print January 2010

Tim Roda

The black in Tim Roda’s black-and-white photographs is inky, saturated, and absolute, and the whites are moony, stark, and often, although not always, provided by intense spotlights. Within these atmospheric extremes Roda stages tableaux reminiscent of myths, fables, fairy tales, and parables, often starring his son Ethan, and using a mixture of inventive props, costumes, and prosthetics to create a whatever’s-at-hand aesthetic—so that his stage is cluttered with bits of wood, wire, string, and wallpaper, a sort of art-studio noir. The images in his recent exhibition “Family Matters” (all titled

print December 2009

Janine Antoni

In the works on view in Janine Antoni’s recent exhibition, the body veers between mythical symbol and stubborn flesh and blood—it can be a tool, a vehicle for something else, an expression. In Tear, 2008, the blinking of a gigantic eye, shown in a large video projection, produces the sound of a wrecking ball crashing into a building (the wrecking ball itself is also part of the work and was shown, dented and the worse for wear, not far away). In Conduit, 2009, Antoni has created a set of gargoyle-shaped copper apparatuses through which a woman might pee while standing up, and traces of verdigris

print November 2009

“Maurizio Cattelan Is Dead”

“Maurizio Cattelan Is Dead: Life and Work, 1960–2009” was the most recent of a series of unauthorized homages organized by the Harlem gallery Triple Candie. In a general sense, these exhibitions investigate the ways in which an entity on the sidelines of the art world—one presumably without the right connections or very much money, and definitely without permission—might elbow its way toward the center or, at the very least, force a confrontation with art-world systems of status and access. More specifically, they seem to poke fun at certain key characteristics of the artists they present. Two

print October 2009

Conrad Shawcross

Conrad Shawcross’s Slow Arc III, 2009, is a small light in a cage in a darkened room—already fertile ground for metaphor—mounted on a mechanism that moves up and down, side to side, and forward and back. The light travels slowly from point to point along the three axes that these movements describe, and in so doing casts shadows of the wire mesh onto the walls; these moving shadows make the walls appear to recede and stop and come closer and reverse, a vertiginous and not entirely benignant effect, especially when accompanied by the relentless grinding sound of the mechanism.

Slow Arc III is the

print Summer 2009

Barbara Probst

A woman reaches for something on a coffee table. This is the core event of Barbara Probst’s Exposure #56: NYC, 428 Broome Street, 06.05.08, 1:42 PM (all works 2008). Around it are layers of action that play out, as in Probst’s other works, in multiple photographs taken from various points of view, all of them shot simultaneously by radio-controlled cameras that Probst sets up around and within her tableaux. She does not hide her apparatus, so that the cameras, as they record the limited bits of information afforded by their various angles, also record one another, creating an extra layer of

print April 2009

Mary Lum

The subject of Mary Lum’s exhibition was urban space and time, and the materials of choice were comic books—cut neatly and precisely into strips, slivers, and squares and collaged onto paper, or rendered in paint on panels or, in a wall installation, around the gallery. Like an urban landscape, the comic is an instrument of compression: In the former, wildly diverse lives and cultures are organized by buildings within blocks—by grids within grids—and in the latter neat rows of squares create a shorthand for movement and the passage of time. Lum shatters the order of both, creating, instead, a

picks March 17, 2009

Davide Balula

Davide Balula’s installation, in a gallery that used to be a storage closet, is the simplest of arrangements: a wooden floor with two long, narrow, and asymmetrical white shapes laid into it parquet-style, with two identical wooden shapes mounted flat on the wall above it. The work is in every way interstitial, hovering between dimensions in a reclaimed space. Like many seemingly simple works, it reverberates with echoes, from decorative arts to Minimalism and Conceptual art, from esoteric diagrams to patterns of light on the floor.

The most present ghost is that of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose

print March 2009

Paul P.

Paul P. depicts youth with a longing that suggests nostalgia, although he is himself quite young. His early works feature the faces of young men taken from pornographic photographs shot between the 1960s and the 1980s, portraits that, by denying full-body views, run counter to the imagery’s initial uses and introduce the complexities of the subjects’ emotional life, of the parallel truths of boyishness and sensuality. Lounging, posing, staring languidly into the distance, P.’s most recent subjects appear to be taken from high-fashion and beefcake photographs, though the artist has given them

print February 2009

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is known for hacking various technologies to produce sophisticated remixes. His works have generally radiated a cheerful aesthetic (Super Landscape #1, 2005, for example, is a tranquil scene created by removing everything but the clouds and sky from the Super Mario Brothers video game), while also examining the information that ﬂies under our radar (for Old Friends, 2005, the artist cleverly reprogrammed a DVD of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1981 concert in Central Park to highlight the duo’s disintegrating relationship). Arcangel’s hacks attest to computer mastery, but they do not

print January 2009

Annika von Hausswolff

I Am the Runway of Your Thoughts (all works 2008), the installation that gave Annika von Hausswolff’s recent show its title, is made up of multiple photographs of a woman pointing a model airplane toward her open mouth. Produced in either color or black-and-white, and displayed either singly or in sets of two, three, or five, the photographs are cinematically and dramatically lit, and together have the effect of a slow-motion advance toward a terrible moment.

The gesture in the images is obviously sexual, and obviously violent; the echoes of 9/11 are impossible to ignore, there (still) being no

print December 2008

Jane Hammond

We are the willing and unwilling recipients of so many altered images over the course of a day that assessing their truth content no longer seems important. As a result, the eeriness of photographic manipulation is largely lost to us. Jane Hammond brings it back, in photo-montages in which the rupture inherent to collage is held in tension with the smoothness of fact. On a neon-lit street, a car with two dead deer atop it—laid nose to nose, in the manner of a crest—stops next to two ecclesiastical figures standing with their backs to the camera, almost out of the frame, in magnificently embroidered

print September 2007

Julianne Swartz

Julianne Swartz’s sculpture is often made out of materials one might acquire from a hardware store—wire, cement blocks, PVC piping—but these commonplace components are transformed into objects that mimic human processes of communication and connection.

In a set of seven sculptures, clock mechanisms embedded in concrete blocks move fragile-seeming constructions of wire and string around in slow, small circles. Some of these inch around with an insectoid furtiveness close to the floor, while others, more vertically oriented, respond to viewers’ footsteps like ultrasensitive antennae. But while the

Emily Hall