print May 2022

Emily Oliveira

How thin is the veil between our world and the next? Emily Oliveira’s exhibition “Red Velvet, Orange Crush” examined this numinous terrain for felicitous cracks, where a quick glance between astral planes can potentially offer up moments of satori. Oliveira positions herself between these realms as a kind of mystical gatekeeper, providing safe passage into unknown dimensions. A lustrous array of tapestries and sculptures were housed in this gallery turned devotional space, inviting us into the artist’s search for an existence free of earthly chaos and mortal inhibitions.

Oliveira draws inspiration

picks March 17, 2022

Mimi Park

In H. G. Wells’s 1896 science-fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, a shipwrecked protagonist finds himself on the titular landmass, which is inhabited by the abominable creations of a mad scientist whose interspecies experiments are a haunting metaphor for man’s disregard and cruelty toward nature. South Korean artist Mimi Park’s exhibition here, “Dawning: dust, seeds, Coplees,” takes on this theme, offering the viewer an experience—simultaneously amusing, bewildering, and horrifying—one might have if one were ever stranded on the dark shores of Doctor Moreau’s laboratory.

Live seedlings

picks January 11, 2022

Jimmy Raskin

Jimmy Raskin is an aberrant poet who reveals himself on rare and vital occasions, like “a kind of ten-year cicada,” as critic John Reed once wrote. His work is often a whirlwind of chaotic, exciting, and sometimes incomprehensible musings on the nature of artistic creativity. Thankfully for us, Raskin has emerged from the soil once again with “Stations of the Last Eccentric,” a presentation that attempts to describe a metaphysical state in which an artist’s desire to create has evaporated into absolute fulfillment, an experience that, per Raskin, is “filled to the brim with inspiration, but no

print December 2021

Onyedika Chuke

“Won’t you join us in this great new national crusade?” Nancy Reagan’s cold, scripted words echoed across the gallery and between dozens of Quaker church pews that, for Onyedika Chuke’s exhibition here, had been arranged into an enormous maze titled The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/Labyrinth, 2020–21. The sound bite was cut from President Reagan’s 1986 national address on the perils of drug use among America’s youth. Ron and Nancy appealed to the public on live TV in the guise of two concerned grandparents, welcoming the country into the Oval Office for a fireside chat. Yet, as history

print Summer 2021

Ginny Casey

Painter Ginny Casey’s previous show at Half Gallery, in 2018, featured an assortment of household wares rendered in haunting shades of coral, cobalt, and marigold. These items—watering cans, shoes, kitchen chairs, and other things—have long been a part of the artist’s visual repertoire. While isolating during the pandemic, Casey burrowed deep into herself and into the vistas of her domestic environment, rendering the familiar wondrous, strange. The eleven oil-on-canvas works here explored the notion of “home” as a domain that is both safe and scary, a place in which life is not only lived but

picks February 11, 2019

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw’s “an idea of god, or a toothbrush” offers a shaded view of the American dream: full of sugar, laced with poison, and topped with a cherry for your tasting pleasure. The art duo, lauded for their ostentatious performances and installations, have targeted the dark heart of the United States in eighteen mixed-media sculptures that feature, among other things, depictions of delectable cakes, gooey slices of pizza, and one enormous ice cream sundae.

This vision of America—the land of Pizzagate, The Jim Bakker Show, and WikiLeaks—is defined by unchecked paranoia, doomsday

picks July 19, 2018

Igor Hosnedl

Alex

Painter Igor Hosnedl’s “The Opening of the Wells” takes its name from a 1955 chamber cantata by the composer Bohuslav Martinů. The composition celebrates the magical flourishing of spring throughout the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands of Czechia. Here, the Czech-born Hosnedl also embraces the season’s sensuousness and grand, mystical dimensions.

In Emerald Twilight (all works 2018), one of five canvases on view, primavera has blossomed. A silhouette of a nude female figure reclines into a curtain of lush, leafy greenery. The scene is intoxicating—the picture’s rich absinthe hues seduce the psyche.

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

Gabriel H. Sanchez