Standing before the photographs from Bill Armstrong’s Infinity series, resistance is futile. Intense washes of color and uncertain, alluring forms beckon yet elude one’s grasp, and the encounter between viewer and work becomes a question not of looking but, more powerfully, of experiencing. Critical distance is collapsed, vision becomes a channel for sensation, and image expands into an all-encompassing, alternative reality. Such is the effect[…..]

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[…..]

Central to Doug Aitken’s “100 YRS” exhibition at 303 Gallery is a new “Sonic Fountain,” in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the[…..]

One of the more thought-provoking pieces of art writing this month was not about contemporary work, but modern art. Tucked away in his review of “Radical Terrain” at the Rubin Museum, New York Times critic Holland Cotter called out the Euro-American belief that the West invented modernism, which was then either copied or imposed (inferiorly) across the globe. We might have missed Cotter’s article, if[…..]

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[…..]

In restless anticipation of the MoMA show Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets  (opened just last weekend on August 12), I have been re-visiting the depths of the Quays’ body of work. The show—billed as “the first presentation of the Quay Brothers’ work in all their fields of creative activity”—promises a comprehensive, considered overview of this inimitable duo’s eclectic œuvre, which encompasses[…..]