picks December 14, 2017

Flo Brooks

Flo Brooks’s sextet of acrylic paintings here is rendered with precise strokes in bright colors. The artist depicts himself and his parents in the middle of sundry familial activities. You feel like a voyeur running your eyes over these intimate, quotidian tableaux. The maintenance of objects and people is a running theme: Brooks dyes his mother’s gray hairs, helps her deal with a dodgy washing machine, and lies on the floor while working with his father to repair a bathtub. Nobody wants or wants to be a broken thing.

Having recently moved back to his provincial hometown in South West England (

picks October 31, 2017

Terre Thaemlitz

Stepping into the darkness of trans artist Terre Thaemlitz’s electroacoustic audio-video installation here, Interstices, 2000–03, one hears a calm and assertive voice describing a dick slowly penetrating someone’s butt. With each inch, we hear the bottom loudly grunt with pain and pleasure while the screen moans through rapid bursts of light. The visual absence of flesh in this moment demands a certain level of erotic imagination.

The looped eighteen-minute video repurposes music, text, and images from her 2000 album of the same title. Via techniques of framing and “systolic composition” (creating

picks July 11, 2017

Justin Fitzpatrick

Justin Fitzpatrick knows how to toy with perception—not just in the way that we see a thing, but also with how we might approach it in the first place. Flowing between three rooms, the paintings and sculptures in this exhibition turn living organisms into architectural forms and esoteric systems with a stylish, queenly panache. In The Song of Men (all works 2017), a regal-looking aluminum egg sits upon a glass sheet on a stool. Due to its size and scaly, ornamental surface, one can imagine the egg containing some fabulous reptilian creature. Coming out of its sides are cables that connect to

picks May 31, 2017

Evelyn Taocheng Wang

Having trained in China, the Netherlands, and Germany, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s first solo exhibition in London vacillates between the East and the West. Drawings and videos are placed on walls and display units painted a soothing shade of pastel green. The addition of a gray rug, along with various floor and table lamps, makes the room feel oddly domestic. Yet ideas surrounding sex and death run through this comfortably appointed show.

On the walls hang a number of new mixed-media drawings on rice paper that depict scenes from chapters of Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (1792), one of China’s

picks May 04, 2017

Ann Craven

Beware, if you’re not a big fan of cute animals: Ann Craven’s current exhibition is chock-full of them, nearly twenty years’ worth. Pandas, birds, cats, and deer, among other critters, are rendered with soft, clean, and precise strokes. The creatures appear regal, as if properly sitting for their portraits, calm and even aware of the viewer’s presence—to a rather unsettling degree. Craven’s gaze is like that of a proud owner or perhaps mother. The canvases, rich with buoyant pinks, greens, and blues, exude a kind of loving care. Their tenderly delineated backgrounds are full of trees, grass,

picks May 02, 2017

“The problem with having a body / is that it always needs to be somewhere”

This exhibition, curated by Nora Heidorn, brings together eight artists, seven of whom are women. Proposing convergences and common lines across generations and practices, the works shown here attempt to capture and sometimes contain the female body. The show provokes questions about materiality but more crucially highlights ideas surrounding embodiment and the politics of belonging to or being excluded from a place and time.

Alexandra Bircken’s Doris, 2013, a headless, halved female torso made out of a wax cast filled with crumpled, grungy clothing, and Zilia Sánchez’s Luna VI, 1986, an oval

picks March 02, 2017

Ghislaine Leung

Ghislaine Leung’s current exhibition presents sound, videos, and sculptures among a variety of vinyl texts installed on ten large glass panels. The pieces all bleed into one another: Sounds become textual in their ability to lead the imaginary; words appear audible by incarnating registers of tone, style, and drive; narratives become literally built in as objects.

Playing from a round speaker inserted into a wall is a loop of scores and sound effects that evoke a connection to silent cartoons. In Huh, 2016, doors open and close, phones vibrate, voices murmur. The vinyl texts seem to recount,

Eliel Jones