July 30, 2016 to February 12, 2017
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In a small, square room that branches diagonally from MoMA’s second-floor hallway, Teiji Furuhashi’s 1994 installation, Lovers, projects mutely dancing figures as dusky light onto gallery walls. Glistening like ice or the slick sterility of hospital vinyl floors, a white expanse of Marley unfurls across the gallery to meet black walls. Eyes adjusting to the low illumination, the glossy surface’s glare dominates vision, creating a sense of strange suspension. In the room’s center, the apertures of seven projectors, stacked in a spine-like tower, trace beams of light across the room’s varied contours. The hum of these machines is background and breath to the chirping pulse of the installation’s accompanying audio.

With steps that drag over the resistant surface, my motions are a material echo to the pale shadows that sidle over the surrounding walls. Starched white by the projectors’ thin lights, the dancers of Dumb Type — the artist collective that Teiji helped found in 1984 — patrol the room’s perimeter, moving along the screen-like walls. The nude figures of men and women move in synchronicity or lethargic pursuit of each other through the room’s corners and planes. One man dashes with long, dramatic strides through the rectangular frames of the walls, trailing a woman who, like Daphne to this young Apollo, is ever just beyond reach. Her short hair alive with the staccato of hurried steps, she moves counter-clockwise through the encircling walls to fade out, eroded by the harsher light of the exit. Following and overtaking the nude figures, vertical lines inscribed “limit” and “fear” rove the space, mapping the geographies of bodies and walls alike as though scanning barcodes.

As the room grows close with people, these specters move through their choreographies on a stage of flesh, illuminating viewers in a fluid projection whose bare feet are just visible through the legs of onlookers.  This shifting crowd dances with the flickering lights, which hurry the periphery to catch intimate movements even as the audience reciprocally turns to trace their gleaming paths. To enter the space is to join in the motions of the work. A man exits the room and a luminous dancer hastens to follow. I am looking down at my notebook when a figure passes over me and through me.

The installation’s austere design recalls an early ‘90s vision of futurity, imagined by one who would never get to see it; Teiji passed from AIDS-related illness in the month following the work’s original installation at MoMA in 1995. The barren simplicity of the installation hosts cruel contrasts: alive with motion and sound, but grave-like in darkness and intimacy, playing across viewers’ bodies, but aloof in the hollowness of its engagement. There is a sense of having entered someone, only to be confronted by the loneliness of fear, vulnerability, and unrequited desire. A man and woman are projected to overlap, bending towards one another, arms cradling air. The Venn diagram of their intersecting bodies is a thin, elongated silhouette, a symbolic convergence that only approximates union.

In spite of the title and the dancers’ nudity, Lovers does not emphasize romance or physical closeness, but rather the uncomfortable coupling of loving and dying, the intoxicating terror of the “little death.” Tracing their movements like memories repeated over and again, the dancers pass through the installation without leaving impressions, ghosts as ineffectual as they are impotent. Do their fleeting pursuits seek the comfort of touch or flee the realization of solitude? However, the desolate fear of abandonment is overshadowed by hints of a more final end; in prone bodies and flat horizontals, reminiscent of the flat line of a cardiograph gone flat, is the recognition not of losing but of being lost. Musing on the hope of forever that is implicit in the creative act, Lovers asks what our gestures — in life and in love — amount to when all is said and done? Despite, and perhaps because of, these grim indications of mortality, Teiji dances on in this cyclical video work, a dream ever in danger of obsolescence. We see him moving alongside his fellow dancers. Flickering into sight, he stands crucified with arms outstretched at the crosshairs of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. Wavering in and out of focus, he hesitates before falling away with the grace and control of a diver, passing into nothingness beyond museum walls.

The post So Slow It Stopped: Teiji Furuhashi at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

July 8 to August 12, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

Sticky, squishy, felty, rubbery. Plush, plump, porous.

Part cactus, part snowman-shaped Peep candy, a bulbous form stands a shy distance from the front doors. Shaded a dusty aquamarine, slightly blanched like the surface of freshly cut silicone, three cylindrical volumes perch one atop the other. In tumid contours, this shape vaguely gestures to that the class of object that contains canine chew toys, children’s building blocks, and paraphernalia for the sexually adventurous. Jayson Musson infuses Pedestrian (2014) with unexpected life, bringing the object to the physical scale of the human form. In the placement of this work, curator Feelings (whose book on soft art was published last year by Rizzoli) prepares us for the wealth of sensations to come, abstracted in objects that become bodily in their engagement of ours.

Temptingly tactile, Justin Adian’s works echo gestures that feel intimately human; in Yabba Dabba Doo (2016) a mitted hand crunches closed, while 2^nd Cousins (2016) gives a sidling sway that closes the awkward distance between a baby-boy-blue rectangle and a girlishly pink wave. Spongy, enamel-coated forms cling to gallery walls, creating pastel pop-out patterns detailed by crinkled material and real-life shadow. John Chamberlain’s Untitled (1967) seems to complete these flirtatious motions on the second floor of the gallery, comprised of two partial spheres that kiss, tenderly embracing to become whole.

