In an age when everything is called into doubt, Squeak Carnwath’s concern with seeing carries a deep urgency.
John Yau
John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His latest poetry publications include a book of poems, Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and the chapbook, Egyptian Sonnets (Rain Taxi, 2012). His most recent monographs are Catherine Murphy (Rizzoli, 2016), the first book on the artist, and Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert (Black Dog Publishing, 2015). He has also written monographs on A. R. Penck, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011) before he began writing regularly for Hyperallergic. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).
In Praise of Illegibility
Nadia Haji Omar’s art asks us: Can we look for the sake of looking? Or must looking always be about gaining and extraction?
Opening Up the Thingness of Painting
Dana Lok explores a range of perceptual conundrums in an impressive debut exhibition.
Thornton Willis’s Aversion to Perfection
The openness of Willis’s art suggests that he does not believe that painting needs to attain visual perfection; painting is a process that does not search for closure.
Gloria Graham Records the Movement of the Earth
Graham is inspired by science and draws on her deep knowledge of it, which ranges from chemistry and molecular structures to botany.
The Beauty of the Ephemeral World
Whereas the creators of landscape abstractions generally believed their paintings were impervious to time, Lucy Mullican makes artworks that are exposed and susceptible.
Abstractions That Record the Scars of Trauma
Kwon Young-Woo presents the viewer with a deeper sense of the reality that nature goes on, no matter what humans are doing to each other.
Is It an Artificial Paradise or an Artificial Hell or Both?
Elliott Green seems to be espousing that landscapes are living forms governed by rules we cannot fathom — they appear to be welcoming us, but we might be wrong.
Shadow Play and the Art of Utako Shindo
Utako Shindo is interested in transitional passages and hinge experiences, or what she calls the “in-between spatiality.”
There’s Something Special About Jim Osman’s Sculpture
Osman’s care for and attention to his modest materials, the particularities of their identity, is rare in a society where excess is celebrated daily.
Messing with Museums and Our Desire for Order
Is the earth a necropolis in which the survivors live among the dead and their sarcophagi, which includes museums, pyramids, and monuments of all kinds?
Julia Fish’s Architectural Abstractions Are Joyful Enigmas
Fish’s artworks elude every attempt to enclose them in language, and they resist explanation. They become something only a painting can be.