picks February 01, 2023

Tori Wrånes

Gorgeously awkward, the troll-like characters in Tori Wrånes’s video installation BIG WATER, 2022, have round bodies and auburn fur that ripples underwater. Each creature is really a body suit, latex flippers, and taloned gloves worn by a human diver swimming either off the shore of Thailand or in the Arctic Sea. Sometimes filmed close up in pairs and sometimes in groups of four or five, the figures float in the deep current or cluster together on picturesque craggy outcroppings, softly rocking themselves or surreptitiously playing flute instruments. There is no conflict between these beings,

print January 2023

Gluklya

Two yurts, a dome, and a stage: These four elements make up “To those who have no time to play,” a solo presentation by Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), an artist based in Saint Petersburg and Amsterdam. Between these structures, a collection of figures stand facing the stage on which her play Antigone Update (2022) was performed during the opening and will be repeated once again this month. Their bodies are shaped from discarded formal dresses and rough canvas workers’ clothes; an eclectic series of sewing machines appear in place of their heads. Antigone Update was produced collaboratively

picks November 15, 2022

Pablo Castañeda

Pablo Castañeda’s neorealist paintings balance between fidelity to the mundane aesthetics of the border town Mexicali, where he lives and works, and an absurdist irreverence toward semiotic icons. For example, a large air conditioning unit is perched on the sloping roof of a nondescript commercial building in the center of Simulacro 21: Locura en la ciudad (Simulacrum 21: Madness in the city), 2010. The unit’s metal casing has only one remarkable characteristic: It is blocking part of Cindy Sherman’s face, which is painted on a giant billboard in the central background. The image is borrowed

picks September 29, 2022

Ayesha Hameed

“Radio Brown Atlantis” is an exhibition built around a radio program organized by London-based artist Ayesha Hameed and recorded across several continents between 2020 and 2022. The installation places the viewer at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, among the scattered detritus of human passage along historical trade routes. A band of gold has been painted along one wall, across the ceiling, then down the wall opposite. It functions like an entryway to an unmappable space, a space shared by the communities that have traveled or been transported across this water.

The singular, ungraspable quality

picks September 12, 2022

Ayan Farah

To create the dyes for her patchwork paintings, Ayan Farah brews raw materials for months and sometimes years. She harvests rainwater, sea salt, rust, forest ash, soil, and clay and grows indigo and marigold herself. The artist uses these elements to dye fibrous antique hemp and cotton sheets, hotel-room linens, and other textiles sourced during her travels. The exchange of textiles is part of the choreography of arrival for the Somali diaspora, into which Farah was born; their surfaces bear significance in a tactile, portable manner.

The selection of paintings on view within the exhibition “

Natasha marie Llorens