Paula Burleigh

• 

  slant September 20, 2021

  Twisted Sister

  A WOMAN NAMED ROBERTA BREITMORE steps off a Greyhound bus and checks into San Francisco’s Dante Hotel. The year is 1973. Single with no friends in the city, Roberta nervously contemplates her next move, eventually placing roommate-seeking ads in local newspapers. She receives forty-three responses. A victim of childhood trauma, she never finished college and struggles with anxiety. Susceptible to the promises of self-improvement fads, she joins Weight Watchers and EST. After undergoing an exorcism in 1978, Roberta resurfaces, zombielike, as a telerobotic doll with camera eyes in the 1990s. In

• 

  slant June 22, 2020

  Square Roots

  FOR MOST OF US, the threat of disease is a largely invisible one. This is what makes it so pernicious: Often we cannot even see its symptoms. Coronavirus could be anywhere. But the pandemic has rapidly developed a distinct visual culture. The oddly beguiling 3-D visualization of the virus created by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins at the Center for Disease Control has become the default symbol for Covid-19, and as Americans have grown more accustomed to covering their faces, parody images of masked public statuary and even topiary circulate widely. But perhaps the most pervasive of Covid imagery

• 

  picks February 09, 2018

  “Kamrooz Aram, Anwar Jalal Shemza”

  Historically, the relationship between painting and decoration has been uneasy. Critics have long regarded the decorative as anathema to serious Art. It is precisely that contentious space that Kamrooz Aram probes, implicitly asking the audience to consider the values that we ascribe to categories such as ornament, design, painting, and architecture, which his work ultimately suggests are all inextricably linked. Two of Aram’s paintings here, Ornamental Composition for Social Spaces #14 and #15, both 2017, display layers of abstract gestures and figurative marks rendered in oil, wax, and colored

• 

  picks December 01, 2017

  Yasue Maetake

  “Reverse Subterrestrial,” the title of Yasue Maetake’s exhibition here, suggests the dredging up of something buried. Indeed, her site-specific installation produces the strange sensation of plunging into the depths, even as you ascend the vertical space of the two-story structure. The artist’s immersive environment appears in states of both dissolution and becoming, conjuring postapocalyptic visions of slow but resolute regeneration. Maetake’s process is one of productive destruction: beating, boiling, and burning initiate physical transformations in materials that include steel, aluminum,