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, Carolina Magis Weinberg reviews M/D: Coda at SFMOMA in San Francisco.

In the current political moment, in which women and people of color struggle (as always, but now even more tangibly) for visibility, Matisse/Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)—two canonical artists shown in cross-generational conversation—is a bit too pretty, perfect, and White-male-centered. Does Matisse need another show? Is this exhibition, heavily publicized by this major institution, relevant today? It’s a gendered imbalance of male painters of female subjects, again. As a Mexican female critic and artist, I enjoyed Matisse/Diebenkorn the way one enjoys art history that feels distant; like overhearing someone else’s conversation, I had the feeling of being somewhere I did not belong.

Yet, after I passed through the exhibition’s exit, one more room sparked my hope and excitement. Accessible without a surcharged ticket, this exhibition was also curated by Matisse/Diebenkorn curator Janet Bishop, and had its own wall text and title. M/D: Coda operates as a footnote—or even punctuation—to the main show, ending it with an ellipsis, rather than a full stop.

This appendix, which features Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Bechtle, Elizabeth Payton, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison, and Mickalene Thomas, brought Matisse and Diebenkorn’s influence into a contemporary dialogue by showing how their lineages extend to other artists across time. Most importantly, this gallery showcases artists of other identities. Whereas women are only subjects of representation in Matisse/Diebenkorn, M/D: Coda presents women as authors of images. Thomas’s Sista Sista Lady Blue (2007) struck me the most in this regard.

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Kristin Cammermeyer’s works are tributes to becoming. They render a sense that completion is an arbitrary concept, that anything that ends has more to do with one’s perspective than its inherent finitude. Her installations are constantly in flux, resulting either from her construction and deconstruction of the spaces they inhabit or from the multimedia videos that become both artifacts of the physical pieces and digital worlds all their own. Cammermeyer intertwines time and materiality to ask viewers to consider iterations of a space as an environment for a body and as a psychological and emotional landscape.

Many of Cammermeyer’s pieces involve found materials, placed in conversation within their installation sites, which she then documents or records to create accompanying videos. These video pieces extend her invented spaces and allow her to explore the conceptual effects of building and dismantling within a short time frame, collapsing and expanding the assemblage visually and aurally to consider the boundaries of structure and enclosure. At what point does something change from a building to a landscape to an ecology?

Kristin Cammermeyer. 40 days in 8332 scenes (generating a psychic ecology with available means), 2016; stop-motion animation; 4:38; sound design by Michael Dillon. Courtesy of the Artist.

In the work 40 Days in 8332 Scenes (Generating a Psychic Ecology with Available Means) (2016), Cammermeyer uses stop-motion animation, shifting one’s sense of perspective with each added layer. The work’s kaleidoscopic symmetries convey affective associations—the gothic, science fiction, the natural world—that pull a viewer through an experience of psychic travel. The video begins with a view of the wall of the gallery, Elephant Art Space, in which Cammermeyer built the initial installation, and defines the viewer’s physical context. Then, emerging from the center of the screen, are a string of images: dark, delicate, almost Edwardian filigrees. From this first column, objects gyrate, whirr, and flash like strobes across the screen; the shifting light evokes passing days and nights, bird songs and animal calls evoke the outdoors. The image seems to breathe and grow, taking a viewer far beyond the immediate surroundings. From the edges of the video frame, feathery green ferns bloom and mix with industrial grating. Soon this chaotic, moving mandala acquires a deep-green hue and the shape of soft fractals. The video seems to have gone beyond the frame of the monitor, beyond physical space.

