Shin Gallery’s newest exhibition, Amalgamation: Celebrating 10 Years of Shin Gallery, on view until April 23, 2022, is perhaps one of the most unique gallery shows I have seen. This is due to both the exhibition’s a-chronological curatorship and the opportunity to view old masters and so-called “blue chip” art historical bastions alongside “outsider artists,” […]
Kate Oh’s Gallery’s new exhibition, The Korean Archetype, on view from March 1 until March 11, 2022, introduces the stridently feminist work of Miky (Yoohyun) Kim to a wider audience. I characterize Kim’s work as “stridently feminist” even though Kim is not interested in veridical or representational indices that directly cull femininity nor straightforwardly espouse […]
Kwan Jin Oh’s “Emptying and Filling”, on view at Kate Oh Gallery from January 1 – 30, 2022, teeters on intermedia, balancing formal prowess with poetic lyricism. This is evident in how Jin Oh’s paintings, each of which display ceramic moon jars, cleverly play with dimensionality and photorealism, albeit without allowing for any one facet to overdetermine […]
Abstractionism—think Kandinsky—denied representation altogether, but assumed all the conventions of pictorial space, hence the nonrepresentational use of color, line, form, and so on. J.M. Bernstein, “Freedom From Nature” in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 220. Approaching it in one way I see no essential difference between a line […]
It is a genuine tragedy that the art of Antonio Pietro Narducci (1915-1999) is not a staple within Abstract Expressionism but, luckily, curator Inhee Iris Moon has prompted what is hopefully the first step in changing this unfortunate art historical shortcoming. One reason why Narducci’s work and name is perhaps not as well-known as it […]
MoMA PS1’s “Structures for Life” is the first major US exhibition of the Nouveau Réaliste artist Niki de Saint Phalle. French-born and American-raised, Saint Phalle is something of an “outsider artist”—entirely self-taught, Saint Phalle is known for her unconventional, characteristically whimsical, and at times childish sculptures, public artworks, artefacts, and drawings. MoMA PS1’s sprawling, impressive […]
Gerhard Richter’s Cage paintings (2006), on display at the Gagosian Gallery at 541 West 24th Street, are named after the composer John Cage, apparently drawing on the theme of coincidence. The paintings are massive, sprawling works, constructed from intersecting fields, lines, and swaths of uneven smears that reflect the broad squeegee tool which Richter dragged […]
Recently, given the fomenting protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery (amongst countless others), much discussion has erupted amongst contemporary artist-activists about the proper place for art and the aestheticization of politics. This is, of course, by no means a novel conversation. Historically, the aestheticization of politics has been disparaged […]
Unfortunately, albeit perhaps tethered to imposed historical responsibility, most introductions to Camille Claudel and her oeuvre are steeped in biographical detail that inevitably draws in her partner Rodin’s shadow. I am afraid that I, too, have lapsed into entertaining this impulse if only to make it an object of critique. Although “Rodin’s mistress,” “Rodin’s assistant” […]
A collection of Gerhard Richter’s prints are currently being exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City’s Upper East Side. The works include two more recent pieces–Mustangs (2005, fig. 1)[1] and Frau mit Kind (Woman with Child, 2005, fig. 2)–and the infamous Betty (1991). Rather than extensively detail Betty’s theoretical mirth, which has been […]
Turkish media artist Refik Anadol’s public art installation synthesizing architecture and intermedia, Machine Hallucination, is quite possibly one of the most interesting recent new media works of our epoch. This is explicitly because the piece not only integrates machine learning but presents a neural net in action. The piece has a dataset of over 300 […]
In my home country, Turkey, the amorphous term “terrorist” has adopted folk-lore speculative projections: from a baklava magnate to journalist dissenters and high school teachers, from professors to artists, the unpredictability of being labeled a “terrorist” blankets all such dissenters who dare problematize the ruling AK Party/President Erdoğan. One such case is that of Oktay […]
