picks April 13, 2022

Jorian Charlton

Moving through “Jorian Charlton: Out of Many,” an exhibition of work by the Toronto-based photographer, one is struck by the dynamism of her subjects. Several of the large-scale portraits feature individuals—mostly adults and a handful of children—looking out assertively at the viewer. In some cases, we’re invited to witness domestic intimacies: In Untitled (Shai & Lex), 2020, a young man embraces a woman sitting atop a kitchen counter; with eyes closed, he nestles his face against her chest. Meanwhile, the woman looks directly at the camera with a somewhat equivocal expression. Neither guarded

interviews March 29, 2022

Margaux Williamson

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Taking in the fifteen years of work in “Interiors,” the first career-spanning survey of the Toronto-based painter Margaux Williamson, one senses an uncanny presentiment of pandemic life and its rhythms. Glowing laptop screens, half-drunk glasses of water, ornate rugs, rumpled bedsheets, handwritten notes, and the occasional dog seem to appear and recede from focus, evoking the displacements of memory and the alternately comforting and claustrophobic weight of extended time spent at home. These upended domestic tableaux display, as Ben Lerner says in an accompanying text, the “unstable relations

picks October 19, 2020

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino

In Jennifer Rose Sciarrino’s solo show “for Swan,” the artist proposes a science-fiction conceit for a series of sculptures that resemble composite organisms. Cast-glass works in glimmering shades of amber, green, and blue—canary 1, canary 2, canary 3, and canary 4, all 2020—embody forms inspired by species of endangered lichen. These translucent, wall-mounted objects adorn the gallery’s perimeter and appear to gaze out at a grouping of carved alabaster pieces, which rest upon tidy stacks of kiln bricks in the center of the room.

The polished-and-sanded carvings—in mottled slate, cream, raspberry,

picks May 18, 2020

Spring Hurlbut

During week six of isolation, I heard a man yelling, “Black holes! Black holes!” into a train yard. The following week, I saw Spring Hurlbut’s “Dyadic Circles” in the Georgia Scherman Projects online viewing room, and the man’s cries came into eclipse-like focus.

The photographs in “Dyadic Circles” inevitably read as somber: Each depicts a neatly bisected circle of funerary ash from humans or animals arranged on a square black background that recalls the zero-point energy of Malevich’s Black Square, 1915. The halves of each vertically divided sphere are different tones of shimmering gray or sandy

picks November 20, 2019

Eric N. Mack

Eric N. Mack’s sewn, taped, painted, bleached, and dyed assemblages evoke the ephemeral architectures of circuses, children’s forts, and encampments as much as the decorative vocabulary of high fashion. With their altered, locally gathered, secondhand materials, the works pose questions about the reasons, from playful to desperate, behind building precarious structures.

Paramount, 2015, the largest hanging piece on view, is suspended by ropes in the center of the gallery. Its sail-like rectangular swath of fabric is almost always visible as one moves throughout the space, and functions as a

picks May 13, 2019

Anne Low

Anne Low’s exhibition at Franz Kaka, a basement-level gallery, is sparse and winsome. At once obliging and testing the parameters of a subterranean space, her works—which include a maple-and-basswood chair with carved zoomorphic details (Chair for a woman, 2018); a handwoven rolled mattress (Dust bed, 2018); and a car tire shrouded in hand-dyed, handwoven pink silk (Tire bag, 2019)—feel half-forgotten, as if they were left behind in a storage unit.

The title of Low’s show, “Bletting,” describes the process whereby fruit softens, ripens, and eventually rots, which aptly summarizes the atmosphere

picks March 18, 2019

Kara Hamilton

Kara Hamilton’s “Water in Two Colours” consists of three biomorphic sculptures, a delicate human-size crown, and a takeaway text by writer Raimundas Malašauskas, each of which explores what the artist calls “jewellery for architecture.” Hamilton draws on her training in both architecture and design to pose questions about value and its representation; her works are made of brass, aluminum, silver, gold, fool’s gold, diamonds, pearl, and concrete. The large-scale pieces are fleshly: Two brass elevator doors are reconfigured into forms reminiscent of cetacean tongues in states of repose (Purple

Esmé Hogeveen