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Fifty years ago, in conversations with Robert Smithson, Allan Kaprow referred to museums as mausoleums, and proposed the Guggenheim be emptied of all of its contents and presented as a sculptural form. [1] Today, we still struggle with bringing life into museums. In particular, performance work can be conceptually fraught in the museum when artists have circumvented the commodification and rarefaction of art by creating ephemeral works designed for the context of the everyday and the accessibility of public space. However, museums can also archive works for future generations to appreciate (as has happened with Kaprow’s documents at the Guggenheim), give artists their due institutional respect, and even disrupt traditional museological models that prioritize stasis and physically disengaged viewers. While the museum context benefited some performances in “Latin American Circle Presents: An Evening of Performances” at the Guggenheim on May 5, it also formalized works that were intended to reverberate off of the social and political life of public space, drawing on larger questions of how major institutions support site-specific performance works and how the museum attempts to engage its public through event-based programming.

For Asamble (2015), the first performance of the evening, Amalia Pica’s twenty-nine performers slowly and methodically entered the museum’s rotunda while carrying folding metal, wood, and plastic chairs and stools. As the procession snaked through the rotunda and ramp, they formed almost complete circles with their seated chairs, only to pick them up and begin moving again. The rotunda’s spiral ramp offered viewers a striking, panoramic bird’s-eye view of the mesmerizing piece, which echoed the rotunda’s curves.

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The historic Green-Wood Cemetery is a sprawling, verdant oasis occupying 487 acres of northwest Brooklyn. For centuries, the site has been a sanctuary for mourners as well as a destination for day-trippers—sightseers, birdwatchers, and picnickers who meander landscaped paths and take selfies under blossoming trees. On April 29, 2017, a new memorial was erected on the summit of Grove Hill: a marble obelisk inscribed with the epitaph, “Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery.” So marks a twenty-five-year project created by French artist Sophie Calle in collaboration with the cemetery and Creative Time. Celebrated for her rituals, games, and long cons, Calle’s most unassuming and intimate interactions are often transformed into art. Here Lie the Secrets is a repository—a literal and symbolic final resting place—so that our deepest intimacies may be interred into the ground rather than carried with us to the grave.

As I approached the cemetery on foot through the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, I tried to think of a secret meaty enough to divulge. Calle was on site on April 29th and 30th to receive and transcribe secrets in person. Without taking pictures or names, there was a caveat that the artist “might keep a memory of your story, but it will remain anonymous.” Predictably, I came up with nothing—not an unfulfilled desire, taboo belief, or misdeed of any kind, so in lieu of writing something trivial or fabricated, I decided to leave my note card blank. Thus forgoing direct participation, I turned my attention to what appeared to be a number of cathartic confessions imparted to Calle by other Creative Time devotees. Between the two chairs, drama was high; the artist was present. However, for those of us lingering on the margins, the procedure of the piece proved challenging to engage. The marble obelisk is designed with a mail slot to inter secrets into a chamber below the monument for the next twenty-five years. Annually, Calle will return to Green-Wood to oversee the burning of the accumulation. On the heels of Creative Time’s 2016 programs—Duke Riley’s magical Fly By Night and Pedro Reyes’s haunting Doomocracy—Calle’s mediation of public intimacy registered among my fellow observers as a miss.

Calle is not a newcomer to social practice—intimate encounters with others is a hallmark of her oeuvre. In 1979, Calle surveilled a man through the streets of Venice to create her seminal work, Suite Vénitienne. More recently, her project Take Care of Yourself (2007) prompted 107 women to respond to a breakup letter through the media and vocabulary of their choice, resulting in 107 vignettes of dance, music, visual art, and written word. Where Here Lie the Secrets diverges is in the architecture of the open call. Participants were not selected—instead, they showed up. Moreover, only a small selection of secrets will ever be heard or seen by Calle, so by and large, public participation is not fodder for appropriation and fictionalization, as is the case with many of her formative works. With Here Lie the Secrets, Calle shifts the emphasis of the artwork from the story being told (and subsequently hijacked and rewritten into a creative project) to the gesture itself.

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“…Once the Rodney King incident happened, I realized at that moment that I was an artist with a social conscience. […] But you know, honey, we got a lot of work to do around the world,” says Nick Cave in conversation with Tori Bush. At a time when energies toward resistance might be flagging, we find inspiration in Cave’s work with the community in Shreveport and in his philosophy of enacting change through artistic practices. This interview was originally published on December 4, 2015.

