picks January 21, 2020

Will Boone

Texas is surrounded by legends of violence and bizarre phenomena that are surpassed in strangeness only by the land itself. Will Boone’s site-specific exhibition “The Highway Hex” embraces and tests perceptions of the state's ethos.

With reference to “highway hypnosis”—a sort of trance caused by driving for long distances—the show traces a route from California to the artist’s home state of Texas. The centerpiece of the exhibition, Sweet Perfume (all works 2019), is a fan-fiction video based on Leatherface, the infamous character from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), here played by the artist’s

picks October 22, 2018

Ben Morgan-Cleveland and Eli Ping

Dueling perceptual experiences play out from terrestrial to cosmic scale in Eli Ping and Ben Morgan-Cleveland’s current exhibition. Theories of colliding universes, missing galaxies, and the Cold Spot—a peculiar region of space that has an unusually low temperature—permeate the show. Yet, in keeping with its title, “Geschichten” (Stories), the work here also evokes personal narratives.

A shoji screen made by Morgan-Cleveland, covering a gallery window, softly diffuses sunlight. “Soothing Waterfall,” 2018—a series of fountains constructed with rocks sourced from the artist’s hometown of Bedford,

picks April 20, 2018

“Frame Structures”

This four-person exhibition takes its name from Susan Howe’s 1996 collection of poems written between 1974 and 1979—early pieces that use notions of place and identity as a method for deconstructing the fixity of history. With sculpture, painting, video, and photography, the artists here take up Howe’s approach to dismantling the idea of narrative through objects and images.

Three digital photographs by Steel Stillman, scanned and enlarged from old snapshots, are documents of fleeting moments. Time-stamps from when the pictures were originally taken appear in the works, confusing the viewer’s

picks February 16, 2018

Yuji Agematsu

On the rainy nights of February 1 and February 16, 2016, Yuji Agematsu walked an area around the Bowery and Delancey Street in New York to capture in photographs what he has become so keen at representing: the distinct effects of a specific time and place on objects. Shown alongside his signature displays of meticulously collected and archived street debris, the eponymous images in this series, “2016.02.01/16 Bowery and Delancey St,” 2016, each feature two parallel photographs that take on a frenetic cadence evocative of the unpredictable and emotive shifting of improvised music.

The glowing

picks November 24, 2017

Lewis Stein

After reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior (1942) while studying architecture at MIT, Lewis Stein developed an interest in dance and subsequently took classes at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. During a summer workshop with Anna Halprin that year, participants went on a field trip to Mendocino. When prompted to build structures on the beach, Stein dug a hole. Shortly afterward, the artist began the subtly anarchistic body of works on display here, whose functions are associated with the regulation and policing of space.

The objects, all Untitled, generate a

picks October 27, 2017

Alessandro Pessoli

For the artist Alessandro Pessoli, as for many of us, 2016 was an annus horribilis. The unease he found in the studio pushed him to experiment, discovering archery and creating custom bows and arrows for his new hobby. The artist’s solo exhibition here, full of paintings, ceramics, and sculptural installations, functions as the site of an epic battle in which he plays both hero and villain.

Our journey begins on the gallery’s first floor, with 2016 Empty Year, 2017, a wooden rack carrying the implements of his newfound pastime along with, among other items, a neon sign, a ceramic chicken head,

picks August 18, 2017

“The Horizontal”

The poetic use of the horizon for the purpose of abstraction can be traced back to early twentieth-century philosophy, when the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, took the concept of the horizon as a way to conflate experience with what is lived rather than perceived. This group exhibition expands upon the power of the horizon line in formalist, landscape-inflected imagery.

An oil painting by Jenny Holzer, compromised knowledge, 2014–15, made up of blurred horizontal bands of color appearing to redact faint traces of text on a white background, is strikingly uncanny. A darkly resolute

Tabitha Piseno