“The temporary” might seem like a neutral concept, but in reality it is ideologically loaded. Depending on the context (and on the social class of the speaker), temporary work and temporary dwelling might mean either insecurity and precarity–or flexibility and dynamism. How are some of San Francisco’s city officials planning to lure young innovators and entrepreneurs, for instance? By allowing developers to build 220-square foot[…..]
Things are not quite what they seem in ‘Double Take’ at the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The exhibition presents some new works and others which have been seen before but deserve re-examination. A heap of porcelain sunflower seeds, a shiny Harley Davidson which turns out, on closer inspection, to be a bicycle, and the doorway of a Beijing apartment which reveals itself to be[…..]
Post-Fordlândia, the new exhibit at Good Children Gallery, is a palimpsest for modern times: it calls from faded pasts to warn us of an ill-advised future. A series of high-def videos and large format photographs, taken by Irish artists Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, depict the now defunct and abandoned town of Fordlândia, the mad brainchild of Henry Ford. This experiment in urban and cultural[…..]
In Kurosawa’s 1955 movie ‘I Live in Fear’ Toshiro Mifune plays an aging industrialist so frightened of a nuclear attack on Japan that he tries to move his entire family to Brazil, far away from radioactive fallout. If the birds knew what was coming, he says, they would fly away in terror. His children have him committed to a psychiatric institution. The alternative title for[…..]
“Jack Goldstein is currently at work on a new film called “The Jump.” It is to be nineteen seconds long and will show a diver performing a somersault from a high board. But the high board and the water into which he plunges will be absent from the finished film…Goldstein is performing a set of operations that isolate, distill, alter, and augment the filmed recording[…..]
Disembarking visitors to the 18th Biennale of Sydney at Cockatoo Island first encounter fog rising from a crevice between sandstone cliffs and the island’s abandoned buildings. A site-specific work by Fujiko Nakaya, it exemplifies the intentions of the artistic directors – to open our senses to water, wind, and earth. Jonathan Jones, of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations, created a midden of oyster shells and porcelain teacups, a poignant reference[…..]
In Thomas Zummer’s partial retrospective of works I should have done, on view at PNCA’s Philip Feldman Gallery, things are not what they seem. For starters, the show is more replete than it sounds. The Brooklyn-based writer, artist, teacher, and curator presents an assortment of drawings, prints, and sculptures spanning his career. The pieces are a motley crew: portraits of robots butt against blurred, interstitial[…..]
