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…]
Four exhibitions in a year is rare exposure for an artist in New York City, yet Yevgeniy Fiks (b. 1972 Moscow) has accomplished just that; for “In sight/In mind,” Kathleen MacQueen discusses with Fiks the conflation of “spy” with “homosexual” as well as the artist’s application of interventionist tactics to history and social space… [Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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…]
In our everyday existence, we face any number of challenges from the banal to the life threatening. Where do we find strength? What are our metaphors for the power to overcome adversity? Such an investigation can take years but, occasionally, a timely event suffices. 1200 individuals stumbled upon inspiration by chance, last month in New York City, when artist Daniel Canogar introduced his project: Storming Times Square…[Read More…]
In Faces, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar pairs newspaper clippings with a single face, extracted from the crowd and enlarged, to “rescue it” from anonymity and oblivion. This reframing of the content within a new context also applies to what the artist intends as a trilogy of works, each dedicated to a single image. [Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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