passages January 2019

ANNETTE MICHELSON

WHAT COMES WITH VERY OLD AGE, Annette Michelson often told me, is a necessary pragmatism—and being pragmatic, she’d add with a wry smile, was never something that interested her. For almost thirty years, Annette had intended to publish a collection of her writings on film, but there always seemed to be a more compelling project vying for her attention. Sometimes it was her own: She was researching Ivan Pavlov and Mechanics of the Brain, the 1926 documentary Vsevolod Pudovkin made on the physiologist’s experiments, for a new essay until just a few months before her death. Sometimes she was

print January 2019

Juliana Cerqueira Leite

During the inaugural Antarctic Biennale in 2017, held aboard research vessels surrounded by icy desolation, the artist Juliana Cerqueira Leite met the architect Barbara Imhof while working on shee (Self-Deploying Habitat for Extreme Environments), inflatable housing for inhospitable terrain. Funded in part by the European Union’s Seventh-Framework Programme, the shee comes fully equipped with a kitchen, sleeping quarters, and working areas to provide one week of shelter. The artist obtained plans for a shee and built a cardboard-and-wood three-quarter scale replica in the back room of Arsenal

print November 2018

Gravity and Grace

FOR MAREN HASSINGER, uncertainty is both the origin and the destination of artmaking. “I don’t know where I come from and I don’t know where I’m going,” she wrote for the exhibition catalogue accompanying “Maren Hassinger . . . Dreaming,” her 2015 retrospective at Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. But while some artists burrow into mystery’s solitudes, Hassinger is inspired by solidarity. “This is the life I share with everyone. We are equal in this predicament. We are all passing through. From this untenable place, I make things.”

Her modesty echoes the restraint of her elegantly

print November 2018

Judith Eisler

Judith Eisler paints from film stills. This fact is often the first thing you hear about the artist, as if the conceit, which she has productively mined for more than two decades now, is sufficient to explain the formal qualities and conceptual underpinnings of her work. Snapping pictures while pausing movies on her DVD (or, in another age, VHS) player, Eisler freezes moments meant to be fleeting—capturing headlights in the fog, for example, or exhaled cigarette smoke, a backward glance—and renders them in oil. Blurry and slightly distorted, the resulting paintings are explications of

print October 2018

Diana Moore

Diana Moore’s eleven-foot-tall Head of Justice, 1991, commands a plaza in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Building & Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey. And the artist’s stainless-steel statue of Figure of Justice, 1998, at nine and a half feet tall, towers over the foyer of another courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire. Working as a figurative sculptor since the late 1960s, Moore gained prominence with these and other 1990s commissions by the US General Services Administration—they are touchstones of her practice. Intended to stand as universal figures, the monuments nonetheless

print September 2018

Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger’s stunning exhibition “As One” covered more than forty years of the artist’s elegant and unassuming productions, and left me wanting more. (Thankfully, the Studio Museum in Harlem is presenting her sculptures in Marcus Garvey Park through 2019, and a large-scale exhibition organized by Los Angeles’s Art + Practice and the Baltimore Museum of Art opened at the latter this past summer). The eight works on view were spun from everyday materials, such as pink plastic bags (inflated with the breath of the artist and gallery staff) and strips of muslin dyed with tea and coffee to

previews September 2018

“CECILY BROWN: WHERE, WHEN, HOW OFTEN AND WITH WHOM”

After an exhilarating show at the Drawing Center in 2016 that highlighted the immediacy and erudition of her works on paper, Cecily Brown doubled down on gestural painting, debuting several massive pieces—one of them thirty-three feet long—at Paula Cooper Gallery the following year. This fall, audiences in Denmark will get to see thirty of Brown’s paintings, many of them large-scale, exhibited alongside an extensive selection of her drawings and monotypes, most from the past twenty years. Curated by the Louisiana’s Anders Kold, “Where, When, How Often and with Whom” emphasizes

print Summer 2018

Zoe Leonard

THE TITLE of Zoe Leonard’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Survey,” immediately positions both her practice and this presentation as elusive and defiant. Even the word itself freely slips between noun and verb. Organized by Bennett Simpson with Rebecca Matalon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and debuting at the Whitney under the guidance of Elisabeth Sherman, the show is billed as the “first large-scale overview of the artist’s work in an American museum.” In both its austerity and its refusal of chronological order, the installation suggests that this is not

print Summer 2018

“For Us”

Years ago, when I first moved to Brooklyn, my downstairs neighbor told me he was having a party. I was welcome to come, he said, but I should understand that if no one engaged me, it wouldn’t be personal. “The party’s for us,”was how he put it. I never forgot the precision of his message: As a white woman in a predominantly African American neighborhood, I wouldn’t be excluded, but my inclusion wasn’t a priority. I remembered this as I walked into “For Us,” a group show of eight female artists of color under thirty, curated by Kiara Ventura at BronxArtSpace. And while the particulars of who

print May 2018

Pam Lins

Three years ago, Pam Lins exhibited a series of sculptures made after photos of sculptures, including a group of ceramics based on late-1920s images of spatial models by students at the Vkhutemas (Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios) in Moscow. It was a conceptual conceit well suited to her rigorous explorations of the ways in which reproduction tends to dominate our experience of objects. More specifically, those works addressed how we often perceive sculptures as flat and frontal, even when we know full well they are dimensional, and how we prioritize their contours at the expense of

previews May 2018

“Chloë Bass: The Book of Everyday Instruction”

Like the social-practice equivalent of Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 film Powers of Ten, the work of artist Chloë Bass conceptualizes a steady pan outward from the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011–13) to the pair (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015–17) to the family (Obligation to Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018–). At Knockdown Center, her eight-part study of one-on-one interactions will be shown in its entirety for the first time. Through photographs, videos, installations, and interviews at sites across the US, Bass has documented what she

print April 2018

O PIONEER!

TWO THOUSAND SEVENTEEN was a milestone year for the irrepressible Barbara Hammer. In October, the seventy-eight-year-old pioneer of experimental queer cinema, who has produced almost ninety films over the course of her five-decade career, was the “first living lesbian” to receive a retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York. Titled “Evidentiary Bodies,” the exhibition was a testament to the singular combination of sincerity and irreverent humor that characterizes her sex-positive feminism. Featuring an impressive range of films and videos, early drawings,

Rachel Churner