In a world full of arbitrary choices, Martin Creed is an artist who uses systems to make decisions and create order. Unlike most of the YBAs, who are mainly traditionalists using unconventional materials, Creed is a true conceptualist, and his work embodies the 2.0 of contemporary British art. In the lineage of Sol LeWitt—but also radically departing from his precedent—Creed examines ideas and material, identifying[…..]
Visceral, bracing, potent, Kathryn Parker Almanas’s Pre-Existing Condition, currently on view at Yellow Peril Gallery, is a collision of sensory extremes and formal nuances. In large-scale color photographs and small-scale collage works, the artist pictures and probes the physical body, both its corporeal effusions and existential implications. The result is an intensely vital, deeply disorienting study of being, sensation, and the intersection of inner and outer[…..]
Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. I’ve been meeting with a commercial gallery in my city for some time, and they’ve extended me an offer to come aboard. I’m excited about the idea of professional representation, having a platform to[…..]
Windows of Opportunity (2013), Jiten Thukral’s and Sumir Tagra’s (branded as Thukral & Tagra) latest show at Art Plural gallery, gives expression to the cacophonous spectacle of hybridity that defines contemporary India, a site that they deem to be a hotbed of conflicted histories and global transactions. These issues of societal flux are explored in their oeuvre through an eclectic visual language composed of cartoonish[…..]
Born in 1962 of parents who were attached to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Geng Jianyi grew up in a country shaped by rigid, state-mandated structures that had, by the late 1960s to the early ‘70s, fallen a long way short of the idealistic socialist Chinese state that Mao Zedong had envisioned. Where solidary socialism was intended to create commitment to the system by way[…..]
What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed. And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn. In the case of Washburn’s[…..]
I was originally scheduled to interview Lukasz Jastrubczak in Poland last summer, but as I researched his background and projects I discovered that he was going to be in San Francisco in the fall on a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Jastrubczak is a thoughtful artist, working his way through multiple concepts at once to make art that is both complex and[…..]
