Barkley L. Hendricks. Down Home Taste, 1971; oil and linen on acrylic; 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Office of the Dean of Students, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).

Caricatures of the South as backwards, unsophisticated, and inherently conservative are dismantled and put to rest by the vast richness and diversity of work on display, with the list of included artists forming a “who’s who” of American contemporary art—from Kara Walker and Amy Sherald to Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall. Southern Accent avoids many of the tired and problematic themes that tend to romanticize the South and dilute the heterogeneity of its citizens by including works that expand our visual field of who, what, and where the South actually is.[2] Barkley L. Hendricks’s life-size portrait Down Home Taste (1971)—a confident celebration of the Black urban experience, style, and everyday life—affirms a more fluid, expansive understanding of Southern-ness. Hendricks’s paintings (including this one) are often portraits of the friends and strangers who populated his life in various cities across the 1960s and ’70s. Down Home Taste presents a fashionable man lighting a cigarette with matches from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the North Carolina corporation of Winston-Salem fame. Taste—whether sensory, aesthetic, or nostalgic—is something that defies and crosses borders, mixing and marking people, places, and their histories in overt and subtle ways.

The exhibition does not shy away from the legacies of slavery, segregation, and racism in the South, and their impact on regional and national politics and culture. Commissioned for the bicentennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase, Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic series The Louisiana Project (2003) provides a powerful account of the ways in which slavery and racism continue to hide in plain sight across the South, like so many ruins. Clad in a softly patterned white dress, Weems bears witness to the spaces and sites where Black people were made to work, suffer, live, and die—sites that now act as monuments, cleansed of their dark histories, for tourist consumption and pleasure. The image of the cemetery emphasizes this liminal space, where the past, present, and future of racial politics and history live above and below the surface of everyday life.

Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Woman Standing in Cemetery) from The Louisiana Project, 2003; gelatin silver print; 20 ¾ x 20 ¾ in framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City, NY).

In addition, the exhibition includes work dedicated to exploring and recognizing more recent changes to urban and rural demographics due to growing populations of Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, and other immigrant communities, while creating space for Native American, LGBTQ+, and women artists. Diego Camposeco’s Tabaco (Tabacco), from the 2015 series Diego Saves the World, articulates the ethical spectrum of human rights, environmental, and labor issues in the growing communities working in agricultural industries across the region, specifically in the tobacco fields of his hometown of North Carolina.[3] Overwhelmed and surrounded by green tobacco plants, the male figure of a worker stands in the landscape with his face masked by the children’s cartoon animal-rescuer, Diego, as a way to articulate the emancipatory power and growing presence of this marginalized community under attack by the current political administration.

Diego Camposeco. Tabaco (Tobacco), from the series Diego Saves the World, 2015 (printed 2016); inkjet print. Courtesy of the Artist.

Our notions of how we think about the region, its culture, and American identity overall are put to the test in this exhibition—timely in the wake of one of the nastiest presidential elections in recent American history, and one that was shaped in part by a long-term rift between urban and rural regions. As the removal of monuments to the Confederacy across the South unearths deep-seated rage on both sides of the political spectrum, violence toward Black bodies continues to rage on, and attacks on immigrant communities escalate, how will we begin to address these issues in an era of national division? Leaving the exhibition, I realized that Southern Accent is not just a presentation of the long-ignored complexity of the South and its culture, but a resistance to a long history of geographical stereotypes that reproduce social divisions in American culture. The South is many things, and it is in “the many” that its richness is to be found.

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, through October 14, 2017.

[1] See Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” (1960), in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: The Library of America), 1988, 814–815.

[2] The Historic New Orleans Collection’s current presentation of rare guidebooks to houses of prostitution and directories for sex workers operating in the bayous of southern Louisiana, Storyville: Madams and Music, articulates the ways in which images of the Deep South have been mishandled by institutions of art and culture, often romanticizing and/or domesticating racial, gender, and class-based inequalities rather than critique them. See Pamela D. Arceneaux and Emily Epstein Landau’s accompanying text for this exhibition, Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville, New Orleans (New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection), 2017.

[3] Diego Camposeco was featured in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article on testifying on behalf of undocumented immigrant rights in “My Family’s Papers” for the New York Times, February 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/my-familys-papers.html

Mickalene Thomas. Sista Sista Lady Blue, 2007; chromogenic print; 40 3/8 x 48 1/2 in. © Mickalene Thomas/Artists Rights Society, New York. Courtesy of SFMOMA, San Francisco. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.

In the current political moment, in which women and people of color struggle (as always, but now even more tangibly) for visibility, Matisse/Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)—two canonical artists shown in cross-generational conversation—is a bit too pretty, perfect, and White-male-centered. Does Matisse need another show? Is this exhibition, heavily publicized by this major institution, relevant today? It’s a gendered imbalance of male painters of female subjects, again. As a Mexican female critic and artist, I enjoyed Matisse/Diebenkorn the way one enjoys art history that feels distant; like overhearing someone else’s conversation, I had the feeling of being somewhere I did not belong.

Yet, after I passed through the exhibition’s exit, one more room sparked my hope and excitement. Accessible without a surcharged ticket, this exhibition was also curated by Matisse/Diebenkorn curator Janet Bishop, and had its own wall text and title. M/D: Coda operates as a footnote—or even punctuation—to the main show, ending it with an ellipsis, rather than a full stop.

This appendix, which features Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Bechtle, Elizabeth Payton, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison, and Mickalene Thomas, brought Matisse and Diebenkorn’s influence into a contemporary dialogue by showing how their lineages extend to other artists across time. Most importantly, this gallery showcases artists of other identities. Whereas women are only subjects of representation in Matisse/Diebenkorn, M/D: Coda presents women as authors of images. Thomas’s Sista Sista Lady Blue (2007) struck me the most in this regard.

The photograph, a staged portrait, features a confident woman on a couch, surrounded by patterned textiles that create a soft, colorful setting. Her gaze pierces back at viewers. Another woman figure, reflected in a background mirror, also gazes back. This piece is unapologetic and empowering: a woman who looks back, a woman who stages representation, and a woman who quotes Matisse and updates his work to this time—a moment when a woman of color deserves her own construction of visibility.

Matisse/Diebenkorn’s relationship to M/D: Coda becomes a matter of real estate. Five artists are compressed in one last gallery—an exhibition that exists to make amends. Although I salute and value this coda, the distribution of artists could change even more, so that the distribution of representation appears to be more timely and balanced. Could we perhaps imagine a Mickalene Thomas solo show that ends with a small gallery with a few Matisse paintings?

