Mixed Media

Co-opting Form: An Interview with Liz Miller

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Liz Miller‘s installations are stunningly elaborate compositions, combining materials and shapes in ways that often belie our expectations. In her current exhibition, Recalcitrant Mimesis, Miller responds to the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still, whose museum opened late last year in Denver. Recalcitrant Mimesis is up through today at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver. Miller’s work is also currently included in the group[…..]

The 2012 DeCordova Biennial

Steve-Lambert

There is always someone who is offended by every biennial. They are inherently two-headed beasts, with the introspective head judging the strengths and weaknesses of a portion of the art world, while the extroverted head optimistically presents a narrative, declaring why the included artists are notable. For this year’s DeCordova Biennial, curators Dina Deitsch and Abigail Ross Goodman followed tradition by programming a regional Biennial[…..]

“Hello, all but forgotten piece of 1970s feminist Earth Art, have you ever seen a transsexual before?”

Liz Rosenfeld, Untitled [Dyketactics Revisited], 2005. Video transfer.

Sight, acknowledgment, and shared experience all figure prominently in Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of Self and the Imagined Self, currently at Mac Arthur B Arthur in Oakland, CA. Artists Liz Rosenfeld, Chris E. Vargas, Sofia Cordova and Shana Moulton make themselves “seen” though video, film transfer, installation and performance. Rosenfeld’s Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), a 16mm film transfer to video, brings us to another time both[…..]

Complicated History: Interview with Olaf Brzeski

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Olaf Brzeski’s work spans many different media, but his practice is unified by a central sense of iconic situations having gone awry. For Brzeski, the hunter becomes the hunted, the superhero-savior is hideously deformed, the stately bust is bloated and misshapen. Brzeski’s work has been included in solo and group shows throughout Poland and in Prague, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Lille. We met up in Tarnow,[…..]

Memoria (Memory): Bibiana Suárez at Hyde Park Art Center

(L t R): Bibiana Suárez. Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 1 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 1, 2005-2011; archival inkjet print on aluminum panel (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections); 24 x 24 in.  Bibiana Suárez. Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 2 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 2, 2005-2011; archival inkjet print (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections); 24 x 24 in.

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not[…..]

One man’s rabbit is another man’s…

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On my first interview for graduate school, I unerringly identified each slide shown to me: Warhol, Matisse, Pollock, Smithson. I left confident for my next interview the following day. I waltzed into the building and calmly road up to the eighth floor.  There, I was completely caught off guard. Instead of Rauschenberg, Duchamp or Hirst, I was presented with a photograph of a man clad[…..]

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence. Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises[…..]