Lizzie Homersham

  • Caspar Heinemann, Glorie #2, 2022, cardboard, acrylic, tape, string, wood, Huberd’s shoe grease, 
4 3/8 x 9 x 4 3/4"
    picks June 17, 2022

    Caspar Heinemann

    The irreverence of Caspar Heinemann’s exhibition “Glorie” is encapsulated by the title of a paper chain strung diagonally overhead like bunting, a formal allusion to fisting: And I’ve taken other guys there, too And it’s realer and more important to me than your world That’s all, 2022. A similar tone pulses through Novelty Theory, Heinemann’s 2019 poetry collection. (“Destroy purity but leave a droplet behind to thrive / to make sure you’ve really destroyed purity.”) This publication sits on the front desk alongside Free Files, 2022, a handful of emery boards inside a tin of Huberd’s Shoe Grease,

  • Sam Keogh, Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe (detail), 2021, mixed media installation and performance. Installation view. Photo: Rob Harris.

    Sam Keogh

    On three separate nights during the opening week of his exhibition “Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe,” Sam Keogh gave a live performance outdoors. Script in hand, he unraveled the flamboyant story of an artist undergoing questioning by UK border guards, who suspected the traveler of attempting to smuggle cigarettes through London Stansted Airport. In doing so, he wove fiction together with fact: The guards had mistaken a series of folded paper collages by Keogh for cigarettes; these very collages were installed in the Centre for Contemporary Art’s basement as part of Keogh’s show. As

  • Nikhil Vettukattil, Circulation (Fluidics 0 gate), 2021, PVC tubing, mineral oil, fake blood, water pump, electronics, various plastics, dimensions variable.
    picks September 28, 2021

    “The Fountain Show II”

    The fourteen works by as many artists assembled for this cybernetic exhibition form a circuit through a townhouse living room and its back garden. Talking back in commoditized voices to land art, the objects on view summon Jack Burnham’s 1968 essay “Systems Esthetics” and Kabbalistic readings of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–1923. Nikhil Vettukattil’s Circulation (Fluidics 0 gate), 2021, installed above a fireplace, pumps fake blood through PVC tubing, while Vytautas Kumža’s Brexit lamentation Bitter Sweet, 2021, frames a lemon which spurts

  • Charles Atlas, Because We Must, 1989, video, color, sound, 52 minutes 37 seconds. Foreground: Michael Clark. Background: Amanda King. Production still. Photo: Dee Conway/Bridgeman Images.

    Celestial Body

    “I DANCED MYSELF out of the womb . . . I danced myself into the tomb,” quavers Marc Bolan in the 1971 T. Rex song from which “Cosmic Dancer,” a retrospective marking the fifteen-year anniversary of Michael Clark Company’s residence at London’s Barbican, takes its title. Cosmic suggests earthly transcension—not needing to be grounded—and indeed, the tension between flight and anchorage is what lent this survey its off-kilter coherence, providing room for reflection on what Clark, both a blazing provocateur and an imperially laureled institution of British dance, can and cannot offer audiences

  • Jesse Darling, Gravity Road, 2020, steel, sandbags, soil, flowers, elastic bandage, metal coating, 15 1/2 x 19 x 53'. Kunstverein Freiburg. Photo: Marc Doradzillo.
    interviews September 30, 2020

    Jesse Darling

    After months of working under lockdown in Berlin, Jesse Darling recently traveled by train to Kunstverein Freiburg, in southwest Germany, to install Gravity Road, a “dysfunctional roller coaster” that consists of a suspended horizontal track, a ladder twisting to nowhere. Like the artist’s previous experiments in steel—such as The Veterans and Wounded Door 1, both 2014the work’s anthropometric scale and distorted form suggest both vulnerability and potential. The exhibition opened on September 19 and runs through November 1, 2020. Here, Darling talks about the work’s genesis and installation,

  • A sign used by a demonstrator at the Tate Modern on July 27. Photo: Lizzie Homersham.
    slant July 31, 2020

    Tate Awakening

    “SHAME ON TATE.” This chant reverberated at a protest organized by dozens of staffers with PCS Tate United and PCS Culture Group on Monday, ensuring that no visitor to London’s Tate Modern—newly reopened after four months due to the pandemic—could think it accepted or normal for the institution to threaten 334 employees of its commercial arm, Tate Enterprises, with redundancy. The decimation of jobs is completely preventable, workers argue, and political. Ultimately, Tate’s board decides on resource allocations, and the Prime Minister appoints thirteen out of fourteen members. Monday’s protest

  • Carolyn Lazard, CRIP TIME, 2018, HD Video, color, sound, 10 minutes. Artist-provided description: A set of hands sort seven pillbox compartments on an embroidered tablecloth. The image is taken from an overhead position with the hands partially obstructing the view of the differently colored compartments. The compartments are yellow, blue, pink, green, and white. They are filled with differently colored pills too. There is a patch of bright sunlight on the tablecloth and there are a few pill bottles barely visible along the edge of the frame. Bright orange pills are held in the palm of one hand.
    film May 11, 2020

    Good Measure

    PLEASE BELIEVE THESE DAYS WILL PASS. Amid a massive collective reckoning with sickness and death, these words are emblazoned on billboards across ten UK cities, oblivious to anger and grief. Carolyn Lazard’s work offers a markedly different perspective on temporality, putting store in indeterminacy. How will disparate feelings around what could have been, and what is now, affect what happens in the future? The Philadelphia-based artist’s first UK solo show, “Safe Space,” originally scheduled to open on April 2 at Cell Project Space in London, is indefinitely postponed. An April screening of

  • Maria Pininska-Beres, Window in Spring, 1976, plywood, canvas, cotton, acrylic, 57 1⁄8 × 81 1⁄8 × 20 7⁄8".

    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

  • View of “or the song spilling out,” 2019.
    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

  • Olga Jevrić, Proposal for a Monument. Zev, 1958, iron, 4 1⁄2 × 5 1⁄8 × 2 3⁄4".

    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

  • Julian Abraham “Togar” and Grace Samboh, Jatiwangi Cup Calendar, 2015, twelve digital prints, each 15 3/4 x 12 5/8''.
    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

  • View of “Moarg Keil,” 2019.
    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