M/D: Coda will be on view through May 29, 2017.

Carolina Magis Weinberg is a whether reporter, and a sight specific artist and critical writer. Her projects investigate discrete forms of otherness such as the accent, which she considers to expand from orality, becoming a visual form in the production of the migrating maker.

Dennis Jeffy. Dooli Sings, 2000; oil on canvas; 80 in. diameter. Courtesy of the Artist and MOCA Tucson. Photo: Maya Heilman-Hall.

Made in the early 2000s, the earliest works on view are Jeffy’s large-scale paintings on circular canvases. While the curatorial statement positions these paintings as tondos (a term developed in the Renaissance for round paintings and sculptures, which were typically incorporated into archways), Jeffy’s use of the circular form has little to do with this Eurocentric tradition of portraiture connected to the church. Instead, Jeffy uses the round form as a way to establish a physical and conceptual connection to the body. He explains, “My paintings are round because of the natural roundness of the eye. Our vision is round. I was raised in a hogan, which is round and represents the cycle of life.”[1] Through the direction of his paint strokes, Jeffy creates visual movements within his work that pull and swirl viewers into and around his paintings. The circular form and large scale of the canvases further enhance this bodily experience in viewing his work.

Dooli Sings (2000) is an example of one such work. It combines a variety of painting styles. Partially rendered faces sit at the edge of the painting, and are distorted and lengthened, as if they have been dragged and slowed down through time. Slanted paint marks in dark blues, pinks, purples, and teals fill the canvas and create swirling fields of color that reflect the shades of the galaxy. On top of these strokes, Jeffy inserts hyperrealistically painted images: drops of water, a pile of sand, and a spherical planet-like shape with a shadow. Each element of the painting pulls and pushes viewers around the piece, into the Earth’s surface, and out to the universe.

Dennis Jeffy. Holy Man, 2015; oil on canvas; 24 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and MOCA Tucson. Photo: Author.

The next gallery demonstrates Jeffy’s transition out of the circular form and realism, embracing abstraction. In Holy Man (2015), an abstract figure emanates in bright yellows, greens, and pinks, looking out toward a field and horizon. Outside of this central arena of color, the canvas is otherwise raw, stained and scribbled with black, gray, and brown marks. The piece hints at realms invisible to the eye, whether physical, mental, or spiritual. In the same room sits Poetess (2014), a large, eight-foot-tall sliver of canvas that seems to be cut out from a much larger painting. Shaped like a beam of sunlight shining down, the canvas hosts a range of colors that again recall outer space, with marks that pull viewers up and out of our world.

Dennis Jeffy. Fractals, 2014 (left); oil on canvas; 52 1⁄2 x 52 1⁄2 in. Poetess, 2014 (right); oil on canvas; 13 x 95 1⁄2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and MOCA Tucson. Photo: Maya Heilman-Hall.

The most exciting pieces lie in the last gallery, with Jeffy’s latest mixed-media work on Plexiglas. The only listed material for each work is Plexi. As such, it is unclear what precise materials were used to create the forms, which sit on both sides of the plastic sheets. The pieces are displayed five inches away from the wall, allowing the translucent and subtle forms to cast a slight shadow. The abstract symbols and marks on the Plexi’s surfaces seem to be created by directly carving out the Plexi and a combination of other materials: white milky paint or white glue that has dried, copper and light tan sand, a black Sharpie that has run out of ink, faint inklings of pink, green, blue, and yellow paint, and stains from an indistinguishable source.

Dennis Jeffy. Dreamer, 2017 (left); Plexiglas; 30 x 40 in. Alpha and Omega, 2017 (right); Plexiglas; 48 1⁄4 x 58 in. Courtesy of the Artist and MOCA Tucson. Photo: Maya Heilman-Hall.

Jeffy describes these Plexiglas pieces in relation to archaeology, or as if looking through the telescope and seeing the layers of stars.[2] Throughout the Arizona region, petroglyphs by the ancient Hohokam, Mogollon, and Ancestral Puebloans can be found. Some petroglyphs have become barely visible over time. Their forms have faded back into the rock. Jeffy’s mastery of his materials and practice captures this fading, which is usually produced by the passing of an incredible amount of time. Somehow, Jeffy performs an impossibility; his marks appear as if they are gradually returning back into the Plexiglas material. This stunning reversal creates the experience of seeing something simultaneously futuristic and ancient.

Dennis Jeffy. Excavation, 2017; Plexiglas; 48 1⁄4 x 65 in. Courtesy of the Artist and MOCA Tucson. Photo: Maya Heilman-Hall.

Let us not make From Antelope Springs a rare cosmic event. Jeffy’s works are too generous to be felt only in a sliver of time. The playfulness in his experimentation emanates throughout his works. His loose and controlled marks create gravitation of the eye and body, calling upon viewers to look and enjoy looking.

Dennis Jeffy: From Antelope Springs is on view at MOCA Tucson through May 28, 2017.

[1] Curator’s Essay, Dennis Jeffy: From Antelope Springs, 2017, https://www.moca-tucson.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Dennis-Jeffy-Didactic.pdf.

[2] Christian Rozier, Dennis Jeffy Artist Statement 2017, https://vimeo.com/203916112.

José Bedia. Mpangui Jimagua (Twin Brothers), 2000; acrylic and conté on canvas with objects; 122 x 355 x 188 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Entering the newly renovated Jemison Galleries, the viewer is drawn to Cuban-born artist José Bedia’s multimedia installation Mpangui Jimagua (Twin Brothers) (2000), which immediately places ideas of crossings, migration, multiplicity, and exile at the center of the presentation. The son of a sailor, Bedia has lived outside of his home country since 1991. Here he paints a doubled silhouette that stretches off the wall and is pulled into space by the small boat attached to the assemblage. Dynamic and suggestive, the work emphasizes the movement of human capital across bodies of water as an ambiguous journey for those seeking new opportunities and financial security, or those fleeing as refugees or exiles. It is this idea of migration and the terrible contexts bound up in the histories of diasporic communities across the world that continues to appear in the exhibition, articulating culture as something mobile, durational, and thus continually in flux.

Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2009; fabric with applique crochet and buttons, knitted yarn, metal armature, mannequin. Courtesy of the Artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Birmingham Museum of Art.

