Dylan Huw

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  picks February 03, 2023

  “The Voices of a Tempest”

  Among the achievements of Une tempête (1969), Aimé Césaire’s transposition of Shakespeare’s late romance onto the imaginative landscape of 1960s anticolonialism, is its sensitivity to how language and translation have the capacity to make and unmake worlds. That sensitivity, and the Martinican’s later writings more generally, provides conceptual scaffolding for a group exhibition in which the construction of elaborate fictions, drawing on the residuum of struggles past, is a strategy both of translation (of one epoch, medium, or cultural milieu to another) and survival. Emphasized are the sardonic

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  print February 2023

  Cerith Wyn Evans

  None of the sculptures in “….)(” make contact with the floor; the entire exhibition seems to levitate. Throughout this sly presentation of recent work by Cerith Wyn Evans—the artist’s first significant institutional show in his home country of Wales—our gaze is directed upward, his signature in hanging neon forming an unlikely kinship with Mostyn’s airy chambers. Easy on the eye and knowingly impenetrable, the show provokes awe and disorientation in equal measure.

  A primary claim of much contemporary sculpture is to untangle—to dissect, to lay bare. Evans embraces the tangle itself. Across a

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  picks November 01, 2022

  Rene Matić

  Many Rivers, 2022, the video that anchors London-based multidisciplinarian Rene Matić’s largest exhibition to date, seats its viewers on a wooden church bench. We are guided to consider its intimate documentary narrative—which orbits around the experiences of the artist’s father, Paul, within variously hostile environments—as one underpinned by questions of faith and of the endurance of the soul. While Matić’s visual idiom utilizes imagery from markedly unexpected contexts, the artist’s address, here as throughout the exhibition, is characterized by a rare memoiristic sincerity. The sharp

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  picks August 26, 2022

  Lou Lou Sainsbury

  Four words protrude, stigmata-like, from a patch of white wall above the gallery’s double doors: “Sign reads: euphoria only.” That they appear next to a glowing emergency-exit sign seems apposite. Lou Lou Sainsbury, in her debut London solo, “Earth Is a Deadname,” unravels the means by which vocabularies created without our consent structure how we relate to our environments. The “interplanetary poetics” devised by Sainsbury and her collaborators articulate strategies of imagining that can surmount the claustrophobic logic of quotidian language, fixating on how narratives of trans being and