Much is written about the biography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. A Navy man, born in Illinois, he attended Williams College through the Navy’s V-12 program. He became a licensed optician and lived most of his life in Lexington, KY. In 1950, before his first child was born, he made a life changing decision: he bought a camera. That’s when he found his new calling. He[…..]
In what sort of hybridised mise-en-scene can a human-puppet, man-made flowers (or they could just be gigantic paper-clips) and a bellman’s trolleys co-exist? Finding explanations of deliberate instability in Ola Vasijeva’s Alchimie Du Verbe (2009) compositional decisions are likely to be as vexing as sorting through a storehouse populated with random artefacts that come with no cataloguing labels. We who saw signs presents works that[…..]
Flipping through Suburbia, Bill Owens’s now seminal examination of suburban life in 1970s California, I find my initial responses closely resemble the way I recall feeling as I watched “Leave it To Beaver” or “I Love Lucy” as a child: amusement, plus a sense of distance from my own way of life. After scanning the book, I pass it over to my father. A grin[…..]
Outmoded by street festivals, public music events, movies in the parks, and trips to the beach, Chicago’s summertime visual art scene is a desert of options. Dominated by loosely-themed group shows and limited gallery hours, art spaces choose to focus on scheduling studio visits and re-strategizing programming, all but closing their doors to the public. Kavi Gupta is arguably no exception, but the lure of[…..]
In our attempts to decode new art, we often skip over a fundamental process that helps make art function: false perceptions. Artists often make things that deceive. The metaphysical disconnect between the object that we are looking at and the intellectual experience is the subject of Otherworldly at the Museum of Art & Design, which focuses on dioramas, models, snow globes, and other illusionary sculptures[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Larry Clark’s mother was an itinerant baby photographer, and she took her son with her on her rounds. This means that Clark, the photographer famous/infamous for his grittily voyeuristic depictions of youth culture, began photographing kids when he still was one. Before he reached 20, he was taking his camera deep into[…..]
For the last year, Bay Area artist Chris Sollars has sported a biblical behemoth of a beard, although his cleanly shaven cheeks are once again on view in Sollars’s newest project, Hairy, shown as part of YBCA’s Bay Area Now. It’s an interesting update on an identity-probing lineage that includes predecessors like Chris Burden, Gordon Matta Clark, James Luna, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons. DailyServing[…..]
