“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,