Guy Goodwin’s cardboard cushions resemble the dotted patterning and depressions of upholstery, an allusion borne out in titles such as Springtime for Henry Grimes (2016). However, we are made sharply aware of the distinction between content and form as Goodwin’s cardboard amoebas stiffly sail through stippled seas. Weirdly plush in volume, these rigid surfaces model structures that they cannot possibly match, distorting internal integrity to achieve the uncanny quality of plastic food or fake hair.

The humble moving blankets that compose Sam Moyer’s series of Night Moves (2009) are impeccably folded, the original patterning of gray and neutral-toned expanses are divided by neat seams, joining one region to another. Regular, orderly ripples traverse each square plane. As with Goodwin’s unyielding bubbles, Moyer’s compositions fall eerily flat, less interested as they are in tactile pleasure, than in clean aestheticism.

Retaliating against hard lines and geometry, Lynda Benglis’s Untitled (1970) makes the fluid discrete in a colorful spill that fails to mar the floor of the gallery. Uneven blocks of color seep stickily in this flow frozen in diffusion, movement caught in permanence. By contrast, Erwin Wurm’s Internal (2016) dissolves that which should have integrity, warping the sturdy exoskeleton of a toaster.

Samara Golden’s pillowy figurative sculptures are tattooed with patterns that feel distinctly, embarrassingly American. Here is the body politic, striated by squiggly bacon strips, foreheads emblazoned with law books and hammering gavels. If we sit too hard and long on the couch — watching conventions, of course — will we too soak up its dull, grandmotherly floral ornamentation? The American flag flourishes across arms upraised in the pose of one of Picasso’s demoiselles. Eyes, painted over these designs and illuminated by a track of fierce gallery lights, look at us coyly sideways. Walk around to other side, and these same limp forms are illuminated by a blacklight that causes a very different relief to manifest: glowing skeletons, skulls, and bones fluoresce. Yet, for these two fronts, there is no substance, no interior.

Airy, insubstantial, empty, hollow, these various works find life in the inanimate and the object in the human. There may not be a whole lot in the way of content here, but that is proudly proclaimed by the exhibition title. This is about substance, but not the intellectual kind; texture is the name of the game and we are awarded with a crunchy, crinkly, plushy show that gives to our gaze as easily and as generously as it would under the weight of a hand. Touch with your eyes. I dare you to feel something.

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July 1 to July 30, 2016
126 Baxter Street (between Hester and Canal streets)
New York, 212 260 9927

Every person is a Venn diagram, sequences of spheres coming into and out of focus. We are composed of our gender, sexuality, nationality, histories both personal and cultural; but we are also something more, a quality of selfhood that is as ineffable as it is irresolute. In “The Ties that Bind,” the ICP-Bard MFA class of 2016 offers us selves sketched out in networks across time and space. This group of 10 artists, hailing from eight different countries, undertakes an investigation of self in the attempt to understand who we are in the context of our relationships and our worlds.

Excerpted from larger series and engaging in explicit storylines, these photographs and videos acknowledge their own fragmentation. Verónica Puche’s two photographs are accompanied by a descriptive page, inscribed with the Roman numeral “I,” a mark that suggests the continuation of her account. The story that plays out across her photographs — the life and death of her great uncle Guillermo — resists the photo as an agent of stasis and receives it instead as the ghost of someone long gone. Guillermo comes to the artist and the viewer like a Marian apparition, traversing time and space to look seriously out at us from this photograph of a photograph. Opening onto fracture and discontinuity, Puche’s Guillermo and Granada  (both 2016) announce the photo as a second existence, a proposition that finds correspondence in many of the images now coloring the walls of the Baxter Street Camera Club.

At the far end of the gallery, an unwavering projection casts a still image onto the wall. From a foamy blue room, a young girl looks out from atop the bare shoulders of a man who is turned away. Part of the same projection, English text scrolls  below while a pair of headphones offer the original audio in Spanish. Martha Naranjo Sandoval takes up the personal narrative as written in familial memory in How this has to be told (2016), a audio-visual work that catches the artist and her grandmother disagreeing over the story of this childhood photo. Is the young Naranjo Sandoval crying or laughing? Naranjo Sandoval’s grandmother wavers in the face of a granddaughter’s certainty, however, neither can truly remember. In opening interpretation to dispute, Naranjo Sandoval questions the verity that photography implies; is the past is merely what we believe it to be? How this has to be told demonstrates the continued life of history in the mutability of a photograph, which grows ever more exaggerated with the years that pass between the present and its moment of capture. In the ambiguity of memory and interpretation, doubt is the birth of new narratives.

