Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery & Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.

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.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

Creative Time Artistic Director Nato Thompson describes the piece as providing a “space for intimate reflection. It is a quiet, personal, and yet also public act.” Calle’s monument is more of a provocation than an object, compelling visitors to meditate on the dual nature of secrecy—intimacies that linger unfulfilled and withheld, or misdeeds with public effect. What is a secret in the digital age, when every movement and click is surveilled, recorded, and sold? Beneath the epitaph, Here Lie the Secrets confronts our contemporary political reality—a reality in which power is strengthened by a strategic balance of secrets and leaks. As Žižek suggests, “The truth liberates us, yes, but not this truth.” There may be secrets, but there is also truth in a cemetery’s stones.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

Moreover, the context of the cemetery provokes a spatio-temporal disruption, which Foucault describes as “absolute break with traditional time.” Leveraging the context of Green-Wood, Calle evokes deeper questions related to time and existence—ideas that were similarly explored in Rachel, Monique (2006), a video work documenting her mother’s death, which made its New York debut at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in 2014. Even so, Here Lie the Secrets is different than previous works, sharing more kinship with Richard McGuire’s time-traveling graphic novel Here, which presents time as an experiential allusion, illustrating scenes, objects, and events from separate centuries within the same frame.  Similarly, Green-Wood’s centuries-old gravestones conjure larger continuities between the evolution of people and culture bound by a specific place.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

In the artist statement for Here Lie the Secrets, Calle writes of the confession of a secret as the ultimate proof of intimacy. However, it can be argued that cemeteries—though eternally silent—are profoundly intimate sites where all life intersects. Bringing to mind the title of Calle’s 2001 retrospective Double Game, here too there is a conscious redoubling at work. The obelisk is a classic Egyptian motif symbolizing the connection between heaven and earth, and Calle’s monument can be viewed as a conduit, forging connections across time and generations—uniting us through shared human commonalities, including our inescapable universal end.

Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery is on view at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, through April 29, 2042.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (Double Portrait of Artist with Frustula Sculpture), n.d.; black-and-white photograph with original paint marks; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

A comprehensive and long-overdue exhibition of Beverly Buchanan’s work kicks off A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum—a yearlong program of ten exhibitions celebrating the first decade of the museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Feminist Art Center. In a time when voices of misogyny and white supremacy are gaining renewed validation in national political discourse, exploring assumptions around feminism and what feminist art can be is more vital than ever. Buchanan’s work highlights unmarked and under-recognized histories of African American life in the rural South. Her practice is redemptive and recuperative at its core—each piece a poignant gesture standing in resistance to the currents of history-writing that prioritize white male voices. Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals is a rewarding exhibition to see, for in addition to giving a much-undersung artist her due, it also reminds us that expanding access to the national historical narrative is a deeply feminist gesture.

Born in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, Buchanan spent a lot of her upbringing on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her great-uncle was the dean of the School of Architecture. She went on to earn master’s degrees in both parasitology and public health from Columbia University before working as a public health educator in New Jersey. While in New York, she studied with the painter Norman Lewis at the Art Students League, and found a mentor in Romare Bearden. Buchanan was a visible and known figure in New York’s art scene throughout the ’70s and ’80s until she felt drawn back to the South and resettled in Macon, Georgia.

Her practice traverses sculpture, earthworks, photography, and drawing. While certain bodies of work bear formal and conceptual connections to Post-Minimalism and Land Art, others share more in common with outsider and vernacular art that have drawn inspiration from Buchanan’s native rural South. Despite the range and resistance to classification, a clear through line is the artist’s commitment to testimony: her need to record, mark, and memorialize sites in the U.S. landscape that are embedded with suppressed or little acknowledged legacies of racism, violence, and neglect. Ruins and Rituals reminds us of the thousands of stories that remain untold in our national consciousness—some lost forever.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled Slab Works 1, circa 1978-1980; black and white photograph of cast concrete sculptures with acrylic paint in artist studio; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

While still in New York and New Jersey, Buchanan began casting sculptures she called Frustula, meaning “fragments.” They were largely inspired by the detritus of destroyed buildings she encountered in her work in public health. These “ruins” were minimalist gestures in their early stages—formal material experiments resembling blocks or slabs. It wasn’t until Buchanan returned to Georgia that she took this studio practice of casting concrete out into the landscape, placing the works as markers on sites where she learned of pivotal moments of local history.

