October 27 to December 18, 2016
319 Grand Street, Second Floor (between Allen and Orchard streets)
New York, 212 989 7700

“Mother Tongue,” a selection of new paintings by Loie Hollowell (all 2016) on view at Feuer/Mesler, osculate in slow-burning sensuality. These pictures induce dream logic/experience in the viewer — the sort of truth that doesn’t make sense when attempting to explain the morning after. But the memory is known and felt.

Hollowell’s work has as much to do with the body as landscape and symbolism. One might wonder what Forrest Bess would make of her pictures in reference to his dreams and lexicon of symbols notating the body, landscape, sex, cosmos, moisture, dilating, cutting, etc. Looking at Clouds, Cactus and Sun one sees a bizarre, arousing composition of two clouds a cactus, and a sun which are simultaneously two hands spreading apart a figure’s bent-over ass. There’s an mysterious sexuality hidden, which folds in and out of landscape, creating a low-key expectancy. The anticipation and ambiguity sustains a number of narrative possibilities at play with the works’ structure, symmetry and concise divides of form and color. The strong sense of clarity and design make these images approachable, while the metamorphosing forms keep the viewer transfixed. Rise, Risen is a closeup of a woman’s torso, it’s the sun seen from behind a dewy window with viscous droplets warping our vision of it, and nipples superimposed over a feverish sky, rhythmically falling to the earth.

The colors affected in these paintings reinforce their spellbinding nature. The purples, reds, and yellows aren’t readily nameable. Rather, they feel extracted directly from a desert sunset slipping into a blue, green night. Color creates an internal light that oozes like magma. Hung (Up) is all at once a desert, orgasm, strange flora, internal organs, and an erection. In Incoming Tide the backside of a woman’s spread, south-to-north facing thighs pulse and push to the surface and balance over a deep back dome, implying an impending gush. Fluidity is key. Everything in this world flows inward and outward — from one thing to another. Contemplating any particular instance of Hollowell’s world, such as Think Pound Over Green Mound, the center form appears just as bulbous and outward as it is convex. It’s a cataclysmic explosion triggered by the tip of a pointed mound.

Many of the canvases are shaped, with rounded protuberances projecting from their surfaces. The illusion of physical painting and the painted allusion add to the psychedelic nature of these works. It is nearly impossible to decipher, even when viewing in person, where Hollowell has sculpted up areas of the surface and where the illusion is trompe-l’œil. The seamless transition from dream to physical representation also points toward the micro/macro quality of these images. Hung (Detail) could be a single cell organism under a microscope or a supernova millions of lightyears away.

What Hollowell is getting at is a definition of intimacy through visual poetry. These paintings describe a multivalent set of intimate relationships among the self, selves, the body in relation to nature, gender, time, sex, and space. She finds comfort hanging in the ever-evolving place between these barriers to show us the value and richness of undefined, ever-evolving territory.

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June 30 to July 29, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 1044

“The Woman Destroyed,” a group exhibition at P.P.O.W, titled after Simone de Beauvoir’s work of fiction, is a latently hostile display of frustration aimed toward overused, female-unfriendly tropes. Picking up where De Beauvoir leaves off in her book, which focuses on the lives of middle-aged women and their unsexy encounters with betrayal, failure, and various crises, these six artists each embody a unique and complicated experience that emerges from such a disadvantage.

Perhaps the poster image for this exhibition is Bag Lady (2016) by Robin F. Williams. According to urban slang, a Bag Lady is a homeless and/or crazy woman who carries all her possessions in an assortment of bags. Another colloquialism explains that if a man wishes to have sex with an ugly woman that he may better his experience by putting a bag over her head. In this painting, the insulting act of hooding her subject with a bag is muffled by the trippy palette, the stormy, gray atmosphere blooming in the distance, and by the subject’s relaxed attitude, which lets the viewer know that she’s been through this sort of thing at least a thousand times. She’s a self-proclaimed Bag Lady that put the bag on her own damn head. Maybe it’s her way of saying that her mind is her only true possession — and that men finding her sexually attractive is not her main occupation. Williams’s other painting in the show, In the Gutter (2015), is a similar display of bad-assery. The model in this picture looks as though she walked off a billboard of naked women selling watches or shoes, and assumed a squat right over a gutter, as if to say “Sell this.” The crass gesture, coupled with her beautiful form adorned in golden shoes and matching belt, reinforce the simultaneously sad and unapologetic situation: a strong, capable woman stuck playing one of the most intellectually underwhelming roles of her life.

