Michael Archer

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  previews January 2014

  Ceal Floyer

  Ceal Floyer’s works often revolve around fleeting physical phenomena—the sound of footsteps, the movement of a window blind—that hover on the edge of significance. But the infrastructures that deliver these stimuli (projectors, speaker systems, turntables, and other common devices) serves as a constant reminder that in fact the given gesture or sensation exists concretely within our environment. Such an approach is foundational to Floyer’s practice, as is her use of words not as abstract vehicles of meaning but as material: For example, the artist replaced

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  print December 2012

  Roman Liška

  London-based German artist Roman Liška’s exhibition “NU BALANCE” was a statement of dissatisfaction and an expression of desire. The show was conceived not only as a group of works, but as an extended debate; each week the works on view were replaced with a new group, providing a shifting context and stimulus for discussion. Liška’s fundamental question was this: If the social status quo is under threat from financial, political, and environmental pressures, how might we reconfigure things in order to establish a new, dynamic equilibrium? Included in the first week’s hang was the eponymous NU

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  print January 2012

  Lloyd Corporation

  Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees, working collaboratively as Lloyd Corporation, inaugurated Carlos/Ishikawa’s new space with a show of works that have grown out of, and offer an oblique take on, the febrile indeterminacies of the present economic situation. Presiding over the show through several of the works’ titles was the spirit of the Roman god Janus. Guardian of the gateway, looking both forward and backward, the deity offers a symbolic link between the distant past, in which an empire was born, and a future cobbled from its rubble.

  Titled “Connect. Conjugate. Continue,” the exhibition

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  print December 2011

  Helen Marten

  Helen Marten has been garnering a reputation for expansive sculptural installations in which she orchestrates the buzz of conversation between suggestive form and perverted function, material and finish, image and effect, glamour and illusion. What preoccupies her is the range of qualities inherent in the products that populate our environment. How is it that we can largely ignore the embedded intelligence and technical know-how in things and yet still make use of them? And if we do notice these aspects of an object, what can they tell us about the political viewpoints and cultural attitudes

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  previews May 2011

  Folkestone Triennial

  When the Folkestone’s inaugural curator, Andrea Schlieker, announced in 2008 that this extensive exhibition of artworks would become a triennial, the proposition might have been taken as speculative.

  When the Folkestone’s inaugural curator, Andrea Schlieker, announced in 2008 that this extensive exhibition of artworks would become a triennial, the proposition might have been taken as speculative. Yet three years later, Schlieker, remaining the project’s driving curatorial force, has organized an intriguing program of commissions by nearly twenty artists from Egypt, Guyana, India, and the UK (including Tonico Lemos Auad, Latifa Echakhch, and Zineb Sedira, as well as locals Hamish Fulton and the collective Strange Cargo) to be presented at multifarious locations

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  print January 2011

  Angela Bulloch

  Toward the end of the 1990s, Angela Bulloch began working with pixel boxes. Each is a wooden cube with one translucent face, behind which are lighting tubes that glow any desired color, controlled by the input signal from the artist’s proprietary DMX module. These objects quickly became her signature, employed in diverse ways over the next few years. With “Discrete Manifold Whatsoever,” her first solo show in Britain since 2005, Bulloch has again turned to the pixel box, albeit in a new way that emphasizes concerns that have perhaps not always been so overtly apparent. Rather than foregrounding

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  previews January 2011

  Susan Hiller

  The practice developed by UK-based Susan Hiller over the past forty years has been remarkable for both its diversity of form and its consistency of focus.

  The practice developed by UK-based Susan Hiller over the past forty years has been remarkable for both its diversity of form and its consistency of focus. In her treatment of objects and phenomena drawn from cultural and natural sources, she has explored the range of those presumptions, fantasies, nightmares, and aspirations that shape our shared reality. Her work reveals a fruitful interplay between contrasting orderings in the conscious and unconscious mind, and in this career-spanning show of some forty works—including major audiovisual installations such as

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  print Summer 2010

  Kaye Donachie

  The modest proportions of the six paintings in Kaye Donachie’s latest exhibition served only to sharpen the focus of the gaze she turns upon her subjects—a gaze that makes visible a kind of fruitful incoherence (to use artist Susan Hiller’s endlessly useful and provocative term). To say, then, that Donachie’s subject here is women’s contributions to modernist thought and practice would be to oversimplify. What it is to be present, to be active, to have a voice, and to assume, ultimately, some measure of control over the fate of one’s productive labor are all questions that these paintings bring

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  print May 2010

  Jost Münster

  The first work in Jost Münster’s show “Ground Control” was the wall painting Bands, 2010, featuring vertical stripes of slightly different lengths running roughly from the ceiling down to knee height: a wide central black band flanked by a narrower, marginally shorter sky blue one to its right and a thin yellow line to its left, all abutting except for a section of the yellow line, which peels away from the black toward its lower end. The colors and their arrangements were evocative, gently suggestive of the street from which one had just stepped. But they were also implacably there, flat on

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  print February 2010

  Phillip Lai

  Right from the start, you could be certain only that there would be no certainties. Just inside the door of this show, on the floor of the gallery’s lobby, Phillip Lai had installed Untitled (all works 2009). On and around a low pile of foam slabs of various sizes and thicknesses were four wine bottles, a couple of balls, and a baseball bat—a temporary resting place, perhaps, for a gregarious though security-minded vagrant. All of the objects are cast in sponge foam, but they are imperfect, looking as if parts of their surface layers have been left in the mold; the balls in particular seem almost

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  previews January 2010

  Rodney Graham: Through the Forest

  Through disturbances of perception and perspective, textual interpolations, looped narratives, and visual inversions, Rodney Graham’s art unfailingly challenges both the intellect and the senses.

  Through disturbances of perception and perspective, textual interpolations, looped narratives, and visual inversions, Rodney Graham’s art unfailingly challenges both the intellect and the senses, while his repeated references to a range of cultural giants are less a matter of appropriating their legacy than of opening it up. With more than one hundred works in media ranging from light boxes to Liquitex to film and video, as well as book works and Graham’s first foray into painting, the 2005 series “Picasso, My Master,” this midcareer retrospective draws on three

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  print November 2009

  Paul McDevitt and Cornelius Quabeck

  Though Cornelius Quabeck and Paul McDevitt are now both based in Germany, the two first met while studying in London. Quabeck has recently been working on the West Coast, and it was in San Francisco that the two artists encountered the work of Albert Bierstadt. Popular, successful, hugely productive, and not averse to redeploying tried-and-tested compositional tricks, the nineteenth-century landscapist— trained, as Quabeck initially was, in Düsseldorf—seemed an appropriate reference point for their own ongoing collaborative project. It helped, too, that Bierstadt’s name can be literally translated