Category Shifting Connections
Tactical Response III: Torture & “seeing stars”
In response to the release of the senate intelligence committee report on torture, Shifting Connections offers an excerpt from the publication Tactical Response: Art in an Age of Terror (2014) that emphasizes the awareness that intelligence gained from torture is a negative sentience – a display of authority and power – an actuality of little worth… [Read More…]
All that is marvelous: Haacke’s Gift Horse
One could easily believe Hans Haacke’s current exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery is about the cooptation of art in support of ultra-conservative agendas, while, fundamentally, what he shows us is H2O as the basis and the link for all life on earth… [Read More…]
Tactical Response II: Art as social action
In recognition of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection taking place in the Place des Arts in Montreal through November 23rd, Shifting Connections offers an excerpt from the publication Tactical Response: Art in an Age of Terror (2014) that gives a historical perspective to the artist’s work in the public sphere…[Read More…]
All that is marvelous: Chris Ofili
All That Is Marvelous represents a turn in Shifting Connections – weekly shorts on books, exhibitions, and artworks that radiate Eros even as they face the darkest Thanatos of contemporary systems. This “marvelous” entry features Chris Ofili: Night and Day at the New Museum. [Read More…]
Utopias and Realities
How we respond to the conditions around us is influenced by histories we no longer remember but, in turn, impact conditions we may know nothing about. What we say and how we say it matters and the videos presented in “Utopias and Realities” speak oceans and skies, deserts and mountains, rock, paper, scissors, and skin… [Read More…]
Tactical Response I: War, an autophagous game
As men shoot blindly at civilian targets in Gaza and over the airspace of eastern Ukraine, I return to Umberto Eco’s 1991 prognosis that war has become a self-perpetuating affair, locked in an endless pursuit of instability… [Read More…]
In sight/In mind: Nightboat Books & Callicoon Fine Arts
I wondered why a literary publication might join forces with a fine art gallery and sat down with publisher Stephen Motika of Nightboat Books and gallery director Photios Giovanis of Callicoon Fine Arts to discuss the converging initiatives of their collaborative endeavors… [Read More…]
And now to begin…
For both Camille Henrot and Alejandro Cesarco, words extracted from their original context are a kind of shorthand substitution of the act of reading for the act of writing…an assemblage of aphoristic messages to the experience of belonging… [Read More…]
Lizards and stones
Given the withering criticism of this year’s Whitney Biennial for prioritizing the work of deceased and older artists and eschewing politics in favor of material craft, it begs the question: what makes an artwork significant? … [Read More…]
Moyra Davey: On touching
Moyra Davey is a photographer and filmmaker but I think of her work as the art of touch. In her exhibition: Ornament and Reproach at Murray Guy, every stone, bottle, record, book, paper, image, stamp, text, letter, and thought has been touched. She caresses surfaces. Her work touches me…. [Read More…]
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…]
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