Elizabeth Glaessner’s 20 small paintings (all 2016) slip into a deeper, psychological realm. The space is internal, slow, and sludgy; each picture resembles a snapshot from a psychedelic vision or nightmare. Circling, for instance, reads like a creepy transcription of the Three Fates. The color emits a curious internal light and is often applied with direct, gestural mark-making. Helping a Friend has raised, red iron oxide hands in the immediate foreground, which suggest that the dreamer is falling away from, or calling out to, the two figures struggling in the mid ground. De Beauvoir wrote, in The Second Sex (1949), that, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” These images feel as though they move from the emergence to dissimilation of a woman — that a lifetime of memories and experience produce a psyche that is irreconcilable with reality perceived at face value. Glaessner’s figures appear to be forgetting their womanhood.

A similar disparate culling of inner thought and outer being can be found in David Mramor’s work. Mramor, who sometimes goes by his feminine pseudonym, Enid Ellen, features photographs of his late mother. The images, printed on canvas are embellished with smudges and lines of acrylic to create a juxtaposition of reality and painted marks. Ambiguous yet provoking, the pictures seem to point to an inability to access his mother, his inner womanhood, or even a comfortable synthesis of his his male and female attributes. The blatant clashing of language in his work corresponds to a dichotomous sensibility weighted by melancholy.

Moving from male-female to female-animal, Centaurette in Forest (2015), by Alison Schulnik, is a visceral, chunky rendering of a lady centaur. Not a bull in a china shop, but a centaurette in a cake shop, the frantic creature grasping at the sides of her head appears as though she herself is an amalgamation of frosting, wading through the surrounding flora, which is equally goopy. Historically, female centaurs rarely appear in mythology but are occasionally found in Greek and Roman mosaics. Conceivably, this work speaks to the nature of existing without the power to communicate — of being trapped. Similar in both form and content, Lauren Kelly’s digital print, Wall Flower (2011), depicts a constructed mini dancehall. A doll, whose face is cropped out of the shot, sits amid a cluster of empty chairs, wearing a billowing dress literally made of cake frosting. What was made to be tasted and enjoyed by others goes unsampled, either because her choice to withhold it, or by rejection of others.

Looking at Jessica Stoller’s sculpture, Slip (2016), we see again the persistent theme of dessert. The subject of a porcelain bust rears her head, smiling as she balances various pastries, sweets, and plates that have been plopped on top. But unlike Schulnik or Kelly’s females, who are either frantic or lonely, and different even from Williams’s cool and collected women, the figure here appears content — as though she’s merely wearing an extravagant hat to a Surrealist costume ball. Ultimately, what the various dispositions portrayed have in common is a post-angry dissatisfaction with the onslaught of slangs and expectations that women remarkably deal with.

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Balancing discipline and emotion, Sean Sully’s paintings from the early 1970s exude a curious mixture of formal consideration and felt observation. Grid (1973), for instance, strikes a note of homey quirkiness with its layers of pattern superimposed within the eponymous hard-edged structure, a bit like the patches held together by a beloved pair of jeans. Seeing works from the outset of Scully’s career in a renovated warehouse in a humble corner of Queens – Cheim & Read’s outer-borough new venture – inevitably makes us connect with the collective energy of the massed hipsters at work nearby.

May 20 to July 1, 2016
16-13 Stephen Street, Queens, NY –

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March 11 to August 1, 2016
150 West 17th Street (at 7th Avenue)
New York, 212 620 5000

If one were interested in having a transformative experience through visual means, one may very well find oneself at the Rubin Museum, which houses several pieces of Himalayan art created for that exact purpose. Writing about the Rubin’s collection in the book Worlds of Transformation (1999), Robert F. Thurman states that “we can engage this extraordinary art as a vehicle of enlightenment. […] We can reach out of the planet and allow sacred and aesthetic objects such as these to lift us up into their exquisite, transcendental yet sensual visionary, transformative realms.” And it is nothing short of providence that an exhibition by renegade artist, occultist, and pandrogynous icon Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Try to Altar Everything,” finds itself in this context. (Breyer P-Orridge identifies as a third gender and is typically referred to as “h/er” or “s/he.”) H/er work in this show includes new pieces made in Nepal for this show, earlier work courtesy of Invisible Exports, site-specific installation made by participating visitors and staff under the guidance of Breyer P-Orridge, as well as a series of live performances.