One-third of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition is devoted to these Frustula sculptures and includes video documentation of their installation in specific locations. A trio of stones, titled Marsh Ruins (1981), is placed near St. Simons Island in Georgia, where a group of Igbo people who were sold into slavery collectively drowned themselves in 1803. Buchanan included an outer layer of tabby (a cement made of lime, gravel, and oyster shells) in each stone, a material that had been used to build plantations in the region. Nearby, a historical marker sits on the site where the confederate soldier Sidney Lanier wrote his famous Reconstruction era poem “The Marshes of Glynn.” Another Frustula work, titled Ruins and Rituals (1979), is composed partially of concrete from a nearby railroad bridge, and is placed in view of the relocated and restored Kingfisher Cabin, the site where Harry Stillwell Edwards wrote his 1919 pro-slavery novel Eneas Africanus. Both Marsh Ruins and Ruins and Rituals incorporate local materials tied to the historical suppression of Black life, while sitting in contrast to the official markings and historical preservations that keep Lanier and Edwards’s legacies permanently visible. Buchanan’s works will age, erode, and integrate into the landscape, reminding us how much these sites have absorbed forever, and how the recovery of these stories is a project without end.

Beverly Buchanan. Low Country House, n.d.; wood, 17.75 x 16.75 x 13.25 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Adam Reich.

Buchanan is best known for her shack sculptures, which make up another third of the exhibition: small scale constructions inspired by a range of architecture the artist researched and encountered during her travels through rural Southern towns. Many are named for the traditional forms they represent—low country house and shotgun house, for instance. Others are given the names of specific people and paired with texts referred to as “legends”—amalgams of different stories inspired by a range of individuals who lived in shacks just like these. Each sculpture is carefully crafted and specific, yet stand as a monument to a way of life inhabited by many. In the performance Out of Control (1991), Buchanan lit a shack on fire and left it for her friends to extinguish. The weight of this single gesture is hard to hold: within it are a thousand stories of violence by fire committed against Black communities. Buchanan’s work offers a way to begin to comprehend the enormity of that loss, and to question if reconciliation with it will ever be possible.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals, installation view. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.

The final section of Ruins and Rituals is devoted to the artist’s archive. Research was clearly integral to the artist’s process: Copious polaroids of herself, postcards, journal entries, and photo documentation of the sites, structures, and people she met are laid out in cases for careful inspection. This is a bevy of rich material, and underlines what Buchanan understood so well in her life’s work: the need to bear witness to what has been lost, and the inability to learn from what we choose not to remember.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 5, 2017.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (Double Portrait of Artist with Frustula Sculpture), n.d.; black and white photograph with original paint marks; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, Buchanan spent a lot of her upbringing on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her great-uncle was the dean of the School of Architecture. She went on to earn master’s degrees in both parasitology and public health from Columbia University before working as a public health educator in New Jersey. While in New York, she studied with the painter Norman Lewis at the Art Students League, and found a mentor in Romare Bearden. Buchanan was a visible and known figure in New York’s art scene throughout the ’70s and ’80s until she felt drawn back to the South and resettled in Macon, Georgia.

Her practice traverses sculpture, earthworks, photography, and drawing. While certain bodies of work bear formal and conceptual connections to Post-Minimalism and Land Art, others share more in common with outsider and vernacular art that have drawn inspiration from Buchanan’s native rural South. Despite the range and resistance to classification, a clear through line is the artist’s commitment to testimony: her need to record, mark, and memorialize sites in the US landscape that are embedded with suppressed or little acknowledged legacies of racism, violence, and neglect. Ruins and Rituals reminds us of the thousands of stories that remain untold in our national consciousness—some lost forever.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled Slab Works 1, circa 1978-1980; black and white photograph of cast concrete sculptures with acrylic paint in artist studio; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

While still in New York and New Jersey, Buchanan began casting sculptures she called Frustula, meaning fragments. They were largely inspired by the detritus of destroyed buildings she encountered in her work in public health. These “ruins” were minimalist gestures in their early stages—formal material experiments resembling blocks or slabs. It wasn’t until Buchanan returned to Georgia that she took this studio practice of casting concrete out into the landscape, placing the works as markers on sites where she learned of pivotal moments of local history.

