picks October 05, 2004

Sally-Ann Rowland

The vapidity of the visual and textual sentiments of readymade greeting cards is hard to top, and their consequent potential as ground for collage is equally hard to resist. In her second solo show at ZieherSmith, featuring a series of new works, Sally-Ann Rowland digs beneath the saccharine surface of these printed ephemera for the rot that lies beneath, unearthing shadows, decay, and vomit-y spray that spreads across the image in the charming form of appliqué. Rowland's colorful threads and beads eat their way across images as grossly Hallmark-esque as a sepia-toned golden retriever puppy, a

picks September 21, 2004

Alessandra Sanguinetti

In the remote farmlands near Buenos Aires live two cousins, Guille and Belinda. One year apart in age, they are the lyrical, generous force that animates Argentinean photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti's six-year-long series of images, “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams,” begun when the girls were nine and ten. In Sanguinetti's much overdue U.S. solo debut, we see the pair of cousins amongst their thickset older relatives and neighbors—but also, much more intimately and remarkably, as they play for the camera at pearl diving and dress-up, assuming

Untitled (The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.), 2003.

picks June 09, 2004

Jason Oddy

Large-format color pictures of empty spaces are nothing new in our post-Becher world, but British artist Jason Oddy’s series of eight untitled color photographs have a pointed relevance as a catalogue of the interior architecture of power. Over the past five years, Oddy has gained access to such centers of authority as the United Nations, the Palace of Nations in Geneva, a car museum in Wolfsburg, Germany, and, unbelievably, the Pentagon and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—in 2003. True to the genre, his photographs are entirely divested of people; phantasmically, they retain their varied auras of authority,

picks April 21, 2004

Anna Gaskell

Anna Gaskell has always been a rescuer of girl characters, carrying them out of the clutches of a familiar children’s story and into the unpredictable narratives of her own pictures. For her fourth solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan, she runs after a story she can’t quite capture, revolving around the nighttime adventures of a group of kids. Across five six-by-seven-foot C-prints, a tale of this gang of boys and girls majestically fails to unfold. In dark clothes and a red skirt or two, they perform mysterious rituals in fake snow, bare knees touching the feathery white drifts. Under a painted moon

picks April 21, 2004

Gordon Matta-Clark

During a prolific career of eight short years, Gordon Matta-Clark sliced through architecture, served food, went underground (literally), and danced in a tree. In 1974, he cut the side of a condemned Niagara Falls house into nine equal parts, removing all but the central panel. Near the end of the color film that documents this theatrical deconstruction and demolition (titled Bingo), the house is shot head-on, flat as a painting, paradoxically revealing inside and outside simultaneously. (Note the experience of watching this on Super 8 instead of video.) The “Bingo” Cibachromes displayed in the

picks March 11, 2004

Helen Mirra

In “Hewn Third,” Helen Mirra gathers together three individual works which speak among themselves in tones of blue, green, and brown. Long, finger’s-width strips of watercolor-dyed cotton run in a delicately broken horizon along three of the gallery’s walls. Poetically incidental words typed haltingly across them constitute the only actual text in the show, but the other works also highlight Mirra’s preoccupation with language. Hung horizontally as well, but in clustered fragments, are wooden planks colored with milk paint (an eighteenth-century furniture finisher), their imperfections gently

picks February 18, 2004

Loretta Lux

Pictures of kids are everywhere these days—from Diane Arbus’s to Nicky Hoberman’s to those of various Japanese Pop stars of the moment—confronting viewers with the unsettling mix of the familiar and the unknowable that inhabits the most affecting representations of childhood. Loretta Lux’s first solo endeavor in the US does them one better. Her photographs of eerily enigmatic children are strangely perfect, impeccable the way a painting can be in terms of composition and palette. Borrowing strategies from masters new and old (Balthus’s knack for barely sublimated eroticism, Piero della Francesca’s

picks November 04, 2003

John Wesley

For the past forty years, John Wesley—a painter whose cast of characters includes Dagwood Bumstead, bald, naked men in garters, birds, and bears—has created some of the most hilariously erotic pictures around. His paintings are flat and bright, their palette limited to sky blue, flesh beige, and candy pink, their figures reduced to simple shapes rimmed by bold black lines. A white border frames many of the pictures, flattening things out even more. Wesley owes as much to Japanese ukiyo-e as to the comic book, and in this group of new paintings he directly quotes the work of Kitagawa Utamaro (

picks September 20, 2003

Christine Heindl

If Raymond Pettibon used angry wit to elevate the juvenile sketch to the level of high art and Chris Johanson added color and a certain grungy pathos, Christine Heindl adds a girly-domestic texture for a welcome feminization of the doodle. Though without the textual meanderings that caption most high-art scribbles, Heindl’s enamel paintings make icons of the pointy-edged suns and Yule-log fireplaces depicted in the margins of notebooks everywhere. The suns reiterate their two-dimensionality through subtle collage of painted paper; the fireplaces do the same, jettisoning perspective in favor of

picks July 21, 2003

Jaye Moon

Jaye Moon “paints” with Legos. Her standard support is a twelve-by-twelve-inch square of colored plastic; on these backgrounds, which over time have varied from primary colors to more subtle hues of purple and teal, she applies the modular playthings to form geometric compositions. If Judd assembled milled aluminum in a way that enabled us to appreciate its innate material qualities, Moon composes Lego components to draw out their dual function as child's toy and universal building block. The results can’t help but be marvelously familiar to those of us who played with Legos—and then went on to

Diane Nerwen, The Thief of Baghdad, 2003.

picks July 11, 2003

“Hard Times”

Times are hard indeed, but this show offers a welcome respite. Sit yourself down on Bart Bettencourt and Colleen Smiley’s comfy ottomans and view the program of six videos that collectively clock in at a brisk fifteen minutes. Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s Margaret, 2002, is a painterly presentation of television footage of Kenyan Margaret Okayo’s triumphant run in the 2001 New York City Marathon. In a voice-over, excerpts from a European explorer’s African travelogue ironically double as Okayo’s thoughts. In Lynn Sullivan’s Veronica’s Veil, 2002, noisy, dirty Manhattan magically disappears as a

picks May 28, 2003

Olafur Eliasson

If R. Buckminster Fuller had been an artist and not an architect, a conceptualist and not a visionary, this is what his laboratory might have looked like. Olafur Eliasson's Modelroom, 2003, is a configuration of plywood shelves whose trapezoidal compartments are stuffed with the sort of geometric forms that inspired Fuller's most extraordinary designs. These fivefold symmetries, endless doughnuts, and kaleidoscopes have informed Eliasson's studies of space and its construction; and his maquettes, fashioned from familiar materials like cardboard, aluminum foil, and chicken wire, are genial and

Lori Waxman