Since the early 1970s, Breyer P-Orridge has been exercising h/er polymath powers in the fields of experimental music, performance, poetry, magic, documentary, body modification, and more. S/he’s best known for h/er music-and-performance projects, such as COUM Transmissions, Psychic TV, and Throbbing Gristle. Being interested in so many forms of art and expression, and working in a non-linear, multivalent manner opens up a breadth and depth of possibility in h/er investigations. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse once said, “One-dimensional man is the product of one-dimensional society,” and he’s right. Breyer P-Orridge’s multi-dimensional person, just like h/er work, has always revolved around collaboration, synthesis, and multichannel appropriation, making rich and complex work. H/er interpersonal and layered method of operating is a rebellion against one-dimensionality.

The title of this show is also twofold, playing on the homonyms “alter” (to change, transform) and “altar” (a pedestal for religious objects or ceremonies). In order to demonstrate a method of questioning the way we perceive ordinary, everyday things and transfigure them through religious sacrifice, Breyer P-Orridge invited the public to bring small objects to the museum in exchange for a Psychic Cross pendant (the logo of Breyer P-Orridge’s Psychic TV group). S/he ordains the objects as devotional relics, installing them in windowed containers. The donations vary greatly: hotel keys, pins, photographs, ribbons, toys, spoons, etc. The top floor of the museum dedicated solely to this show, and throughout the room many of the small objects, in metal-and-Plexiglas canisters, are conglomerated onto separate panels, serving as partitions for the other works in the show, while creating a sense of unity throughout the entire space. Every element in this project can be seen as a microcosm that contains the entirety of the installation as a whole. The groupings of these objects seem to be serving as a formal way to accent the idea that few can be many, the mundane can be holy, male can be female; and further still, that these divides can be disintegrated altogether, as Breyer P-Orridge has done personally.

One of the most moving pieces in the show, Touching of the Hands (2016), is a detailed bronze casting of Breyer P-Orridge’s right hand and arm in a clasping gesture, which the viewer is encouraged to touch. The intimacy transposed through the arm is accomplished through the gentle, inviting gesture and the ability to physically engage with the sculpture. The label explains, “The title refers to a remark made by artist and mystic Brion Gysin to Breyer P-Orridge that true wisdom can only be passed on by the ‘touching of the hands.’ […] S/he intends that the bronze will wear down over time through visitors’ touch.” Some viewers reported “getting the chills” interacting with this piece, perhaps reminded of moments of prayer or meditation where another’s touch seemed to generate a profound excitation, or even conjure a supernatural entity.

One of the earlier works in this exhibition, Blood Bunny (1997–2007), is a life-sized wooden sculpture of a rabbit, covered dried blood let from Breyer P-Orridge and h/er late partner, Lady Jaye, who died in 2007. On its head is laid a ponytail lock of Lady Jaye’s hair, bound with a scrunchie, possibly taken post-mortem. Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye nicknamed one another “bunny,” and the totem serves as a symbol for the third gender literally embodied in their surgical transformation into near mirror images of one another. In making the sculpture, they ceremoniously injected themselves with the dissociative anesthetic drug ketamine in order to aid in the suspension of their physical awareness and unify in sanguineous sanctification. This act, to a certain degree absurd, sustains the paradoxical nature of Breyer P-Orridge’s work. Of course the artists cannot expel their spirits and synthesize into a third entity, such as a bunny. But at the same time they can. Is this not the undying question of art? Is something “art” because one ordains it as such, or is there a factual criteria we can hold it to?

The intensity Breyer P-Orridge brings to many media (sculpture, installation, sound, poetry, etc.) in one exhibition is a remarkable display of an ever-probing mind. S/he is abundantly generous in sharing h/er process and discoveries and for that, we may thank h/er for showing us how to yoke belief to practice and alter our perception of everything.

