All of Aideen Barry’s work exists in a very fragile balance: a woman performs domestic tasks while levitating; a sculpture promises both the control of cleanliness and the chaos of an explosion; women in flowing red dresses dance on water in giant floating plastic balls, all the while falling comically—and using up the oxygen in the sealed sphere. At each viewing of her work I,[…..]
In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts &[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Maybe it’s an American thing, a hanger-on Puritan fetish, but I can think of few qualities more seductive than discipline. It seems like the quickest path to perfection, and as much as I purport to accept—even celebrate—“idiosyncrasy,” “peculiarity,” “limitation,” they’re all consolation prizes, the realities you force yourself to love once you[…..]
Today we continue our week-long series, Summer of Utopia, through the work of artists Rosa Casado and Mike Brookes. Spanish performance artist, Rosa Casado and British visual artist, Mike Brookes initiated a long-term collaboration in 2000 focusing on performative engagements in social spaces, informed by seminal works addressing utopian ideals of social equality, self-organization and ecological sustainability. In Paradise 2 – the incessant sound of[…..]
Today, Daily Serving continues our seven-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate the work of seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley At the start of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s charming novella about a troubled socialite looking for “what’s hers” and attracted to everything that’s not, the unnamed narrator receives a message from a bartender named Joe Bell. He meets Bell, an old friend, and the two clandestinely talk about Holly, the socialite[…..]
The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial[…..]
