In an unassuming brick building on a gray Willamsburg street, adjacent to a used car lot and several doors down from a polythene bag manufacturer, there is a portal to the West Coast. Kevin Cooley’s Skyward, currently on view at the Boiler—the project space of the Pierogi Gallery—captures the quintessence of Los Angeles life: the car as constant, the looping freeways, the towering palm trees[…..]
Xavier Cha‘s Untitled (2012), on view at 47 Canal through January 13th, positions four high definition video screens displaying a series of “screen tests” throughout the small gallery. These close-up video portraits present subjects alternately gazing at and away from the viewer, inviting the audience to scrutinize both the faces and backs of these heads. Jonathan Coward scores the videos with an intensified background noise[…..]
Eric Yahnker’s current solo show VIRGIN BIRTH N’ TURF, at The Hole through October 6, is a meticulous chronicle of canonical American cultural mediocrity. Walking into the vaulted white squareness of The Hole, I’m slammed from all sides by Yahnker’s enormous images — meticulously hand-drawn, magnified portraits of kitsch. Yahnker takes aesthetically unexalted elements of popular media, elevating the mediocre cultural staple and outfitting it[…..]
The other day, in a somewhat drowsy effort to shake my late-summer torpor, I decided to poke around online in search of some intriguing, under-the-radar gallery shows. Rather quickly, and despite (or perhaps because of) the aimless, unfocused nature of my ramblings, I happened upon the just-concluded show Icy and Sot: Made in Iran, which ran August 23-25 at New York’s Openhouse Gallery. As I[…..]
Michael Berryhill’s oil paintings at KANSAS make me uneasy. In trying to decide why, I made a list of the things that remind me of his work. Instead of smoothing these references out into a proper review (as I had initially planned), I present them to the reader as is. I believe that this enumerated strategy will better serve objects that, by their very nature,[…..]
Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery[…..]
Kim Dingle’s exhibition entitled still lives at Sperone Westwater portrays a series of calamities played out by children sitting at tables, whirling off of chairs and clinking wine glasses in roistering merriment. Clown-like in depiction with disproportionally large feet and nondescript faces, the toddlers she presents are more so dolls than human children. Dingle’s newest works are less crowded than older works and by virtue[…..]
