Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s multidimensional practice is currently on view in their expansive Sound Speed Marker at the Blaffer Art Museum. The duo’s range of collaborative skills and cinematic investments is present in three video installations—Grand Paris Texas, Movie Mountain (Méliès), and Giant—and in the related photographs and an outdoor sculpture. Using as a backdrop the arid terrain of three Texas towns, Ryan, Paris,[…..]

In his 1971 essay “The Function of the Studio,” conceptual artist Daniel Buren defined the artist’s studio as a metadiscourse of “frames, envelopes, and limits” imposed upon the working artist in the age of advanced capitalism.[1] Claiming that this privileged space had become nothing more than an “ossified custom”—a “commercial depot” for curators and dealers to ship works out into the world (and thus detach[…..]

Taravat Talepasand’s work takes on the representational codes and image systems of the Iranian state: national currency, political propaganda, religious iconography, and gendered forms of identity making. The paintings in Not an Arab Spring open up the ideological assumptions that index Iranian identity, state power, and gender in order to consider how the body (male and female) comes to signify the state as well as[…..]

Mark Steinmetz’s current exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art has narrative ambition, but also asks difficult questions about the meaning of “straight photography” and its relationship to the documentary tradition. In what sense are documentary photographs social records, deadpan descriptions, or allegorical explications of the artist’s worldview? Are they a series of facile maneuvers, or as critic Garry Badger once claimed, “an existential[…..]

Radcliffe Bailey’s current exhibition at Contemporary Art Center New Orleans rewards multiple visits. Comprising seven large-scale works by the Atlanta-based artist, the exhibition gathers an intensely personal constellation of imagery that has continued to distinguish Bailey as a contemporary artist of significant aesthetic and critical power. Bailey’s emphasis on the rich symbolic context of the liminal, or the in-between, provides support for his expansive definition[…..]

To invoke a palimpsest is to find oneself wading into an extremely fertile territory of meaning. With equal relevance to the development of mathematics, geology, architecture, and memory studies, the term has transcended its origins as a reusable writing parchment in ancient Greece to become a material metaphor for the multilayered history of a particular place, epoch, or individual subject. Despite the term’s dynamic etymological[…..]

In Double Life, now on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, it is clear that the city is in the midst of becoming one of the most interesting and significant locations for performance art in the southeast—a statement confirmed by the national attention given recently to the performance art collective DiverseWorks, the emergence of the Lone Star Explosion International Performance Art Biennale in 2012, and the[…..]