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Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

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Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967-76 at Craig F. Starr Gallery
February 5 to March 26, 2016
5 East 73rd Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York, 212 570 1739

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end. […] We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.
-Brian Doyle

In so many words, this poetic excerpt gets at the heart of Catherine Murphy’s work, which is fortuitously on view at Sargent’s Daughters, and is featured in a new Peter Freeman, Inc. publication with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers and an essay by John Yau. The book offers the best possible surrogate to experiencing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in person, further providing a comprehensive, chronological exposition of her life’s work. Yau has clearly dedicated as much rigor and fidelity to Murphy as she herself has invested in her paintings and drawings. The reader is provided with an intimate, formal, conceptual, and even spiritual survey that touches on her personal life and artistic career. Living reclusively with her husband outside New York, Murphy submitted herself entirely to painting and drawing, frequently using the view from her apartment window as the vehicle for her expression. Yau writes, “Often, we find ourselves scrutinizing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in search of a clue to explain why she chose this particular moment and not some other one. The feeling of awe and bewilderment embodied in such concentrated looking is akin to what I experience when I again turn to her views from an apartment window, done nearly forty-five years ago.”

Murphy’s work hangs somewhere between an exacting and invented space. In the book she explains that while measured, it is necessary to avoid the pigeonhole of photorealism. Such a formulaic precision is too easy; rather, her observation must simultaneously bump up against and work with her own invention. As another rule, her invention never relies on overt markmaking and gesture. Despite the personal content, she never cares to assert her ego through those means, but rather aims toward a higher end: to deliver an experience of being in a particular moment.

We see her direct, emotionally reserved hand in the preparatory drawings on view at Sargent’s Daughters. Working Drawing (Getting Set Up) (ca. 1998), for example, depicts a note the artist wrote to herself about the anxiety of getting set up for a painting. Anxiety is literally expressed with words, and even felt in the painstaking accuracy of the picture. But true to the artist’s paradoxical insistence, one also experiences great pleasure in Murphy’s careful rendering of the moment this crumpled note rested on her desk or floor. She is incredibly serious, but always remains open to life in a lighthearted manner. In Working Drawing (Cathy) (ca. 1999), we see her name, apparently traced with a finger on the outer side of a foggy window. Cued by the painted version of this composition done a year later (featured in the book) we know that this was a very sensitive, factual study of a moment in time. But the drawing gives something the painting doesn’t: a cheeky red smudge in the top right corner. An element of chance is revealed in a number of colorful, incidental smudges found on the drawings. This body of work also demonstrates how experimental Murphy is in composing the scenes from her life. Working Drawing (Hand Mirror) (ca. 2006) is comprised of two pieces of paper unabashedly taped together in order to expand the originally conceived composition.

Murphy appears to be preoccupied with a number of relationships. Clarity and ambiguity meet in Working Drawing (Lampshade Reflected on a Painted Wall) (ca. 2000), where a fuzzy atmospheric thumbnail compares to a more linear study. In Working Drawing (n.d.) an economic contour drawing of a chair sits starkly in front of obsessively detailed wallpaper.

One cannot help but think of Murphy’s contemporary, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who also has a show up at Craig F. Starr Gallery. In the same vein, Mangold insists on acute observation while walking the fine line between naturalistic exactitude and invention, resulting in a variety of mysterious, peculiar pictures. Floor with Laundry No. 3 (1971) brings the viewer into the painting by plopping three white, yellow, and brown pieces of fabric onto wooden floorboards. Because we cannot affirm a particular perspective, it being something between hovering above and sitting on the floor, it is clear that Mangold, like Murphy, paints, with a deeply felt love of perspective and perception, for her experiences’ sake and not necessarily for the viewer’s benefit. Four Coats (1976) is simultaneously intense and simple. Two rulers rest on the right and left edges of the painting to create an immense pressure squeezed between them. But that space between is but a plain, white field — possibly the floor or a sheet of paper.

Murphy and Mangold share a miraculous ability to reveal the extraordinary nature of everyday happenings, the ordinary. Perhaps in this present time, in dealing with the immediacy technological advances impose, we can find their work especially vital. We can look towards these artists who have clearly shown us how to slow down and wake up to life.

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February 11 to March 12, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Immediately upon entering the “Pink Palace,” Aida Ruilova’s exhibition held at the Chelsea Marlborough Gallery, one is presented with is an enormous, black, vinyl blow-up thought-bubble form, humming with pressure caused by a machine perpetually filling it with more air. The sculpture seems to transmit a sort of warning for what the viewer is about to experience upon entering the main space of the gallery; it’s foreboding presence imbued with an even deeper omen suggested by it’s title, Rocky (2016). Discovering that we’re not looking at a thought-bubble, but a pair of boxing gloves (perhaps even specifically Sylvester Stallone’s gloves from his iconic movie series) violence, sweat and heavy breathing come to mind.

