picks May 12, 2017

Adriana Ramić

A wall-to-wall landscape of fragrant herbs, green moss, and wildflowers fills the gallery with the sweet, aromatic perfume of a garden at morning. For her first solo exhibition, Adriana Ramić has built an ecosystem, titled Every time step that passes has a cost of one (all works 2017), specifically designed to entice ladybugs. In stark contrast to this natural scenery, hundreds of printed images—what the artist describes as flashcards—cascade down the gallery walls, depicting plants, mysterious diagrams, toxic-waste barrels, elephants, kitties, and balaclavas, among countless other things.

The

picks April 14, 2017

Erwin Wurm

Since the 1980s, Erwin Wurm’s “one-minute sculptures” have instigated artful absurdity within the gallery space by asking visitors to act out detailed, irrational tasks with a vast spectrum of common objects. In his latest exhibition, “Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order,” the artist employs midcentury modern furniture as elegant props for a new suite of sculptures that will make most modernist design aficionados squirm.

Deep Snow (all works 2016) invites you to step into two wobbly, oblong holes that have been cut into a pristine Baker Copenhagen bench. In the artist’s own handwriting

picks March 10, 2017

Jeremy Couillard

On a dusty, slate-colored couch reeking of bong water and dirty laundry, Jeremy Couillard invites visitors to experience a multidimensional journey into the great beyond with Alien Afterlife, 2016–17. The installation’s centerpiece is a video game designed and engineered by Couillard, unfurling as a quest for reincarnation amid kaleidoscopic landscapes and eccentric extraterrestrials. When the player is killed, the game abruptly ends with a stern and graphic “NO!” Moments later, you are returned to a limbo/home-base level called the Mother, sans penalty, likely because the character was dead to

picks September 23, 2016

Aneta Grzeszykowska

Skin, with all of its imperfections, wraps itself around the core of Aneta Grzeszykowska’s two-venue exhibition, “No/Body.” At 11R Gallery, a series of macabre photographs, “Selfie,” 2014–15, depicts bizarre lumps of stylized flesh—pigskin that’s been realistically modeled after (mostly female) body parts. Each sickening, deftly produced picture offers up a mongrel kind of beauty, straight from the cinematic annals of horror and science fiction. A hypnotic video, Bolimorfia, 2008–2010, shows the artist, nude, engaged in a surreal ballet, choreographed to a score by Maurice Ravel. Additional

interviews July 25, 2016

Liz Deschenes

Since the early 1990s, Liz Deschenes has made photographs stripped bare, focusing on elements of light, material, and space to expose the aesthetic and conceptual boundaries of the medium. Here, Deschenes discusses her current midcareer retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, as well as her fascination with the histories and challenges of photography. The show is on view through October 18, 2016.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS still being historicized and I’m happy about that, but I’m no historian. What I am most interested in is how long it took for certain discoveries to be worked out. For

interviews June 14, 2016

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are a collaborative duo whose photography-based practice explores themes of institutional authority, surveillance, and consent in an era of rapid technological advances. Here they discuss their recent book, Spirit Is a Bone (Mack, 2015), as well as their first US solo exhibition, which is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through September 11, 2016.

IN MARK TWAIN’S 1905 pamphlet King Leopold’s Soliloquy, he assumes the persona of King Leopold bemoaning the arrival of the camera, the “incorruptible Kodak.” This new technology is able to bear witness to the

picks May 27, 2016

Duane Michals

Duane Michals thrives when pitted against an unfamiliar medium. And having waited over four decades to approach filmmaking, he does so now with the wide-eyed sincerity and innocence of a first-timer. A theater within the gallery looks like a seedy Times Square peep show from another era. A flashy electric arrow guides you toward an entrance with a red velvet curtain. Right outside is a small handwritten note, listing all twelve of the short videos made by the artist over the last two years. Michals describes these pieces as “mini-movies,” and they are as thoughtful and as cosmic as his photos,

picks April 22, 2016

Carlos Reyes

For “Feather Belly,” Carlos Reyes’s solo exhibition here, the peephole in the gallery’s door has been reversed, allowing visitors to peek into the space before entering. What you witness gazing through it is a fisheye perspective on an ominous scene: An enormous, spiky deathtrap occupies the entire entrance floor. In a corner, an orb, colored black and blue like a bruise, shines a beam of white light in the direction of the peephole, signaling the work’s menacing presence to any potential voyeur. An anxiety-inducing sight, to say the least.

The scene unravels, however, once one is inside the

picks March 04, 2016

Jack Early

In the center of a large star-spangled podium is a yellow phonograph, its title painted out in black letters across the front: “Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes!” The tune that plays from this 2014 work is a slapstick jazz number, spoken by the artist, about growing up gay during the Nixon administration in Raleigh, North Carolina. Early’s solo exhibition here is an autobiographical, Technicolor-drenched journey into a childhood that was a little bit sweet and a little bit saccharine, with a whole lot of sexy roiling just beneath.

In Jack, Mr. Early and Friends, 2016, thirty canvas

picks January 15, 2016

“Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015”

“Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015,” featuring the work of nineteen artists and artist collectives, invades sundry realms outside of the strictly photographic, such as sculpture, installation, and performance. The exhibition places a strong emphasis on the networks of communication that connect us all, while highlighting themes of image ownership, branding, and visual syntax.

