Christopher Chiappa

Defamiliarization is the engine that drives Christopher Chiappa’s art. Most of the sculptures here feel like coffee tables and nightstands, but from a realm a bit more fucked up and magical. Wooden legs, slinking up and around in myriad directions, feel poured rather than carved. His pieces are direct descendants of De Stijl, Constructivism, or Suprematism, but funnier—serious angles and reverential lines get tweaked into preposterous, quasi-utilitarian objects with a color palette straight out of a Skittles factory.

In the second room of the gallery, the notion of furniture falls away as the

picks April 13, 2018

Bogosi Sekhukhuni

Bogosi Sekhukhuni’s inaugural US show is steeped in longing, invoking, again and again, the cruelty and greed of the good-for-nothing fourth dimension, time. The exhibition’s most moving piece is a two-channel video, Consciousness Engine 2: absentblackfatherbot, 2014. Two screens stand on tripods several feet apart, facing one another. Each displays a disembodied face at its center, looking straight ahead while floating before a gilded background. One avatar represents Sekhukhuni and the other, his estranged father. They converse through digitally manipulated voices, reciting real, heartbreakingly