Author Archives: Kathleen MacQueen
Winter Notations II: Moving Images
Disclaimer: I don’t “do” the art fairs! I don’t like to see art in boxes – little office cubicles that strip art of its communicative value and reduce it to a common denominator of financial worth – overwhelming the intake valve with a surfeit of divergent impressions such as one would find in taste samples at a banquet. Moving Image Art Fair, however, is different… [Read More…]
Winter Notations: Circumnavigating Time
Winter Notations focuses this season on selections from the Savannah College of Art and Design deFINE ART 2014: Sam Nhlengethwa, Alfredo Jaar, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S. [Read More…]
Wangechi Mutu: When Images Start to Go Crazy
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, at the Brooklyn Museum through March 9th, exerts both push and pull: it is at once engaging and disturbing, seductive and unsettling… [Read More…]
Peace on Earth!
Shifting Connections wishes you peace on earth, good will, and good health for the New Year!
In sight/In mind: Jill O’Bryan
Artist Jill O’Bryan divides her year between urban life in New York City and wide open spaces on a mesa in New Mexico. Shifting Connections talks to her about her newest work situated along former Route 66 where the process of her meditative practice yields to the precision of fact… [Read More…]
Between nothing and everything
“The Last International” takes up the utopian impulse that transported the First International from Europe to New York City in 1872. Sidestepping theatrical convention through a mélange of genres from symposium to improvisation to multimedia and storytelling, Raqs Media Collective upends time and space from the moment one hands over a ticket and enters… [Read More…]
Who is listening?
Artist Suzanne Lacy seeks to rectify the absence of women’s voices by creating platforms for their speech. In mid-October just as the days felt shorter and the late afternoons were cooling considerably, she initiated a performance of over 300 feminist participants for “Between the Door and the Street”…. [Read More…]
Pablo Helguera on BOMB Daily
Themes of language, translation, and polyphonic voice are prevalent in the conceptual and socially engaged art practice of Pablo Helguera, particularly his project Librería Donceles (New York) 2013. Kathleen MacQueen speaks with the artist about his exhibition at Kent Fine Art (up through November 8, 2013). See BOMBlog for the full conversation.
SVA Talk 10/23/13
Kathleen MacQueen will present a talk at the School of Visual Arts, as part of their 2013-2014 lecture series, on Wednesday, October 23, 2013. She will speak on the limitations of voice in expressing collective and historical trauma in the public sphere, taking as a point of departure Jacques Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship to reflect on a politics of intimacy… [Read More…]
Fall Variations: Shows by women artists
Art critic Deborah Solomon announced on WNYC recently that canonical white male artists were prominent on the scene this fall in New York’s major museums but these exhibitions don’t occlude the presence of some outstanding women artists in installations scattered throughout the city… [Read More…]
Virtual Venice
I fully intended to view this year’s Venice Biennale but care-giving took precedence over profession and I had no choice but to content myself with reading (rather than writing) the reviews…that is, until I downloaded Dutch artist Jonas Staal’s free app and went on my own virtual tour, a perusal of the ideological nature of national pavilions… [Read More…]
Benches – Pure and Simple?
For the sculptor Francis Cape, benches are where We Sit Together and he often organizes group talks in the various venues where he exhibits this work. But sitting on a bench is not as agreeable as it first seems and, as Rossella Biscotti shows us in The Trial, not always a welcoming proposition… [Read More…]
Summer Shorts II
Imran Qureshi creates an image of immemorial dying – the unremitting onslaught of cruelty – covering the rooftop tiles of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In an intervention of reduced form, he assuages an emotional outpouring of abstract expressionist torment with subtle brush strokes… [Read More…]
Summer Shorts
Call it a gender thing but I don’t find Paul McCarthy’s WS – spilling out over the vast drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory – either cathartic or amusing. I have a completely different take, however, on Robert Irwin’s Scrim Veil – Black Rectangle – Natural Light at the Whitney Museum. This space of almost nothing is more than enough for dialogue… [Read More…]
Strange Pilgrims
On any given day, hundreds and if not thousands of visitors climb the steps to enter the nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Among the worshippers this summer is a strange flock descended like figures of the Antichrist poised to engender fear while others like fallen angels plead for forgiveness through glistening eyes… [Read More…]
Shifting Connections 