Kate Green

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  picks November 21, 2016

  Yoshua Okón

  The dark heart of “Miasma” is the ten-minute video (all works titled Miasma and dated 2016) Yoshua Okón developed––along with sculptures and drawings for this living-room space located in a state associated with more than its fair share of showman politicians––amid a spectacularly disheartening US presidential election. Recorded at night, the video, presented here on a flat screen above the fireplace, features Houston’s bronze statue of the former CIA director and president George H. W. Bush backlit and shot mostly from below. This gives him gravitas, yet he is shrouded in fog and paired with

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  picks November 03, 2016

  Tammie Rubin

  Millions fled Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, yet the disproportionate abuse of black bodies continues, as does hope for its end. Prompted by Black Lives Matter, we lament institutionalized injustices even as we venerate our first black president; we are reminded, via the outcry in St. Louis over artist Kelly Walker’s treatment of black bodies appropriated from the media, that white-dominated culture industries continue to exploit “blackness.” These currents charge this solo show by ceramicist Tammie Rubin, suggesting that even abstraction is always already personal, and political.

  “

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  picks May 09, 2016

  Mai-Thu Perret

  One’s first glimpse of this small yet powerful exhibition—an installation of eight life-size female fighters, a ceramic dog, an enormous Rorschach-like painting, and two oversize sculptural eyes—is through a glass wall that Mai-Thu Perret has smeared with petroleum jelly. Fittingly, and elegantly, the viscous salve on the manufactured surface initially makes the contents of “Sightings” an alluring mystery.

  Once visitors pass through the glass to mingle among “Les guérillères” (The Guerillas), 2016—comprising the female figures and their dog, each subtitled I through IX and inspired by female

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  picks November 20, 2015

  “Strange Pilgrims”

  Circa 1968, amid the Cold War’s existential crises and worldwide student protests against institutionalized repression and violence, artists challenged the hegemony of autonomous objects with conceptual works that exposed the role of embodied perception in establishing art’s meaning. Fast-forward several decades, and the role of perception and “experience” is golden, evident in social-practice debates and the ubiquity of performance. “Strange Pilgrims” wades into this territory and succeeds by giving its thirty installations, made by an eclectic array of thirteen artists and one collective,

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  picks October 12, 2015

  Michael Smith

  The fulcrum of Michael Smith’s newest body of work is an intriguing twenty-minute video that, like the larger project it is part of, is titled Excuse Me!?! . . . I’m Looking for the “Fountain of Youth.” Produced with collaborators and subtitled A Ballet in Three Acts, 2015, it contains a telling moment in which the artist, dressed as a knight yet wearing the sneakers and grin of the Everyman he has performed for decades, finds an elixir amid a circle of young dancers. Smith drinks and turns first into a court jester and then Baby Ikki, his diaper-wearing persona. The reversion—from knight to

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  picks June 05, 2015

  Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio

  Performance is now practically ubiquitous in exhibitions, and this can make it difficult for artists to leverage bodies to startling ends. Yet Janine Antoni and choreographer Stephen Petronio achieve this in their latest effort, a small show of mostly jointly made photographs, sculptures, and a video, all but the video dated 2015. The exhibition unfolds around testsite’s foyer and living room, which is installed with photographs featuring the creators. In a diptych titled Bound, Antoni’s and Petronio’s heads are wrapped in rope, while in Tongue Tied, printed on wallpaper, their tongues are yoked

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  picks April 07, 2014

  Deborah Hay

  This exhibition, the first in a museum for choreographer Deborah Hay, involves an absorbing multiscreen video installation that presents four versions of a solo dance. For decades, Hay, who worked in the 1960s with Merce Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater, has composed dances intended to be adapted differently by each dancer, and therefore has never performed the same piece twice. Laying this premise bare, the installation, A Continuity of Discontinuity, 2014, shows various individuals giving life to the written notes and drawings of a single score.

  For the Blanton, Hay has choreographed a

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  picks February 24, 2014

  Vishal Jugdeo

  Vishal Jugdeo’s installation A Weight Dangles Above Your Head / A Shaky Picture Has No Weight, 2014, is captivating and as elusive as its subject: the instability of representation and of arriving at truth. The project’s twenty-three-minute video, a version of which was presented at Performa 13, features the artist and his boyfriend performing a script loosely revolving around Guyana, where in the 1800s Jugdeo’s family was brought from India as indentured laborers. Slipping from staged scenes and dialogue between the couple in Los Angeles to footage and sound Jugdeo shot in Guyana, the project

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  picks October 31, 2013

  Marianne Vitale

  In one of the two large-scale installations that make up Marianne Vitale’s striking exhibition, nine cast-steel railway joints used in train switches stand vertically in an outdoor riverside meadow, like a clan of marooned, rusty beings. Titled Common Crossings, 2013, the grouping exudes a vitality that belies the material’s industrial past and lineage of Minimalist, monumental, and masculine sculpture. The feat suggests that the young Vitale (born in East Rockaway, New York, in 1973) is a formidable match for such physical and conceptual heft. Each thousand-pound form is welded to a base from

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  picks August 07, 2013

  “Lifelike”

  Like an excellent summer blockbuster, this exhibition has a pedigreed producer (the Walker Art Center), an accessible theme (post-1960s realism), a large cast (over fifty artists), and many stars of its genre (Ron Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Thomas Demand, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Robert Gober). Featuring seventy-two paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos, the show is rich with arresting twists on the humdrum: a garbage bag made of marble (Jud Nelson), a bee crafted from clay (Tom Friedman), an eight-foot-tall bronze milk carton (Jonathan Seliger), and a miniature working

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  picks April 23, 2013

  Jessica Halonen

  There is eeriness to the perfection of the works in Austin artist Jessica Halonen’s new show. At first glance the half-dozen canvases and drawings and five sculptures appear to be flawless investigations of color, shape, and material. From adjacent walls of the intimate gallery, two paintings pop like off-key color wheels composed of strips of pure hue on raw canvas (Target 20, 2013, and Target 17, 2012). In a nearby drawing (Tangle 5, 2013) and smaller canvas (Tangle 2, 2013) the strips reappear, but now they have fallen out of sequence, gained three-dimensionality, and landed like piles of

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  picks July 02, 2012

  Adam Schreiber

  Some photographers manage to explore and define their subjects at the same time. Such nuance is at play in “FLANAGAN – TIRAVANIJA,” an exhibition of ten photographs, which Adam Schreiber was commissioned to shoot in the home of the late collector, artist, and philanthropist Linda Pace. Schreiber is skilled at using his medium to isolate cultural material––from car parts to archives––and this makes him a wise choice to examine the Linda Pace Foundation’s holdings. He creates photographs that are earthly and ethereal, and that observe as they describe.

  Schreiber’s images are installed in a lofty