On September 4th, I eagerly trekked to the Brooklyn gallery Art in General in order to attend the opening reception of Caitlin Berrigan’s highly anticipated exhibition, “Imaginary Explosion” (running from September 4 through November 11, 2019). Berrigan, a young artist who has recently graduated from MIT’s video art program, and is currently pursuing a PhD-in-Practice […]
The Guggenheim’s spring retrospective of the seminal Swedish painter, Hilma Af Klint, has, naturally, evoked a multitude of art critics and visual culture scholars who laud her radical abstraction which, at the beginning of the 20th century, preceded Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. Yet, where much attention has been given to the symbology and motifs riddling Klint’s […]
It was 1957 when “nudity for nudity’s sake” in cinema became a point for deliberation: the court case, Excelsior Pictures v. New York Board of Regents, hinged whether the display of onscreen nudity in Garden of Eden (dir. Max Nosseck), a “ludicrous nudist colony picture,” was legally obscene. Garden of Eden was distributed by Excelsior […]
French-born American-Cuban essayist Anaïs Nin’s diaristic reflections on Havana reveal the nostalgic caprice that a city can wield – its atmospheric impulse-potential to “cure negative states of being,” as Guiliana Bruno terms it (211). Reminiscing on Havana entering her field of vision, her mood suddenly uncannily boosted, Nin’s diary entry notes that “with this, the […]
This takes me back to some of my Japanese reading, in particular to my beloved Dôgen, who belongs to a Zen tradition that is particularly severe insofar as it is particularly sensitive to the sensible. . . . The problems here are very close to those of medieval aesthetics. . . . Must creation be […]
As a researcher, theorist, and something of a contemporary continental philosophy-bent author in, my interests in new media theory, film studies, and comparative media are necessarily political, often siding with a turn towards “speculative realism,” Quentin Meillassoux’s “correlationism,” or François Laruelle’s “non-standard philosophy” at the expense of affect theory or those “poetics” that salvage media […]
Harmony Korine’s second show at Gagosian Madison in the last six months, closely following “Blockbuster” (which ran from September – October, 2018), “Young Twitchy” (showing from March 14 – April 20, 2019) is a step in both a more formal painterly order and, arguably, in a direction that runs parallel to Korine’s recent filmic interest […]
British installation artist Alex Hibbitt’s Rhizome: Falling (2018) has traversed numerous gallery locales throughout the States in the last few years and hangs, suspended and static, in the Weston Gallery’s atrium ceiling. The work – a horizontal web of variegated materiality and form – while weighty, sputters a certain recherché of the ethereal, culling to […]
Synthetica, which showed at the Weston Art Gallery from November 30, 2018 – January 27, 2019, professed a keen logic of material innovation accompanied by a significant theoretical undertaking –these nine local artists sought not only to transfigure two-dimensional surfaces with an array of diverse materials but, also, how to consequently render new linguistic applications […]
Over the last year, Thunder-Sky, Inc. has been probing visual culture vis-à-vis consumers, products, and marketing, as this year’s theme has revolved around “Product Placement,” with the gallery presenting exhibitions that frame production and commerce. Certain shows over the last year at this gallery have been right on the mark regarding pop art aesthetics and […]
Carl Solway Gallery’s director Michael Solway has organized the first installation of video art and kinetic sculptures at Cincinnati’s newly and ornately restored Memorial Hall ballrooms. The intermedia exhibition, titled Body Language, features a myriad of carnal moving images and works by Detroit artist Cynthia Greig and Cincinnati natives Rachel Rampleman and Alan Rath. The […]
Minnesota-based multi-media artist Chris Larson’s work “Function is Redundant” is displayed at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center and runs until September 2, 2018. In this large display of single and multi-channel video art installations, sculptures, paintings, and intermedia, Larson’s work incorporates large-scale ethereal photography, drawings and sound to supplement his documented process of structural abrogation. As […]
