Zachary Fine

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  picks September 14, 2019

  Diana Cherbuliez

  Fourteen hairless naked dolls sit on the gallery floor, each holding two mint-size black rectangles. One, in the corner, seems to be texting on both “screens” simultaneously; another two photograph their faces and anuses at the same time; and a group of four gathers at the gallery owner’s desk, spread-eagled, supine, blissed-out with their smartphones (a fifteenth doll is posed on a chair at the desk). They are sexless and produced in an array of skin tones. This work is called Their selves 1–15, 2019.

  On the wall are three pairs of boxing gloves. Swatches of blue, gray, and white vinyl have been

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  print Summer 2019

  Ursula von Rydingsvard

  Monumental sculpture has a way of imposing its will. It rears up and demands to be seen, often crowding out delicacy with bold gestures. Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures resist the heavy-handedness of monuments. The artist works in cedar, gluing together planks and stone-shaped chunks until the wood looks pixelated, like glitchy flotsam that’s drifted onto a screen. The surfaces are coarse, scarred, and stained in places with the coal-colored sheen of graphite. Most of the sculptures are outsize indoors—the intimate galleries of the National Museum of Women in the Arts being far from the

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  print April 2019

  Xylor Jane

  Xylor Jane’s paintings are composed of delicate grids of Arabic numerals, each obediently stabled in its own square. The digits are not quivering in the air or bolting through cables or scurrying behind images. They are firm, settled. With their seemingly mechanical precision, the paintings can recall stock-ticker displays or sheets of raw data. But there are traces of the artist’s hand everywhere. All of the cells are lovingly stippled with dots—their soft-serve tips indexing the paintbrush’s release—and smudges are left in plain sight on the sides of every canvas. Jane dotes on the numbers,

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  picks February 21, 2019

  “Material History”

  The Ice House belongs to a brood of service quarters set back, uphill, from a parent estate on the Hudson River. The building is perched on the lip of its own pond, where large blocks of ice were once extracted and hauled indoors to create a refrigerated storage space. It has since been converted into a white-walled gallery, and to see the art, one must first drive along an icy gravel path, through the complex of buildings, to find the warm and welcoming curator Jayne Drost Johnson, who devotedly waits.

  Her current show features work by three artists: Yuji Agematsu, Charles Harlan, and Nari Ward.

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  picks January 23, 2019

  Elliott Green

  The media theorist’s story of so-called remediation is a familiar one. Each new medium is metabolized by the next—painting by photography, photography by film, film by television, all of it by the internet—and in turn, older media are reshaped in the mold of the new. But how does painting respond to photography? Television? The internet?

  Elliott Green’s abstractions, smeared with shale-like layers of paint, offer a dizzying response: paintings that remediate computer graphics that remediates painting. Countless artists quote liberally from digital screens—for instance, Jack Whitten renders the

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  picks January 11, 2019

  William Forsythe

  A suite of words crowds hungrily around the work of William Forsythe: aleatoric, heuristic, calculated, diagnostic, investigative, algorithmic, reflexive. This stark and scientific vocabulary belies the sly varieties of play on view in this exhibition at the ICA.

  The centerpiece of the show—the first comprehensive exhibition of Forsythe’s work in the United States since 2009—is The Fact of Matter, 2009, a field of gymnastic rings, which visitors are instructed to climb across without touching the ground. (This reviewer and his significant other garnered not one but two contusions and a mild groin

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  picks November 09, 2018

  “New Southern Photography”

  The walk from the Lee Circle streetcar stop to the Ogden is punctuated by a column divested of its Confederate monument, a manicured lawn patrolled by the homeless, and Confederate Memorial Hall. The museum’s current exhibition is haunted by this context; twenty-five photographers and filmmakers offer images of a “new,” uncertain South.

  The influence of the Southern documentary tradition, of Walker Evans and William Christenberry and Birney Imes, is outsize in the show. RaMell Ross returns to the now majority-black Hale County, Alabama, where Evans and James Agee once set their chronicle of tenant