previews January 2001

Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers

Organized by a team of four led by BMA curator of photography Barbara Head Millstein, this selection of more than ninety photographers (from established figures like Carrie Mae Weems and Gordon Parks to newcomers Fern Logan and Accra Shepp), represented by two works apiece, should nicely map the terrain. Restricted to currently practicing photographers, “Committed to the Image” nonetheless promises a historical scope. To be included: iconic civil rights images and portraits of cultural figures, as well as recent work addressing the political and social struggles of today and the emergence of

print December 2000

“Glee: Painting Now”

“Glee”? Only in the wake of 13,000-plus stock-market averages would such a title be imaginable. Optimism, confidence, and fun are the watchwords here, and the curators, Amy Cappellazzo (of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, where the exhibition will travel next) and the Aldrich’s Jessica Hough, are pretty open about the fact that these twenty artists “skirt weighty subject matter or politicized content.” The show is premised on the idea that painting exists with more conviction now that it has been forced to shed some of its worn conventions and historical baggage in order to survive

print November 2000

Marcel Dzama

Marcel Dzama’s drawings are like frozen moments from dreams and nightmares. The twenty-six-year-old Canadian continues to add to his voluminous output of simple ink-and-watercolor drawings of various human and animal characters. In Dzama’s shows, the sheets of creamy Manila paper, most of which he tacks to the wall unframed, are often so numerous (191 were included here, and they can number as many as 500 in a single exhibition) that it can be difficult to focus on any one of them for long. All are equally fantastical, absurd, and deadpan. In the eleven-by-fourteen drawings recently on view,

print October 2000

James White/Tim Sheward

BRITISH DUO James White and Tim Sheward “embrace the delusion perpetuated by the worship of false icons.” In their ongoing project of simultaneously critiquing and reveling in manufactured pleasure, White and Sheward have poked fun at brand-name consumerism—the “worship” of products like the Nike and Adidas sneakers and workout clothes worn by the almost life-size bendable figures in the 1997 installation Plastic Picnic. Recently the artists have turned to the “false icons” of the tourism industry: In an exhibition in London last winter, they showed Untitled 7, 1999, a small palm tree

previews September 2000

Y E S Yoko Ono

While the title of this show refers to one of Yoko Ono's early works, the “YES” must also be taken as a laconic riposte to that confused and sometimes hostile lot—the Yoko debunkers—who continue to question her importance. Perhaps a major US retrospective (her first) will sway the naysayers? Curator Alexandra Munroe, in consultation with Ono's archivist Jon Hendricks, brings together some 150 examples of the artist's multimedia output, including installations, films, and videos, from the Fluxus period right up to the present. A new CD of Ono's electrifying vocals comes with the catalogue.

music Summer 2000

Fischerspooner

You may not actually have known any of the songs, but with their pleasingly familiar New Romantic techno-pop beat, you felt like you should. In any case, by the time you filed out of Gavin Brown’s Fifteenth Street gallery—filled to capacity for every performance of Fischerspooner’s five-night run—you were more than ready to shell out twenty bucks for the CD. And weeks later, it has become your sound track. Every time “Fucker” or “Invisible” comes on you’re back in the strobe-lit, sweaty heaven of Fischerspooner’s synching and dancing extravaganza.

Transformed by black fabric and a series of

print Summer 2000

Amy Sillman

The first thing you noticed on entering Amy Sillman’s show of new paintings was The Umbrian Line, 1999–2000, a group of twenty bright gouaches on paper. Mostly small and arranged in a slightly uneven row, they contain elements of Italian landscapes and architecture and conjure a trecento fresco cycle like those seen in the churches of Umbria, where Sillman completed the series. Umbria doesn’t exactly fit into the romantic category of the sublime-but-neglected place, but it’s still a little hard to get there, and patience is required to uncover the region’s rewards—not an inaccurate metaphor for

previews May 2000

Tim Hawkinson

What do you get when you combine Popsicle sticks, socks, TV antennae, tin foil, electrical cords, and plastic doll eyes with an infusion of wacky Conceptual spirit? Tim Hawkinson provides an answer in this mini-retrospective. Jetsetters who made the last Venice Biennale will certainly remember Pentecost, 1999, a large installation comprising twelve figures connected to an enormous tree, all fashioned from sonotubes and mechanized to tap out popular melodies. Fifteen other works by this California artist/inventor round out the show. The catalogue includes essays by curator Philip Monk and Los

interviews April 2000

1000 WORDS: JUSTINE KURLAND

History Painting 101—revised. Moments serene enough to be from a Claude Lorrain, staged beneath a freeway overpass or on the banks of a toxic swamp. Pastoral bathers wear concert-tour T-shirts; highway angels with dirty fingernails shoplift Oreos; Pre-Raphaelite nymphs capture hapless boys who’ve happened on the wrong glade. Each of Justine Kurland’s photographs is a vignette from an ongoing narrative. Inspired by autobiography no less than by fairy tales, movies, Afterschool Specials, even painting in the Grand Manner, Justine’s World is an idyll where fact melts into fiction, where every girl

print March 2000

Sarah Morris

Sarah Morris’s recent paintings of midtown Manhattan buildings are very New York indeed: stylish, hip, loud, reflexive, and assured. Isolating fragments of the glass-curtain facades, the works are rendered in forceful colors—citron, ocher, electric blue, fuchsia—representing the blazing neon light reflected by neighboring buildings and adjacent advertising signage. The structures Morris focuses on are among the more recognizable in the area, including the Seagram Building, mother ship of International Style, and two Skidmore, Owings & Merrill projects (9 West 57th Street and the Grace Building),

print January 2000

Brad Kahlhamer

Entering Brad Kahlhamer’s exhibition “Friendly Frontier” was a bit like stopping off at a roadside attraction on Route 66. The viewer was immediately confronted by a wall-based installation of small kachina figures wrought from pieces of wood, nails, and old clothing, with ropy hair fashioned from unraveled twine. In a nearby corner was a stuffed javelina, its tiny but fearsome jaws parted, captured mid-prance in a diorama-like replica of its native desert landscape, which came complete with sand, cacti, and birds overhead. Handmade from feathers and scraps of fabric and hung from highly visible

previews January 2000

Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker’s 1998 solo outing at the Serpentine Gallery may have cemented her position in the British art world, but American audiences know her for one reason alone: her 1997 Turner Prize nomination. Now, a first US museum survey is sure to provide firsthand evidence to back up the buzz. ICA curator Jessica Morgan brings together some sixty works on paper and sculptures, often simple and delicate pieces whose material origins offer a conceptual thrill: charred fragments from a church destroyed by lightning; silver objects flattened by a steamroller; and snake venom reacting to anti-venom.

Meghan Dailey