print May 2003

Claudia and Julia Müller

In their first New York show, Swiss sisters Claudia and Julia Müller presented three series of ink drawings, an animated video, and two unassuming sculptures (all works 2002) that focus on the complex negotiation of the individual with the constructs that simultaneously facilitate and inhibit self-realization: culture and, more intimately, family. To make the drawings, the Müllers projected images clipped from magazines and newspapers onto paper and traced them in a faux-naive style, isolating the figures in their camera-induced attitudes: shyness, bravado, calculated modesty. Two series here

print May 2003

John Maeda

What does it mean for a digital artwork to be medium-specific? The answer usually involves interactivity, a variously controlled and predictable behavior and response onscreen. But new-media theorists have shown that interactivity is largely a mirage, a mediated reflection of the programmer’s choices and hence not much more radical than the kind of engagement famously identified by Ernst Gombrich in 1959 as the requisite fill-in-the-blank response to illusionistic painting.

With his recent exhibition of twenty-eight color digital photographs (all 2002), some sandwiched between panels of Plexiglas,

print December 2002

Thomas Scheibitz

For visitors pining for another encounter with Thomas Scheibitz’s exuberant, chalky pastel canvases, this show must have been disappointing. In place of the wide, quasiabstract suburban landscapes and quirky still lifes that hung here in two previous exhibitions were a few framed works on paper, one tiny painting, and a roomful of odd sculptures arranged on an ad hoc platform. Whereas Scheibitz’s paintings reliably offer thrilling hues, jostling forms, and tensed, matte surfaces, these new sculptures looked uneven, almost unfinished. Pale beneath the gallery’s large skylight, they seemed shy

print November 2002

Leah Gilliam

The Pathfinder mission to Mars five years ago produced only some soil samples and a week’s worth of grainy stills showing a broad red desert that looked like the inner reaches of Nevada. Yet NASA’s scientists, eager to establish the history of Mars’s formation and the potential for further exploration there, were thrilled. And the rest of the world fell in love, crowding around TV screens and jamming Web pages in record numbers to ogle the planet’s never before seen contours as recorded by the vessel’s little roving camera, Sojourner.

It is this moment of fascination and longing that Leah Gilliam

Nell McClister