Theadora Walsh

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  picks September 17, 2019

  Kim Cogan

  San Francisco represents the far edge of colonial expansion, an apocalyptic end zone. The gold rush dwindled in the nineteenth century. The beats got jobs, the hippies bought houses, the artists had to move to Oakland. Change is the only constant. Kim Cogan’s impressionistic paintings of the city feature its anti-landmarks—corner stores, relic motels, cars oxidizing from Pacific fog—while carefully attending to telephone wires, peeling paint, and vacant sidewalks. His attention to these scenes demonstrates an intimate concern for the ever-shifting city.

  Cogan works from a combination of reference

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  picks July 22, 2019

  Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuko Naito

  In describing the opening scene of Godard’s Passion (1982), Harun Farocki has remarked that the shot’s unsteady pan—which follows an airplane’s disintegrating white contrail—is actually a register of “the movements of Godard’s eyes, scanning the sky to see what it can tell us.” Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuko Naito’s exhibition at Adrian Rosenfeld is a similar pan through the six-decade career of this power couple within the Minimalism movement. In Kuwayama’s Untitled (Diptych), 1969, a bisected blue panel measuring more than seven feet in both directions is mounted beside a bisected white panel of

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  picks May 22, 2019

  Lydia Ourahmane

  This is not obvious when you first enter Lydia Ourahmane’s “low relief,” but the entirety of the gallery floor has been mopped with antiseptics. The atmosphere is surgical, cloying, and yet intimate. Also not apparent is that the show’s central bronze sculptures, cast with the exact measurements of the artist’s abdomen, have been implanted with lead, which will slowly creep into the bronze and mutate the color. Titled bronze belly I–IV, 2019, these works are laid on the ground, naked and vulnerable, pelvic bones lilting upward.

  Renée Falconetti as a weeping Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s