The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger[…..]
British-born photo, video and performance-based artist Gillian Wearing is best known for bringing home the 1997 Turner prize and her series of direct street portraits, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-3). At London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the artist presents a fascinating collection of honest, if not creepy, portraits in an[…..]
Walking through one of the isles of a big London supermarket last week made me realise once again how we are culturally programmed to value image over substance. The way we deal with food packaging is one of the best examples of our inclination towards superficiality and the ease with which we are swayed to buy and eat something that looks nice/tasty/healthy (when it actually isn’t)[…..]
Kim Dingle’s exhibition entitled still lives at Sperone Westwater portrays a series of calamities played out by children sitting at tables, whirling off of chairs and clinking wine glasses in roistering merriment. Clown-like in depiction with disproportionally large feet and nondescript faces, the toddlers she presents are more so dolls than human children. Dingle’s newest works are less crowded than older works and by virtue[…..]
‘It’s just too much, don’t you think?’ asks Saul Leiter as he walks around his own exhibition, on view until April 15th at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen. The video documenting Leiter’s reaction accompanies over 400 photographs and paintings that fill the soaring spaces of this re-purposed industrial complex, now a centre for contemporary art and photography. With room after room after room of images that riff on[…..]
Horton Gallery, with its evocatively titled two-person show Evil Dead 2, pays homage to Romero’s glorious second stab by exploring expansive and ever-mutable revision. The setup seems sitcom-like; two artists and friends from Brooklyn display their process-heavy paintings shoulder to shoulder in a kind of Oscar/Felix cohabitation. Matt Jones is deep and celestial (the messy one), while gallery-mate Kadar Brock aims towards a final[…..]
There are numerous contemporary works in which the artists’ choice of physical ‘matter’ contains within it their intended meaning. Xu Bing’s poignant ‘Where the Dust Itself Collects’ made from dust collected in the streets of Manhattan after the destruction of the twin towers falls into this category, as does Marc Quinn’s self-portrait made of 9 pints of the artist’s own frozen blood. Sydney artist Shoufay Derz[…..]
