Honoré de Balzac wrote: “Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.” This passage was included in Camille Henrot’s writings about her video Grosse Fatigue (2014), now on view in Prospect.3, a sprawling biennial in both geographic and thematic[…..]
Photographer AnnieLaurie Erickson has spent a lot of time lately being watched by law enforcement. In her recent trip this year to Oklahoma, she stood on public property, taking photographs while security guards, local officers, and state police looked on. One might ask, what has she been photographing that requires so much surveillance? The answer is: big data centers throughout the Southern United States, the[…..]
Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based art collective, explores the persistence of collective memory in their deeply introspective exhibit, Moving Still, at the Front in New Orleans. A twelve-person-core collective of artists, Meow Wolf has developed a following around their sensorial and immersive installations that have previously taken the form of a 75-foot ship from the future, The Due Return (2011), built in the Center for[…..]
Just over forty-seven years ago this month, it was illegal for interracial couples to marry in sixteen states throughout the United States. Richard and Mildred Loving, the serendipitously named couple, were married in 1958 and then promptly arrested under anti-miscegenation laws. The legacy of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark decision of the Supreme Court to strike down race-based restrictions on marriage, reverberates clearly on the[…..]
Mel Chin’s Rematch, now on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, is the artist’s first retrospective, long overdue and particularly prescient this week as a new U.N. report highlights the dire conditions of the Earth created by pollution, energy, and population, among other factors. Chin, while making visually stunning work, strives to create environmental reactions, rather than objects. However, reactions can have effects[…..]
In a nod to Linda Nochlin’s famous query, Michele Wallace asked, “Why are there no great black artists?”[1] 30 Americans is the response to this question, a beautiful, rambunctious show that gathers the work of 31 African American artists. Unfortunately, 30 Americans, similar to Thelma Golden’s Freestyle in 2001, is not about a specific curatorial theory or thought, but rather a placing of African American[…..]
Continuing our Best of 2013 series, Anuradha Vikram writes, “Camille Henrot’s work is global in the best sense of the word. Mining source material from around the world, she creates works that draw out commonalities between Enlightenment cultures and the cultures that they have historically Othered. She uses technology as is logical for an artist of her generation-yet the subjects she explores are ancient as[…..]
