Phil Binaco: The Affirming Flame
Phil Binaco’s recent body of work was inspired by a poem by W. H. Auden...
October 30, 2018
Diane Armitage
Wilderness Acts: Art in the Land
It’s a pleasure to be taken by surprise in a place I had never heard of before—the Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve in La Cienega. Managed by the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, this thirty-five-acre gem is a kiss away from I-25, yet it’s a haven for flora and fauna...
October 01, 2018
Eye Contact
Why is it no one looks? Why is it no one knows how to look. —Robert Wilson...
August 28, 2018
The Knight, Death, and the Devil—Doctor Atomic Comes Home
A tragic awareness haunts every element of the opera Doctor Atomic. The libretto, the music—the tableaux of singers, dancers, scenes, and the one prop that never ceases to cast its shadow on the whole...
July 30, 2018
Stuart Arends: Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House
Mayeur Projects: Stuart Arends is fond of saying that he lives in the middle of nowhere. Ever hear of Willard, New Mexico? The landscape around the artist’s house is austere, almost barren, with a view of some mountains off in the distance. He is “off the grid and under the radar”...
June 01, 2018
Jane Lackey: Shifting Pulse
Central Features Contemporary Art: The term shibui refers to a particular aesthetic in Japanese art, and it can mean a variety of things that are like spokes on a wheel organized around a central core of perceptions: simplicity, unobtrusive beauty, a spare elegance, and implicity...
May 01, 2018
Shelley Horton-Trippe: High Brow Low Ride
Phil Space: Shelley Horton-Trippe, in her recent exhibition High Brow Low Ride, references the great twentieth-century French writer Colette, and she does this by way of a large painting titled The Pure and the Impure (Colette). Horton-Trippe draws on Colette’s book...
April 06, 2018
Everything I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable...
April 01, 2018
Ciel Bergman: The Linens
Center for Contemporary Arts: Begun in 1970 and ending in 1977, the late Ciel Bergman’s series, The Linens, is in truth the work of an “emerging artist.” Bergman (1938-2017) was thirty-two when she began these large-scale paintings on unstretched linen, an age in keeping with the...
March 02, 2018
Aftershocks: The Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson
Roberta Breitmore was never “real,” even though she was made of flesh and blood; her persona was, in fact, just a figment of Hershman Leeson’s feminist imagination, only more developed than most artificially created alter egos that are set loose in the art world...
February 01, 2018
Thais Mather: Reckless Abandon
form & concept: Feminist artist Thais Mather’s new exhibition, Reckless Abandon, comes at a time of cultural, political, and environmental soul searching. The artist offers urgent questions that suggest a new path forward, away from oppression and toward a more enlightened...
February 01, 2018
Cate White: The Keys to the City
One art critic from the Bay Area, Jessica Zack, referred to Cate White’s work as “vivid tragicomic painting... with its skin-in-the-game vitality” and that is what first hits you—White’s go-for-broke passion for art, life, social justice, and racial fairness. It seems that there is nothing that White won’t investigate...
December 01, 2016
Are You Listening?
It was John Seabrook’s profile of singer Tanya Tagaq in The New Yorker that introduced me to her work as a contemporary performer. Seabrook went on to write, “Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and she was in the city for a performance... a jaw-dropping forty-five minutes of guttural heaves, juddering howls, and murderous shrieks—Inuit folk meets Karen Finley."...
November 01, 2016
Visages Villages (Faces Places)
The movie Faces Places, considered a masterpiece by many contemporary film critics, won Best Documentary at Cannes in 2017. It was written by the esteemed French filmmaker Agnès Varda and was directed by her and the French artist-activist JR. Faces Places has been enthusiastically received...
December 05, 2017
Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand
Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe: It’s impossible to convey the monumental quality present in Tom Joyce’s exhibition. The scale of some of his forged iron and steel pieces is something to consider along with the works’ refined Platonic sense of form. In addition, there...
December 01, 2017
Constance DeJong: Measure and Light, 30 Years
One of humanity’s most important accomplishments, after the invention of written language, is the application of systematic measurements to things like distances, weights, codified sizes of this or that object. Applying number to the concept of a standard measurement has at its...
November 01, 2017
Frida Kahlo: Her Photos
In the new documentary that accompanies the exhibition Frida Kahlo:Her Photos, curated by Mexican photographer and historian Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, reference is made at the very beginning to Kahlo’s horrific accident at the age of eighteen. It was the dreadful collision of a bus with...
October 01, 2017
Something Fierce
Lannan Foundation: Roni Horn’s series of photographs of the river Thames—each one capturing a different texture of the opaque and oily water—creates a portrait of the river as if it were [...]
September 01, 2017
Liberty City: Coming of Age in Cinematic Space
I don’t know if I will ever hear the world ‘moonlight’ again without thinking of the wondrous movie that came out to great acclaim in 2016. Moonlight is a masterpiece of understated filmic construction, [...]
February 01, 2017
Collecting Digital Art: Highlights + New Acquisitions from the Thoma Foundation
The newly acquired work at the Thoma Foundation, by such artists as computer pioneer Vera Molnar, Alan Rath, Steina Vasulka, and Guillermo Galindo, unfolds in so many technological and conceptual directions [...]
August 01, 2017
The Radical Eyes of Virginia Dwan
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 is a bold and illuminating exhibition in honor of Virginia Dwan and is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) [...]
July 01, 2017
Marcus Zúñiga: Ya Veo
No Land Gallery: There is one segment in the episodic Bayeux Tapestry—the famous 230-foot long textile (ca. 1070-1080) that depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066 [...]
June 01, 2017
Confected
Richard Levy Gallery: In this two-person show, with paintings by Matthew McConville and photographs by Jason DeMarte, both the genres of still-life painting and nature photography are given a conceptual once-over [...]
April 01, 2017