Nick Cave’s wearable, sculptural Soundsuit (2009) centers the second room of the exhibition, and places weight on the ways in which identity (particularly the categories of gender, class, and race) often appears in-between outward performativities and invisible concealments. These beautiful suits of armor are resplendent with jewel-toned appliqués of meticulously embroidered “throw-away” materials resonant of West African ritual costumes, as well as more “American” translations of these practices, such as by the Black Carnival Mardi Gras Indians. The suits signify as forms of bodily beautification and protection from outside force—from physical harm, judgment, or gaze. However, Soundsuit is also a garment of sensory and physical restriction; blinded by the cylindrical headdress and physically constricted down to the feet, Cave articulates identity, embodiment, and self-fashioning as forms of empowerment and entrapment simultaneously. This contradiction of freedom and constriction in regard to subjectivity mobilizes Bhabha’s sense of cultural hybridity toward more personal, lived articulations of self-identification and representation of the marginal body.

Merritt Johnson. Crow Booming the One Big Water, Gulls Flying Away, 2010; oil and alkyd on panel; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Birmingham Museum of Art.

While each work in this exhibition could inspire book-length treatises on its significance to this incredibly rich show, I was left deeply moved by Crow Booming the One Big Water, Gulls Flying Away (2010) by the multidisciplinary artist Merritt Johnson. Descendant of the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) and Blackfoot indigenous North American tribes, Johnson signals the seasonal migration of gulls across the ocean, mapping their aerial flight plans across destructive explosions of oil rigs in the Gulf. By attending to the murderous violence of indigenous peoples, animals, and the environment by the European colonizer, Johnson’s hard-edged, fragmented forms of bold, brilliant color operate as clashes between the human and nonhuman world. While the realm of nature offers up beautiful reminders of the ways in which animals and living cycles transcend the manmade borders, systems, and classifications imposed upon them, Johnson forces a recognition that these very beings are often destroyed by them nonetheless. Pushing Bhabha’s concept of a “third space” into a dialectic between human and nonhuman, this exhibition asks urgent and provocative questions of our current cultural climate—where it is going, where it has come from, and most importantly, what is/will be lost.

Third Space: Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art is on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art through January 6, 2019.

[1] I extend my deepest thanks to the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, and Sarah Tiambeng, Public Relations Account Executive for Third Space, for all of their help and support in the research and writing of this article.

[2] See Homi K. Bhabha’s text, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1994), 55.

Cynthia Daignault. The Pure Products of America Go Crazy, 2017; installation view, CAPITAL, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

In her past project Light Atlas (2014), a result of a yearlong road trip throughout the United States, the artist explored the social and geographic characteristics of paintings as what she calls “place settings,” or stakeholders—as objects that create meaning from particular representations of claims to space. Daignault’s odyssey resulted in an epic portrait of the country in the form of 360 paintings, which spanned more than 300 linear feet of wall, filling the gallery from edge to edge. Prior to embarking on this project, Daignault realized that she could name over a hundred canonical works that depicted and defined the country, all produced by men: Twain, Dylan, Guthrie, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Evans, Ruscha, Smithson, and so on. Light Atlas is a feminist corrective and as close to a performative as painting can get.

As in all of Daignault’s painting–installations or painting–performances, each painting in The Pure Products of America Go Crazy can be experienced as an individual work or as part of a larger theoretical and optical puzzle. The artist explained that the work was made “100% post-election,” as she was reckoning with the new order of things in a “deep fog,” and the fuzzy images of the series Matrix (2017)—based on front pages of U.S. newspapers that feature headlines and photographs of Trump’s victory—can be read as trembling reproductions of horror.[1] Alternatively, they can be read as the current U.S. condition and in relationship with violent pop-culture icons, such as the machine-gun-toting Rambo or Schwarzenegger depicted on a round plate set on an adjacent table. They prompt the question: Whose dinner party is this?

Cynthia Daignault. Matrix, 2017 (detail); oil on linen; 11 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

The artist’s reverence for art history and her playful resistance to its authorial discourse are made evident in references to heavy hitters such as Judy Chicago (a queen mother of feminist art and the maker of The Dinner Party, 1974–79) and Marcel Broodthaers (a conceptual-art mastermind and the creator of Department of Eagles in Brussels in 1968). The two figures symbolize polar opposites and are represented here, the former by a plate with a Georgia O’Keeffe–style vaginal form, part of Dinner Party on the Eve of My Conception (Or: We Were Born Under a Dark Star) (2017), and the latter by a picture of an American bald eagle, in a series titled Reading Room (Belgium) (2016). Standing out as an oddity is a portrait of Karen Carpenter: Is it a random marker of 1970s pop culture or a doppelgänger of the artist?

Cynthia Daignault. The First Edition Karen Carpenter Commemorative Collector Plate, 2017; oil on linen; 10 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

Daignault operates with the idea that her painted objects are “dreams or feelings,” but nonetheless her exhibitions remain within a semantic and representational logic. She has been called “a poet of a painter” by the New Yorker, and the exhibition title is a line from a poem by William Carlos Williams. Is Daignault suggesting that her methodology is like that of the Imagist poets, whose aesthetic manifestos proclaimed, “‘Imagism’ does not merely mean the presentation of pictures. ‘Imagism’ refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject” and the “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective.”[2] She explains, “All my text works (whether painted or typed) are hybrids of painting/writing/drawing. But the question is if the work wants to relate more closely with painting or with writing, if it wants to be an image or a text.”[3]

Cynthia Daignault. The Feminine Mystique; 2017; ink on paper, framed; 20 parts, 12 x 9 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

Indeed, filling the back gallery is Daignault’s most literary and psychographic exploration of thingness to date: a series of framed, typewritten lists, entitled The Impalpable Sustenance of Me from All Things. In these works that resemble 1960s conceptual art, Daignault creates portraits of the women in her life by carefully cataloging the contents of their purses: reading glasses, tissues, Burt’s Bees lip balm, one blue bag with panty liners, tampons, CeraVe cream, Weleda Skin Food, hair ties. The lists are like another form of still life. Daignault plays with Freud’s famous interpretation of Dora’s purse as a vagina—a metonym for gender, sexuality, and economics—the purse-as-vagina-as-purse. Daignault’s desire for a current feminist interpretation seems so urgent that the title for her new artist book (in newsprint, like vintage Village Voice or Bay Guardian papers, and available as an exhibition handout), A–Z Volume 4: The Feminine Mystique, confronts second-wave feminism with first-100-days-in-office feminist rage.

