Jess Wilcox

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  picks March 21, 2011

  Anna Ostoya

  “Exposures,” 2011, a collage-on-canvas series by Polish artist Anna Ostoya, is a meditation on the complexities of marking time. Following a self-prescribed regimen of one work per day, the artist produced the suite this past February for her first solo show in New York. The twenty-eight collages chronicle temporality via multiple registers: in the hours of a day’s work spent cutting, pulping, and pasting together the papier-mâché, gold foil, and newsprint; in the rhythms of daily financial graphs; and in the events that beget history––front-page images of revolution in 2011. Here the constraints

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  picks January 29, 2010

  Daniel Bozhkov

  Where traditional institutional critique often dissatisfies with self-congratulatory rhetoric or a failure to engage its audience, Daniel Bozhkov’s project at this museum engulfs the viewer in an eddy of the often entwined and at times competing narratives of art, urbanism, literature, and popular culture. His installation offers a decaying maze: old lockers from the building’s United Nations days, boxes of unused Moby-Dick-themed coloring books, administrative furnishings, and stacked glass bricks from the adjacent (and now closed) ice rink. Puncturing this wasteland of signs are abstracted

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  previews September 2009

  “Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself”

  Due in part to his background as a political cartoonist, Mexico City–based Damián Ortega has a knack for animating objects in unexpected yet incisive ways.

  Due in part to his background as a political cartoonist, Mexico City–based Damián Ortega has a knack for animating objects in unexpected yet incisive ways. Cosmic Thing, 2002, a fastidiously exploded 1983 VW Beetle whose disassembled parts are suspended in midair, is characteristic: at once playfully destructive and rigorously diagrammatic. A common car in Mexico, the Bug is one of many stereotypically Latin American products stacked, rolled, or pulled by Ortega, along with tortillas, pickaxes, and bricks. Indeed, this exhibition, which includes eighteen sculptures,

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  previews January 2009

  Melanie Smith

  Mexico City’s unruly order has proved fertile for Melanie Smith. Since the British-born artist relocated to the city some twenty years ago, she has produced artworks that position the lush materiality and bold colors of the megalopolis in dialogue with painting.

  Mexico City’s unruly order has proved fertile for Melanie Smith. Since the British-born artist relocated to the city some twenty years ago, she has produced artworks that—whether executed in the medium of photography, video, installation, or performance—position the lush materiality and bold colors of the megalopolis in dialogue with painting. Smith’s approach affords an oblique view that deftly reveals structures of social and economic exchange, as this survey, which travels from Mexico City and features twenty-three works made between 1992 and 2006, will demonstrate.

• previews September 2008

  28th Biennal de São Paulo

  Not least by leaving empty the second floor of the massive Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, the curators of this year’s Bienal de São Paulo intend to create a “pause for reflection” on the vocation of the BSP as an institution as well as the hyperactivity of international exhibitions in general.

  Not least by leaving empty the second floor of the massive Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, the curators of this year’s Bienal de São Paulo intend to create a “pause for reflection” on the vocation of the BSP as an institution as well as the hyperactivity of international exhibitions in general. Events and discussions addressing the crisis of the biennial model will be held on the first floor of the Oscar Niemeyer–designed building, along with more traditional artist’s talks, performances, and concerts, while the top floor will house a display of material

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  picks July 17, 2008

  “Elizabeth Peyton: Portrait of an Artist”

  Fashion, fame, and photography, the main intrigues of Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings, oddly reconvene in this exhibition of the artist’s photographs. Although these portraits, modestly sized and framed in wood, retain the intimacy of Peyton’s canvases, most of them lack the glamour of those gem-colored creations. Hung in loose chronological order and shot between 1994 and 2008, the pictures catch her (mostly young) friends in the center of the frame. The minimal compositions and blurriness seem borrowed from recent fashion spreads and compliment her self-aware subjects, with their stylish signifiers