One-third of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition is devoted to these Frustula sculptures and includes video documentation of their installation in specific locations. A trio of stones, titled Marsh Ruins (1981), is placed near St. Simons Island in Georgia, where a group of Igbo people who were sold into slavery collectively drowned themselves in 1803. Buchanan included an outer layer of tabby (a cement made of lime, gravel, and oyster shells) in each stone, a material that had been used to build plantations in the region. Nearby, a historical marker sits on the site where the confederate soldier Sidney Lanier wrote his famous Reconstruction era poem “The Marshes of Glynn.” Another Frustula work, titled Ruins and Rituals (1979), is composed partially of concrete from a nearby railroad bridge, and is placed in view of the relocated and restored Kingfisher Cabin, the site where Harry Stillwell Edwards wrote his 1919 pro-slavery novel Eneas Africanus. Both Marsh Ruins and Ruins and Rituals incorporate local materials tied to the historical suppression of Black life, while sitting in contrast to the official markings and historical preservations that keep Lanier and Edwards’s legacies permanently visible. Buchanan’s works will age, erode, and integrate into the landscape, reminding us how much these sites have absorbed forever, and how the recovery of these stories is a project without end.

Beverly Buchanan. Low Country House, n.d.; wood, 17.75 x 16.75 x 13.25 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Adam Reich.

Buchanan is best known for her shack sculptures, which make up another third of the exhibition: small scale constructions inspired by a range of architecture the artist researched and encountered during her travels through rural Southern towns. Many are named for the traditional forms they represent—low country house and shotgun house, for instance. Others are given the names of specific people and paired with texts referred to as “legends”—amalgams of different stories inspired by a range of individuals who lived in shacks just like these. Each sculpture is carefully crafted and specific, yet stand as a monument to a way of life inhabited by many. In the performance Out of Control (1991), Buchanan lit a shack on fire and left it for her friends to extinguish. The weight of this single gesture is hard to hold: within it are a thousand stories of violence by fire committed against Black communities. Buchanan’s work offers a way to begin to comprehend the enormity of that loss, and to question if reconciliation with it will ever be possible.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals, installation view. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.

The final section of Ruins and Rituals is devoted to the artist’s archive. Research was clearly integral to the artist’s process: Copious polaroids of herself, postcards, journal entries, and photo documentation of the sites, structures, and people she met are laid out in cases for careful inspection. This is a bevy of rich material, and underlines what Buchanan understood so well in her life’s work: the need to bear witness to what has been lost, and the inability to learn from what we choose not to remember.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 5, 2017.

Pedro Reyes. Lady Liberty, 2016; installation view, Pedro Reyes: Doomocracy, 2016. Courtesy of Creative Time, New York. Photo: Will Star Shooting Stars Pro.

Organized in collaboration with Creative Time, Reyes’s Doomocracy opened to the public on October 7, 2016, and will be performed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights through November 6th. Curated by Nato Thompson, directed by Meghan Finn, and written by Paul Hufker, Doomocracy occupies a vital moment in our collective history. According to Creative Time, the project emerged with some urgency from the confluence of Halloween and the American presidential election—two events looming large, haunting our cultural imagination.

Gun violence, climate change, abortion, voter fraud, and surveillance are just a few of the issues addressed in Reyes’s series of fourteen Doomocracy scenarios. Performed by more than thirty actors, the vignettes take place within a labyrinthine set of stages constructed in the Brooklyn Army Terminal—itself a dystopian institutional backdrop akin to those in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). At once chilling and absurd, each act is performed with a self-conscious theatricality that never gives itself over to an entirely convincing tableau. A number of scenes, such as Matthew Korahais’s performance as a junk food coffin salesman, venture toward slapstick, while others, like Carolina Do’s infomercial for artisanal air, are sci-fi parodies that dissolve wonder into giggles. What becomes truly terrifying are not the performances themselves, but rather the larger questions the entire project provokes.

