Olivia Perce

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  picks November 10, 2020

  Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor

  Within the clean, vertical lines of this former Masonic temple, silence sounds almost reverential. La Loge is the ideal setting for Romanian duo Mona Vǎtǎmanu and Florin Tudor’s “Omnia Communia Deserta,” a sober meditation on Omnia Hall, the Brutalist Bucharest arena that once housed Nicolae Ceaușescu’s seat of power and is now finishing renovations to become a National Center of Dance.

  The installations in the temple, all composed from objects formerly at Omnia, index the decay of Ceaușescu’s authoritarian socialism. Roots (all works 2020) occupies the center: ornate wooden columns, once standing

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  picks August 12, 2019

  Tokimeki Memorial

  Koji Nakano was seventeen, Yusuke Abe was one, and Nanami Hori not yet born when the hit 1994 dating simulation video game Tokimeki Memorial was released. Their group show, curated by XYZ Collective, makes no reference to it other than in its title. This is fitting, since all three artists borrow images and phrases from the realms of kabuki, video games, manga, or anime, yet stop just short of clearly naming their sources. Nanami Hori’s vibrant oil painting Timing of the ZABUTON, all works 2019, features a cartoonish samurai frozen in flight over a pillow pile. He wields a katana with his right

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  picks May 09, 2019

  “Twinkle”

  A twinkle is a vector of transformation. The thought pervades this four-person show, where a glitch, a gleam, or shimmering fetish gear function to reconfigure the self. KC Crow Maddux speaks to the experience of living in a trans body, mounting indexical photos of himself into sculptural frames. Untitled (3), 2019, layers a smiling blue phallus atop a triangular structure, from which gazes a piercing green eye. It is a symbol, a resignified language of gender fluidity. Leonard Suryajaya’s installation similarly stages his life in order to actualize it—see Round Table Conference, 2015, a photograph