Lizzie Homersham

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  print December 2019

  Maria Pininska-Beres

  “A window view is not the real thing,” Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999) wrote in 1994, at a time when she was prevented by illness from “actively communing” with the outdoors. In the same text, she remembers one summer when she “escaped from the ‘cage’ of the garden” and “pressed herself into the moss, wallowing in it, moaning in ecstasy.” These reflections find more immediately accessible form in two works chronologically bookending “Living Pink,” the first presentation of the artist’s work outside her native Poland. The show comprised a total of nine pieces spanning mixed-media performance

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  picks November 27, 2019

  Sable Elyse Smith

  A car burns red at night by a deserted sidewalk, then explodes. Sable Elyse Smith’s installation of this silently looping, shaky footage, Untitled (all works 2019), on a flatscreen suspended in the corner, suggests a courtroom monitor. Gallerygoers, ordinarily judging artworks, may in other circumstances find themselves serving as witnesses, legal workers, jury members, defendants, or prison visitors. The speech bubble of a large cartoon bird addresses viewers in a nearby silk-screen and oil-stick work on paper: “Thanks for visiting!”

  On the floor, Riot I and Pivot II resemble playground equipment

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  print November 2019

  Olga Jevrić

  In a selection of works dated 1955 to 2001, several poised, boulder-like works by the Serbian artist Olga Jevrić (1922–2014) absorbed light into heavy gray, brown, and orange surfaces derived from ferric oxide, iron, cement, terra-cotta, and bronze. The ensemble had a grounding quality that was also uplifting. Invested with movement, certain constructions driven through with iron rods appeared to have forced themselves out of the earth. Inspired by the twelfth- to sixteenth-century stećci, or medieval tombstones, found in vast numbers in cemeteries across the borders of southeast Europe, Jevrić

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  picks August 07, 2019

  “Unorganised Response”

  In Christelle Oyiri’s Collective Amnesia (Call and Response), 2019, a woman dances in a museum, taking viscous, gliding steps as the marble floor beneath her gains a transparent layer of archival riot footage. Cars burn and lights flash, suggesting the resurfacing of exultant scenes long repressed. The video reflects, from a Parisian context, on the recent uptake of Logobi, a fast-paced Ivorian dance, by black working-class banlieusards. From its soundtrack emerge recognizable elements of “Just Because This Is a Funeral Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Rave,” from Oyiri’s 2018 album Mere Noises, released

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  picks March 03, 2019

  Morag Keil

  Controllers, 2019, installed in the upper galleries of “Moarg Kiel,” is a bile-green door jammed shut. Its peephole affords a glimpse of Alexa’s blue halo, as if to propose the Amazon bot—feminized, confined—as an update of Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Another door opens onto Shopping, 2011/19, where tendril-like wires hang from the ceiling. The wires connect a system of speakers nestled into washing-up bowls from which audio spills, clashing advertising and video-game samples to give the bare room a homely, mall-like atmosphere. Art’s technological support structures become a site of consumption

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  picks December 26, 2018

  Josephine Pryde

  In Josephine Pryde’s exhibition “In Case My Mind Is Changing,” four 3D-printed sculptures resemble icebergs. Titled Time and the Tampon 1–4 (all works 2018), they are opaque, white, and scaled to fit with plenty of space around them, placed atop three thin black mats. It becomes hard to dissociate these mats from yoga after reading “Constable,” a short text contributed by Pryde to Anarchic sexual desires of plain unmarried schoolteachers (2015), in which the artist describes how practicing yoga generates various landscapes in her mind. “I make no effort to summon them as memories,” she writes.