Cynthia Daignault. A–Z Volume 4: The Feminine Mystique, 2017; newsprint. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

Purse- (or pussy-) snatching has never been more of a political commentary than in this election year’s re-visioning of Betty Freidan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. In this show, Daignault seems to be emptying out her own bag: Trump, Freud, California landscape, gender, sex, psychology, capitalism, objecthood, still life, vaginas, and painting in the era of post-Obama traumatic stress.

Cynthia Daignault: The Pure Products of America Go Crazy is on view at CAPITAL in San Francisco through April 22, 2017.

[1] Interview with the artist, March 28, 2017.

[2] “Imagism,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism.

[3] Interview with the artist, March 28, 2017.

Objeto Movil Recomendado a las Familias; installation view with artworks by Orlando Pierri, Zdravko Dučmelić, Mildred Burton, and Tobías Dirty. Courtesy of Fundación OSDE. Photo: Tania Puente.

Curator Santiago Villanueva states in the first lines of the exhibition’s text that there was no specific outline or agenda for the Surrealism movement in Argentina. The most concerted attempt to establish a Surrealist group in the country took place in 1939 (fifteen years after Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto) with Grupo Orión, a collective of visual artists that couldn’t maintain a stable and unified aesthetic project for long. Their dissolution was imminent. Ambiguity, however, can nevertheless provide a fertile ground for possibilities, and that is precisely what Objeto Móvil Recomendado a las Familias tries to prove: When no one is looking at the margins and without strict limitations on parameters, loyalties, and particular interests, things can be built.

Surrealism never actually left the Argentinian art scene. It coexisted with many manifestations in different stages and moments—at times more visible, while at others, segregated by the indifference of institutions and the art market. Instead of following a chronological order or sticking to an aesthetic script, the artworks included in this exhibition follow a survival model (in the way that Georges Didi-Huberman conceives it), where images gain and lose force in a continuous and anachronistic fluctuation. Their arrangement by the exhibition’s designer and artist, Osías Yanov, asks spectators to take an active place in viewing the works. Yanov installs a series of dark metallic structures that can either frame or disrupt the visitors’ stare, depending on where they stand. With this specific display, what are we supposed to look at? Should we identify similarities and discontinuities? Do these structures gather the artworks into one big picture? The museographic resource challenges the exhibition’s spatiality.

Mildred Burton. La Indiferencia de Blonda Bug, 1981; mixed media on canvas; 23 x 19 in. Courtesy of Fundación OSDE. Photo: Tania Puente.

Take, for example, the following composition: six small-format paintings, positioned one after the other with a very small gap between them, all aligned at the bottom. Five of the paintings depict human shapes, while the sixth, a crying cup with a printed landscape (Mildred Burton’s El Primer Dolor de Jean Jarrow, 1992), can be thought of as a metaphysical portrait. This is a looking exercise. While the shapes and subjects in the paintings resemble one another, there’s a considerable difference in each work’s dates and creators. The oldest image is by Orlando Pierri, who was part of Grupo Orión, followed by two pieces by Zdravko Dučmelić, Burton’s 1992 painting, and finally Tobías Dirty’s scatological drawings, both dated 2016. One of Yanov’s metallic structures on the floor traces a curved, ascending line toward the right side; this indicator outlines a reverberant tension within this proposal to see all the pictures as part of a whole, and, simultaneously, to appreciate their irreducible strength.

Miguel Harte. S/T (Mesa), 1992; folding table and transparent resin; 29.5 x 39.3 x 23.6 in. Courtesy of Fundación OSDE. Photo: Tania Puente.

Without further text beyond the curatorial statement and the technical information for each artwork, the relations that appear between the pieces are organic, fluid, and astonishingly sincere. The intense research behind the exhibition is also still noticeable at all times. The oddness of some of the characters painted by Leónidas Gambartes echo in Miguel Harte’s self-portrait S/T (Autorretrato Multiplicado), (1991–1992). Fermín Eguía’s walking nose, Paseo Nocturno de la Creatura (2011), can easily dialogue with Emilio Bianchic’s Fashion Number One Rule Number One (2017), a satirical soap opera where a famous singer’s feet are the protagonists. The uncanny atmosphere of asylums and deserted landscapes captured in Mariette Lydis’s paintings can be found in the hyper-sexualized scenes from Tobías Dirty’s drawing Baba del Diablo (2016).

Tobías Dirty. Baba del Diablo, 2016; pencil on paper; 60.2 x 76 in. Courtesy of Fundación OSDE. Photo: Tania Puente.

Despite moving the spotlight to brighten peripheral and renegade artistic productions, Objeto Móvil Recomendado a las Familias is not a reclamation exhibition. Its main intention doesn’t lie with a reconsideration of the canon of the Surrealist experience in Argentina. On the contrary, this exhibit calls upon autonomy and identity. Through the montage device, there’s no interest in settling a closed genealogy. Instead, it is a nonchalant and powerful way to weave new visual relations, a Surrealist constellation, a big reckless party between generations, themes, and techniques that celebrates oddness and willingness.

Objeto Móvil Recomendado a las Familias is on view at Espacio de Arte de Fundación OSDE in Buenos Aires through April 29, 2017.

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, 2017; installation view, New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio.

Presenting approximately 800 drawings from the artist’s creative career since the 1970s, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work at New Museum demonstrates the artist’s obsessive relationship with language and literature in an ambivalent tone that is both darkly ironic and lovingly inspired. In his distinctive caricaturistic style, Pettibon juxtaposes figurative images with fragmented texts throughout all mediums and subject matters. The combination is consistent, despite his almost schizophrenic voices in different series, whether they are celebrating nature, mocking religions, or attacking political figures.

Pettibon’s surf drawings, the most visually captivating series in the exhibition, metaphorically embody his joyful literary fetish. The surfer, represented as a solitary hero exploring and challenging the natural sublime, evokes the Romantic ideal of a creative genius wrestling in the sea of inspiration. (Fittingly, the title of the show is a reference to a Byron poem.) Drawn in brilliant blue shades, the currents’ patterns have flowing, organic characteristics that suggest a visualization of one’s stream of consciousness, or even hints of the rhythms of poetic verse. The figures appear diminutive against the monumental waves engulfing them. The tides carry a sense of increasing velocity; the hero is nearly submerged into the swells and swirls of the blue water. The expansive images with texts allude to the artist’s cumulative, almost compulsive creative process. All of the 20,000 drawings Pettibon has made in his life are captioned; the sheer quantity and the variety of words seem to suggest a form of logorrhea.