Beginnings too are born in uncertainty. Matthew Papa catches the story at its inception in Self-portrait with Jerome (2015), one in a series of nude self-portraits that capture the artist as he encounters other men for the first time. Looking inscrutably out of the print, the artist casually accepts Jerome’s tender embrace. This portrait is a dance of intimacies; even while Jerome’s body presses despairingly against Papa’s, his fingers on the artist’s shoulder arch away from this unfamiliar body as if afraid to caress. Papa’s head, cocked upward, reciprocates the tender press of Jerome’s forehead, but also conveys a wary consideration of the camera’s gaze. These tentative affections, tempered by cautious trepidation, feel directly pertinent in the weeks following the shooting in Orlando, Florida, speaking to what we can see of the future and how we may continue to hope.

Each of these works constitutes a proposal, an experiment, in identities coming into contact with others; “You are you, and I am I.” However, you and I must also sometimes be together, overlapping. These works, which are diverse in more ways than one, reckon with the trials of alterity and the modes of understanding the collision of incongruous narratives. Together they offer a model of a self constructed through others and a society of accumulated selves.

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May 5 to June 25, 2016
525 West 19th Street
New York, 212 727 2070

At David Zwirner, Jordan Wolfson’s puppet, totally helpless against the insistent tug of thick chains, inspires a deep sympathy. Yet, its vulnerability springs precisely from its lifelessness. The title, Colored sculpture (2016), fails so utterly to encapsulate the presence and experience of this work. Yet, simultaneously, this overly simple characterization reminds a viewer of the objecthood of this figure, which can, at moments, feel so terribly real. The disappointing artificiality of its intelligence swims into evidence in the bouncing, unnatural animations that dance through the figure’s deep-set eye sockets. Both point to empathy, but also mark him as an object of contempt; Colored sculpture shifts in and out of the semblance of sentience. Even as Wolfson takes advantage of our susceptibility to perceive humanity everywhere, the emotive response is interrupted by the cruelty with which this uncanny figure is tossed about on his scaffold stage. Does the perception of humanity precede or emerge from the violence that is being wreaked upon the body that Wolfson presents?

Heavy steel chains and a limp form clatter and scrape across the gallery’s concrete floor. Mechanized pulleys move back and forth across parallel tracks, distributing and retracting the chain supports in a stilted choreography. The chains withdraw and the metal body ascends to reveal the caricatured form of a boy whose eyes, made of LCD screens, dart around the room to meet onlookers’ stares, tracking them in real time with face-recognition software. Mouth fixed in an expression that is both grimace of pain and hostile affront, this boy — less Huck Finn than Pinocchio, sans-nose — sways, suspended. The strange grace of this figure, as he is gently raised, toes seeming to articulate a regretful caress as they leave the floor, becomes even more fragile and poignant when, a moment later, this precious burden falls unceremoniously, clamorously to the ground.

The thunder of metal is joined precipitously by the Percy Sledge’s swelling vocals as “When A Man Loves a Woman” unexpectedly blasts from speakers overhead. The gallery is filled with a carnival’s promise of seedy spectacle and thrill; here though, you don’t have to pay to watch a chained bear, or boy, dance on chains from behind the security of a metal fence. The uninhibited violence of this display — expressed in the punished surfaces of the floor and the clown’s chipped, ravaged face — breaks brutally upon a viewer. An attendant, earbuds securely inserted, stands watchful, lest visitors stray too close.

Colored sculpture is a study in sadism. However, it remains unclear on which side of the fence the viewer identifies: as aggressor and instigator of this pathetic display, or as with empathy for this vulnerable humanoid creature. In one sense, Colored sculpture is its own master and puppet, wielding the whip to its own torturous destruction. After all, the boyish form is one with the chains mechanism that pulls it about in a self-contained cycle of violence and suffering. In a 2012 interview with Stefan Kalmár, Wolfson said that, “imagining something is a way of understanding to decide if it’s wrong or right,” posing his works as trials of moral fortitude. This sculpture comes to us as a question, a curiosity, about a world in which we can treat people as objects and objects as human beings.

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May 4 to June 26, 2016
235 Bowery (between Rivington and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 219 1222

Exiting the east stairwell onto the New Museum’s third floor, I am greeted immediately by Hanging Man (2016), a sculpture of wood and wax mounted on a wheeled, metal table. The wooden structure’s arms end in clumps of clay from which organic sticks awkwardly protrude. Just below this armature, a figure rests vertically but upside down, legs kicking in the air atop a torso-less giant head. Clumps of dark brown wax are strewn about the worktable. Below, a stream of burnt sienna paint issues from a tube to form a spiraling pile beneath the table’s final shelf. Crudely, playfully, this tableau evokes linguistic and experiential allusions that, much as we try to avoid it, are undeniably part of human life; these rough, “piece-of-shit” objects suggest the different shapes and smells that our bodies are capable of producing. However, equally present in the sculpture is its titular relationship to hang-man — formally established in the hooking arrangement of the wooden arms — and the history of violence so carelessly invoked in this children’s game. This olfactory experience and the following tide of associations seems a fitting introduction to “Al-ugh-ories,” a survey exhibition that attempts to address the humor, complexity, and satire of Nicole Eisenman’s varied and probing works.