Shreveport is a border town at the crossroads of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The city is known for its musical history—the term “Elvis has left the building” was coined there. But Shreveport also suffers from crippling issues of injustice. Shreveport prosecutors use peremptory challenges to bar people of color from juries, and juries in Caddo Parish “now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America.” Beyond disparities in the justice system, Shreveport has the fourth-highest rate of persons living with HIV in Louisiana. In 2013, 22.8% of the residents lived below the poverty line. Poverty, health, and the justice system are all intertwined here, and this year visual artist Nick Cave is in residence at these crossroads, participating in a residency with the Shreveport Regional Arts Council. How does a visual artist address these problems? From October 2015 to March 2016, Cave is working on a multi-dimensional project that attempts to speak to the disparate realities of the citizenry.

Tori Bush: What led you to create this project in Shreveport? How does the history and context of each place inform your projects?

Nick Cave: The Shreveport Regional Arts Council contacted me when I was working in Detroit on a project titled Hear Here. They were interested in working with visual artists who practice within a social spectrum as well. And I was very interested in the project, to work with social organizations, which for me was a different outreach than I was familiar with. And I was even more interested in the fact that SRAC was using art as a kind of healing device. I was very interested in that, and really that is why I came on board with the project. It allowed me to go even further into the fieldwork. This project is the way I’m interested in working right now. I come to a city with an idea, and the city builds the project. And the thing that’s so fascinating here is that this is really Shreveport’s project. I’m acting as the director.

I said from the start, this project is not going to be a wow-wow, bang-bang performance, where everyone is going to have a good time. We are working with social-services organizations that aid citizens who are trying to reenter society. We are dealing with serious issues. How can I come to this project with compassion? How can I create a work that is reflective of the voices of the community? How can I leave with an imprint so that it is moving, and not just fluff? It’s allowing me to rethink the role of my work and the purpose of this project, and take myself out of the center of it.

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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, Becca Roy-O’Gorman reviews Evergreen, Searchlight, Rosebud at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.

Margo Wolowiec’s work intersects many planes: physical and virtual spaces, pleasure and danger, analog and conceptual practices, and the mediums of painting, sculpture, textile, and installation. Wolowiec’s exhibition Evergreen, Searchlight, Rosebud at Jessica Silverman Gallery, on view through May 27, explores these thresholds through her multidimensional practice.

Wolowiec sources her images with a digital program that captures photographs from social-media platforms like Instagram and Facebook using predetermined hashtags, such as #BlackAndWhite, or geolocations, like the Louvre or Dubai Mall. Additionally, she sources text from screenshots of established and fake online news sites. She prints the compiled images onto strands of thread with a sublimation dye printer, and manually weaves them with floor loom; the final textile is mounted on a frame or in a freestanding support.

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Lionel Cruet is preoccupied by the idea of place. Much of his work explores how one can attempt to access the places in which one is not physically present, and questions if these attempts can ever be successful. Of particular concern to Cruet is how race and geopolitical status factor into these attempts—how one’s described and prescribed identities render access to, and denial from, a place, both literally and conceptually. His works speak of border crossings, real and imagined, successful and unsuccessful. His pieces describe an apparent collusion of sensory experiences that never quite make up for the real thing.

Some of his works become portals to other sites, exploring the possibility for one to have a geographic experience in absentia. Yet the geographic cannot be separated from the sociopolitical. In his piece Intangible Sites (2016), Cruet projects a series of still images and video clips given to him by the immigrant community of Taos, New Mexico, onto the back wall of a shipping container, suffusing the small space with reflected light. The voices of Cruet’s interviewees, some in English and others in Spanish, are heard, speaking to the landscapes projected on the wall. For example, two English speakers relate the images to particular memories of their earlier lives in the Dominican Republic and Mexico—remembering other places through their current landscape.

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