On the flip side, the artist uses language satirically to disrupt the implied historical narratives of political propaganda, religion, and mass media in America. He subverts quotes and slogans into dark, humorous, sometimes non-sequitur captions that reveal the absurdity of their contexts. Donald Trump announces, “You’re hired!” Jesus Christ urges the viewer, “Pick up your pens, if you can” as he will “inform you of all that has befallen me from beginning to end.” Charles Manson declares that “I didn’t tell them anything they didn’t get from their fathers first.” As these texts combine with comically bizarre, yet skillfully drawn, grotesque renderings, the works manifest how religious, political, and cult leaders manipulate and misappropriate words to hypnotize the public on an everyday basis. In Pettibon’s art world, language is both earnestly embraced as an expression of creativity and critically analyzed as insidious means of seduction.

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work will be on view through April 9, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Niele Toroni. Andata E Ritorno (Orange), 1991; installation of four canvases, easels, imprints of No. 50 brush repeated at regular distances; 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London. Photo: Thierry Bal.

In Michael Newman’s poetic text accompanying the exhibition The Supreme Rifts… A Measured Propinquity at London’s Marian Goodman Gallery, he attempts to justify the grouping of five (exclusively male) artists that, to this author, initially seemed based purely on art-world pragmatism and economic interest: Sol LeWitt, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, Ettore Spalletti, and Niele Toroni. Might this layering of grids, cubes, and chromatic forms—displayed (for the umpteenth time) with plenty of prime white-cube space left for phenomenological shuffling—be supreme, an adjective that Newman borrows from a poem to describe the “rifts,” or spaces of discourse opened between the different works? Can it still be so, especially when so many of the works were produced last year?[1] Newman’s stream-of-consciousness explanation of the exhibition’s title does little to dissuade.

Newman’s quasi-exegetic exploration of the arrangement of LeWitt’s “rules,” Orozco’s “combination of the machinic and the handmade,” Richter’s color strips, Spalletti’s chromatic “depth,” and Toroni’s signature brush imprints leads him to consult Stéphan Mallarmé. Just as Marcel Broodthaers had declared Mallarmé to be the source of all contemporary art, Newman remarks that Mallarmé is the “key to almost everything that has happened in art since he wrote.”[2] Mallarmé’s seminal poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard” famously utilized white space, making a “spatialized poem.” With this, Broodthaers claimed, Mallarmé invented modern space. Newman instead invokes Mallarme’s “Mystery in Literature,” and from there culls the phrase “the supreme rifts,” in his view describing the physical and immaterial spaces of argumentation between the arranged works. What about a measured propinquity, implying a more-than-coincidental proximity? Newman claims that there exists an essential reason why these works should be shown in this way.

Such a quest for a justified propinquity ultimately belies a potentially more convincing result of the works’ positioning: an evocation of the tension between physical materiality and process-based strategies, two different poles of production that many of the works navigate between. For example, Toroni’s characteristic brush imprints—shown with the group BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Paramentier and Toroni) in 1967-68—have clearly lost their political verve.[3] However, the contemporary reactivation of this cool Conceptual gesture makes underlying pencil-drawn X’s, marking the points where brush had touched canvas resolutely visible: an evocation of their material construction. So too with LeWitt’s “sloppy” cube paintings: The presence of the artist’s “hand” is not lost. After passing paintings by the older postwar titans, Orozco’s Blackboard Drawing works (1998) show that the traditions of “first generation” conceptual artists, themselves informed by Minimalist aesthetics, have not been forgotten. Such drawings—in sharp contrast to Orozco’s earlier poetic work—retain clean geometry and a precise process. Perhaps this arrangement can, in fact, be supreme—or affectively contentious—if we follow the pertinent discourses between different generations.

The Supreme Rifts… A Measured Propinquity will be on view through April 8, 2017.

Andreas Petrossiants is completing his MA in art history at Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He is currently writing on the work of “second generation” institutional critique artists, and their inscription of labor within research-based practices.

[1] The short answer is no.
[2] Marian Goodman Gallery, The Supreme Rifts…A Measured Propinquity, Gallery Press Release, London, 2017, http://mariangoodman.com/exhibition/4279/press-release.
[3] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Group That Was (Not) One: Daniel Buren and BMPT,” Artforum (May 2008).

Andrea Bowers. Throwing Bricks (Johanna Saavedra), 2016; archival pigment print; 77 1/2 x 57 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

As more feminist marches, protests, and gatherings organize in the wake of the new U.S. administration, critiques of contemporary feminist approaches also emerge. Two of the largest issues that feminism faces today are the exclusion of transgender and non-White cultural perspectives and representations. The Intersectional Self at 8th Floor Gallery answers the call for the need of these inclusions by assembling myriad identities to center the conversation around feminism and gender.

Andrea Bowers’ Trans Liberation: Beauty in the Street (Johanna Saavedra) (2016) photograph features Saavedra, a trans Latina immigrant activist, walking down a street in Los Angeles, throwing a symbolic brick. Its portrayal of a woman-identified person with multiple other melding identities is a striking example of communicating resilience and intersectionality. The piece, which recalls the Stonewall Riots, exemplifies that the ongoing fight for equality will not be forfeited until it is achieved for all.

The exhibition also utilizes a wide range of media, including video, photography, sculpture, collage, and printmaking, to explore how femininity and thus masculinity have morphed along with definitions of gender identity in recent history. A majority of the works in the show, whether representational or abstract, are self-portraits, hence the “Self” in the exhibition title. In Thump (2016), renowned feminist Martha Wilson dresses in drag as a sickeningly orange, vastly double-chinned Donald Trump. Giving the thumbs-up sign, while standing in front of a classical statue with the word “Force” engraved onto it, Wilson utilizes herself as a feminist icon to ironically subvert the image of the oppressor.

Ana Mendieta also manipulates the gender boundary through Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) (1972), in which she adheres a man’s beard to her own face as he shaves it off throughout a series of photographs, defying what is expected of male and female surface appearances. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s piece, My Funny Valentine (2013), depicts an ambiguous, kaleidoscope-like up-skirt shot in which red panties are remnant of a repeating heart shape. The inclusion of P-Orridge also promotes that gender and the body itself are not solidified concepts, but malleable vessels for the person, which exists only in the mind.

The Intersectional Self sets a precedent on how to present a feminist exhibition. The widely Instagrammed, White cis-woman in her bright pink Pussy Hat should not be the poster-image of the contemporary feminist movement. This exhibition addresses women who are trans, queer, immigrants, and of color as the engine of real change.