Pedro Reyes. Artisanal Air, 2016; performed by Carolina Do, Pedro Reyes: Doomocracy, 2016. Courtesy of Creative Time, New York. Photo: Will Star Shooting Stars Pro.

Are we entirely trapped by systems and institutions that are hopelessly corrupt? How much detriment to our privacy, physical health, education, and environment are we willing to accept? Referring to Doomocracy as an act of “political catharsis,” Reyes leverages political, social, and cultural anxiety—and fear itself—as the media for participation and cultural critique. “Haunted houses don’t have a narrative or make sense,” claimed Reyes in the New York Times. “You’re there to be terrified, to be a masochist. So those are the limits I decided to work within for this.”

Beyond representing the possibility of a President Trump, like in Mike Judge’s irreverent and anti-intellectual Idiocracy (2006), Doomocracy is pure satire—a counter-site employing the discourses of the extreme right as a platform for play. The most striking scenes resemble the world as we know it today: a living room, a classroom, a high-school gymnasium. As the performances unfold, assumptions are turned—a Tupperware party or neighborhood watch meeting turns into a xenophobic scramble for handguns; a demonstration of a robotic tool for distance learning transforms into a duck-and-cover drill; a rally led by cheerleaders becomes an elaborate musical number that has the audience chanting anti-abortion slogans.

Pedro Reyes. Sugar Coffins, 2016; performed by Korahais, Pedro Reyes: Doomocracy, 2016. Courtesy of Creative Time, New York. Photo: Will Star Shooting Stars Pro.

What distinguishes Doomocracy is the role of the audience—presumably a liberal, art-going crowd—who are forced to perform the ideologies of the zealous right. Neither passive observation nor active political positioning are options—participants are typecast as gun-toting and anti-abortion. Only one scenario allows participants to choose between two poles: ally with the working class, or accept a “golden parachute” and side with the elite. Despite Doomocracy’s obvious fiction, participants overwhelmingly raised a hand for the workers—in all probability, an expression of personal beliefs. The question arises: Who is this moral decision for—oneself or the dozen other strangers in the room? Is it a gesture of atonement for previous albeit satirical Doomocracy-related indiscretions, or a choice made in haste with the knowledge that the actual effect will be nil?

If really confronted with a mortal choice, who would truly decide to save others before themselves? Overwhelmingly, the forced discomfort of an ideologically contrary role provokes participants to react with a requisite laugh, converting anguish into amusement from the safe space of art. This blurring of politics and entertainment is a genre that, with the doggedness of Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, has become a mainstay of pop culture. Perhaps it is not an anomaly that the 2016 presidential election has become a complete farce—a product of a global entertainment industry more motivated by clicks than critical news. In the opening decades of the 21st century, the political arena has unleashed tsunamis of cynicism, and the reflexive response of the submerged electorate is to lighten our shared sense of hopelessness with a laugh.

Pedro Reyes. Voting Room, 2016; installation view, Pedro Reyes: Doomocracy, 2016. Courtesy of Creative Time, New York. Photo: Will Star Shooting Stars Pro.

Reyes, an artist known for projects that make space for meaningful, transformative encounters, acknowledges Doomocracy to be dark and truly haunted—evoking catharsis rather than a feeling of hope. “This is a new kind of monster,” remarked Reyes. “It’s a monster that’s chasing us in real life. New vampires are banks. New Frankensteins are Monsanto and other companies that are messing with the very essence of life.”

Halloween is a time of grotesque, over-the-top fakeries and epic displays of pastiche. Doomocracy is a veritable carnival of iniquities, skewing art and reality, present and future, to rearrange the world as it is—not as we acknowledge it to be.

Pedro Reyes: Doomocracy is on view at the Brooklyn Army Terminal through November 6, 2016.

