print May 2019

Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz’s “The Early Years, 1970–1983: Archive Project No. 1” at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles began with a wall-size timeline anchoring us firmly amid the total noise of this thirteen-year stretch. The timeline traced a capricious selection of personal and pop-cultural tidbits with a relatively sympathetic focus on the American spirit and zeitgeist, its aspirations and rock-star veneer, with occasional detours toward political injustices and small and large tragedies. Two vast galleries were divided into seven rooms by freestanding panels, to which more than four thousand images, mostly

print April 2019

Rosha Yaghmai

A bathroom scene enlarged: floor, a few inches of wall, a lone strand of hair. The slightly raised ground is covered with what appear to be oversize ceramic tiles of a pastel-green hue but are in fact painted MDF. The trompe l’oeil binding “grout” is made of paint and sand. Along the walls, black “tiles,” roughly four feet tall, are also made of wood panels and coated with piano lacquer. Their edges hug the floor in decorative curves. The whole space is an amplified, supersize reality. “It is the unfamiliar familiar, the conventional made suspect,” Mike Kelley might say, and, indeed, this

print January 2019

Nikita Gale

fuck transparency. Nikita Gale’s exhibition “DESCENT” was paced by a rhythmic guitar distortion and a stoic voice-over emanating from its namesake video. The title’s multiple reads—hereditary descent, angled descent, dissent—were part of Gale’s efforts throughout the show to scramble legibility, both visually and conceptually.

A long corridor lit green led to the gallery; the color, complementary to the occasional red glow of Gale’s video, left a blinding afterimage of the silhouetted shapes that obstructed the hallway’s other doorways. Gale had divided the main space with a series of

print December 2018

“measuring with a bent ruler”

The announcing dispatch promised this exhibition would “unravel,” and the unconventional group show was, indeed, deconstructed into a sequence of solo presentations—unwieldy exhibitions that embraced undoneness. Each iteration treated the exhibition space as a forum for making and showed works neither nascent nor completed by three artists (introduced in the press release as mutual strangers). Their pieces segued into one another conceptually as well as formally, offering distinct and complementary approaches to text, collage, and performance.

PART ONE: Dylan Mira’s Night Vision (all works

print November 2018

Fernando Palma Rodríguez

A small red robot with a coyote head pivoted. It drew back, ready to take a step, but found itself tethered to a rock. Its agency was neutralized by this unjust mechanism, yet it was still threatening, as its blade-clad hands rotated menacingly. Just like its blue double, on view in a simultaneous exhibition across the country, the work is titled Soldado.

The architect of this machine, Fernando Palma Rodríguez—an artist, engineer, and activist—is based in Milpa Alta, a key agricultural region near Mexico City, where, in addition to his studio, he runs a not-for-profit institution

print October 2018

Patrick Jackson

Starting with its title, Patrick Jackson’s summer exhibition “DUM MUD” was a palindrome. Typeset on the invitation in large, bubbly letters dripping like cartoon blood (or perhaps more obviously like mud), the made-up word established the tone—and material—of the show. Palindromes are, after all, allegorical representations that upend the linear sequence of language and, in so doing, ping-pong time, focusing a reader’s attention equally on the form and the meaning of a word.

Staged “off-site” in the artist’s one-bedroom apartment, this unconventional exhibition invited visitors to come

picks September 06, 2018

Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele

For a few months in the late 1970s, Toronto-based video-makers Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele lived in Venice Beach. Like anthropologists arriving in a foreign land (as Steele has noted), they kept a scientific distance from their subjects and shrewdly consumed the native culture (in person and on-screen) in order to cannibalize it, spitting it back out in dispatches on video-art tapes. Their stint in California was a marathon of highly productive role-playing, tape-making, and persona-building that continued to feed their work long after they left.

Before California, Steele viewed her work as

print September 2018

Allen Ruppersberg

Self-fiction and play, double entendre and wit, slippery authorship and off-site-ness are the underpinnings of Allen Ruppersberg’s oeuvre. The Conceptual artist’s retrospective at the Walker Art Center, “Intellectual Property 1968–2018,” foregrounded his persistent fascination with the American vernacular—its humor, horror, literature, and pop culture—unfurled through a thematic and chronological sequence of galleries. EACH WORK IS ONE OF A KIND, as Ruppersberg once wrote in “Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday,” 1985. The show strung experiments into a narrative, bracketed by

Lauren Mackler