picks May 02, 2021

Jenna Bliss

Adopting both the lens of a low-definition, flickering 8-mm camera and the effortlessness of early 2000s advertisements, Jenna Bliss’s fictionalized documentaries in “Now vacant” subject 9/11 to a time-shifted gaze. Three shorts—Connecting the Dots, Spectacle, and Conspiracy (all 2021, the latter two shown on monitors theatrically elevated on towering pedestals)—superimpose erratic footage of a Lower Manhattan skyline, airplanes hovering in the sky, an attempt to capture a “Tribute in Light” show, flashing neon signs, and a digital animation of an unspecified map. The montages loosely concatenate

picks June 22, 2020

Angharad Williams

If certain sizes in Angharad Williams’s exhibition “Without the Scales“ appear ambiguous—a plywood table too big for a child yet too small for an adult (Untitled, 2020) and a “naive” pastel-on-paper drawing (You don’t know anything and that’s good and nice, 2010–20)—it is to address the conundrum of temporal and psychological scales. Measures of time and self are recurring motifs in Williams’s titular installation (Without the Scales, 2020), which becomes a Janus-faced affair as the tight gallery space is symbolically turned into a clockwork, with multiple temporalities overlapping to hallucinatory

picks May 22, 2020

“Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.”

Nick Mauss’s keen understanding of scenography—through which he’s often mapped interdisciplinary transmissions between drawing, architecture, artifacts, genealogies, and viewers—is here worked into a mise-en-scène featuring an eclectic array of works by eighteen artists. A substrate of Mauss’s curatorial staging lies in the eccentric grammar of the titular “bizarre silks,” from the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy. The eighteenth-century European silk brocades begin to trace an idea of dressing or bodily presence onto the gallery, one that is achingly reinforced by Georgia Sagri’s oversize

picks September 27, 2019

John Miller

The images that produce the public self (and the private) most often lie beyond our awareness, locked into an overarching normative system of hyperreal signs we rarely comprehend. The wig-sporting mannequins that populate John Miller’s “Other Subjectivities,” produced in cooperation with Galerie Barbara Weiss, make for interfaces through which such habitual identifications surface and sediment.

For Dress Rehearsal for the Revolution, 2019, Miller configured a mannequin school of rock, deadpan and frozen in a state of detached contemplation. Read together with the pathetic tableau of Poverty,

picks September 09, 2019

Bea Schlingelhoff

In a two-part exhibition produced offsite by Kunsthaus Glarus at the landmarked 1648 Freulerpalast, Bea Schlingelhoff has staged a series of sculptures made of museum vitrines, either modularly displayed or functionally stacked on support structures. Contrary to the stylistic quotation of a default Minimalism, Schlingelhoff’s Plexiglas works display visible wear and tear, as well as the taxonomic inscriptions of their past lives. The artist, in an unapologetic transposition, has removed the vitrines from the permanent installations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century objects at the Freulerpalast’s

picks November 02, 2018

“October 12 – November 25, 2018”

This exhibition, featuring mostly new works by thirteen artists, questions the stability of the artwork by focusing on its tangible and metaphorical processes of circulation. Lined up in the middle of the ground-floor gallery, Ghislaine Leung’s Public Sculpture, 2018, comprises fifteen toy versions of name-brand vacuums and laundry machines, on loan from Reading Central Library, UK. Previously purchased for her Reading International commission, the objects—duplicates of existing library toys for children—have subsequently been incorporated into the Toy Library, and are thus available for both

Kathrin Bentele