Lori Cole

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  picks August 06, 2009

  Graciela Iturbide

  “Fotografías de Graciela Iturbide” follows the artist’s travels through India, Mexico, Spain, Madagascar, and the United States from the 1970s to the present, as she documents her encounters with landscape and street life. While some of the 180 photographs in the show contain only a trace of human presence, such as a jacket that hangs delicately and improbably from the tip of a tree branch in Khajuraho, India, 1998, other images focus on the whimsical violence of daily life. Baile de cabrito, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, México (The Goat’s Dance, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, Mexico), 1992, presents a dead goat,

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  picks February 15, 2009

  “In Practice”

  In this series of installations commissioned for the institution’s basement space, artists offer disparate interpretations of site specificity. Becket Bowes invites visitors to linger in the nooks of a narrow, tunnel-like hallway in Social Isolate Club (all works 2009) to contemplate thematically linked sculptures and read neatly bound books with fake titles like Identity Tactics Vol. 1.

  Instead of paring down the art to accentuate the surrounding space, Rachel Mason transforms her designated area into a Hapsburg-era foyer, covering the walls and ceiling with heavy red fabrics, gold-tasseled

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  picks January 26, 2009

  “Things Fall Apart”

  This exhibition, curated by artist Joy Garnett, culls its title from a poem by W. B. Yeats. The show responds to a variety of political issues, including Hurricane Katrina, which is loosely referenced in a series of unframed drawings, prints, and photographs by Paul Chan and the New Orleans–based artist collective the Front. Most striking from this group are the architecturally inflected images, such as Jonathan Traviesa’s Sculptural Awareness #7, 2005, a photograph of a house covered with peeling strips of canvas, and Megan Roniger’s precise pen-and-ink drawing of vine-covered houses precariously

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  picks January 23, 2009

  “Contradictions in Black and White”

  The artists in this group exhibition gently tease out the limitations of still life and landscape, transforming both constructed and natural subjects into unrecognizable, formalist experiments. Irving Penn presents an everyday object, Deli Package, New York, 1975, as a flattened, grainy, X-ray-like image. Barfield, 2003, Michael Flomen’s photograph of a snowy day, is suggestive of a sleek, eerie moonscape. The light-dappled field produced by scattering fireflies in Flomen’s Being, 2000, resembles the swarm of mechanical objects in Margaret Bourke White’s adjacent Russel Birdsall & Ward Bolt and

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  picks January 20, 2009

  Nobuyoshi Araki

  A selection of nearly two hundred unframed seventeen-by-fourteen-inch images from Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Ginza” series, 1963–72, covers two walls of this exhibition, forming a haphazard archive of his lesser-known street photographs. While many of the pictures capture Tokyo’s bustling high-end shopping district, as suggested by legs in motion, jarring angles, and pedestrian traffic, Araki also includes an unusual number of portraits. These close-ups of passersby, caught midstride, provide points of access for the viewer, who could otherwise be overwhelmed by the crowded grid of photographs.

  Araki

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  picks October 30, 2008

  “Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now”

  In this group exhibition, guest curator Lydia Yee historicizes the street as subject and stage, a space onto which artists project their shifting visions of public life. It opens with politically charged photojournalistic candids, such as William Klein's antagonistic Gun No. 1, New York, 1954, which forces the viewer to stare down the blurry barrel of a pistol aimed by a sneering child. Although the show mostly consists of New York–based photography, with an emphasis on performance documentation, it nevertheless showcases a range of practices attempting to model urban experience.

  Artists transform

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  picks October 19, 2008

  “Untethered”

  Tethered is cyber-law expert Jonathan Zittrain’s term for objects hardwired to perform a single act; “Untethered” presents artworks by artists who unlock items from this proprietary use and redirect them toward aesthetic purposes. Organized by Eyebeam curatorial fellow Sarah Cook, the show includes Eyebeam residents and international artists who playfully transform everyday objects into participatory, otherworldly experiences through technology. The exhibition opens with Thomson & Craighead’s Unprepared Piano, 2004, a glossy Baby Grand piano that selects random parts of ensemble scores from MIDI

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  picks October 11, 2008

  Michal Chelbin

  Eastern European adolescents stare out of Michal Chelbin’s staged yet intimate portrait photographs, seducing the viewer into uncomfortable, voyeuristic complicity with the camera. At once touching and disturbing, the series on view in this exhibition ranges from Jenya, Ukraine, 2005, wherein a teenager in a swimsuit leans suggestively against a car, to Nastya, Russia, 2007, a seemingly old-fashioned portrait of a girl sitting sweetly in a chair, her red hair neatly combed. Many of Chelbin’s subjects pose in isolated settings, which stirs the impulse to narrate—a desire quickly frustrated by

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  picks August 05, 2008

  “Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946–2004”

  Organized by the Jeu de Paume and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, “Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946–2004,” the first major retrospective of Avedon’s work in France, opens with Avedon’s Parisian fashion photography. Working for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, Avedon glamorized the city as a vibrant backdrop against which Suzy Parker played pinball in a Lavin-Castillo gown at the Café de Beaux Arts and Elise Daniels posed in Balenciagia among street performers in the Marais.

  The exhibition shifts from fashion photography to Avedon’s acclaimed celebrity and political portraiture, defined by his use of

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  picks August 05, 2008

  “César Baldaccini: An Anthology by Jean Nouvel”

  In homage to their shared history with César Baldaccini, the Fondation Cartier and the architect Jean Nouvel have collaborated to produce a loosely retrospective show marking the tenth anniversary of the sculptor’s death. Showcasing nearly one hundred pieces that fit into four discrete modes, the exhibition demonstrates the visceral relationship César, who went by his first name, had with industrial materials, the properties of which often determine the work’s formal qualities.

  Visible through the breathtakingly transparent museum designed by Nouvel, César’s brightly colored, whimsical sculptures

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  picks July 23, 2008

  “Ready Made”

  “Ready Made,” the Parisian half of the gallery’s summer group shows, revisits the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s groundbreaking proposition that objects can also be works of art. While Saâdane Afif directly references Duchamp in his series of framed news and catalogue clippings, M. D. Urinoire, 2008, most of the show instead only loosely invokes the readymade and its conceptual implications. Bertrand Lavier elevates his crashed motorcycle to the status of art by gracefully suspending it from the ceiling, while Kaz Oshiro inverts the Duchampian model in Microwave Oven #4, 2007, an artwork that mimics

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  picks February 19, 2008

  “Nina in Position”

  Although curator Jeffrey Uslip makes many theoretical claims for “Nina in Position,” the exhibition primarily presents various strategies for representing biological materials and processes. Marcos Rios crafts a slab of beef out of stainless steel, while Kelly Barrie transforms an image of his hand, saliva, and flour into an austere photographic composition. In Red on White, 1993, Anya Gallaccio uses animal blood, glass, and salt to create an abstract floor piece with a visceral punch. Many of the works are activated by juxtaposition, such as Wade Guyton’s abstract, curved mirrored sculpture,