the most incisive works on view often included aspects of either monumentality or social experiment. One of the more imposing pieces, Pascale

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  interviews October 08, 2010

  Wooloo

  Known for “New Life Copenhagen,” an initiative that paired international visitors with host families during the city’s climate summit last year, the collective Wooloo is currently operating “New Life Residency” as part of Manifesta 8 in Murica, Spain. For this project, the group has invited five artists to live and work entirely in the dark. In addition, each artist has been paired with a visually impaired assistant. Here, cofounders Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard describe their latest project.

  WHEN WE WERE PRESENTED WITH the curatorial investigation by Manifesta and the Chamber of

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  interviews July 28, 2010

  Bless

  The conceptual fashion and design collaborative Bless was founded by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag in 1997. Their current exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz, “N°41,” is an immersive installation that reprises a number of their previous “products.” Here, they talk about transforming the exhibition setting into an intimate and user-friendly environment for their interactive items. The show closes on August 29.

  THE KUNSTHAUS GRAZ is an amorphous, gray space lit by massive neon-light spirals that demand a lot of attention. It’s quite different from the sort of venue we tend to like—yet it was tempting

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  picks December 23, 2009

  “Telling Secrets: Codes, Captions and Conundrums in Contemporary Art”

  By including numerous works from the 1960s through the ’90s—and by omitting performance and video—the curators of “Telling Secrets: Codes, Captions, and Conundrums in Contemporary Art” imbue the show with a strangely old-school feel, seeming to insist that the pieces on view, and more traditional media in general, haven’t fallen from the limelight through any fault of their own. The featured artists, doyennes like Ann Hamilton and Niki de Saint Phalle, are all female, and given the museum’s mission of promoting women in the arts, an unavoidable question arises: Ought questions of gender inform

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  picks November 08, 2009

  Martin Flemming

  In Martin Flemming’s solo show, twelve individually titled spherical lamps hang from the ceiling at different heights, forming a tilted ring that recalls the seats of an amusement park’s octopus ride in full swing. Clumps and streaks of sandy sediment create patterns along the interior surfaces of the orbs, each of which is tinted a different hue from Bauhaus master Johannes Itten’s color wheel. The lamps themselves are Bauhaus designs. The residue is salt from the Dead Sea, which the exhibition’s press release links to Israel’s concentration of gradually eroding buildings created by the many

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  interviews June 26, 2009

  MOS

  MOS is a self-described “collective of designers, architects, thinkers, and state-of-the-art weirdos.” As the 2009 winners of MoMA/P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center’s Young Architects’ Program, they were invited to construct a landscape to adorn P.S. 1’s outdoor courtyard, which will also serve as the environment for the museum’s Warm Up summer music series. Here, Michael Meredith, cofounder of MOS with Hilary Sample, speaks about their winning proposal, Afterparty.

  ABJECTION RUNS THROUGHOUT AFTERPARTY, especially in its use of materials. There are two nearly monolithic materials at play: the

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  interviews March 18, 2009

  Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom

  Choreographer Ann Carlson and video artist Mary Ellen Strom, frequent collaborators, recently created a six-channel video installation, Meadowlark, for their exhibition at the DeCordova Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on view until May 17. Here, Strom discusses their new work, as well as their use of spectacle and humor to provide spaces of reflection.

  MEADOWLARK BEGAN, AS MOST WORK DOES, as a research project. The project involved the painter and illustrator Frederic Remington and his method of circulating imagery. In his painting Indians Simulating Buffalo [1908], Remington depicts a pair