Jacquelyn Davis

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  picks January 02, 2012

  Jorge Peris

  In Jorge Peris’s earliest childhood memory, which until recently he believed to be a dream, lies the uncanny presence of salt. For his latest exhibition, “Aladas Almas” (Winged Souls), he traveled to the salt flats of San Pedro del Pinatar, Spain, to experience being surrounded by salt. This journey assisted him in creating the show’s mood, which consists of 170 tons of salt sculpted into an architectural structure resembling an ancient tower and mythological ruin. Salt also surrounds the structure, which contrasts with the gallery’s black walls. Installed nearby one finds a silo, an accelerated

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  picks October 19, 2011

  Pamela Rosenkranz and Nikolas Gambaroff

  Pamela Rosenkranz and Nikolas Gambaroff display works side by side in their resepective shows, “This Is Not My Color” (Rosenkranz) and “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (Gambaroff), for the Swiss Institute’s first exhibition in one of Jeffrey Deitch’s former gallery spaces. Twenty distinct pieces are strategically positioned in conversation with one another in Swiss Institute’s main space, and downstairs two projectors display Rosenkranz’s disturbing work Over My Brainbow, 2011, a haunting apparition of the Michael Jackson many will recognize from his later years. In one projection,

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  picks September 17, 2011

  Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena

  Far from neutral, the new works in Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena’s exhibition “YANKEE GO HOME! but please take me with you” favor extreme positions. Yet in ways similar to concentric circles, the ideas underpinning each piece fluently coincide. For instance, the shameful transforms into the sublime in the drawing Black Madonnas, 2011. Its dark metamorphosis is accomplished via means of calculated erasure—editing out graphic details of pornographic centerfolds, leaving untouched only the elusive eyes and mouth of each woman, which are awash in murky ink strokes and hints of pastel.

  In the largest

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  picks September 02, 2011

  “Imagine Being Here Now”

  From the perspective of one who had viewed the Sixth Momentum Biennial before the recent massacres in Oslo and Utøya Island, and who now proceeds to discuss it afterward, the biennial’s title “Imagine Being Here Now” carries even more significance. Momentum’s curatorial statement reads: “The inherent present of each individual not only extends to momentary impressions but to his or her past as well as their expectations of the future, owing to the fact that we have the ability to imagine being somewhere else entirely, in any other place at any other time.” It now seems difficult to imagine “

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  picks April 24, 2011

  Gardar Eide Einarsson

  Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson’s major solo exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, titled “Power Has a Fragrance,” marks the first time his work has been shown in Sweden. Einarsson is well aware that––as a formally trained artist often given the opportunity to display work in museum settings––he produces art from a position of privilege, and he does not shy away from criticizing his own creative role within artistic institutions. This ripe collection of declarative pieces, acute and contradictory, exists in a crossfire of communication, invoking feelings—ranging from awe to anxiety—that stem

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  picks December 26, 2010

  Jonas Nobel

  A narrative installation inspired by his mythical novel that also serves as an entry point, Jonas Nobel’s fourth solo exhibition, “Display of Loss—This Play We Lost,” offers his svelte sculptural version of a raft, as well as a geometric mountain range and a porthole-framed sketch with view of a tumultuous sea. The works are connected to the novel Nobel has written, which shares a title with the exhibition and tells the story of a burdened crew destined to fail in delivering unwanted merchandise to an infinite number of harbors, instead ending up shipwrecked on an island, disillusioned, and

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  picks September 13, 2010

  Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer

  Based in Göteborg, Sweden, the artists Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer began to collaborate in 2006, for they share an attraction to issues of place and the act of site-specific storytelling. “Under Nomadic Surfaces,” the duo’s latest exhibition, presents images from their travels to Kyrgyzstan and Qatar; all of the works depict individuals who crossed their paths. The artists emphasize the personal narratives of each subject, eschewing the obvious political or religious connotations that could be extracted from these pictures. Instead, Cooper and Gorfer attempt to portray the memories of each

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  picks June 04, 2010

  Tony Matelli

  “The Constant Now,” Tony Matelli’s fourth solo exhibition at this gallery, presents five new sculptures and three paintings that are reminiscent of his previous explorations. For example, there are obvious similarities between his sculpture Josh, 2010, and Sleepwalker, 2001: Both eerily depict displaced human figures and appear to be conspicuous mockeries. This show more fully formulates a question that his earlier work touched on: What particular value can be found in art that overstates a seemingly directionless, wasted state of being?

  Josh appears to magnify an ambivalent condition that stems

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  picks April 28, 2010

  Tom Friedman

  The first solo exhibition in Scandinavia by the Leverett, Massachusetts–based artist Tom Friedman is titled “Up in the Air,” and it asks for a heightened consideration of what consitutes a meaningful experience, in hopes of upgrading the possibilities of artistic production. Although some might find Friedman’s work inaccessible or view it as the output of someone with too much free time, such reactions perhaps bespeak a certain impatience and ingratitude toward what we have and what we are, stances that risk locking us into the predicament of feeling disconnected from current artmaking strategies.