I once read that when we travel to new or strange places that a very interesting phenomenon occurs. Since we are a bit lost and disoriented, our brains miscalculate the faces of strangers in the crowd in an attempt to find the familiar. As synapses fire, a person on the sidewalk may look like an old lover—or we swear we glanced a family friend across[…..]

Jonathan Ehrenberg‘s The Outskirts conjures a world of mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply disorienting beauty. Currently on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the artist’s latest video envisions a world of visual enchantment and visceral disquiet, of existential ambivalence and psychic uncertainty. With its opening shot of a shadowed, densely wooded landscape, The Outskirts plunges us into a world that is superficially suggestive of yet atmospherically apart[…..]

iona ROZEAL brown’s stylized painting emerges from a studied transmutation of African-American and Japanese cultural tradition. Brown has developed a strong narrative lineage essential to reading her coded (albeit straightforward) illustrative paintings of Afro-Japanese courtesans, voguing stars, and fantasy creatures of mythic royalty. Brown’s concurrent exhibitions at Salon 94 Freemans and Edward Tyler Nahem seek to extend and perpetuate this narrative in a new elaboration[…..]

Amongst the many trends floating around the contemporary art world, you may have noticed a resurgence in performance art in galleries and museums.  The old guard of artists from the 60’s and 70’s are being recognized in grand retrospectives, such as Marina Abramovic’s critically acclaimed The Artist is Present at MoMA in 2010, as well as the Guggenheim’s current show, Gutai: Splendid Playground, a retrospective of[…..]

This, and then. It’s the title of Matt Phillips’ latest exhibition and a useful shorthand for the mental quick march a viewer undergoes when observing his work. Through his abstract oil and acrylic paintings, Phillips plays with color, form, and volume—the building blocks of our artistic experience—to create dynamic, shifting spatial relationships. His canvases evoke, simultaneously, the calm beauty of the natural world, the randomness[…..]

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star is the New Museum’s crash course in the recent history of contemporary art in New York. The exhibition positions 1993 as a signifier for mass cultural change: the thesis being that the events of this year irrevocably directed culture towards its manifestation in 2013. NYC 1993 seems just as concerned, however, with the ways that we[…..]

The journalistic expression “If it bleeds; it leads” is particularly resonant in Mexico, where an entire subgenre of daily tabloids, devoted to crime and disaster, cover train wrecks and murders in lurid detail. Enrique Metinides made a career as a crime photographer for these nota roja (“bloody news”), earning the sobriquet the “Mexican Weegee” for his obsessive chronicling of accidents and crime scenes throughout Mexico[…..]