Early in 2013, six Australian artists made a pilgrimage of sorts. They left a sweltering southern summer for the gray frigidity of London, where they spent three weeks working on-site at the Freud Museum; Susan Flavell and I were among their number. At the museum, we encountered the shrine-like space of Sigmund Freud’s study, preserved as it was in the final year of his life,[…..]
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, M. Rebekah Otto reviews Stacey Steers’ Night Hunter at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Experimental animator Stacey Steers currently has work on view in Night Hunter at[…..]
The story of Los Angeles is the story of water. Since the creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct by William Mulholland 100 years ago this month (fictionalized in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown), water has been intimately tied to power, status, and politics in Southern California. Here, more than in any other major U.S. city, water is an essential part of the urban landscape. Who has access[…..]
Now on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, British British Polish Polish is a comprehensive—nearly overwhelming—exhibition with works by more than 60 artists occupying two floors. Though the individual pieces of the show are often thrilling, their overall placement leaves much to be desired. According to curators Marek Goździewski and Tom Morton, the exhibition is meant to reflect “the extraordinary[…..]
Senan Lee and Pansy Aung make up the duo Salt’n’Pepper Squid, and they specialize in making innovative and often humorous advertising campaigns that range from magazine spreads to promotional videos. Their recent evolution from individual creative producers to collaborators—in June of this year—has inspired new ways of thinking that reach beyond the campaigns the duo are accustomed to making. In September, they came up with[…..]
Premised on the obliquely hypothetical question “What if the world changed?”, the Singapore Biennale 2013 (SB2013) is presented as a deconstructed entity centered on allusive keywords—or “tags” in internetspeak—such as “histories,” “intervention,” and “materiality” in order to highlight the transmutative and the transformative qualities of the art produced in the region. With a collaborative team of 27 curators instead of an artistic director helming the show,[…..]
Australian artist Andrew Nicholls dredges the queasy aesthetics of sentiment for its submerged ideological content. In an ongoing thread of his practice, he locates the ideals and practices of British imperialism in the kitsch, seemingly innocuous world of 19th- and 20th-century ceramics, disrupting this historical narrative with traces of the otherness otherwise repressed in the imperial worldview. He subsumes his viewers in an unsteady undertow[…..]
