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

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

Gabriel H. Sanchez