Jo-ey Tang

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  interviews March 24, 2017

  Heide Hinrichs

  Heide Hinrichs is a Brussels-based artist whose work will be featured in the debut Kathmandu Triennale, “The City, My Studio / The City, My Life,” curated by Philippe van Cauteren. For On Some of the Birds of Nepal (Parting the Animal Kingdom of the East), 2017, Hinrichs is bringing a volume of original drawings commissioned by Brian Hodgson between 1825 and 1857 from the Natural History Museum in London back to the place of its origin. The triennial is on view from March 24 through April 9, 2017.

  THE IDEA OF CONFINEMENT in Brian Hodgson’s twenty-three years of being enclosed within the Kathmandu

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  picks November 07, 2016

  Rodrigo Hernández

  Rodrigo Hernández’s current exhibition “I Am Nothing” packs a surreal punch with a rambling display of humble papier-maché and cardboard sculptures, found objects, and paintings. The artist combines Giorgio de Chirico’s perspectival metaphysics with Russian space exploration, poking holes in our conceptions of time, space, history, and the self.

  The show’s title echoes the first words in Patrick Modiano’s 1978 novel Rue des Boutiques Obscures (translated to Missing Person for English-reading audiences), narrated from the perspective of an amnesiac detective. Figure 1, 2013, is a humanoid with a

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  interviews November 04, 2016

  Jean-Luc Moulène

  The haunting photographs and sculptures of Paris-based artist Jean-Luc Moulène are material sleights of hand, vibrational time-space objects. Here, in a “discontinuous interview,” he speaks about inhabiting fields outside art as well as his “retrospective of protocols,” featuring thirty new pieces, which is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through February 20, 2017.

  SOPHIE DUPLAIX, the curator of this show, has come to my studio every year for the past ten years. To answer the question of an institutional retrospective, I originally asked to do it anonymously. So, I did two things for

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  picks October 13, 2016

  Walter Pfeiffer

  In the 1964 sherbet-hued rom-com Send Me No Flowers, Rock Hudson’s character thinks he’s dying and tries to get his wife, played by Doris Day, to marry one of her old college flames, who’s become quite wealthy. She, however, thinks her husband is setting her up so that he can have an affair with another woman. . . . If she only knew. Humor, death, love, and a touch of the screwball are never out of sight in the works of Walter Pfeiffer, whose current exhibition borrows its title from the film. Since the 1970s, Pfeiffer’s photographs, mainly of pretty young men, have always been too arty for

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  picks October 04, 2016

  Dorian Gaudin

  The revoltingly twee pleasure of watching a slam-dunking cat in GIF form can unleash all manner of anxiety. Dorian Gaudin, a French artist based in New York, occupies this space of tension in “Second Offense,” his self-deprecatingly titled second solo exhibition, which explores the social and political unease he feels in his home and adopted countries.

  We encounter a trio of slapstick, Mad Max–style objects: a chair, crudely soldered in aluminum, tricked out with a number of vile contraptions that could send a sitter careening into a death drop, along with a waist-high aluminum slide, rigged with

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  interviews August 02, 2016

  Josephine Halvorson

  The Massachusetts-based artist Josephine Halvorson has long plumbed psychological depth in her paintings through surface texture, with an acute sensitivity to light, scale, and the passing of time. Her latest and largest project, Measures, 2016, comprises three outdoor sculptures—the artist’s first work in this form—and is on view at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, as part of its annual “Outlooks” series, through November 27, 2016.

  I LIKE USING MY BODY TO MEASURE THINGS. Sometimes I close one eye at a time and watch the world shift left or right, proportionate to the distance

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  picks August 02, 2016

  Jacopo Miliani

  Longing is a defiant, out-of-body experience. Voguing, an instrument of consciousness transformation—named in homage to the fashion magazine—is a dance form that grew out of New York’s African American and Latino gay communities starting in the mid 1980s (one can watch voguers at a ball, an event that ironically recalibrates America’s WASPy cotillion culture of the early twentieth century). In Jacopo Miliani’s “Burning Desire,” the corporeality of a voguer inflames the transaction of desire.

  Inside this vitrine gallery is dot dot dot, 2016, composed of three silver fitness balls that sit below

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  picks May 04, 2016

  Emmanuel Lagarrigue

  Does obscurity allow certain things to burn more intensely, away from the grit of sight, of earthly matters? And if the flame is witnessed, is its extinguishment nigh? History is rife with instances of disappearance, willful and not. Emmanuel Lagarrigue’s exhibition, titled “Quelque chose d’invisible n’en peut plus” (Something invisible can no longer be), teases out these issues.

  The artist uses the writings of the nearly forgotten avant-garde, protofeminist French writer Hélène Bessette to goad various materials toward dissolution. In Le crépuscule du matin (Dusk of the morning), 2013, two

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  picks March 31, 2016

  Oscar Tuazon

  Oscar Tuazon’s current exhibition, appropriately titled “Shelters,” examines the twinned specters of hope and idealism through industrial design through the lens of his Pacific Northwest upbringing.

  The nucleus of this show is Quonset Tent (all works 2016), a semicylindrical structure of aluminum and glass, which has been kitted out with floor planks, a door with a porthole window, and a suspended table, all made out of wood. This utilitarian-looking domicile is modeled and named after a style of prefab military hut popular during World War II. It’s a versatile space and could function as

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  picks January 30, 2016

  Quintessa Matranga and Rafael Delacruz

  The rabbit hole of pop apotheosis, where Jerry Garcia, Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, Elvis, and the Mad Hatter reside, threatens us with a question: Where do we go from here? Quintessa Matranga and Rafael Delacruz, in their dual exhibition, “100% Stupid,” take on the impossible task of drawing out how one can wrest subjectivity and creativity in the force of unattainable perfection.

  Delacruz’s oil pastel drawings simulate the visual tide of the online art-sharing platform DeviantArt. As Jacob Ciocci, a founding member of Paper Rad, attests in the show’s press release, the website serves as a digital

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  picks January 05, 2016

  Carissa Rodriguez

  We are all Northern Californian now. Conscious, sustainable, holistic, but with no sacrifice of artisanal luxury from our eco slow-lives. This style of contemporary living—with its ethics and repercussions—is the fulcrum of Carissa Rodriguez’s exhibition “I’m normal. I have a garden. I’m a person.,” for which she foraged from what was once the fringe and is now the heart of American culture that serves as digital technology’s geographical and spiritual headquarters.

  Succulents (all works 2015) is a floor installation of over 200 grass-fed cattle bones in a post-broth state, sourced from a holacratic

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  picks June 22, 2015

  Pratchaya Phinthong

  Rice, sun, parking spots, teeth, 7-Eleven—these are the elements that form the matrix of Pratchaya Phinthong’s current exhibition carved from the unstable contours of contemporary Thailand. For instance, Internal rhyme, 2015, is a set of nine drawings of the artist’s teeth, based on the sensory observations of his fingers guided by his tongue. These were made near Paris, outside the final home of political exile Pridi Banomyong, who attempted to overthrow his native country’s monarchy in 1949.

  Phinthong knows well how to entangle political exigencies with conceptual precision. In the larger room