The Intersectional Self will be on view at 8th Floor in New York through May 19, 2017.

Jasa McKenzie is a curator and artist based in New York City. She is currently a fellow in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts.

Patricia Smith. Upper Brooklyn Recovered Memory Tureen, 2014; ink, watercolor, graphite, collage on paper; 41 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

One can imagine that the Incidents maps are made in much the same way topographic maps are, with the spaces and situations felt out by the mapmaker and recorded as faithfully as her skill allows. By referring to actual geography, usually without declaring the place, a Smith map engages the attention of viewers who recognize the places by sight—presumably people who are familiar with and have connections to them. Though Smith’s references are deeply personal, her maps can tap rather intimately into her audience’s experiences, in a way formalizing a landscape of interpersonal qualia. With her maps, Smith declares the inextricable reciprocity between place and sensation, asserting that each is created and understood through the lens of the other.

Patricia Smith. Recovered Memory Incident, 2013; ink, watercolor, gouache, graphite pencil on paper; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This idea, of linking place and sensation, is perhaps most popularly recognized through the Situationist concept of dérive. First developed by Guy Debord in 1956 and meaning “to drift,” the dérive act was intended to disrupt normal experiences of urban spaces by refusing their prescribed modes and uses—allowing oneself to be attracted to certain areas or repelled by others, free from an objective or clear intent, and therefore presumably also free from the site’s imposed logic or use. A person’s resultant movements through the streets were often characterized as somnambulistic, their purpose derived from affective sensation rather than any external curriculum.

Patricia Smith. Dissolution Drift (Left Bank), 2013; ink, watercolor, graphite, charcoal pencil on paper; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

But for a viewer of Smith’s maps—rather than moving in a dérive through the streets, allowing them to affect her feelings—the streets seem to move through Smith’s internal experience, their subsequent mappings influenced by, but not beholden to, any static geography. Her maps are delicate and without distinct edges, like a dream-state perception in which only the center of one’s attention holds. Similar to the dérive, her maps feel dreamlike and ethereal, but her functional reversal of the dérive concept privileges the psyche of psychogeography in a way that the Situationists did not, thus allowing for a record of Smith’s engagement with space. This act of mapping affective experience solidifies and, potentially, legitimizes what has always been considered too slippery to trust or believe: memory.

Patricia Smith. Marnix Incident, 2012; ink, watercolor, collage, rubber stamps on paper; 24 ¾ x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In works like Residue of a Violent Event (L.I.C.) (2014), Smith refers to an incident in her personal history, rooted in a specific location. In hazy watercolor, she sketches out the relevant geographic features: a short section of a river, split by a dark, thin island at its northern bend and trickling into narrower creeks to the east. Two bridges extend from the island to the shore like grasping tendrils. An uneven grid of a few streets is penciled onto the pointed corner of land between the main river and a creek. A stippled shadow hugs the wavering coastline and hovers like a miasma over the roughly drawn streets. Smith neatly labels the features recorded by her map, marking “The Murder” a few blocks away from “Tom Cat Bakery”; the black stipples are named “The Dark Heart of Things.” She maps the dispersal of these shadowy marks, noting “A Stagnant Pool of Grief,” “Absorption into Bread,” and “Absorption into Water.” At the bottom right, Smith inscribes the purpose of the work: “Noting the absorption level of negative vibrations over a period of 18 months.”

Patricia Smith. Residue of a Violent Event (L.I.C.), 2014; ink, watercolor, graphite, charcoal pencil on paper; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

By making a record of something as intangible as “negative vibrations” across a recognizable drawing of Long Island City, Smith asserts the tactile effect of one’s internal landscape on the external. The logic of this claim is that subjective experience is not only an important aspect of reality, but also a shared one; we are not islands of personal multitudes, unknowable to one another, but rather are deeply interconnected through and by the spaces we inhabit together. Much like the dérive was meant to be a way to reclaim the streets from inhuman consumerist agendas, Smith’s maps are a way to reassert the power of intersubjectivity and a shared social reality.

Patricia Smith was born in Camden, New Jersey, and studied art at Rutgers University, Camden, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. She received her MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art, New Brunswick, in 1984 and subsequently moved to New York City. She was active in the downtown Manhattan and East Village art scenes, exhibiting at such historic galleries as Sensory Evolution, Helio, Life Gallery, Cuando, Nico Smith, Limbo, Zeus Trabia, and Nite Gallery. She is currently represented by Front Room Gallery, where she has had four solo exhibitions since 2006. Venues of other solo exhibitions include Black + Herron Gallery, Saint Peter’s Church, A.I.R. Gallery, and Piezo Electric Gallery in New York; Croxhapox Gallery in Ghent, Belgium; and S.O.M.A. in Berlin, Germany. Her work was recently featured on the cover of You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, published by the University of Arizona. She was awarded artist residencies for 2013 and 2015 at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and in 2014 was an artist-in-residence at Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. She was a 2014 New York Foundation of the Arts fellow in Drawing/Printmaking/Artist’s Books. She currently lives and works in Paris.

Long story short, I finished my MFA and moved back home to deal with some of my debt before I move to a bigger city with galleries and opportunities, etc. I only plan to be here for a year or so. I’m trying to remain active so that there aren’t bare spots on my CV—doing shows in cafes and bookstores, lobby galleries, things like that. My family and friends seem generally supportive, but they still ask skeptical or frustrating questions like, “Are you still painting?” “How long did it take you to paint that?” “What does that mean?” “Do sell your work?” How do I answer?

Julie Mehretu. Untitled (Skybox), 1999; ink and watercolor on three overlaid vellum sheets pinned on board; 18 x 24 in.

There’s no shame—or at least there oughtn’t be—in exercising some sober options to get your financial house in order. In the long run, you may be setting yourself up for more stability than a graduating MFA who ends up further in debt by heading straight to the Big City in an attempt to fast-track a career. However, it sounds like you’re a bit isolated, and anyone in your position might be tempted to make biased, self-denigrating comparisons. If your peers have taken other routes that currently seem more advantageous, then you might have the sense of being overlooked or delayed in your progress. And after the rush and rigor of an academic program, many newly graduated artists initially feel estranged from their own practices. Taken in aggregate, all this might be enough to make an artist feel defensive, and it’s possible that you are hearing questions like, “Are you still painting?” through the lens of some insecurities. Perhaps these questions aren’t skeptical; maybe the questioners just don’t understand how an art practice or a career in the arts work.

