Benedikt Terwiel

Benedikt Terwiel’s work puts stakes down and sets markers in space, as if fixing coordinates could vanquish alienation. Before cameras, land surveyors would carve measurements directly into rocks, trees, or the sides of mountains, using a technique known as metes and bounds. By tracing a line to measure its length, they physically experienced its translation into two dimensions.

On an extended visit to Los Angeles in 2015, the artist walked past the same derelict, boarded-up motel on Sunset Boulevard nearly every day. The structure was infamous enough to have a nickname, the Bates Motel (it had

picks October 19, 2014

Margaret Harrison

Margaret Harrison’s latest exhibition is an anachronistic experience. Walk into the gallery’s back room and peek at the septuagenarian British feminist artist’s naughty lithographs, displayed in suggestively half-open drawers. There are two from 1971, the year Harrison’s first-ever gallery exhibition was shut down by the London police—a drawing of a corseted but otherwise nude Hugh Hefner as one of his own bunnies was apparently just too much. The lithographs’ preoccupations are braless merry widows, scarlet nipples, and food: An engorged lemon being squeezed by a pinup spurts glistening droplets