Using tactics that feel satirical but border on the freakily earnest is DIS, whose installation Related by Contour, 2015, exists as an enormous stock image of a “multiculti” family, plastered to the gallery wall and

interviews October 01, 2015

Gabriel Sierra

Gabriel Sierra is a Colombian-born artist whose site-specific installations and performances aim to create environmental “intrusions” within space. “Numbers in a Room,” a solo exhibition of his work, is on view at SculptureCenter in New York from September 20, 2015, through January 4, 2016. He will also have a solo show at the Kunsthalle Zurich from November 21, 2015, through February 7, 2016.

I’VE BECOME OBSESSED with how we experience the present. For example, I can’t help but think of how this interview is happening in real time, for something that will be transcribed and read at a later date

picks May 08, 2015

Lucas Samaras

Written in a small, clinical typeface near the gallery entrance are the words “Start Here,” which introduce seven hundred digitally manipulated photographs by Lucas Samaras, collectively titled XYZ 1550 - PLACEBO 97, 2015. From there, a biographical narrative unfurls, which finds Samaras revisiting his family photo album in a manner that recalls his early Polaroid manipulations of the 1960s and ’70s. In the room’s center stands Doorway, 1966 (constructed 2007), a monumental mirrored cube that reflects the gallery’s contents and greets visitors with their unavoidable reflections. Despite the

picks April 17, 2015

Benoit Aquin

On the evening of July 5, 2013, a freight train carrying two million gallons of crude oil escaped from its overnight resting station, and after traveling unguided for seven miles, it derailed at the town center of Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. Forty-seven locals, some sleeping comfortably, unaware in their homes, tragically lost their lives in what would become the deadliest non-passenger train derailment in Canadian history.

That same night, photographer Benoit Aquin traveled to the site and began documenting the aftermath. Despite the ensuing chaos, his pictures, which are now on view at the Montreal

interviews March 27, 2015

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is a celebrated American photographer whose well-known images blur the distinctions between documentary and staged tableaux. Here, diCorcia discusses his ongoing project “East of Eden,” 2008—, a series of fictional scenarios dealing with disenchantment and loss that will be on view at David Zwirner in New York from April 2 to May 2, 2015, and he offers his own perspective on the ever-shifting climate of contemporary photography.

I WAS STUCK IN A RUT AS A YOUNG ADULT. Not even of age—and I think I had been drafted already for the Vietnam War, since I was kicked out of high

interviews January 27, 2015

Alec Soth

Alec Soth’s photographs capture an intimate vision of contemporary Americana. He begins 2015 with the release of Songbook (2015), now available from MACK, as well as accompanying exhibitions this winter and spring, beginning with Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, followed by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, and Loock Galerie in Berlin. Here, he discusses the making of Songbook and its relationship to the music industry. His latest New York exhibition runs January 30 to March 14, 2015.

MY LAST PROJECT, Broken Manual, was about the desire to disengage from society

interviews September 09, 2014

Timur Si-Qin

In Timur Si-Qin’s recent work, commercial and stock photography, as well as displays like those often found in malls and stores, are presented as biological relics. The first part—aptly titled “Part One”—of the Berlin-based artist’s series “Premier Machinic Funerary,” 2014–, is featured in the latest edition of the Taipei Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and on view at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum from September 13, 2014 through January 4, 2015.

“PREMIER MACHINIC FUNERARY” is made up of installations that resemble a form of hypercommercial ancestor worship. Essentially, they are funeral

picks July 14, 2014

“Slip”

“Slip” acts as a sort of pharmaceutical downer, sedating our immediate realities into a meditative blur. Brock Enright’s Secret 3 (all works cited 2014) exists as a pair of immaculate Dorito chips sheathed in gold leaf and accompanied by three equally luminous Doritos “flavors.” Here, snack-food banality is sculpturally propelled into extraordinary circumstances, gratifying the most fantastical potential of an otherwise lackluster commodity. A corpse of an actual house cat is installed on the rear wall of the gallery—appearing curiously tranquil despite its gaping stomach cavity and grotesque

interviews July 03, 2014

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist whose work explores shifting boundaries between the virtual and the real while acknowledging fading distinctions between the two. Here, he discusses his recent work and debut solo exhibition in an American museum. “Jon Rafman: The end of the end of the end” is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from June 27 to August 10, 2014.

I BEGAN TO KNOW the fighting game community of New York while I was doing interviews for my 2011 film Codes of Honor, which is about a lone gamer recounting his past experiences in professional gaming. That work generally deals

picks May 06, 2014

“Home Sweet Home: À propos de l'inquiétude”

For the inaugural exhibition at this space, curators Olivia Boudreau and France Choinière have assembled a selection of photographs, films, and a site-specific installation that posit the concept of “home” as a place of impossible equilibrium, a space that balances precisely between comfort and catastrophe. Among works by its twenty-seven exhibiting artists, the psychosomatic provisos for residential living are at times as enchanting as they are traumatic.

Joseph Ismail’s video Beyond the Pleasure Principle / High Wire, 2010, depicts the artist balancing upon the hind legs of a dining room chair,

picks April 23, 2014

“Thousand Year Old Child”

A thousand years later, the eponymous child evoked by this group show has apparently not learned any manners. Participating artists Glen Baldridge, Ian Cooper, and David Kennedy Cutler present an exhibition that personifies our unwavering pursuit of eternal youth—that crown jewel of vivacity we feverishly crave (as evidenced by today’s abundant health-food supplements, probiotic treatments, and quick over-the-counter cures). Astutely, the twenty-eight works on view—sculptures, prints, and installations—have all anticipated the dystrophic consequences of pursuing the unobtainable.

As if this child

Gabriel H. Sanchez