In any case, the easiest way to answer these sorts of questions is to answer the questions. “Are you still painting?” “Yes.” “How long did it take you to paint that?” “I don’t know.” “Do you sell your work?” “Yes, thank you. I take cash, checks, and PayPal.” And surely, when asked what an artwork or a motif means, your MFA crit-group training will aid you in making something up on the spot.

Endeavor to reserve a little compassion for yourself, and some empathy for others. Remember that the MFA is a specialist degree that has endowed you with a technical vocabulary. Imagine yourself talking to someone with an equally specific body of knowledge that’s foreign to you, like a linguist or a plumber or a key grip. Imagine that, despite your genuine interest, your conversation might be awkward or stilted because you understand only the broadest outlines of what they actually do all day: “So, uh, do you get to hang out with famous actors on set?” Our key grip could now roll her eyes and sigh, or she could meet your enthusiasm with patience and kindness: “Not often, because I work directly with the lighting. But sometimes I help with the blocking, which is lining up the actors with the best audience sight lines.” Though they may occasionally frustrate you, try to assume that your questioners have good intentions, and do what you can to enlighten them about an artist’s practice and career.

The best counterbalance to your frustration is to have a community that you can talk to. If you aren’t already doing it, line up studio visits (or laptop studio visits) with other artists, critics, and art professors in your area. Use Skype to keep in touch with your MFA colleagues. If occasional trips to a city nearby won’t break the bank, consider going a few times to visit galleries and museums, and to meet with people who share both your interests and your specialist insights. If you can make a trip to the place you’d like to eventually live, you could work strategically to make contacts well in advance of moving. The important thing is to focus on the activities that support your practice: making your work, talking with your peers, and looking at what’s happening in the art world(s). If you concentrate your attention on the things that bolster your efforts, you won’t have time to get annoyed. Good luck!

Fathi Hassan. Crossing, 2016; acrylic and gauze on paper; 58.25 x 74.8 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Walking through Fathi Hassan: Edge of Memory at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, I felt the frustration, anguish, and urgency of Said’s claims circulating through the painterly and linguistic surface textures of Hassan’s works, as well as an acute awareness that the tensions of imperialism are not just of the 19th century, but distinctly of today. This timely exhibition asks us to engage with the historical legacies of imperial power alongside the representational possibilities, problems, and mutabilities inherent in visual and linguistic production to form connections between the lived experiences of colonialism and images of it.

Born in Cairo in 1957 to Sudanese and Egyptian parents of Nubian origins, Hassan engages with the history of colonialism through experimentation with ancient scripts and graphic forms of languages that have been upended by imperialism. For Hassan, these “interventions” into Nubian culture shift the historical and cultural memories of those who live at the seams between different accounts and consequences of history and occupation. The legacy of the Nubians, an ethnic group originating from modern-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan, with a history dating back to dynastic Egypt, is a narrative peppered with outside conquest, displacement, economic strife, loss of traditional forms of writing and culture, and a fraught political relationship with the Egyptian state.[3]

Fathi Hassan. Angel, 2008; stone etching; 16.5 x 26 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Hassan’s engagement with the ancient forms and figures of his Nubian past presents a desire to unearth, rework, and revitalize the slow dissolution of this rich culture at the hands of Egyptian elites. Thus, like many artists living and working outside or displaced from their country of origin, Hassan registers the condition of cultural shift and migration conceptually as something liminal—between different spaces, times, perspectives, and memories—as well as precarious and fragile. Nowhere is this expressed more powerfully than in Crossing (2016), a painting rendered on tissue-thin paper, which works as a kind of fulcrum in the exhibition to turn viewers’ attention to the delicate nature of Nubian culture as it exists in an Arab world. Thrusting, ominous vectors of black-and-white layered figures cut into the force of other spaces and grounds built of repetitive calligraphic fragments of Nubian and Arabic languages—teetering between legibility and nonsense, and competing for domination. Bold and powerful despite its insecure foundation, Hassan’s work presents a battle for the survival of Nubian traditions.

Fathi Hassan. Container of Memory, 2000; mixed media with sand; 19 x 27.75 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This struggle finds new form in Angel (2008), a soft, saturated work on paper of a camel progressing through the deep vastness of a desert environs, with an ominous, feathery vortex of bodily and organic fragments emanating out of the animal’s hump. The camel is set on mounds of Arabic-Nubian characters, while a jar sits precariously in the foreground, neither within nor on top of the mound. The desert, through Said’s eyes, is a place of Western imagination, fantasy, and exoticism. Hassan responds to these problematic projects of the Western gaze by presenting the desert and its noble beasts as a historical space of Nubians, who once dominated the deserts of Egypt in nomadic tribes—an account of the former mastery of a terrain they have since lost. The camel as an angel (of history in the Benjamin-ian sense, perhaps) is a monument to the history both alive and lost, walking out of or into the vast desert as a figure or mirage.

The symbol of the jar as a vessel of history and memory is rendered overt and recapitulated in Hassan’s Container of Memory (2000). The ancient utilitarian object often used in rituals, funerals, and ceremonies bears witness to religious rites as well as the activities of the everyday. The form of the jar is shaped from Nubian and Arabic characters that range in scale, from bold and chunky to thin and elegant, and it’s covered with a grainy, sandy texture. The piece points to the absurd logic of historical memory as something fully present and available within the stories and objects of a culture, but forever slipping out between the edges of one period and the next.

Fathi Hassan: Edge of Memory will be on view at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum in Atlanta, GA through May 26, 2017.

[1] I must extend my thanks to Dr. Maurita Poole, Director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, and curatorial assistant Diamond Mason for all of their help in the research and writing of this article. For in-text citations, see Edward Said, “Introduction,” in Orientalism (1978), New York: Vintage Books, 2013, pg. 9.

[2] Ibid. pg. 9.

[3] The most famous incident of Nubian oppression is the seizure of ancestral homelands during the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s by the Egyptian government—a decision that has been an environmental and human-rights disaster for the Nubians (famine, erosion, flooding, and drought are just some of the consequences of this building project). See journalist Khaled Diab’s writing on Nubian history and culture for The Guardian; most recently, his contextualization of Nubian history in the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution.

Rina Banerjee. Heavens no place for girls, no sand, no flowers no count of curls no irons to flatten nor straighten or curl you coiled corns, your hair would not leave you naked as girls when all but one could leave open my calls to trumpet her thoughts, stainless steel bikini and sanding wheels for girls who will not open, 2016; blue silver leaf, acrylic, aluminum leaf, and ink on paper; 66 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.