The–family, of which Kosma and Dijk are a part, is a performance collective that stages highly physical, improvised conversations that attempt to approach states of heightened emotional vulnerability. In Liberty Is Everything When It Necessitates Love for a Human, staged last Saturday at INTERSTATE, Kosma and Dijk performed a series of homoerotic and precarious acro-yoga positions while they goaded one another into revealing anecdotes about memory, their significant others, ass play, and the tendernesses and insecurities of their three-year-long friendship.

Wojciech Kosma and Sjoerd Dijk. Liberty Is Everything When It Necessitates Love for a Human; promotional image. Courtesy of the Artists and INTERSTATE projects. Image: Hayley Silverman.

An obvious imbalance of power marked Kosma and Dijk’s dynamic from the beginning. In The–family, it seems, Kosma is patriarch. As Kosma called the shots, Dijk let loose spurts of nervous laughter, glancing tentatively toward his aggressive partner in anticipation of the next step in their duet. Unfortunately, such a starkly unbalanced power dynamic between two performers does not necessarily encourage emotional honesty, which would seem requisite for the vulnerability that the collective proposes to pursue. While there was much laughter—the pair tested one another’s trust by seeing how close they could get to one another’s genitals, laughing nervously as a way to diffuse this invasive touching—the audience was never afforded the chance to laugh first. Nervous laughter became a hallmark of the piece and a barricade against openness; a fail-safe that was never demolished.

There is a common misconception that performance art differs from theater in that, in performance art, one can get in front of an audience and simply “do anything.” This is both true and untrue. Performance art can be an excellent tool for forcing people to realize that everyday reality is performative. In simply “doing something” in front of an audience, a performer can elevate an otherwise benign action, forcing a reconsideration of the way in which it is charged with meaning. But just “doing anything” onstage does not necessarily ensure the emotional sincerity that The–family so covets. As indicated by the lone promotional graphic that accompanies this review, the artists are vehemently opposed to any published photographs of their work;  in fact, all but one of the images originally published on the gallery’s website have been taken down. Perhaps this is another indication of the collective’s kamikaze-like fidelity to the present moment in performance.

The group describes its dynamics as “at times theatrical, yet hardly staged.”[1] This gesture toward theater incites a fundamental critique frequently leveled at even the best playwrights: You have to give your audience a reason to care about what they are watching. The problem with relying on an improvisational formula to generate emotional honesty, as The–family did in this performance, is that sometimes it simply does not happen. When you gamble in improv, you force your audience to gamble with you. And if nothing happens, the audience is left to try to intellectually parse out meaning where they did not feel it. In not connecting us to feeling, The–family denied its audience as well as its participants the very impetus of its project: that precious access to cathartic emotional release.

Perhaps the most productive result of Kosma and Dijk’s experiment is that witnessing its trials and errors drove me to dissect the minutia of what might make for successful performance art. Such a question is bound to eternally chase its tail, but like those elusive emotional breakdowns so sought after by The–family, it is one worth pursuing—even in the event of perpetual failure.

Liberty Is Everything When It Necessitates Love for a Human was performed Saturday, July 26, 2014, at INTERSTATE, 66 Knickerbocker Ave., Brooklyn, NY, 11237.

[1] From The–family’s artist statement.

Matt Phillips, House of Hands,  mixed media on canvas, 54” x 66”, 2013 / Courtesy of the artist

Phillips is a visiting artist at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts and a founding member of the nonprofit TSA gallery in Bushwick, where he remains a vital presence on the pop up scene. His current show at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects—Phillips’ first solo exhibition in New York—features a selection of his most recent works.

Installation, 2013 / Courtesy of the artist

“The show kind of ended up sorting itself out based on the space and the kind of internal relationships between the paintings,” Phillips said in a phone interview. “I didn’t know exactly what works were going to be included until I got into the space.”

