Category Shifting Connections
Starting Over in 2017
I look back – not just on 2016 but further still – with a sense of atonement; in contrast, the artist Capucine Gros looks forward with gratitude… [Read More…]
By other means…
Jaime Davidovich (1936-2016) lived a long, appreciative (and appreciated) life. I was deeply saddened at the news of his death and knew I would miss our meandering walks… [Read More…]
Blind Dates in Mourning
Curator Neery Melkonian died of cancer on the evening of July 2nd yet no power structure dare silence what death itself fails to accomplish! Blind dates may be in mourning but strategies of (un)silencing continue to unfold…[Read More…]
Dots and Dashes, Crumbs and Ashes
“Dots and Dashes, Crumbs and Ashes: Traces of Trauma’s Abstraction” is Liz Park’s and Kathleen MacQueen’s contribution to volume II of Intervalla (2014/15), featuring the art of Maria Elena Álvarez and Gwenessa Lam. [Read More…]
Shifting Connections
In the late 1970s, Milan Kundera – in the cynical equivalent to Joseph Beuys’ mantra, “We are all artists!” – bemoans the advent of hack writers: a mania, which stems, according to Kundera, from social isolation, excess leisure, and “the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life”… [Read More…]
Summer Shorts
In spite of an overwhelming profusion of monumental abstraction this gallery season by the expected array of STARtists, a number of shows offer stubborn resistance to predictability. Ironically, two stalwart anti-establishment artists are showing at one of the most prestigious galleries in the market today…[Read More…]
Walid Raad’s witness protection program
Who is Suha Traboulsi? Jerry Saltz once wrote that Walid Raad’s work was like a “communiqué from a secret agent.” Isn’t it more like a witness protection program fabricating new identities around ones lost to historical disadvantage? … [Read More…]
All that is marvelous: Hito Steyerl
21st-century Baudelairean tactics would feel like a Kamikazi assault coupled with the reassurance of Gestalt therapy. They would place no one above the fray but recognize (his) her own role in a circulation of images that are lying in wait… [Read More…]
All that is marvelous: Finland’s melancholia
The Moving Image art fair features a wide range of artists including Eric Dyer, Peggy Ahwesh, and Leslie Thornton. Shifting Connections highlights the meticulously rendered drawing animation by the Finnish collective IC-98… [Read More…]
Alejandro Cesarco: An artist’s promise
An artist yields to the expanse, selecting just enough – no more, no less – to entice you into the space…as if walking across the bare floor were to create an act of recollection (so reliant on the relation of memory to images)… [Read More…]
The brilliance of Snow(den) – Congratulations Laura Poitras!
I do not believe that Ed Snowden is just an ordinary person as he insists. He is exceptional as are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. Yet it is equally difficult to translate that truth to the realm of the ordinary; that is, to foster the kind of support that builds the indefatigable Hydra that Snowden alludes to in describing his own role… [Read More…]
All that is marvelous: EAI’s Sleeper Exhibit
If the art world had its own Academy awards, Welcome to My World, an exhibition of artworks by students from PS140 Nathan Straus and MS324 Patria Mirabal at Artists Space Books & Talks, might well be the sleeper hit from 2014! … [Read More…]
All that is marvelous (and eye-opening): Laura Poitras’ Trilogy
“I go to places before they become news. I don’t follow the pack and I don’t look in the same direction as others,” says filmmaker Laura Poitras. Artists Space has provided a unique opportunity to place her most recent film, CITIZENFOUR, within the context of her 9/11 Trilogy that renders transparent the filmmaker’s interest in the story beside the story… [Read More…]
All that is marvelous: Caroline Bergvall
White dots form a strange constellation on a dense black wall – the outline of a zodiac raft – referring to a horrific event from 2011 by which migrants from Africa were cast adrift in the Mediterranean and left to die. Drift is a journey into the primal fear of abandon and abandonment…to be lost, to be without reckoning… [Read More…]
All that is marvelous (and intolerable): Irving Petlin’s Inferno
How do you approach the canvas when you accept responsibility for the problems of the world? For Irving Petlin it means visualizing beyond what we are willing to see… [Read More…]
Shifting Connections 