Indian artist Rina Banerjee titles her bold paintings and intricate sculptures in a disjointed, poetic prose ranging between ten and sixty words each. Deliberately inconvenient, they are the artist’s critique of “Americanized” English, which privileges brevity. As a result, when writing about the work, one can only include the first eight words of Jack Fruit Johnny she was a diasporic Devi…, (2015), in lieu of its original forty-five word text.

In her solo show at Hosfelt Gallery, Human Likeness, Banerjee crafts eccentric constellations of materials in her ornate assemblages—much like her elaborate titles. Brightly colored lace, eyelet fabric, and feathers wrap around animal horns, glass bottles, and bones in the seven sculptures. Despite their initial celebratory and playful appearance, the sculptures’ intent is subtler. Born in Kolkata, reared in the UK and based in New York City, Banerjee lives the migratory reality of many Indians—the largest global diaspora. Her work reflects this fractured existence, and the nostalgia and desire for home that exists in many migrants’ minds.

The objects she compiles in her sculptures suggest these nostalgic, transient, and even historic associations. Sex-bait, in likeness to fish bait… (2017) seems to recount a tale: a hoard of trinkets (or treasures) accumulated on a wall ornament—all of which could have come from a former British governor general’s home. Two small cobalt lightbulbs and an animal horn, nestled among pieces of jewelry (in a phallic arrangement), adorn a steel armature. The work fosters stories of opulence and conquest, as Banerjee’s assemblage reclaims and repurposes colonialism’s derelict remains.

The artist’s works on paper—colorful acrylic washes, featuring delicate inky lines—most often depict women. In Heavens no place for girls… (2016), a young woman’s body, split vertically in three, reflects the artist’s sculptural process of fragmenting and conjoining forms. This fracturing offers insight into the deeper significance of her three-dimensional accumulations.

Banerjee’s enthusiasm for combining objects echoes contemporary Indian culture, exposing the diverse experiences that can’t fall into the fixed means of identity (language, history, nationality). The peculiar complexity of her works’ titles challenge the authority and privilege of those people who determine what is correct, precise English, highlighting the non-native or immigrant speaker’s need to assimilate and reject his or her culturally transient experience. In relation to their titles, Banerjee’s works contrast with the formal purity of high minimalism, still so dominant in the modern art-historical canon. Thus, one walks away from the show with notions of the darker side of neocolonial globalization, a failed modernism guised in Banerjee’s vivid parade of fantastical, pieced-together artworks.

Rina Banerjee: Human Likeness will be on view through March 4, 2017.

Maddie Klett is a writer and independent curator. She is a student in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA.

Fei Li. Entanglement: Trial 0, 2016; ink on paper; 48 x 36 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Li’s landscapes are fundamentally abstract, yet their linguistic evocations seem like conflations of written text and figurative image, despite being neither. Based on Li’s training in Chinese calligraphy from when she was two years old, the movement of her brushstrokes seems to call forth a visceral association with writing. They almost resemble metonymic Arabic calligraphy drawings, in which the word for a figure is written to stylistically resemble it. However, Li’s work refers not to a singular object or phrase but rather to a holistic sensation of movement and space. The result is a dynamic series of ink drawings that encourage a viewer to engage with a form of reading that precedes language, a paradoxical experience of translating without words. This is not to say that the work’s meaning is beyond words, but rather that it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between words and meaning. Far from being unable to be articulated, Li’s landscapes feel like the beginnings of a new written language.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations No. 129, 2016; ink on paper; 60 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Redolent with associations, Li’s landscapes almost become Rorschach tests for their viewers. Evoking a certain kind of delirium, the brushstrokes suggest Chinese calligraphy, then jungle undergrowth, then British tea garden. In Hidden Dimension No. 135 (2016), the loose horizontal strokes in the center ground lap against tight verticals, sketching out what might be a pool of water surrounded by thick vegetation. Small, deliberate strokes read like hidden messages within the ink forest. The riot of movement would almost be chaotic if it were not so tightly ordered. Like hand lettering, the image feels scalable, as if it would be legible rendered as either a sweeping mural on the side of a building or etched in delicate blue lines on porcelain. The result is a piece lush with meanings, continually asserting the tight relationship between sense and interpretation.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations No. 135, 2016; ink on paper; 96 x 120 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Though many of Li’s pieces could be imagined as decorations on vases or dinnerware, they exist at an amplified scale, and the lyrical tension of her strokes shifts as a viewer’s body does in relation to the works. Li’s powerful, large-scale paintings overwhelm the human body; when viewed from a distance, they take on an impressionistic quality that is just as engaging. In Hidden Dimension No. 101 (2016), a chaotic landscape curls around a gallery corner, enveloping any viewer within its expanse; up close, a viewer becomes entangled in the active, looping marks that sketch out a vast and varied environment. But when the work is viewed from farther away, what once appeared like dense undergrowth or rushing water now looks like clouds or drifting fog. As with Claude Monet’s largest paintings of water lilies, one’s relative distance from Hidden Dimension No. 101 changes the meaning of the work, creating a tense and precarious meditative experience.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations No. 101, 2016; ink on paper; 84 x 204 in.; installation view Courtesy of the Artist.

But in certain works, Li does not allow for this meditative distance. The mirrored panels on the floors of Li’s installations restrict a viewer’s movement and force constantly fragmented encounters with the reflections of the pieces. Here, Li forges a relationship between a viewer and her work that she calls “a battle between moving and being moved,” between inherent and iterative signs. This intensifies the fundamental premise of Li’s Hidden Dimension series: Reading and interpretation are active, bodily engagements in both language and landscape, with distance, boundaries, and meanings constantly being drawn and redrawn in relation to a viewer’s position. Li’s work refuses fixed interpretations of either meaning or environment, capturing the almost entropic dynamism of nature and culture.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations, 2016; ink on paper, mirrors; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

Fei Li is a Chinese artist who lives and works in New York. She studied with Lon Clark at the San Francisco Studio School and moved to New York in 2012. Li’s works have been shown internationally in museums and galleries, including the New Britain Museum of American Art in the United States, the Museum of Abbaye de Léhon in France, the Asian Culture Center in South Korea, and the Chinese European Art Center in China. She was awarded a 2016 Queens Arts Fund New Works Grant, funded by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. She can be found on instagram: _fei_li_.