In this time of rapid environmental decline, visual depictions of landscape can become sites for critical positioning. Marcus James’s 2015 works encapsulate the disjuncture between a desire for pristine, solitary experiences in nature and the technological interventions that reveal this desire as pure fantasy. But rather than present a crass comment on this contradiction, James’s pieces offer a possibility outside of the binary constructed between[…..]
Sheltered by darkness, a mysterious octopus-like artifact lies in the nave of the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, a contemporary art museum housed in what was once an ancient convent. Capable of creating light and life by itself, the machine artifact operates by complex mechanisms. Twelve cylinders containing microbial fuel cells are connected to a main Plexiglas tank that houses plants in its interior. Every cylinder carries wastewater from various[…..]
#museums #empathy #posthuman #Anthropocene #environment Recent headlines demonstrate that human beings are consistently terrible to one another, and it can be tempting to reject the human altogether. Drained by a year of public and private deaths, numb with exhaustion after having a child and returning to work, I entered Diana Thater’s mid-career retrospective at LACMA and found that those worldly concerns quickly fell away. Thater’s[…..]
“Memorials are the way people make promises to the future about the past.” Alice Greenwald, director of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, reminds us that a memorial is as much how we describe who we are now as it is about a prior event. The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to look back at a particular moment of disaster, injustice, upheaval, and[…..]
The majesty of our planet—its sublime beauty, biological diversity, and ability to instigate powerful modes of metaphysical reflection within its human inhabitants—remains a constant motif in the history of Western art. The paintings of Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, and George Inness are enduring reminders of the aesthetic richness of the genre. The sensual pleasures that the natural world incites and the darker forces[…..]
Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Jackie Im‘s review of 100° City, a three-person show at City Limits Gallery in Oakland that “…seeks to challenge, to draw people into these messy conversations about anxiety, about the effects we have on the Earth.” Today is your last chance to see the exhibition, which features works by Jason Benson, Joel Dean, and Erin Jane[…..]
In the dark at PSM Gallery in Berlin, a digital animation is silently breathing. It appears as an inverted landscape split in equal parts by land and sky. A field recedes into the horizon, with a mass of permafrost above and mostly clear blue atmosphere below. Green shrubs flop and slide loosely on the screen, wriggling and dismorphic, moving as they would in an acid[…..]
