Lillian Davies

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  picks March 22, 2006

  Andrew Mania & Carl Van Vechten

  Quietly enshrined in this dimly lit gallery, Andrew Mania's drawings, paintings, and simple constructions create a stage for the artist's personal collection of photographs by Carl Van Vechten. With the same focus Mania applies to his use of swatches of cotton fabric and vintage ceramic household items, the artist incorporates a series of black-and-white portraits by Van Vechten, an Iowa-born New Yorker who challenged racial segregation while moving among Manhattan's early twentieth-century social and intellectual circles. Van Vechten, who died ten years before Mania was born in Bristol, is

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  picks February 24, 2006

  Ian Anüll

  Ian Anüll's serigraph When R Died, 1999, which tells the story of a collector seeking to capitalize on an artist friend's death, introduces this exhibition with a sardonic expression of frustration, concluding: “I can't stand the idea of people trafficking on the death of a painter, so I made him a price for R dead, not R alive.” The show, accompanied by a program of Anüll's short, highly voyeuristic films of urban life (looped on bulky television monitors in supermarket trolleys), argues against the existence of truly “found objects.” Leaning against one wall is Carton Collection, 1985/1990,

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  picks February 22, 2006

  Dwayne Moser

  With the sweeping gaze of a nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Dwayne Moser’s Untitled Backdrops, 2006, see the West as a fertile frontier of fantasy and possibility. Likewise, Moser is exacting in his portrayal of particularly pregnant moments of the night and day. However, these backdrops, painted by a team of Warner Brothers professionals, are not inspired by a fanciful sublime; they are instead grounded in the tacky misbehavior of Hollywood celebrities. Each backdrop is still and empty, with visual clues and theatrical lighting that point to the specific sites where Lindsay

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  picks February 02, 2006

  Philippe Decrauzat

  In Philippe Decrauzat’s latest solo show, each of the young Swiss painter’s carefully manicured works glistens with a commitment to physicality; somewhat paradoxically, the vibrant colors and playful shapes hypnotize, seemingly offering an escape from the material world. KOMAKINO, 2005, an elegant wall work whose title references both a hypnotic Japanese dance and a song by Joy Division, wavers between academic abstraction and commercial design. Five drawings made on sixty-centimeter vinyl disks are placed over an elegant black-and-white frieze pattern, mobilizing youth culture to undermine the

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  picks January 20, 2006

  “A picture of war is not war”

  The impossible distance between the people and actions that make war and those who safely watch is summarized by this show’s title, taken from Hito Steyerl’s piece November, 2004. The work, one of a smartly selected program of six films, describes the transformation of Steyerl’s childhood friend Andrea Wolf into an icon for the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party. Her narrative offers an analogy for the arrival of our “post-October” period—a time when some marginalized social groups have become violent. Set in the new extremes of this restless era, Renzo Martens’s Episode 1, 2003, becomes a

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  picks January 11, 2006

  Richard Long

  “The Time of Space” is installed across a stratum of rooms with the same deliberate pacing as Long’s relentless walks, bringing together new and recent photographs, notes, and ephemeral sculptures that exist as humble records of these movements and his site-specific creations. For The Time of Space, 1999, Long travelled to Mount Parnassus, Greece, and arranged a circle of stones, which he then photographed; upon his return to the site in 2002, he “dispersed” the formation, carefully noting his action on the original image. In this work, Long draws our attention to the time that links unique

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  picks January 03, 2006

  “New Video, New Europe”

  “New Video, New Europe,” curated by Hamza Walker, offers three extensive video programs from a region that has, especially since eight Eastern European states joined the European Union in 2003, asserted its position within Western systems of commerce and communication. In the shop front windows of Arthouse, a former department store on the historic main street of Austin, Texas, a single screen, atop a pile of dusty television monitors, loops Anna Niesterowicz’s Beaver, 2001, a video of a woman’s legs as she boldly removes her underwear. Inside, the show immediately turns towards the mouth as a