Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Alex Rojas reviews James Cordas: a, dog I’m holding undermy arm with Its head pointed behind me at Et al. Gallery in San Francisco.  James Cordas’ exhibition a, dog[…..]

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents Ragnar Kjartansson’s gorgeous and shrewd video installation The End (2009). On five rear projection screens, Kjartansson and his collaborator, Icelandic musician Davíð Þór Jónsson, play all of the parts of an unidentified country-music song on piano, banjo, drums, and acoustic and electric guitars. Shot in the Rocky Mountains in Canada, both men are bearded and dressed in[…..]

At the entrance to the black box of the Kitchen’s upstairs gallery, a long vitrine houses an illuminated culture of bacteria on agar jelly. The cracked slab teems with biological entities colored like bruises on sallow skin. Imprinted with capital letters, it reads: YOU CAN CALL ME F. Anicka Yi’s current solo show stages part breeding ground, part containment camp for “F”—the feminine, the woman[…..]

The fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is typically an airy space with high ceilings and ample skylights, but currently it is crowded with an overabundance of furniture. Visitors are greeted with the pleasant mineral smell of dirt and a dense maze of wooden tables. The lighting is diffuse, almost grayed, and the galleries take on the look of a luminous dusk,[…..]

James Bond: debonair hero of the British Secret Service, or Caribbean bird expert? The answer is both. Ian Fleming named his famous spy after an ornithologist who wrote the comprehensive Birds of the West Indies. At Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, artist Taryn Simon fuses the cosmos of 007 with the interests of the researcher to produce a field guide to the birds that appear[…..]

Future Ruins, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, is indeed monumental, incorporating a range of media including print, sculpture, video, and sound. The exhibition does not present a quiet, post-apocalyptic landscape that fetishizes decay; rather, Valenzuela addresses divisions of labor and the nature of work, making these complex issues manifest through the specter of the 21st-century economic landscape. And though it is discordant at[…..]

“Grids punctured with crosses in varying patterns” is perhaps the best—and admittedly, the most simplistic—way of summing up Ding Yi’s oeuvre. Ivory Black at the ShanghArt gallery is his latest iteration of these basic, severely geometric forms, in varying shades of blue, black, and white hues, distinguished only by date and serial number. Like an astronomer’s chart of the night sky, Ding’s gridded, ordered forms[…..]