interviews October 17, 2022

Kelly Akashi

“Formations,” Kelly Akashi’s ongoing exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, surveys the past eight years of the Los Angeles–based artist’s practice, mounting a menagerie of bronze-cast, hand-blown glass, carved-stone, and 3-D–printed sculptures in addition to an array of chromogenic photograms, Cibachrome crystallographs, and silver gelatin prints (not to mention the occasional accoutrement of family heirlooms and human hair). Amid all this processual prowess, attention is also paid to the more mysterious operations of memory, time, the human body, and their mutual imprint on one another.

interviews May 03, 2022

Mounira Al Solh

Growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, Mounira Al Solh witnessed firsthand the ways in which war and conflict upend all aspects of life and wrench a region’s sense of history from its own hands. For “A day is as long as a year,” on view from April 9 to October 2 at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, the Beirut and Netherlands–based artist invited over thirty women to plumb their own personal heritages in order to collaborate on a prismatic display of their own traditions and contemporary realities. History may be written by the victors, but its most powerful

interviews March 08, 2022

Olivia Mole

At “Lifes,” a sundry and symphonic group show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, a string of performances, readings, songs, and a “tuning meditation”—by the great Pauline Oliveros—ebb and flow throughout two galleries as part of an hourly cycle, shifting the vibe as if for the sake of it. The quicksilver approach of the exhibition, which numbers more than fifty participants and runs through May 8, puckishly defies the expectations of a museum to fossilize and dignify its objects on view, to bestow a certain, sacred seriousness. Nothing could be less grave, and more puzzling to pin down, than

print April 2021

Lauren Satlowski

In her solo exhibition at Bel Ami, “Watch the Bouncing Ball,” which spanned the holidays and stretched into the new year, Lauren Satlowski turned a studied eye onto the trinkets and textures of our time, rendering glossy surfaces and glowing gradients with scrupulous, sumptuous glee. The ten oil paintings featured still-life arrangements of dolls, decals, and other bric-a-brac that hover atop creamy, incandescent grounds. Like the Photorealists before her—who took pleasure in replicating, for instance, a Chrysler Sebring’s scintillating silver paint or a chrome napkin dispenser’s glint—Satlowski

interviews December 08, 2020

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer has most often painted the people who surround her, rendering the figures of close friends and classmates from observation as they kick back into couches and armchairs, nestled inside New York apartments and grad-school studios. Transmuted by textured washes and brilliant hues, their bodies and clothing blend into their plush environs, becoming one with the scene and most truly at home. The New York–based artist also applies a soft touch to her recent paintings of flower bouquets, each a sprightly study of color and form that serves as a requiem to the fleeting and fragile beauty

interviews December 10, 2019

Sophia Al-Maria

For the Tate’s exhibition series “Art Now,” London-based artist Sophia Al-Maria has mounted “Beast Type Song,” an installation that foregrounds her new eponymous video. Inside its thirty-eight minutes, Al-Maria braids a narrative from strands of stories and texts, scripts and speech, post-apocalyptic science fiction and apocalyptic reality. Through footage that flips between a film and its own making, the artist lets us watch her assemble a world out of words, built from the rubble of colonial history and the brutality of its tongue. “Beast Type Song” is on view at Tate Britain in London until

interviews April 01, 2019

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

As the 2019 Katowitz Radin artist-in-residence at the Brooklyn Public Library, Kameelah Janan Rasheed has orchestrated Scoring the Stacks, a four-month-long project that fosters new dynamics between the library’s visitors and its books, between the roles of teacher and student, and between our notions of artist and artwork. Six accompanying public events invited participants to explore different ways to create, collaborate, and learn. Scoring the Stacks is on view at the library’s central location until April 7, 2019; Rasheed’s final event, This is Not an Artist Talk, will be held on April 4,

interviews February 14, 2019

Maia Cruz Palileo

The fourteen paintings and drawings that comprise Maia Cruz Palileo’s debut solo exhibition in her native Chicago are, in essence, portraits of the Philippines, imagined as her family had once known it. But Palileo’s lurid, tropical scenes are equally somewhere and nowhere, bridging the continents of a real place and its memory, its histories and its myths, its hard facts and its folklore. “All The While I Thought You Had Received This” will be on view at Monique Meloche Gallery until March 30, 2019.

THIS SHOW’S TITLE comes from a letter that my grandmother wrote to me around ten years ago. I

interviews October 23, 2018

Andrea Büttner

German artist Andrea Büttner has a long-standing practice of using appropriated imagery as a historical and philosophical tool. For the first time, three of Büttner’s slide projections are being shown together as large-scale, standalone installations. “Shepherds and Kings,” a solo exhibition of Büttner’s work, is on view at Bergen Kunsthall in Norway until October 28, 2018. She is also participating in the São Paulo Bienal, on view through December 9, 2018.

I’VE LONG BEEN INTERESTED IN depictions of poverty. Considering how much we know about representations of wealth and power across centuries,

interviews June 05, 2018

Heba Y. Amin

The Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin’s latest project, Operation Sunken Sea, 2018, is well suited for “We don’t need another hero,” the next iteration of the Berlin Biennale, which opens June 9, 2018. With a room-wide installation, Amin imagines herself as the mastermind of a bureaucratic plan to drain the Mediterranean Sea—a singular solution to the crises of terrorism and immigration in the Middle East and Africa. With an air of autocracy, her project exposes long-standing colonial convictions, as well as the inherent bias and violence of power.

OPERATION SUNKEN SEA is an attempt to flip a historical

interviews December 12, 2017

Farah Al Qasimi

Among the thirteen photographs mounted in “More Good News,” the Emirati artist Farah Al Qasimi’s first solo exhibition in New York, are several portraits of men in their homes, reclining on ornately patterned couches or sitting on a bed. Other pictures look inside a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi, and one captures a dog cowering next to a table littered with guns in Texas. Throughout, the images reveal Al Qasimi’s fascination with the privileges of privacy and what it might mean to see or be seen. The show is on view at Helena Anrather until December 22, 2017.

“MORE GOOD NEWS” comes out of my

interviews October 10, 2017

Cauleen Smith

The artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, who recently relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles, rarely tethers her work to bare reality. Her latest film, Triangle Trade, 2017—made in collaboration with Canadian artists Jérôme Havre and Camille Turner—renders three new, fantastical realms, inhabited only by the puppet likenesses of the work’s three creators. Triangle Trade is on view at Gallery TPW in Toronto until November 11, 2017.

TWO YEARS AGO, I visited Toronto to do a site visit at Gallery TPW, where I had been slated to have a solo exhibition. I wanted to make a film in the city for that show,

Juliana Halpert