Halo Rossetti

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  picks May 16, 2022

  “Radical Propagations/Propagaciones Radicales”

  Guerrilla gardening, seed libraries, plant marches, and maintenance art come together in this touching and thoughtful group show on regenerative cultural gestures, curated by Mexican transdisciplinary artist Maru García in the 18th Street Arts Center’s spacious Airport Campus space.

  Light floods the gallery, illuminating Peruvian artist Lucía Monge’s Plantón Móvil (Plant Walks), 2010–, an installation featuring a menagerie of potted plants on skateboards and roller skates and in wheelbarrows, led by another plant with a megaphone—the ringleader of this verdant protest. Behind these conscientious

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  picks February 12, 2016

  “The Value of Food: Sustaining a Green Planet”

  Lining the vaulted halls and nestled in the bays, chapels, and gardens of Saint John the Divine, a Gothic and Romanesque cathedral with a long history of interfaith services and social justice activism, is a bounty of visual art focused on issues of food security, sustainability, and accessibility. Curated by Kirby Gookin and Robin Kahn, and organized into seven sections—Water, Soil, Seed, Farm, Market, Meal, and Waste—the show reflects the cycle of food production. The mixture of well-known with lesser-known artists, and installations with documentation of past works, reflects the intermingling

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  picks December 23, 2014

  Katherine Hubbard

  “Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else,” is a series of black-and-white gelatin silver prints of images shot within the desert landscape of southern Utah. Some pieces contain two, three, or four photographs in one print, three to five inches across or so, clustered together and bordered by the thick black of fully exposed photography paper. They were taken in an area marked by sight lines that delineate the field of vision between two facing cameras. Hubbard’s body moves throughout the picture planes, standing up, lying down, dressed, partially undressed, present, and absent.

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  picks January 18, 2014

  G. T. Pellizzi

  The sculptures and paintings in G. T. Pellizzi’s latest exhibition, “Financial Times,” cast the global economic system as a ubiquitous and disembodied mythology, able to be manipulated by those few—financial analysts, gurus, stockbrokers, and pundits—who claim a special kind of mantic money power. In the center of the gallery are three sculptures, all jungle gyms of steel pipes rested atop stacks of finance-guru books, including classics like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Taken together, the sculptures connote buzzwords like “networks,” “team building,” and “pipe dream,” as well as

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  picks September 26, 2013

  Charline von Heyl

  One may say a successful painting forces the viewer to keep looking, beset with an urge to understand some elusive trait that leaves an impression so fleeting that desire is set off again and again. This paradoxical quality is the crux of Charline von Heyl’s latest exhibition, which presents fourteen large-scale paintings created in the past year. Each is simultaneously form-driven and formless, leaving one with both a strong afterimage and a shifting after-impression. The result is a suite of works that is unfriendly to its beholder, provoking the impulse to look further while refusing to stay

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  film August 15, 2013

  Golden Gloves

  CUTIE AND THE BOXER (2013), a film that splits open the breast, depicts a complex, decades-long marriage between two artists living in close quarters. Far from a tribute to lockstep marital harmony, the film is a document of overlapping primary colors—of two crystalline, earnest characters that collide again and again, yet remain only subtly changed.

  Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko live in a catacomb of paint-splattered walls—part studio, part archive, part family home—somewhere in Brooklyn. For over forty years, through poverty, alcoholism, childrearing, and obscurity, the Shinoharas have

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  picks June 28, 2013

  “Vessels”

  Betty Woodman’s ceramic sculpture On the Way to Mexico, 2012, presides over the entrance “Vessels” as both gatekeeper to this group exhibition and harbinger for the display beyond. The fiery glazed red-and-orange front of the piece feels a world away from its back, a unified, muted surface where a thick cream-colored line meanders its way slowly around a black background shot through with fleshy pink. Moving around the work is akin to crossing a border, leaving one aesthetic realm for another.

  This transmogrification is, on a base level, a metonym for the process of creating a vessel from clay,

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  picks December 14, 2012

  Carroll Dunham

  Carroll Dunham, master of the solid form, man of the (mostly) closed edge, presents a new suite of nudes, and some trees. Brazen as ever, the scopophilic––verging on misogynistic––treatment of the subject matter belies Dunham’s technical proficiency: The afterimage of these trunk-legged, facing-away deities lodges in the mind long after the viewer has turned her back.

  Next Bathers, five (dive), 2012, features the backside of a nude, diving, sliding, along a sumptuous linen canvas into open-edged water, beneath a burning football of a sun. Sex pervades this painting: Everything from the testicle-shaped

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  picks December 12, 2012

  Phong Bui

  Phong Bui’s studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn fell victim to a flash flood last August, claiming 20 percent of his art. Lining the floor of that space, Bui’s life work, accreted, became an unsalvageable bog, detrital and waterlogged. His current solo show is dedicated in part to Shoja Azari, who, during a post–flash flood visit to Bui’s studio, quasi suggested that Bui title his upcoming exhibition “After the Flood.” Unbeknownst to all was the prescience of this title for a show whose opening was held on October 29—the night before Sandy, and a mere day before Bui’s studio would

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  picks November 19, 2012

  Nathlie Provosty

  Nathlie Provosty’s intimate works on paper, linen, and sheepskin, on view in her debut solo New York exhibition, are as much a meditation on the lineage of materials as they are a visually compelling investigation into the history of recurring geometric forms. In eight diptychs of walnut ink on tea-stained paper, titled A Week and Its Seven Days: The Merging of Reason and Optical Intuition (all works 2012), Provosty boldly juxtaposes orderly images—all on the left-hand sides of the pairs—with freeform ones on the right. The left-hand semicircles, squares, and rectangles evoke the illuminated

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  picks October 31, 2012

  Richard Gordon

  Richard Gordon was a very “slow” photographer, a patron of the patient viewer. His many subjects were often quotidian, well framed, and densely layered with meaning. So slow is the impact of his work that it may take a long time after Gordon’s recent death, on October 6, for him to assume his rightful place in twentieth-century photographic history, alongside fellow Leica wielders such as Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Helen Levitt, all of whom have been the subjects of Gordon’s prolific art criticism. This exhibition of black-and-white photographs from the 1970s emphasizes the slow, subtle

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  picks September 19, 2012

  “Interior Visions”

  The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz, at the Colby College Museum of Art, is a wing dedicated to, as its name suggests, a permanent, rotating display of Colby’s considerable collection of Katz’s work. Currently on view is an impressive mini-retrospective, “Maine/New York,” showcasing Katz’s expansive landscapes and fashion-forward figures. To accompany the show, Katz has tried his hand at curating, installing a small selection of paintings, drawings, and photographs from the museum’s holdings in an unassuming little room adjacent to his custom-built wing. Surprisingly, this side