picks September 29, 2017

Kahlil Robert Irving

Kahlil Robert Irving’s smashed porcelain, stoneware, gravel, and glass sculptures hold multitudes. The works, cast from Styrofoam food containers, soda bottles, and paint cans, are destroyed and then pieced together into rough assemblages that interrogate material, visual, and political realities. The chaotic Seven Pack – Memorial edition, August 2014 (RIP) (all works 2017) has a sea of cigarette-butt decals adhered to its base, holding aloft seven precisely made ceramic soda bottles. Bricks, Concrete, Tubes (Mass Memorial) exclaims “I am Mike,” while Mass: Meissen TO – GO (KILLING DAILY; DAILY

picks August 11, 2017

Kiluanji Kia Henda

A metal sign reading Miragem—the Portuguese word for “mirage”—once sat in the restaurant of a small desert community, rusted through from the billowing sands of southern Angola. A photograph of the peculiar sign, Rusty Mirage, 2015, is the centerpiece of Kiluanji Kia Henda’s current exhibition, a meditation on the failures of the modern city. In the main room, a four-channel video installation, Paradise Metalic [sic], 2014, outlines the birth of a mythological country. The Man with the Shovel, the hero of the story, seeks to answer the question, How do you build that which is God’s and not man’s?

picks July 14, 2017

Meschac Gaba

A brilliantly colored tent sits in the large first-floor room of the gallery. You’re invited to draw, write, and discuss inside; the environment is quiet, reminiscent of an elementary-school classroom during recess. The kids are out, but that’s not exactly what’s missing here. Meschac Gaba’s interactive sculpture, Reflection Room Tent, 2017, references the architecture of refugee camps. Its kaleidoscopic stripes, brilliant and gorgeous, are, in fact, stretched images of sundry national flags placed close together. It is Gaba’s utopia, a no-place between countries that simultaneously represents

Patrick Jaojoco