Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In the only photograph I have ever seen of her, Kajon Cermak looks omniscient. She is sitting in a white sedan and glancing sideways at something worthy of a half-smile. But only a half-smile. The main traffic reporter for the public radio station KCRW, Cermak has a been-there-done-that cool to her voice[…..]
SunTek Chung creates images of identity forged from concepts about culture and technology. Like all of his photographs, SunTek makes a real space for us to examine. He challenges the integrity and meaning of artifacts that are marginalized by their own popularity. In his image The South The South, a drunken motorcyclist minds his business on the stoop of his marsh shack facade, drinking tall[…..]
On view this weekend at Five Thirty Three Gallery in Los Angeles is a new two-day video and performance exhibition titled Videos Collide in Real 3D Space! The exhibition, which is co-curated and organized by Beautiful/Decay print and web designer Fei Liu and artist Megan Daalder, will feature real-time software performance by Jeremy Bailey, a score of a projector by Wojciech Kosma, synchronized live animations[…..]
Currently on view at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is a solo presentation of new work by internationally renowned, New York-based artist, Sanford Biggers. The work on view in the exhibition, entitled Moon Medicine, encompasses the breadth of Biggers’ practice. As he tells the SBCAF, “It is a thematic, multi-disciplinary exploration of past themes and new themes meant to broaden and complicate our read on[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “Becoming a human being isn’t just something you get with your birth,” novelist Zadie Smith told Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt in 2006. “It’s an exercise and it takes your whole life.” Smith said this following the publication of On Beauty, her relentless opus in which 450 pages of identity-searching ends in disaster—slander, scandal[…..]
