Katherine Brewer Ball

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  picks April 07, 2017

  Postcommodity

  In the thick velvet darkness of the gallery, a voice whispers, “oyes vengan acá.” Mounted wall speakers take turns asking us to “come over here” in Spanish, echoing the decoy tactics used by the US Border Patrol to seize migrants trying to cross over from Mexico under the blanket of night. On maps, boundaries appear as thin lines, but this exhibition places the audience inside the rich, textured, and opaque sliver of landscape between the communities of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Mexico.

  The aforementioned sound work is half of the two-part installation Coyotaje, 2017—the title is a

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  picks January 06, 2017

  Duane Linklater

  The drywall has been stripped from the side of the gallery’s entrance to expose the underlying brick and bright red scaffolding. White powder-coated steel and plywood beams populate the rooms, but instead of holding up the ceiling, they stand isolated, unattached. One beam wears a faux fur shawl draped over the top, while another stands on a crumpled floral-patterned doormat (Untitled Problem 15 and 8 [all works cited, 2016]). Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater examines the oft-invisible framing that enables and prevents indigenous artwork from being seen. On one wall, a clear plastic tarp

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  picks September 02, 2016

  “Race and Revolution”

  The paint on the ceiling peels while fuzzy balls of mold grow in rows on the floor of a nineteenth-century Army building on Governors Island, Manhattan. In this makeshift gallery, on land that was once a Lenape fishing camp, nine artists respond to this country’s legacy of colonialism and violence. Nona Faustine’s topless photographic self-portrait, Not Gone with the Wind, 2015, taken at the historic eighteenth-century Prospect Park, Brooklyn, home of the Lefferts family—wealthy Dutch settlers and slave owners—sets the tone. Faustine, a black artist, born and raised in Brooklyn, gazes directly

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  picks August 05, 2016

  “THINGS: a queer legacy of graphic art and play”

  Curt McDowell’s soft, grainy voice trickles throughout his 16-mm film, Loads, 1980. The camera frames the low-cut pants of a man’s ass as McDowell quietly muses, “I’d like to be on a sling hanging from his back fucking him while he walked down the street if I could.” McDowell’s “If I could” makes celluloid a second skin, and second only to skin. His fantasy contraption, a creation that has him bouncing like a bad baby boy down the street on a man’s back, weaves desire into the world of objects.

  This group exhibition, curated by Bradford Nordeen, houses an excess of whatchamacallits: the things