Kathy Noble

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  print March 2018

  Maja Čule

  Maja Čule’s new video Mouth, 2017, is what a nature documentary might be like if made with a mumblecore aesthetic. Men in outdoor gear roam through a forest holding big sticks, shuffle around a muddy lake, and cross terrain thickly covered in decaying autumn leaves. One howls to the sky. Another scans a man’s back with his phone, zooming in on what appears to be a tick bite. At night they stalk animals and wrestle with each other—at one point I heard a pig or boar grunt, but it was too dark to see what’s happening. The soundtrack is ambient: Sometimes we hear their voices or the camera

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  print December 2017

  Marianna Simnett

  Marianna Simnett’s film installation Worst Gift, 2017, is a Wizard of Oz for the Botox age. Simnett worked with physician and singer Declan Costello to tell the story of a voice surgeon who injects prepubescent boys with a substance to lower their voices, creating a surreal fairy-tale musical that is part hallucinatory daydream, part nightmare. Shot in a field, a Botox factory, and an operating theater, the film stars the artist herself as a Dorothyesque character—wearing a girly white dress and turquoise sparkling slippers—who is on a journey to be transformed via the same substance.

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  print November 2017

  Nicola Tyson

  Nicola Tyson’s painted forms are bodily. In some, I see human traces. In others, I see animals, trees, and plants. Her subjects are natural bodies—all living entities. They are not perfectly formed, however. Tyson creates them with light, broad sweeps of acrylic paint, using a dry brush, exposing slivers of white linen canvas, revealing the paint’s movement across the surface. Tyson’s recent exhibition “A Tendency to Flock” consisted of seven paintings in a rich palette of dark red, burnt orange, and varying shades of blue (turquoise, baby, sky) and (green forest) alongside numerous browns,

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  previews May 2017

  “YDESSA HENDELES: THE MILLINER’S DAUGHTER”

  In 1988, Ydessa Hendeles opened a private foundation (shuttered in 2012) to support Canadian and internationally based artists:There, she orchestrated uncanny exhibitions combining contemporary art, historical artifacts, and found objects, at times interweaving her own projects with those of the artists she championed. The Power Plant’s exhibition marks the first time the entire venue has been devoted to the work of a female artist, and ample space will be provided for a number of Hendeles’s complex works from the past decade, including From her wooden sleep . . . , 2013,

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  print December 2016

  Nicolas Deshayes

  Plumbing is the original, mostly invisible, technological network that connects us. Clean water, delivered through a hidden maze of pipes that pop up in our homes, enables us to live the sanitary, hygienic lives we take for granted and which are requisite for social acceptability in the developed world. For his exhibition of new work—titled “Thames Water,” after the utility company responsible for waste treatment and the distribution network for clean water in Greater London—Nicolas Deshayes presented six sculptures that functioned as radiators. Cast-iron forms mimicking assholes, wiry

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  print May 2016

  DIS

  Remember those Benetton ads from the 1980s and ’90s? Their contrived rainbow of human skin tones and Pantone-color-chart clothes and their public support of victims of the AIDS crisis were considered representationally radical by the mainstream press at the time. Central to “Image Life,” the first London solo exhibition by the DIS collective, was the video installation Image Life (Related by Contour) (all works 2016): It depicts a similar hybrid of performed racial inclusivity and inclusive chromatics but aspires to stock-photography genericism. The work comprises a flatscreen inside a bespoke

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  print March 2016

  Danai Anesiadou

  Imagine a museum display re-creating a trashy psychedelic party whose attendees include Catherine Deneuve dressed as a princess in Jacques Demy’s 1970 fairy-tale film Donkey Skin; Abe Sada, a woman notorious for erotically asphyxiating and severing her lover’s penis in 1930s Japan; and actress Isabelle Illiers, topless and wrapped in chains for her role in The Fruits of Passion, Shūji Terayama’s 1981 takeoff on The Story of O. The fete is staged in a building modeled on a Greek temple destroyed in an explosive apocalypse; the partygoers’ possessions are stored in ziplock plastic bags as if saved

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  print February 2016

  Christine Sun Kim

  In a recent TED Talk, Christine Sun Kim commented that, “As a deaf person living in a world of sound, it’s as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors, and norms without ever questioning them.” She went on to explain that she used to make paintings, but when she noticed that nearly every exhibition she visited displayed a work incorporating an element of sound, she began to wonder if she was now going to be excluded from contemporary art. She therefore decided to reclaim her “ownership of sound” via her work—something that, as a deaf child, she

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  print January 2016

  Mark Leckey

  The initial idea was simple: On YouTube, Mark Leckey discovered the audio recording of a Joy Division matinee gig he’d attended in 1979, at age fifteen, the memory of which deeply affected him–leading him to wonder if he could compile important memories from his life through film, ads, and music found online. The resulting film, Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD, 2015, could be considered a dystopian romance. It begins the year Leckey was born, 1964, with footage of early Beatles television broadcasts; the work is not only about music as a point of collective memory but also about the rapid evolution

• previews January 2016

  Glasgow International

  Glasgow is a city that makes things. Historically a center for craft and industry, it has today become a hotbed for artists, drawn by the Glasgow School of Art, who continue to live and work there after graduation. McCrory devised the program with this duality in mind, curating a series of commissions and exhibitions that consider the city’s industrial legacy in relation to the studio-production culture of artists based there—inferring that the psyches of the city’s denizens are steeped in its industrial past. Tramway will play host to a group exhibition that includes

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  performance November 2015

  Wojciech Kosma

  TWO WOMEN lie reclining in different positions on a matte-black foam floor. “How are you?” asks one. “I’m better than yesterday,” replies the other. As they continue to chat, they begin to move—pacing and swerving around each other—surrounded by an audience sitting on the floor along the four walls. “How was your Tinder date?” asks one. “It was really good. She was supercute,” replies the other.

  This was the tentative beginning to JESSICA LLEWELLYN TIMOTHY DWAYNE WOJCIECH YUNUEN, the latest installment in a project instigated in 2011 by Wojciech Kosma. The premise is simple: The performers

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  print November 2015

  Larry Johnson

  Untitled (Raven Row Giraffe), 2015, is a wall-spanning photograph of a cartoon giraffe with an image of a pencil inserted in its asshole as it sucks on another—the pencils manipulated by images of two human hands. The animal’s pouty lips are clasped tightly, its eyes popping out. Another photograph, Untitled (Ass), 2007, depicts a line-drawn donkey whose anus is being poked by a pencil eraser as it makes dopey, sexy, come-hither eyes at the hand that wields the writing implement. In Untitled (Kangaroo), 2007, a female marsupial has a pencil sticking erect from her pouch, which she grips