The interaction between the art and the space is particularly affecting in this show. While many galleries have frosted windows or restrict exhibitions to inner rooms, isolating them from the street, Steven Harvey has a floor-to-ceiling window in front, which generates a dialogue between the world outside and the paintings on display. The play of shadows across the surface of Revolverator, a large-scale work done in vibrant pinks, greens, and blues, created new lines on the triangles of the canvas that shifted with the moving sun. Somehow, even the teenagers playing basketball across the street in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and the woman walking by in a seafoam fur coat, seemed to be reflections of Phillips’ vacillating, playful paintings.

Matt Phillips, Revolverlator (for M.L.), mixed media on canvas, 54” x 66,” 2013

The exhibition’s title refers to Phillips’ interest in the relationship between the fixed, stable quality of finished artworks and the active, immediate way in which the viewer processes them.

“It’s the way that I think a good painting works,” Phillips said. “When you first encounter it, it is a purely static object. But then a good painting starts to do something else—it starts to unfold in time and to remake itself. I’m fascinated by that shift from a static object to a temporal experience.”

Phillips’ works underscore our craving for narrative familiarity and our insistence on transforming abstract lines into recognizable objects and forms. The wash of blue squares and the orange diagonals of Canadian Sunset evoke the seashore, while the interlocking yellow shapes in Form Out of Water resemble a honeycomb. For Phillips, the challenge of communicating organic, real-world subject matter through a limited, geometric formal vocabulary is endlessly intriguing.

“Sometimes my paintings evoke really familiar still-life objects, kinds of spaces or even just abstract forms that have a familiar sense of weight or volume. Those are the visual ways that they evoke the known, the everyday, the natural world. . . . As a painter, I have a pretty wide net that is definitely rooted in geometric abstraction, but also in textiles, patterns, quilts and still life painting. I like the idea that painting can go in multiple directions at the same time.”

I was immediately taken with Irina Rozovsky’s current body of work, In Plain Air, a series of photographs taken in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. There is something quietly transcendent about these vignettes – a tranquility rarely evident in public space. I was so pleased to have the chance to ask Rozovsky about these recent photographs and how they relate to her consideration of place.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

How do you feel In Plain Air relates to your previous bodies of work? Does it represent a continuation of certain concerns that are central to your practice?

It’s a new way of working for me—I am slowing down, returning again and again to the same location, balancing the vague images I have in mind and the elements of chance encounters.  Previously, I was a shoot-on-the-go photographer, akin to a version of Eggleston’s democratic camera.  But while what I am looking at and the way I go about it has changed, there is a continuation of interests here.  When I was photographing in Israel, I started to think about history and the essence of time that’s encoded in a landscape and permeates the people of the day.  I think land has age-long, entrenched rules and its contemporary inhabitants subconsciously follow these rules, entering a cannon of history.  In a way, nothing in Israel has changed since it’s beginning. And the park, constructed in the 1860s during the artistic movements of Realism and the visions of democracy, is still running on the same agenda.  It’s simple but profound stuff.  I think it was Gerry Badger that stated by clearly photographing the present, you can access a larger human realm of time.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

I was hoping you could speak a bit about your relationship to your subjects in these photographs.  Are these candid moments or are people aware of your presence?

The subjects in my series In Plain Air are strangers I encounter visiting the park.  We have not met before and typically do not see each other again, but the photograph coalesces in a kind of shared moment—for a split instant, I am let in on a private reverie.  I am drawn to situations where people have carved out a solitary spot in the park to be alone or alone with someone, so very often there is an awkwardness in approaching this intimate space, like coming up to knock on someone’s front door. The pictures are usually made quietly. I don’t tend to say a lot and people seem to accept implicity. It is, after all, a public space, so the rules seem to be the same as on the street. They are not staged, but there is a type of posing that’s going on, since people kind of open themselves for the camera, without breaking from their flow.I usually don’t linger after the photo is made, so as not to impose on or puncture the daydream.

What is the importance of place in your work?

