Upon entering Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery to see Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, the viewer is immediately confronted by a raucous wash of sonorous elements. Over fifty artists and conceptual writers occupy the gallery space; canonical works from Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Marcel Broodthaers, Carl Andre, and Dan Graham are nestled among pieces by contemporary practitioners, contributing to the sense of saturation. Originally curated[…..]

It’s nearly impossible to talk about a show of Sturtevant’s work and have it understood. Like a book, you have to start at the beginning. The key to Sturtevant is context. In 1964’s New York City, Elaine Sturtevant sent shock waves through the art world when she started making replicas of the work of her contemporaries. For this, she received a tremendous amount of crap. The[…..]

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt makes kitsch from the kitchen, using everyday materials such as cellophane, glitter, foil, and Easter-display grass to construct minutely detailed and coded ephemera that sanctify camp, trash, and a kind of queer sentimentality particular to the artist’s experience of the 1970s Hell’s Kitchen scene in New York. Ecce Homo, Pavel Zoubok Gallery’s current three-part exhibition, orbits around this artist’s counter-historical queer aesthetic. On the heels of his extensive[…..]

The flickering, multicolored lights of Shih Chieh Huang’s installation Synthetic Seduction, now on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, reminds me of the cellular and molecular models found in biology classrooms. When I was a student, one of the ways in which I learned about organic forms was by placing mitochondria, lysosomes, and nuclei in their correct locations in these models. Huang[…..]

A Different Kind of Order, the International Center of Photography’s Triennial, includes artworks by twenty-eight international artists whose photographs, films, sculptures, video, and mixed-media works focus on the intersection of modern image making and our technologically advanced contemporary culture. The artists bring light to the nuances of our “new” world’s challenges, whether they are newfangled or all too familiar. Moving between the application and denial of[…..]

There’s no doubt that you’ll hear much about the work of James Turrell in the coming months. With three major exhibitions—at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and the Guggenheim in New York—the art world seems primed to talk about nothing else. Given their geographical spread and the fact that all three exhibitions will be open[…..]

On June 4, I was reminded of a critical moment in history when the eyes of the world were turned towards Poland and the Eastern Bloc. This date marks the anniversary of the first democratic election in Poland; and with its celebration, a cautious optimism pervades the formerly communist country as various events—such as the premiere of the documentary film Eastern Europe Strives for Freedom—take a[…..]