The video opens with the sound of the tide, and a tight close-up of the artist bringing a stone from a shoreline to her mouth. She licks it slowly. The act, along with the sound of the sea, is both primal and sensual. The ritualized action is repeated, establishing a deep connection between the artist and the sea, as well as the viewer—it’s difficult not to imagine the sensation of the coolness of the smooth stone and the taste of salt in one’s mouth while watching it.
Reviews
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Caring About Peter Nadin
Peter Nadin’s “First Mark” opened at Gavin Brown’s enterprise on June 29th, the first time the artist has exhibited his work in this country since 1992. There’s been massive coverage of Nadin’s “comeback,” but is the show grabbing headlines simply because of Nadin’s backstory and the list of boldfaced names he hung out with in the 1970s and 1980s?
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Ghosts Of Glasnost: “Ostalgia” At The New Museum
The specter of communism currently haunts the New Museum in its summer “bloc-buster” exhibition “Ostalgia.” It’s an ambitious project that consumes most of the galleries with a swirling conglomeration of disparate mediums, artists, scales and concepts that reflect the miasmic atmosphere of post-Soviet territories.
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Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial
The Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program has helped emerging artists in the New York area navigate the business side of art since the 1980s. AIM is now celebrating its 30th anniversary with two joint exhibitions at the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill: Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial features 72 participants from the 2010-2011 program and the smaller Taking AIM on the program’s history. I recently journeyed up to the Grand Concourse for the Bronx Museum component of the show.
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Reconfiguring The African Mask: From Artifact To Art Form
Whether sequestered behind glass in a museum or sold to tourists along Fifth Avenue, the African mask is an image from the non-Western world that we are all familiar with. Yet walking though the African art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, I felt somewhat disconnected from the African mask. Severed from its intended use for performance and ceremonies, the mask as it is presented in the museum becomes an ambiguous object. Does the mask still have relevance when removed from its cultural context? Can we appreciate it for just its form? Is it art or artifact?
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From Louisiana With Love: The 2011 Southern Open (Part 2)
As I mentioned in the first part of this article, Amy Mackie—former curatorial associate of the New Museum in New York, now Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans—selected quite a few New Orleans artists for this year’s installment of the Southern Open at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, LA. While she may have stacked the deck, so to speak, she concisely provided audiences with some of the highest caliber art the exhibition has seen to date.
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The Phantoms of Liberty
Now showing at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea, Mark Wagner uses collaged United States dollar bills as his signature medium. He meticulously dissects and reconstitutes the ubiquitous note into highly detailed sketch-like drawings. Full of filigree and ornamentation, his images tinker with the inner workings of American mythology.
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Narration Is The Devil: Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever @ PS1
Discussion of Ryan Trecartin’s work usually brims with a recurring set of buzz words: nonlinear, hyperactive, cut-up, frenetic. Any Ever, the Los Angeles-based artist’s latest exhibition at MoMA PS1, retains the psychedelic schtick that characterizes earlier works but adds higher production values and an expanded cast of actors.
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Mack Attack! The 2011 Southern Open
New York, I feel your pain. You’re hemorrhaging under the weight of your artistic success and accomplishments, bleeding out talent like Jackson Pollock after the car crash. I know it’s hard to keep all your children around while the rents keep rising and the scene gets hyped into the next century while it struggles to hold on to what it had in the last. Times are tough! But your loss is Louisiana’s gain …
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Notes From Bushwick: Jules de Balincourt’s “Itinerant Ones”
Artist Jules de Balincourt has achieved considerable recognition in the last six years since his inclusion in Greater New York at PS 1 in 2005. I love that he’s still involved in his community, and his selection of artists for his Itinerant Ones show at the Storefront in Bushwick seemed like a kind of intimate snapshot of a corner of the Brooklyn art scene. The end result, however, is a different story.
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LOST on the Lower East Side
From L to R: Marianne Vitale, “Model for Burning Bridge (1)” (2011), reclaimed lumber, 68 x 18 x 22; Yamini Nayar, “Strange Event” (2009), c-print, 30 x 40; Leah Beeferman, “Journey into the unknown machines attempt a construction of the skies” (2010), digital animation with sound (All photos by author) Some people look at the […]
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Grant v. Lee: The Battle Continues
150 years after the conflict began, the Civil War provides the subject matter for a group show at the Good Children Gallery in New Orleans. But far from being a mere exercise in nostalgia,”Grant v. Lee”, curated by Sophie Lvoff, gave artists the opportunity to “gently and subtly evoke the times and culture of the Civil War while bringing up significant questions about race and nationalism that we continue to ask today.”