A few years ago, my photography was placeless or worked to undo a solid connection to any specific place. I was traveling a lot and shooting endlessly, but the images never revealed their locations. Instead, they acted as a group alluding to a general pilgrimage, a movement rather than a destination.  With One to Nothing and In Plain Air, the photographs are really playing with a sense of place, but still the connection is amorphous.  For instance, it’s very important that the pictures are made in this particular park and that viewers understand it is a real park and I would not include photos made elsewhere.  Nevertheless, the pictures are not exactly about the park; it’s used as a stage, as a backdrop, as a stand in for a larger human space—the Garden of Eden, America, a mini world.  And many times, it looks to me like the photographs were taken in different places—the south, the bayou, a fictional place.  So it’s interesting to stretch this idea of place.  The photos from Israel work the same way—I’d like the experience of looking at One to Nothing to feel closer to what you already know and feel even if you have never been to Israel.  I hope the places in my pictures have this shifting, virtual nature.

Irina Rozovksy. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

In discussing In Plain Air, you have asserted, “the park is seen as a kind of gritty paradise that wraps its everyday patrons in a sublime, redeeming, equalizing light.” How do you feel the quality of this place serves as an equalizing force?  Is that part of what drew you to this location?

Yes! I was drawn to this place because it felt like a gritty, imperfect paradise outside of time where most traces of modernity are erased and people are returned to themselves.  In the summer, when I started this project, there was bliss in the air, it felt like a sacred place, almost a virtual release from an oppressive life beyond the gates.  Outside on the streets, these same people would have seemed intimidating or unapproachable, but within the park, guards are down and everyone seems to be at their very purest and best. A strange perception of reality sets in and it hardly seems credible that so many different races and backgrounds are all in the same place, all around the same lake, lounging on the same grass.  Fredrick Olmstead designed this park to be shared by all, as a democratic, common land. To see that goal materialized, and hold true today, in some form, a realized vision, it’s uncanny.  Of course, this is idealistic, and ideals are unattainable, but that’s the power of this place; its illusion is that at moments, it seems to come close.

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In November 2011, Kehrer Verlag published Rozovsky’s One to Nothing, which was included on Alec Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks of 2011. Selections from In Plain Air will be in the group exhibition “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from March 2 through March 18 at The Current Space in Baltimore, Maryland.

Now on view at SOFA gallery, a DIY space in the living room of an Austin apartment, is the work of Jeff DeGolier. This pairing is fitting since both the artist and gallery make due with what is on hand. DeGolier, who is based in Brooklyn, came to Austin for a week and harvested bric-a-brac from trash piles and swap meets. Day by day, he assembled a sculpture at the center of the room that runs from floor to ceiling. Hung on the walls are a few digital prints based on similar assemblage sculptures.

The sculpture starts with the ceiling fan that becomes a source of electricity for a faux hearth made of a painted tire and an illuminated white plastic bag as well as some small fans with flashing blue lights, typically used to trick out computers like low riders. Pompoms, plastic hangers and a mop head are also carefully assembled in a way that approaches a kind of ritualized fetish object for our American consumerist wasteland.

This space of assemblage, in which objects hang, pivot and tilt, is flattened and framed in the prints. Color is heightened and patterns emerge to quote the psychedelic without falling into the traps of its potential sentimentality. What holds this work in check is the intensity of its realism and directness combined with a quirky specificity of craft. Like many of the artists in the New Museum’s 2008 exhibition Unmonumental DeGolier dispenses with slick expensive production in favor of the quotidian, making this living room both extraordinary and accessible.

Gabriel "Specter" Reese, Guerrilla Billboard, via Gothamist

Opening today at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn is the group exhibition, The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks. Before it had even officially opened, the show generated a fair amount of controversy. It seems to have created a Brooklyn—and Internet—divided. The exhibition was guest curated by Brooklyn native, Dexter Wimberly, and features 20 artists working in various mediums whose work “investigates the controversial impact of gentrification on the great borough of Brooklyn,” according to the museum. Though MoCADA’s mission seeks to “give a more accurate portrayal of contributions to the historical, artistic and cultural landscape of the world by people of African descent,” Wimberly recently told The Brooklyn Paper, “As a curator, it was important to me to make sure this exhibition was not just an African-American perspective, or a white perspective or an Asian perspective or a Latino perspective.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