Alison Crocetta, Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, spans sculpture, performance, and video art in her work. The Contemporary Arts Center’s exhibition “Circus of One,” features Crocetta’s video art pieces and performances, often presented in digital photography form, divorced from their performative semblance. Her solo-screening at the CAC, “A Circus of One” features the […]
Professor Christopher Carter’s intermedia/new media theory text “Metafilm: Materialist Rhetoric and Reflexive Cinema” proverbially instrumentalizes the paradoxical rhetoric of visual culture by analyzing films that immerse viewers in violent narratives and examining the ethics of these transactions. Carter anaylzes the films of Michael Haneke, Atom Egoyan, Icíar Bollaín, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ryan Coogler. Using […]
Tom Bacher’s Per-40ming Trans-4-ming Phos-4-s-cent Paintings, which is showing at the Weston Art Gallery until June 10, 2018, displays a continuation of Bacher’s hyperrealist quotidian aesthetic re: luminescent paintings that find subjects in object studies, portraiture, and documentation processes. As the two-channel corridor video “Painting with Light” (2018) by YellowHaus Productions elucidates, Bacher’s exhibition […]
Filmmaker and video/conceptual artist C. Jacqueline Wood’s show What Makes a Life at the Weston Art Gallery from May 4 – June 10, 2018 explores how virtual archeology and intermedia modes allot for new narratives of storytelling, proffering from a series of interconnected installations that concern themselves with information networks. The five multi-component installations, […]
Social workers Keith Banner and Bill Ross created Visionaries + Voices for the artists Paul Rowland, Richard Brown, Antonio Adams, and Raymond Thunder-Sky. Bill and Keith arduously worked for county boards serving individuals with disabilities and had met these artists in the course of their work. Subsequently, the pair created more opportunities for artists to […]
The Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center features three works by American installation artist Malcolm Cochran: History Lessons (2011), Requiem (2018), and Washing Feet (1996-97). History Lessons features a looming fixture – a colossal poplar, steel, and polished whitewash stainless steel mirror. The base of the mirrors’ bracket is reminiscent of a sleek vessel, […]
Matthew Metzger’s contemporary interpretations of Chinese painting and its intentions allocate space and dimensionality through shifting and changing perspectives, which qualitatively empower the young painter’s “seeing” entirely. Metzger’s paintings, on view from March 15th – April 28th, 2018 at The Miller Gallery in Cincinnati deliberately question the point of view re: shifting perspectives. They […]
Truly a multifaceted artist whose new media processes and technologies wed organic forms with intermedia landscapes, artist Marcos Novak, born in 1957 in Caracas, Venezuela, eruditely explores architecture and industrial design in his installation artwork. During his career as a researcher at Austin University in Texas, Novak began focusing on the relationship between information […]
Traversing the Art Academy of Cincinnati’s galleries via the looming, metallic stairwell, Covergys Gallery is perhaps the easiest to miss between the larger Pearlman and Childlaw Galleries. A sweeping horizontal pocket within a wall, the second floor gallery is at once invitational and necessarily participatory – it simply can not be ignored, as it effectively […]
Planned prior to Trump’s presidency, the 21C Museum Hotel’s The Future is Female displays a myriad of international female artists – ranging in their modalities and sociopolitical concerns – whose works bridge third and fourth-wave feminist concerns. Built on the foreground of second-wave feminism’s civil rights advances, the third-wave occupies subjectivity and inclusive diversity, […]
“You mean Messiah?” JJ Brine hastily corrects me when I quizzically point at the two McDonalds logos on Vector Gallery’s wall, probing him about his interest in selectively appropriating capitalist imagery. It is the day before JJ Brine’s opening of the newest rendition of Vector Gallery, a space that has traversed a multiplicity of […]
Charles Woodman is a multifaceted new media artist, whose work spans the semblance of public art forums, temporal installations, documentary modes, and multi-channel projections. As an educator, curator, and creator whose work occupies multiple disciplines, Mr. Woodman has crafted a diverse aesthetic, motivated by an amalgamation of experimental and avant-garde video artists, sculptors/installation artists, and […]
