PAE WHITE – RESTLESS RAINBOW by Nick Van Zanten
Pae White’s Restless Rainbow has taken over a terrace on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing, with an outpouring of bright colors printed on opaque vinyl along the glass walls. Why this terrace is where it is, what’s so striking about it and why part of it hosts […]
RYAN TRECARTIN – ANY EVER by Nick Van Zanten
Video artist Ryan Trecartin, a veteran of Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum and the 2006 Whitney Biennial, inaugural winner of the monumental Jack Wolgin prize, RISD graduate, and 30-year old, is showing his very ambitious new piece Any Ever at PS1 this summer, marking his triumphant return to that museum for the first […]
Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic
The most beautiful photograph I ever saw? I have described it here before. An exhibition of Sam Wagstaff’s photography collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut: the usual canonized suspects are all there. Then, unannounced, at a distance across the room, scratching at the corner of ones eye, a small –4×6 maybe– black and […]
Pages from a Magazine: CAMERAWORK at White Columns
White Columns allows itself the luxury –or the, delirium– of putting on shows with zero economic potential that graze in relatively obscure intellectual pastures. Pages from a Magazine: CAMERAWORK is the current wonderful example of this formula. CAMERAWORK was one of a number of left wing journals engaged (very much so) in the critical revaluation […]
Liz Larner at Bonakdar Gallery
In one sense, Liz Larner’s new installation is held together oxymoronically, by lacunae. The spaces between are a large part of the power of this impressively laconic exhibition. Moreover, the items on display not only bear their paucity proudly but are each idiosyncratic, different from the next object, except for a shared allegiance to abstraction. […]
Tara Donovan at Pace Gallery
A sort of antic incrementalism, in which the sheer number of accumulated found objects stuns the viewer into submission, clogging their visual arteries, presently constitutes an academy in itself. How do we know? Art schools and project rooms across the nation are filled to the brim with such compilations. And indeed it is hard to […]
Janet Biggs at Winkleman gallery.
Auden went to the Arctic. Iceland, 1936. He was much taken with the Northern desolation of nature. He was young still. Searching, as they say, for ideals. For the right politics, the right sexuality, the right turn of poetry. (It was of course the last that came easiest to him). While there Auden penned a […]
Susan Unterberg at 16 East 84th
No sooner uncoiled from the sock in the gut delivered by Susan Unterberg’s powerful new portrait photos—with their contorted features, hair literally standing on end, they are horrific, hilarious, inscrutable—no sooner recovered than the viewer is almost immediately besieged by a teeming mass of unswerving allusions, as difficult to shake as a mob of pursuing […]
Ann Shostrum at Elizabeth Harris
Something has to be done about the acreage of camouflage fabric loose in this country. Thankfully Ann Shostrum has taken a shot at it in her current show at Elizabeth Harris. It is true –yes, yes, yes it is true– that, beyond the camouflage, there is much in Shostrum’s work that employs and highlights the […]
Mary Carlson at Elizabeth Harris
Texting reigns but word of mouth is alive and well. This exquisite show, the kind easily overlooked by the art media, was widely praised with a happy sense of discovery by artists on the street. Extremely understated, Carlson’s installation yields outsized results, a plenitude of echoes and connections. Epic subject matter is presented through sleight […]
