Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the[…..]

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[…..]

Summer tends to be a time of spectacle in London – massive installations, blockbuster shows, international festivals and grand theatrical events. With smaller galleries closed and many leaving for a break from the claustrophobic city and intellectual rigour, the spectacle is relied upon to attract the attention of the audience who remain. Israeli designer Ron Arad’s massive undertaking at the Roundhouse, aptly titled Curtain Call,[…..]

Lynn Hershman Leeson is historic.  Some of the most exciting moments of her recent documentary on feminist art, !W.A.R., or !Women Art Revolution, 2010, were shot on her own living room couch.  She and her alter-ego, Roberta Breitmore, are synonymous with an era of women’s art to which all artists (especially—but not exclusively—women) owe a great debt. But we are no longer in the seventies. […..]

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[…..]

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[…..]