Adrian Piper
Elizabeth Dee Gallery
For her first solo show in New York after a seven-year hiatus, influential first-generation Conceptualist Adrian Piper, known for infusing her rigorous practice with the concerns of identity politics, focused on impermanence and loss. Piper presented a selection from a series begun in 2003 titled “Everything,” short for “Everything will be taken away,” a chilling apocalyptic statement that is inscribed on most of the works. The show was thrilling and disturbing but above all confounding; there was nothing here to indicate why she had been quiet for so long. But that, it seemed, was part of the point.
On entering the gallery, visitors encountered Everything #19.2, 2007, a mesmerizing video featuring two news clips (sourced from YouTube and drained of color and sound) that recount the kidnapping, rape, and torture last year of an African-American woman, Megan Williams, by six white West
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