Joseph R. Wolin

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  picks June 06, 2012

  Nicole Wittenberg

  On the black-painted walls of “The Malingers,” Nicole Wittenberg’s debut solo exhibition in New York, thirteen canvases from the 2010 “Interior” series reiterate images of stagelike rooms. Eight paintings depict a palatial bedroom with a curtained oval bed on a stepped platform. Five others show a large, brightly lit room with two incomplete chairs that expectantly face an opening onto another, shadowy space. In the latter works, splotches cover the floor and walls—perhaps representing a decorative pattern on carpet and wallpaper, perhaps some kind of spattered debris. In both series, the

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  picks May 25, 2012

  Matthew Moore

  Matthew Moore grew up on a farm near Phoenix, in desert that was increasingly encroached on by suburban development until the recent burst of the housing bubble. His latest installation, And the Land Grew Quiet, 2012, centers on this personal history and the vicissitudes of our relationship with the land on which we live.

  In one large gallery, white walls carved in low relief tell the story abstractly as they progress from organic lines suggesting schematic natural topographies, to grids of surveyed parcels of land, to plans of residential neighborhoods filled with concentric streets and cul-de-sacs.

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  picks November 03, 2009

  Bryan Zanisnik

  The five photographs in Bryan Zanisnik’s exhibition, “Dry Bones Can Harm No Man,” picture suggestively odd arrangements of objects in shallow spaces. Against flowered wallpaper sutured with red and green tape in What Are the Roots That Clutch, 2008, a crocheted afghan and the starry field of an American flag flank a small decorative suit of armor that supports a plywood shelf filled with milk-white glass vases. A straw hat and a length of chain complete the ensemble. To Hell and Back (Nothing), 2008, includes, among other things, a row of pulp westerns, a coffee mug emblazoned BILL, a snapshot

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  picks October 05, 2009

  Rachel Foullon

  “Grab a Root and Growl,” Rachel Foullon’s solo debut, features various oversize garments sewn from dyed canvases and hung from enormous nails stuck in stained wooden moldings attached to the walls with bolts. A floor-length blue neckerchief drops down from a slanting orange bar in Independence (Everything They Needed) (all works 2009); in The Wrong Place, the Wrong Time, in a Sort of Rapture, a rolled-up red apron is pulled between two gray uprights; knotted sleeves in Only 4 Degrees More than the Temperature Outside suspend a huge pale green shirt from a Y-shaped blue structure. The arrangement

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  picks April 20, 2009

  Matthew Fisher

  Matthew Fisher loves a man in a uniform. His faux-naïf paintings depict soldiers dressed in fanciful costumes and arranged in elaborate tableaux, as if staging narrative allegories. Yet, for all their folk-art charm, their import remains obscure. What might the artist intend, for instance, by the five stiffly posed figures in front of a narrow cottage in June, 2009, two of them inside a birchbark canoe, the others on the lawn? Their diverse garb somewhere between that of Civil War troops and a high school marching band, the unsmiling men stare ahead or askance; one peers through a small telescope.