I talked to Josh Bricker, whose installation piece, The Order of Things, is on display in the exhibition. Bricker, who is an MFA candidate at Parsons The New School for Design, told me that The Order of Things—which is made up of ten Anatex “roller coaster” toys in various stages of manipulation—“confronts a lot of the major issues surrounding gentrification, through a slow process of homogenization and conversion.” Bricker says that the toys “were chosen for their iconic status and place in our memories to allow for a re-contextualization of the mundane, as well as an easy entry point into a much heavier and more serious issue.” The ten roller coaster toys follow a spectrum of visual shifts until the last piece becomes almost unidentifiable from the first. Of his process, Bricker says, “If you know color like most artists do then you realize that while white in light is the presence of all color, it is actually the absence of all color in pigments and, therefore, I felt the perfect representation of homogenization and the loss of individuality.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

Not everyone in Brooklyn, and elsewhere, though agrees with the message of the exhibition. A casual post about the show on the popular New York blog, Gothamist, turned into an all-out war of words and ideologies when commenters began discussing (not always eloquently) issues of gentrification, race and class. One commenter replied sarcastically to the image of Gabriel “Specter” Reese’s piece for the show, Guerrilla Billboard, saying, “Oh boy here we go… How dare you try to come in and actually contribute to the quality of life here. How dare you try to come in here and open up business, and create jobs. How dare you try to put a boutique clothing shop in place of the 3rd liquor store on this block. How dare you pay taxes!” Another disagreed by responding, “I don’t necessarily think: 3 starbucks per block plus several overpirced [sic] organic fairtrade coffee emporiums, plus…3x rent increase for the same shitty apartment is an ‘improvement’.”

The artists whose work will be on view in The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks include: Josh Bricker (Installation), Valerie Caesar (Photography), Oasa DuVerney (Drawing), Zachary Fabri (Video), Rosamond S. King (Installation), Irondale Ensemble (Theater Performance), Nathan Kensinger (Photography), Jess Levey (Photography / Video Installation), Christina Massey (Painting), Musa (Sculpture), Tim Okamura (Painting), Kip Omolade (Painting), John Perry (Painting), Adele Pham (Video), Michael Premo / Rachel Falcone (Photography / Multimedia), Gabriel Reese (Painting), Marie Roberts (Painting), Ali Santana (Music Video), Monique Schubert (Mixed-media), Alexandria Smith (Painting), Sarah Nelson Wright (Installation).

Additionally, photos and essays by students at The Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School and The Secondary School for Research will be on display in a vignette representing their study and documentation of the impact of gentrification in their neighborhoods. The exhibition runs through May 16, 2010 and features a roster of public events surrounding the issues it seeks to explore, including talks and documentary screenings.

Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance at MIT List Visual Arts Center

Currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston is the solo exhibition, Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance. The exhibition, which features works based on Jackson’s artist residency at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA, was originally on view at MIT from May through July of 2009. The work on view reflects Jackson’s curiosity with aspects of MIT’s research, as well as his own while in residency at the institution—particularly the Energy Initiative, since the Brooklyn-based sculptor has historically employed the use of recycled and repurposed objects in much of his work. Chariot—a crashed race car frame that the artist’s cousin, Skip Nichols built, raced and then crashed—has a body rebuilt by Jackson and is lit underneath in a ROYGBIV spectrum of lights generated by solar panels on top of the museum. In a video interview with MIT, Jackson says that “bringing it [the piece, Chariot] to MIT and working with the Energy Initiative was a…seamless, perfect fit in the sense that it was an opportunity to sort of explore perhaps…some poetic aspects of what they’re doing.”

Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance at MIT List Visual Arts Center

Born in Panorama City, CA, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his BFA from University of Washington and his MFA from Rutgers University. Jackson’s solo exhibitions include Terranaut, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY; Diptych, Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, Boston, MA; Paradise Now!, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and By No Means Necessary, The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. His work was included in the 2005 exhibition Greater New York at P.S.1 in New York City. For the 2005 Whitney Biennial of American Art, Jackson contributed Chariot, The Day After the End of Days (2005-2006), a pioneer covered wagon floating above a bed of fluorescent tubes.