Moving past Rocky, The observer is then overwhelmed by Immoral Tales (2014), a 25-foot-long video projection of a woman’s plump lips being caressed by an anonymous index finger. The action isn’t merely contained by the rectangular projection; it truly feels as though it is emerging into our reality. Ruilova sucks us into a David Cronenberg-like space by supplementing the film with eerie, eroticized breathing to make the entire exhibition a fully immersive freak fest. Being a voyeur is not merely allowed but inescapable. And there’s a comfort to be found in being told what to do (especially if it’s in a dark room where no one can judge you). But this comfortableness is met with a subdued evil. We have no way of knowing whether the woman being invaded or caressed.

The tension created by this scenario is closely related to the smaller works in this exhibition: vintage film posters of 1960–70s erotic horror. These works are a continuum of the ideas and emotions explored in the films, which is an exhilarating mixture of sex, cruely, and evil. Ruilova has decorated the posters with floral motifs that were cut out of them, revealing black velvet backing. The floral designs read somewhat like the tacky flowers schoolgirls illegally emboss their textbooks with. It’s bad — like really garish and second-rate. And it’s great! One cannot help but wonder if the artist herself was once one of those bookish, misunderstood youths who listened to strange music and engaged in even stranger behaviors. Another trait Ruilova shares with those mysterious young women is a heavy, intellectual side, revealed in the titles of her work. Beyond Love and Evil (2015), for instance, is a direct reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886): a dense, existential breakdown of the problems regarding freedom and morality. The image is of a beautiful woman lying on her back, ass-forward, with her knees pulled to her chest. A human skull rests on what would have otherwise been revealed as a vagina, accompanied by two cutout flowers adorning the sides of the skull. It’s a curious combination of sex, death, humor, poise, and awkwardness that points out toward the breadth of human experience. Yellow Flowers. Grave. Procession (2015) holds onto a similar energy. Here, the side profile of a woman with little yellow flowers sprouting out of her face reminds one of Shakespeare’s Juliet or Ophelia — there’s a theatricality that clashes with the flower-cutout hovering over her face.

While some of the posters unpack a more complicated meaning, others are just plain silly and pornographic. Pleasure Seeking Nurses (2015), sports a pair of lubricated breasts with a prodigious flower-cutout right between them. I don’t think we’re expected to think too hard about the significance of this piece — and that’s OK too. Erotic horror is a form of art, similar to Surrealism or metal music, which gets at the banal, animalistic side of human nature. It can be a deep, healthy, and even cathartic experience to engage with. It can also be used to say “fuck you” to groups of people who wish to homogenize society with their ideals (i.e. mega church pastors). Pleasure Seeking Nurses, while possibly fitting into the cathartic category, is a fantastically base “fuck you.”

There is a particular, homegrown brand of strange present in this exhibition that we don’t often experience in other varieties of deranged erotica. And one major reason why “The Pink Palace” is successful is that Ruilova doesn’t objectify female sexuality — even though much of the source material does, the intent sublimates through the source. The femme fatale trope and other, similar depictions so often work against women’s liberation because it turns sexuality into a weapon — an object. This exhibition however is about experience as a whole. It’s the observer and his/her response to he heavy breathing, naked bodies, black velvet, flowers, etc. which completes the work. Because this show depends more on the public to piece together a narrative, she was free to be less explicit than in some of her previous, more comprehensive works, which can even be claustrophobic at times, as in life like (2005).

While weird and intense, the works present are clearly not intended to put anyone down or in a box, but to assert sexuality simply as such; a fun, sometimes strange, sometimes fearsome or complicated extension of humanity.

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February 25 to April 23, 2016
520 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 727 2050

It’s a rare and noteworthy instance when an exhibition is so lacking in substance that nothing can really be said in its defense — Anna Ostoya’s current show, “Slaying,” at Bortolami achieves this. The content here revolves around an investigation of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–20), by way of Cubist reproductions of the original image. The renderings are half-heartedly self indulgent, devoid of any inkling of the humanity, blood, or violence that the original conveys, and they insult all that is interesting about Cubist space. They don’t even offer a systematic investigation leading from one study to the next. Rather in choosing to pursue an associative, as opposed to an analytical approach, the artist strips away any chance the viewer may have to find meaning in this series. As the press release points out, “art making is like the act of slaying – an archaic activity, quite brutal when taking seriously. Facing reality can feel as brutal as a beheading,” [sic]. But Ostoya’s investigations are anything but brutal. Actually, if any congratulations should be given for the show, they are deserved for her ability to make a decapitation look blasé.

