Exhibition Review
Diane Simpson’s “1977–1980” at James Cohan
Sculpture | March 20, 2024
Simpson initially resisted moving into sculpture on the grounds that there was nothing wrong with illusion. With her cardboard sculptures, she was clearly trying to put illusion and actual form in tension. Chaise (1979), a warped lounge chair in powder blue archival board, is one of her most extreme and successful efforts along these lines. The shaded grid on the board’s surface imitates tufted leather upholstery (with real and hand-drawn screws in place of buttons), and fabricated shadows create the impression of depth, a fold or joint where there is none.
Exhibition Review
Mary Helena Clark’s “Conveyor” at Bridget Donahue
e-flux Criticism | March 15, 2024
The conveyor of the exhibition’s title could be a communicator, like an artist, but it can also describe a transference from one place to another, as if through a threshold. The door, for Clark, represents both a wall and an invitation, a structure that withholds and protects but also provides access—like the orangutan’s window, the incubator’s aperture, or our own skin, which the artist frequently probes to show us views of our mysterious interiors. What happens, though, when the locks are disabled (or repurposed) and barriers are breached?
Exhibition Review
Jane Dickson’s “Promised Land” at Karma
Artforum | November 2023
Dickson plays with the ambiguity and duplicity of marketing language. What is “promised” by the roadside billboard in Promised Land 2—fittingly displayed in the gallery’s storefront window—is not paradise, but fast cash in exchange for the house you can no longer afford. Bargain, a luminous, seemingly backlit painting on royal-blue felt of a sign festooned with plastic car-lot flags, seems to ask what is gained in any deal, and what, of course, is lost.
Exhibition Review
“Moveables” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
Frieze | October 18, 2023
As underscored by the barbs on Hannah Levy’s handrails, the potentially toxic minerals in Jes Fan’s cyst-like sculptures or the harsh glare of Nikita Gale’s spotlights, our relationship to our environs is often fraught with threat and risk. Collectively, the works in “Moveables” suggest that we are not as divorced from the world outside of our bodies as we might like to be. While some of the art on display evinces our increasing tendency towards self-alienation, the show also provides models for a more entangled coexistence.
Exhibition Text
Mitchell Charbonneau: Foundations
Off Paradise | October 2023
Mitchell Charbonneau’s labor-intensive process, which achieves a high degree of verisimilitude, requires the artist to conduct an intimate examination of his subjects, a level of attention and scrutiny that extends to the viewers experience as well. When was the last time you studied a folding chair? Or questioned its very chair-ness? Have you ever considered the aesthetic merits of energy drink packaging?
Exhibition Review
Alice Adams at Zürcher Gallery
Artforum | September 2023
“The wall,” Alice Adams declared in 1972, “is a non-subject.” Yet, at the time, she was producing a series of latex casts of her studio walls, including Bowery Wall, 1970, the centerpiece of this exhibition. The surfaces, structures, and substrates of walls were very much her subject, and she sought to challenge their supposed nullity. […] The assembled sculptures and drawings formed a kind of portrait of the artist’s workspace at 246 Bowery in Manhattan, just around the corner from this show at Zürcher Gallery, but from another era.
Exhibition Review
Miyoko Ito at Matthew Marks
Artforum | Summer 2023
Glowing with subtle gradations of color, the singular visions that Miyoko Ito committed to canvas throughout the 1970s conflate interior and exterior realms, simultaneously evoking desolate vistas and sun-drenched rooms. Her improvised but methodically built-out compositions—populated with archways, windows that could be mirrors, and pictures within pictures—confine as often as they reflect, refract, or open onto sweeping panoramas.
Exhibition Review
Em Kettner at Chapter NY
Sculpture | December 6, 2022
Kettner’s characters take more unambiguously human (and gendered) form in the series of tiles, which she has embedded into five wooden handrails installed low on the walls. Arranged serially, like the frames of a comic strip, the two-inch-square tiles portray vignettes in narrative arcs that conflate comedic and erotic performance with medical observation. The distinction between displaying oneself and being put on display is muddled.
Profile
New Talent: Charisse Pearlina Weston
Art in America | November 2022
Charisse Pearlina Weston associates glass with “the atmosphere of risk and violence that Black people face.” Employing various strategies to manipulate the fragile, transparent material into something more opaque and resistant, she evokes a tension between the desire to share a story and to secrete it away from probing eyes.