‘Oh’, she said. I looked down and saw the lady. She looked confused. ‘I thought those legs were part of the artwork, but they’re yours’. The legs in question were mine. They were stood on a ladder while the upper half of my body had disappeared into the attic. It had been watching a fairly horrendous film in which two men were making something unidentifiable[…..]
On view at SFMOMA and traveling to the Guggenheim in 2012, Francesca Woodman is a testament to the faithfulness of an artistic inquiry. In photo after photo Woodman experimented with formal elements, tested endless configurations, and explored feminine identity. Woodman’s self-discipline is evident in the multiple galleries hung with her photographs. Considering her age—she was in her late teens and early twenties when the work was[…..]
More a thoroughfare between the institutional offices and educational spaces than destinations, the second and third floor galleries at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) can be, at times, unforgiving display spaces. Nevertheless, as an institution, MoAD consistently presents exhibitions that expand one’s notions of race and identity. One need only to look at last year’s “African Continuum: Sacred Ceremonies and Rituals,” which contrasts[…..]
Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit[…..]
The idea is of an artist being a/n (insert nationality here) artist is becoming a thing of the past. This isn’t politically correct posturing, it’s reality now that the smartest artists today work locally and show globally. Conceptually it’s not a viable option to sit still in one environment understanding only what you consider native, and economically it’s not possible for a single city to[…..]
Alex Spremberg’s current exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts is an exploration of the limits of painting and a meditation upon the throwaway materials that pervade contemporary life, specifically the omnipresent cardboard box and the printed newspaper. Wrong Angles is, ostensibly, a painting exhibition, but despite the polychromatic riot of surfaces dripped and marbled with industrial paint, Spremberg reveals a preoccupation with the formal[…..]
How art can reveal the truth is a debate that will never end. Depending on who you ask, fidelity has been correlated with formal abstraction’s ability to reveal raw feelings, the eye’s capability to expose ontic faithfulness, or sometimes the artworks function in the social or political spheres. Some artists try to reveal truth, wherever they see it. Often unwilling to limit what makes truth,[…..]