Looking at Holofernes Slaying Holofernes (all works 2016), on a formal level, we see generalized forms that suggest Cubism but read more like computer-generated animation, neutral colors, and a democratic placement of emphasis. In this study, Ostoya has given the slayer and the slain the head of Holofernes. In another study, Judith Slaying Judith, with all the same considerations, she has given the two main characters Judith’s head. One untitled work is a close-up of Judith’s head, applying, yet again, all the same aesthetic concerns of digital-looking fractured planes. And then there’s Holofernes, which is the same thing as Judith’s close-up, except it’s Holofernes, but for some reason it’s titled, whereas the Judith portrait isn’t. There’s an even more generalized study, Untitled, which is the same as the other paintings, only there aren’t really any heads, everything turned to abstract polygons.

One must question the arbitrary and flippant nature of the formal changes occurring from one painting to the next. Ostoya claims to move away from a commonly utilized feminist reading of this painting towards a gender-neutral depiction that speaks to some ambiguous, ubiquitous hazard in which “the slaying of the unknown ‘other’ endangers the vulnerable ‘I’.” Whatever that means. In being capricious and vague, the only thing this artist risks is boring the viewer to death. What’s more is that the undermining of the feminist interpretation of this painting takes power away from women at the present and vital time in art’s history where women are only beginning to be treated as equals to the white men.

Perhaps it is the complete severance from exegesis, as biblical apocrypha and the history of the original painting, which is what initiated the chaos and meaninglessness present in the exhibition. In the Old Testament, Judith was an actual, Israeli heroine who tricked the Assyrian general, Holofernes into drinking too much. And when he was asleep, she came to his quarters and decapitated the oppressor of her people with the help of her lovely, young maidservant. Gentileschi, whose given name was derived from Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was considered to be one of the most accomplished painters of the Baroque period (a time no less when it was impossible for women to pursue painting in the first place). She was raped by her mentor and excused for his crime in court. Despite the brutal injustices she faced, she continued to paint and created, what one would speculate as a form of catharsis and vindication, her masterpiece Judith Slaying Holofernes.

But there is no trace of that history here. In a smaller side gallery, a series of inkjet prints serve as a sort of footnote to Ostoya’s thesis. It’s a whole mess of Photoshopped versions of the original painting reiterating the same ideas in her oil versions. In many of the prints, the painting’s elements are superimposed over each other; in others, yet another layer of confusion is added through the introduction of non-sequential information such as geometric design, color splatters, and robots.

Walking away from this exhibition one is reminded of the importance of clarity over cleverness; that often plain, well-considered ideas can say much more — and may even allow one to get away with murder.

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September 12 to November 1, 2015
55 Hester Street (between Ludlow and Essex streets)
New York, 212 229 2757

They say to always watch out for the quiet ones. It’s not that they necessarily have something to hide so much as their calm, reserved nature tends to divert attention from their deep-seated, and in some cases wicked, interests. “Almost A Kiss,” Morgane Tschiember’s solo show at Tracy Williams Ltd., is an example of such a personality. There is a quietness in the space, or conversely, a subverted cacophony one might experience when they almost kiss another, but then holds back with composed restraint.

Entering this exhibition one cannot help but notice an enormous pink wall painting applied with drips directly to the back, left wall of the gallery. One is drawn in by its rosy, illuminating presence and might even be tempted to initially skip he works on the first floor because of it. Once on the bottom level it is clear that the works at hand exude sexual tension coupled with emotional intelligence. Looking at Tschiember’s four glass-and-steel sculptures — each titled Dust Devil (all works 2015) — we see languid, blown-glass forms that ooze and hug their handsome steel armatures. Each of three small, wall-mounted versions of Dust Devil (each roughly 20 x 10 x 10 inches) is composed of an architectural steel structure bearing its own transparent globule. The glass, expectant with an unseen pressure, weighs down on the steel as though it’s about to burst, fall off, or totally envelop its frame. The sculptures feel like a snapshot in time – the moment before the fall, kiss, explosion. A larger, floor-based Dust Devil suggests time in a more complex way. The lines created by the steel serve not only as the support, but also as pathways through space – the glass forms being instances on the moving trajectories. It’s quite spectacular how ephemeral these solid objects feel; they’re like watching morning dew accumulate and bead down a window.

