Davide Quagliola (aka Quayola) an Italian digital artist, loves art. He loves his Roman heritage, brimming with Renaissance and Baroque innuendos. And he loves classical images, and the beauty of the algorithm.
Ellen Pearlman
Ellen Pearlman is a writer and new media artist who lives between New York, Beijing, Hong Kong and Canada
All articles by Ellen Pearlman
Ellen Pearlman
Though Micheal Wenyon and Susan Gamble’s show A Universe held up for Inspection focuses on displays of holograms and other works, the real raison d’ete of this exhibit is to reveal the frisson erupting over the last gasp of the analogue picture.
The brain and perception are, in the words of Buster Poindexter, “hot, hot, hot,” with the buzz they are generating in certain reaches of the art world. Curators Koan Jeff Baysa and Caitlin Hardy, both medical doctors, should be commended for surveying this vast subject with their exhibition Seeing Ourselves, though it proffers mixed results.
Cindy Sherman’s one-woman retrospective is profound, provocative and sadly incomplete, most noticeably in relation to her earliest works despite the inclusion of the entire black and white “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980), the “encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles” that skewered the post modern discourse on photography right through its kabobs.
Post-colonial studies, the legacy of 19th and 20th century colonialism and imperialism, a hit on the academic circuit, underlies the raisone d’etre of the New Museum’s Triennale, The Ungovernables, the second Triennial devoted to global contemporary art. Artists are presented as “actors in the world around them rather than commentators,” and portrayed as “negatively ungovernable.” The show’s emphasis on a series of global “urgencies” casts a wide net focusing more on the message than the medium, which is both the show’s strength and its undoing.
Cui Xiuwen is known for her iconic pictures of defiled schoolgirls in lily-white dresses and red scarfs featured in front of Tiananmen-like structures. Miao Xiaochun uses themes of Western classic art and 3D graphics to produce phantasmagorias of Hieronymus Bosch-inspired splendor. Though both artists are thoroughly Chinese, Western interpretations of the body ricochet throughout their current exhibit.
Pace Gallery has mounted a world class mini-museum show on the art of the Happening using its vast holdings as well as supplemental gleanings loaned from the Whitney, MOMA and Getty museums.
(Liu Dao) or island6, a Shanghai-based international collective of “multimedia artists, performers, writers, curators and tech-geeks” personify the aspirations of contemporary China by skirting verboten political flashpoints and keeping their content short, sweet, flirtatious, erotic and electronic.
North Korea is so wacky they have their own calendar system, and it marks its centennial anniversary in 2012, the birthdate of the late Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Dovetailing neatly with the recent passing of Übermeister Kim Jong-il, A Postcard From Afar: North Korea From A Distance at Apex Art showcases this mysterious place.
ISTANBUL — Istanbul has launched a full frontal assault to claim its place amongst rising art centers by hosting the complex and provocative Istanbul Biennial, as well as a massive all-inclusive history of the city’s female artists, Dream and Reality – Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey at the Istanbul Modern right next door. The timing and juxtaposition of these two shows is not haphazard and should be viewed as twin prongs of an interior exploration and bold emergence.
