Lori Cole

• 

  picks January 30, 2007

  “Omission”

  John Baldessari once noted: “What I leave out is more important. I want that absence, which creates a kind of anxiety.” This remark inspired “Omission,” a group show that examines aesthetic strategies of elision through six works that each erase or obscure some piece of identifying content, forcing the spectator to mentally fill in compositional gaps. Mike Kelley’s work takes as its material the magazine Sex to Sexty, substituting gray or colored panels for issues missing from his personal collection. Placing both the original copies and their monochromatic proxies behind two separate Plexiglas

• 

  picks January 18, 2007

  “Renegades”

  Mining twenty-five years of photographic and video documentation, Exit Art’s performance retrospective “Renegades” fills its warehouse space with elevated floor screens, video monitors, and wall projections to show work that argues for the continued relevance of performance to visual production. Beginning with “Illegal America,” a 1982 exhibition documenting Vito Acconci's, Chris Burden's, Gordon Matta-Clark's, and other artists’ clashes with the law in making their art, Exit Art has used the intersection between Conceptual, performance, and visual art as the basis for its programming. Artists

• 

  picks October 17, 2006

  “Nothing and Everything”

  A crowded installation of photographs, sculptures, and drawings by many of the twentieth century’s great artists, “Nothing and Everything” playfully investigates the materiality and experiential nature of art through careful juxtapositions. Sol LeWitt cleanly tears a piece of white paper into stark geometric sections in R115, 1973, generating an elegant composition with a simple gesture, while Robert Ryman defamiliarizes the monochrome in Untitled, 1967, a white-painted canvas square affixed directly to the white wall with masking tape. Many of the exhibition’s Minimalist pieces foreground the

• 

  picks October 05, 2006

  “Love and War: The Weaponized Woman”

  Taking Joan of Arc as a historical point of departure, “Love and War: The Weaponized Woman” showcases high fashion’s material and formal exploration of feminine strength and vulnerability. Although the exhibition claims to examine the relationship between dress and power, its military motifs and materials often supplement rather than challenge feminine objectification. The fetishistic overtones of Alexandre Herchcovitch’s rubber dress, John Galliano’s pliable leather evening attire for Christian Dior, and Jordan Betten’s reptile-skin hot pants simply serve to sexualize the female figure. Junya

• 

  picks June 30, 2006

  Marianne Brandt

  The only woman to complete the Bauhaus Metal Workshop, Marianne Brandt also briefly served as its acting director after László Moholy-Nagy left in 1928. However, she almost never exhibited the photography, photomontage, and collage work she did during her Bauhaus days before the 1960s, perhaps because of the work’s personal and highly political nature. For example, the explicitly feminist montage With All Ten Fingers, ca. 1930, depicts a man controlling strings connected to a prostrate woman made to look like a marionette, while the double-sided Bull-Ass-Monkey/Modern Idols, 1926, muses on

• 

  picks May 17, 2006

  “Dubuffet/Basquiat: Personal Histories”

  Although at first “Dubuffet/Basquiat: Personal Histories” seems an academic exercise in thematic comparison (we see a Dubuffet car echoed in Basquiat’s Old Cars, 1981, for example), the juxtaposition of the artists’ rich pictorial vocabularies amplifies their distinct visions, proving the value of reexamining their work. Formally, their shared motifs include a blocked-out composition (despite their seeming disorder); ambiguous, cartoonish figures; and an unconventional, often garish, palette. The show pairs Dubuffet’s late “Théâtres de Mémoires” paintings with a range of Basquait’s work from

• 

  picks May 03, 2006

  “reGeneration”

  Last summer, in honor of its twentieth anniversary, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, speculated twenty years into the future of photography by combing top art schools for emerging talent. However, despite some apocalyptic landscapes and high-tech showmanship, “reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow” is not so much a glimpse into the future of the medium as a reminder of the possible range of its application. Some images wryly situate themselves historically, like Carlin Wing’s shot of Nan Goldin’s famous self-portrait in a sterile conference room and Idris Khan’s superimposition

• 

  picks February 28, 2006

  “La Normalidad”

  As the third installment of “Ex-Argentina,” an exhibition series organized in response to the country’s 2001 financial crisis, “La Normalidad” gathers protest ephemera, video documentaries, experiential installations, and public projects that examine the relationship between artistic collaboration and social resistance. For example, the Brazilian collective Contra Filé consciously traces the process of art’s role in political dissent through a series of charts, newspaper clippings, and texts explaining the replacement of a monumental statue with a turnstile. Erring on the side of political

• 

  previews September 2004

  Pepón Osorio

  Pepón Osorio’s latest suite of works, arising from his recent three-year residency at Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services, dramatizes and humanizes the roles of counselors and clients during critical moments of transition.

  Pepón Osorio’s latest suite of works, arising from his recent three-year residency at Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services, dramatizes and humanizes the roles of counselors and clients during critical moments of transition. The artist’s reconstruction at ICA of DHS offices places the personal minutiae of employees’ cubicles adjacent to the caged-in contents of a family’s storage locker. His video of a running child, projected on the wooden skeleton of an unfinished house, dest- bilizes the suburban ideal, while another video implicates the social-service system with footage of teens ill