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Against the Received View of Art History: Curatorship as Genealogical Meaning-Making

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,” […]

Read | Comments Off on Against the Received View of Art History: Curatorship as Genealogical Meaning-Making | Tags: * · March 2022

Kate Oh Gallery: The Korean Archetype

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Kate Oh Gallery: The Korean Archetype | Tags: * · February 2022

Lyrics in Vases

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Lyrics in Vases | Tags: * · January 2022

Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle | Tags: * · December 2021

Narducci: Transcendental Aesthetics

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Narducci: Transcendental Aesthetics | Tags: * · October 2021

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Figures of Life

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Niki de Saint Phalle’s Figures of Life | Tags: * · June/July 2021

Aleatory Aesthetics: Appraising the Aesthetics of “Chance” in Gerhard Richter’s Cage Paintings

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Aleatory Aesthetics: Appraising the Aesthetics of “Chance” in Gerhard Richter’s Cage Paintings | Tags: * · May 2021

Arrest: the Politics and Transcendence of Aesthetic Arrest Qua Protest

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Arrest: the Politics and Transcendence of Aesthetic Arrest Qua Protest | Tags: * · June 2020

Camille Claudel’s Les Causeuses: The Subject of Lack and the Leaning Tree of Destiny

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” […]

Read | Comments Off on Camille Claudel’s Les Causeuses: The Subject of Lack and the Leaning Tree of Destiny | Tags: May 2020

Gerhard Richter’s Distorted Fields of Vision and Allen Feldman’s “Photopolitics”

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Gerhard Richter’s Distorted Fields of Vision and Allen Feldman’s “Photopolitics” | Tags: December 2019

The Aesthetic Experience of Machine Learning: Grounding Control

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on The Aesthetic Experience of Machine Learning: Grounding Control | Tags: November 2019

The Bent and Biologized Bodies of Oktay Ince’s Breakages

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on The Bent and Biologized Bodies of Oktay Ince’s Breakages | Tags: * · September 2019

On Posthuman Ecology and Affective Omnicide: Eros as Excess and Misguided Solution-Building

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on On Posthuman Ecology and Affective Omnicide: Eros as Excess and Misguided Solution-Building | Tags: September 2019

Hilna Af Klint at The Guggenheim: Metaphysics as it Patrols Mortality’s Borders

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Hilna Af Klint at The Guggenheim: Metaphysics as it Patrols Mortality’s Borders | Tags: * · June/July 2019

The Laughter of the Unconscious

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on The Laughter of the Unconscious | Tags: June/July 2019

The “Right to Look” and Nari Ward’s “Amazing Grace”

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on The “Right to Look” and Nari Ward’s “Amazing Grace” | Tags: April 2019

Severe Ascesis: Shusaku Arakawa’s Object-Oriented Ontologies and the Spectral Event

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Severe Ascesis: Shusaku Arakawa’s Object-Oriented Ontologies and the Spectral Event | Tags: April 2019

From the “California Ideology” to Tiqqun’s “Total War:” Tracing net.art’s Archival Poetics

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on From the “California Ideology” to Tiqqun’s “Total War:” Tracing net.art’s Archival Poetics | Tags: * · March 2019

Inverting Vulgarity: Harmony Korine’s Florida Films, “Young Twitchy,” and Hauntology

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Inverting Vulgarity: Harmony Korine’s Florida Films, “Young Twitchy,” and Hauntology | Tags: March 2019

On a Certain Tendency of Contemporary Installation Art

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 […]

Read | 2 Comments | Tags: * · Winter 2019

On the Question of How to Approach a New Visual Language?

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on On the Question of How to Approach a New Visual Language? | Tags: Winter 2019

A Humane Touch in Product Placement

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on A Humane Touch in Product Placement | Tags: * · July/August 2018

Traipsing Ballroom Halls

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Traipsing Ballroom Halls | Tags: July/August 2018

Chris Larson’s Entropy

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Chris Larson’s Entropy | Tags: * · June 2018

Alison Crocetta’s Deconstructed Still Circus

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Alison Crocetta’s Deconstructed Still Circus | Tags: June 2018

Carter’s “Metafilm” and the Affect of Sociological Virulence

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Carter’s “Metafilm” and the Affect of Sociological Virulence | Tags: June 2018

Divinity Affirmations – Light, Luminescence, and Liminal Spaces with Tom Bacher

  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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Divinity Affirmations – Light, Luminescence, and Liminal Spaces with Tom Bacher | Tags: * · April/May 2018

What Makes a Life – Virtual Circulation and Digital Storytelling

  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, […]

Read | Comments Off on What Makes a Life – Virtual Circulation and Digital Storytelling | Tags: April/May 2018

Found and Unfound Pre-Existing Conditions

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Found and Unfound Pre-Existing Conditions | Tags: April/May 2018

Historical Materialism and Survey: Malcolm Cochran’s History Lessons

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, […]

Read | Comments Off on Historical Materialism and Survey: Malcolm Cochran’s History Lessons | Tags: * · March 2018

Matthew Metzger: Traversing the Meditative and Experiential

  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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Matthew Metzger: Traversing the Meditative and Experiential | Tags: March 2018

Marcos Novak: Transarchitecture and Traversing Augmented Reality

  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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Marcos Novak: Transarchitecture and Traversing Augmented Reality | Tags: March 2018

(Im)material Culture, Alienation Affect, and the Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ Curious Social Experiment

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on (Im)material Culture, Alienation Affect, and the Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ Curious Social Experiment | Tags: * · January/February 2018

Bridging Inter-Spaces and Navigating Contemporary Feminist Art

  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, […]

Read | Comments Off on Bridging Inter-Spaces and Navigating Contemporary Feminist Art | Tags: * · January/February 2018

Posthumanism and Catharsis: JJ Brine’s “Vector Gallery”

  “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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Posthumanism and Catharsis: JJ Brine’s “Vector Gallery” | Tags: December 2017

The Affect of Serenity: “Table of Elements”

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 […]

Read | Comments Off on The Affect of Serenity: “Table of Elements” | Tags: November 2017