In what sort of hybridised mise-en-scene can a human-puppet, man-made flowers (or they could just be gigantic paper-clips) and a bellman’s trolleys co-exist? Finding explanations of deliberate instability in Ola Vasijeva’s Alchimie Du Verbe (2009) compositional decisions are likely to be as vexing as sorting through a storehouse populated with random artefacts that come with no cataloguing labels. We who saw signs presents works that[…..]
Outmoded by street festivals, public music events, movies in the parks, and trips to the beach, Chicago’s summertime visual art scene is a desert of options. Dominated by loosely-themed group shows and limited gallery hours, art spaces choose to focus on scheduling studio visits and re-strategizing programming, all but closing their doors to the public. Kavi Gupta is arguably no exception, but the lure of[…..]
In our attempts to decode new art, we often skip over a fundamental process that helps make art function: false perceptions. Artists often make things that deceive. The metaphysical disconnect between the object that we are looking at and the intellectual experience is the subject of Otherworldly at the Museum of Art & Design, which focuses on dioramas, models, snow globes, and other illusionary sculptures[…..]
Jake and Dinos Chapman are one of those duos whose artistic identity seems to be forever fused together – much like the disfigured, conjoined zygotic children they famously produced in the 1990s. So what happens when that artistic relationship in severed? As their current exhibition in London shows – really, not that much. Spread across both of the White Cube spaces in London, Jake &[…..]
For the last year, Bay Area artist Chris Sollars has sported a biblical behemoth of a beard, although his cleanly shaven cheeks are once again on view in Sollars’s newest project, Hairy, shown as part of YBCA’s Bay Area Now. It’s an interesting update on an identity-probing lineage that includes predecessors like Chris Burden, Gordon Matta Clark, James Luna, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons. DailyServing[…..]
“People don’t like to read art.” It’s the sort of self-deprecating, tongue in cheek, slightly hipster-ish title you’d expect from a show featuring just such a group of young artists. “We acknowledge not everyone will enjoy this text+art stuff. And we don’t care, because we say it’s important.” But taken a bit less literally, as I had initially interpreted the title, it gets at the[…..]
As an exhibition of contemporary Puerto Rican artists, one might be tempted to hypothesize that Paraíso, on view this month at ltd los angeles, is meant to express a quintessentially Puerto Rican attitude, or perhaps act as homage to the land itself. What’s primarily on display, however, is a state of mind: one shared by quite a few 21st-century contemporary artists, regardless of nationality. In[…..]
