Jake Yuzna

  • Piotr Szyhalski, “COVID-19: Labor Camp Report” (detail), 2020, digital offset prints, dimensions variable.
    picks July 13, 2021

    Piotr Szyhalski

    On March 23, 2020, then-President Trump proclaimed, “America will again and soon be open for business—very soon.” The following day, Minneapolis-based artist Piotr Szyhalski got to work. The result was “COVID-19: Labor Camp Report,” 2020, a series of 225 posterlike drawings done in black-and-white ink; a new one was made every day, all the way through Election Night. Created under the umbrella of Szyhalski’s ongoing Labor Camp, 1998–, a project that prioritizes the artistic process over any capital derived from it, each “report” funneled the day’s emotional maelstrom into a single combination

  • Karen Carson, Butterfly, 2018, acrylic on bas-relief wood, 21 1⁄2 × 32 1⁄2 × 3".

    Karen Carson

    For painter Karen Carson, an early West Coast Minimalist, the abstract has been, and continues to be, a quiet and powerful tool for navigating the maelstrom of life in the here and now. This notion was made strikingly clear in “Middle Ground,” an exhibition that featured two bodies of work created nearly fifty years apart.

    Carson’s more recent bas-relief paintings are small, intricate, and intimate, crafted from numerous hand-cut and individually painted pieces of wood. Taking inspiration from the environment of her Montana studio, Carson uses some of nature’s more vivid hues to create kaleidoscopic

  • Pippa Garner, The Bowels of the Mind (detail), 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable.
    picks February 02, 2021

    Pippa Garner

    Steps from the seedy heart of the Hollywood Walk of Fame lies an inaccessible storefront in a recently constructed luxury apartment building. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, we see an unusual menagerie of items, including a pair of kitschy 1970s-style tourist T-shirts that proclaim “CRITIC: Where do you get your ideas from?” and “ARTIST: The sh#t just pops into my head.” These mock-souvenir items hang before a sphincter-like arrangement of multicolored cushions and netting, out of which protrudes a single, blinking light bulb.

    Welcome to The Bowels of the Mind, 2021, a new work by Pippa Garner

  • Clara Nartey, Charleena, 2020, digitally-printed fabric, polyester felt, polyester interfacing, polyester thread, cotton, 40 x 30".
    picks October 12, 2020

    “Gone but Never Forgotten: Remembering Those Lost to Police Brutality”

    What will form the record of this, our unrelenting moment, in American history? Looking back, many of the objects that best captured the zeitgeist of their eras were traditional craft works such as the wampum beads and belts of the Haudenosaunee Nations, the story cloths of the Hmong people, and the wood carvings of Scandinavia, from the Vikings to the Slöjd tradition.

    After its hometown of Minneapolis became the epicenter of an international protest movement following the murder of George Floyd, the Textile Center teamed up with the Women of Color Quilters Network to copresent “Gone but Never

  • Hannah Kim Varamini, Dalgona Ghosts, 2020, Dalgona candy, sugar, baking soda, found bullet, 2 x 4 x 1".
    picks October 02, 2020

    “No more land West”

    How will galleries and alternative spaces survive 2020? This seemingly endless refrain obscures the rich history of unorthodox approaches to presenting art as well as the potential for innovation that lurks all around us. One such example is Arm Gallery, a two-by-four-inch rectangle tattooed on the left forearm of artist John Burtle. Since 2007, Arm has presented sculptures, paintings, performances, videos, and more with the help of some spirit gum, medical tape, and straps. These artworks can attach themselves to Burtle for just a few hours, days, or even months. When the artist-run Visitor