Across the room, a two-story structure — also made with steel — features eight variations called Shibari. Named after the Japanese practice of aestheticized rope bondage, the Shibari appear to be broken or distorted pieces of pottery suspended from the support by rope, held at various heights. Unique in size, shape, color, and deformity, the clay pieces look as though they find solace in their repression as they may totally fall apart without the rope. Unlike the self-contained glass formations, an outside force is literally restraining them. There’s an intricately mysterious power struggle at hand. Perhaps these installations in relation to each other speak to a person’s need to control and/or be relinquished from control.

Moving back up to the first floor of the gallery on the way out of the exhibition, we notice another intriguing relationship to consider. Here, two sculptures occupy opposing walls of the space: Rash (Couple) on one side and Rash (Triplet) on the other. They were made by pouring concrete into long, rectangular cardboard boxes and pulling off as much as the cardboard as possible. The result of each component is a single, corporally scaled gesture relating to one’s body — similar to the initial gesture line one draws when rendering a figure. In Rash (Couple), the gesture lines butt up against each other and create a harmony as they use one another for balance, whereas the gestures of Rash (Triplet) create an uresolved tension. Because they exist in relation to the couple, they suggest that balance could or ought to be achieved, but the middle one remains in limbo between the outside two.

What this exhibition is getting at the erotic and visceral power of body language and signals as opposed to verbal exchange. The viewer is taken by these works the way he is felled by a woman’s second glance or the way she bites her lip. And this unspoken suspense is greater than achieving any sort of resolution, which is why all these sculptures — with exception to Rash (Couple) — seem to freeze in that heightened moment.

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June 7 to September 27, 2015
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at South Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, 323 857 6000

California is a great place to incubate, lending itself to a slower pace where its more contemplative residents may think and create amid beautiful landscape and sunshine, Noah Purifoy spent the last 15 years of his life creating sculptures and installations in the desert around Joshua Tree, California. His body of work, namely assemblage of locally found objects, offers a unique Mojave Desert experience that is now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The title of the show, “Junk Dada,” serves as an insight to Purifoy’s work as it finds aesthetic, contextual relatives to artists who were known for turning menial objects/readymades into profound statements, while simultaneously referring to the homophonous “junk data.” His assemblage The Last Supper II (1989), for instance, consists of old, rusted silverware and sardine cans arranged neatly in a frame. The title and earth tone composition transforms the pieces of refuse into something meaningful, or possibly holy. Like a still life, each component of once-used material is a unit of data that tells us something about being in a certain place and time, but also transcends its fractured nature to become something new and unified. Purifoy doesn’t simply repurpose objects; one can sense the history of the silverware and sardine cans the way old photographs and antiques are haunted. Because of this, there is something morbidly nostalgic, yet beautiful in using dead things to create. The meticulous arrangement of photos, pigments, a skull, and various objects in The Summer of 1965 (1996), for example, holds the tension of a mysterious spell, every object a vital component to its potency.

Walking through the exhibition, it is easy to imagine the home of many of the works: Joshua Tree is a vast and strange landscape where the eerie silence overwhelms. It takes someone with a strong intellect to thrive in such solitude and Purifoy’s work is a reflection of such an experience. There is a toughness in his creations, but there is also at times a lighthearted sense of humor. His piece Ode to Frank Gehry (1999) is as hokey as it is architectural. Perhaps it speaks to the complete and bittersweet nature of existence — that what constitutes its tragedy is also what makes it comic. It also says something about the power of imagination: Don Quixote’s windmills in the desert come to mind looking at this piece.

Purifoy created his own atlas of fetishes and imagery. Whether a given piece is a politically charged collage, a wooden sculpture, or a textile assemblage, they all point to something central in his work: his sense of humanity. The viewer feels the love of material and handiwork in Rags and Old Iron I & II (1989), through the decisive arrangement of beads and textiles, which compel us with a mystical simplicity. In three mixed-media paintings hung together — Picket Fence, Four Horsemen, and Crucifixion (all 1993) — black and gray cubes float together over a white, textured ground and form coarse, charming symbols. They hold the mystery of an ambiguous tarot card reading yet one senses that they are but honest renderings made form observation.

In an age of single-use materials and computer-fabricated objects, Noah Purifoy’s work holds relevance in that the spirit cannot be stripped from art — that making things with one’s own hands and cherishing the materials and process of creation will always be magical.

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