Mythos: fantasy, fiction, legend, saga, parable, fable, narrative, invention, fabrication, yarn. The conceptual distance between myth and the concrete manifestations of mythology is a potentially endless—yet meaningfully orderable—list of synonyms. But with each word the gap shrinks, as mental images of processes and then objects emerge, even if just as puns. Wendy Given is bridging the gaps between the abstract idea of a mythos and[…..]
The constructions of Israeli-born artist Michelle Segre—towering webs of yarn, wire, and organic matter—resemble dispatches from another planet or totems of some long-lost civilization. Unfinished and roughly made, her work still evidences painstaking attention to detail, a ritualistic practice in which all the constituent elements impart shrouded, mystical meaning. A small show of her most recent work, currently on view at Derek Eller Gallery, expands[…..]
Last Saturday, curator and Artforum editor-at-large Jack Bankowsky moderated a roundtable on “Sculpture after Sculpture” (more on the title in a moment) at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, in anticipation of his forthcoming three-artist survey of the same name at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm this October. The three artists, Katharina Fritsch, Jeff Koons, and Charles Ray, are united by work that[…..]
Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, currently on view at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, confirms how productive a dialogue between queer theory and critical craft theory can be. The twenty-four participating artists in the exhibition interpret and complicate the rich histories of these theoretical frameworks in a variety of ways. The resulting conversation illuminates certain commonalities between the two fields,[…..]
The preserved crocodile carcass, pinned against a ratty tarp to form the centerpiece of a work called On Your Way Up, is as good a place as any to begin a review of Radcliffe Bailey’s exhibition Maroons at Jack Shainman gallery. Though purportedly on the ascent, this climber has clearly seen better days; its exposed finger bones, protruding between disintegrated flesh, seem unlikely to carry[…..]
Tom Pazderka’s work has a visual weight and intensity—scarred and blackened reused wood, grids made of charred book jackets, charcoal- and wood-burning drawings of ancient, destroyed, and invented places—that is matched only by the artist’s descriptions of his subjects. Pazderka takes an interest in history as a flexible structure with multiple readings: “That which most [people] would rather leave alone I find the most interest[…..]
Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Blair Murphy reviews Mia Feuer: An Unkindness at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Mia Feuer: An Unkindness provides the rare opportunity to view a young artist[…..]