After the fashion of the old masters that she alludes to, Eisenman creates compositions so rich in their references that they are painted not only in pigment but also in words and relationships. In Night Studio (2009), the names of artists and movements listed on the spines of painted books color my reading of the painting, pressing it into a history of imperialism and cultural appropriation, even while objects such as a bottle of Vitamin Water and an orange extension cord return the scene to the present moment.

In literal and contemporary interpretations, Eisenman demonstrates the ridiculousness and crudity of the ideas that construct our intellectual canon. Eisenman visualizes Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex in Dysfunctional Family (2009), mocks the fleshy dynamism of Michelangelo’s renditions of the human form in Spring Fling (1996), and teasingly exaggerates the tawdry romance implicit in traditional renditions of Death and the Maiden (2009). The Triumph of Poverty (2009) gestures explicitly to Hans Holbein the Younger’s drawing of the same name, even while imposing a group of miniature figures copied directly from Pieter Bruegel’s The Parable of the Blind Men (1568). In spite of the richness of this iconography, there is a fundamental humanity in Eisenman’s paintings that make them legible to a varied audience. Her portraits render our lives in startling relief, bringing the awkwardnesses and banalities of life to the painted canvas. This leveling does not discriminate between an alluring nude, an individual performing oral sex on his or her partner, and boy looking onto his own body with confusion.

In a society that mortifies the flesh for the beacon of intellectual democratization, Eisenman’s sculptures and canvases confront us with visions of human corporeality, capturing the body in all of its base carnality and abjection. Captured in gaudy hues and caricatured parts, these figures are aliases for human bodies that allow us to enter a surreal space of symbolism and alterity. In the startling revelation of the human form rendered grotesque and confusing, Eisenman refuses to adhere to expectations of class, age, or gender. In Coping (2008), a mummy, a bundled form, and a female nude pass each other in anonymity on a provincial street. A reclining yellow figure in the forefront of Night Studio, although explicitly female, remains uncertainly coded in a challenge to a sexual binary that is fully realized by the child who castrates himself in Dysfunctional Family. Many of Eisenman’s characters exhibit a curiosity and physical self-inspection that both question and potentially affirm difference. The cartoonish cyclops of Selfie (2014), a boyish figure in I’m with Stupid (2001), and child in the Dysfunctional Family all seem to wonder “Am I normal?” These disruptions ask us, in turn, to dispute the idea of normal and other cultural expectations laden with judgmental biases.

Eisenman reveals modern allegories in even the most banal of gestures. The stack of books and cheap beer depicted in Night Studio do as much to communicate time and narrative as iconographic and allegorical details do in classical paintings. The individuals who live out the minutiae of the everyday in these colorful canvases unselfconsciously wear their unusual identities on their sleeves. As layered as they are in emblematic markers of character, these badges point to an “ordinary” that is not necessarily common. By comparing the flawed models of aesthetic tradition to the normative power of contemporary conventionality, Eisenman demonstrates the stifling impossibility of conforming to the idealized archetype. In the lovingly mocking tone of Breugel’s paintings of peasants, the artist brings our daily discomforts and failures into sharp (or occasionally stylized) relief. These unapologetic portraits of unexceptional life are characterized not only my mistakes, foolishness, and crudity, but also by the joys of affection and laughter. Eisenman’s forgiving gaze tells us that it is alright to have a nonconventional face, body, or sexuality. Because nothing follows the prescribed model, particularly not our allegories.

The post Crudely, Playfully: Nicole Eisenman at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

April 21 to May 21, 2016
508 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 0890

Stacked vertically on the page, black-and-white thumbnails of photographs and sketchy drawings survey flat, domestic, suburban environments. Although gallery documentation is rarely more significant than the titles and materials it catalogs, Greene Naftali’s checklist communicates the stakes of William Levitt’s “Telemetry,” in which sculptural installations are shown to be as iconic as two-dimensional drawings. Leavitt has filled the gallery’s first-floor space with a series of works on paper, as well as three installations: the interior of a modern home in Telemetry Set (2016), a crimson-lit collection of contraptions and plants in The Small Laboratory (2015), and French doors opening onto a video of a rotating planet in Arctic Earth (2013).

Drawing influence from an industry that is pure façade, Leavitt’s work is informed by the Los Angeles milieu in which it has developed. The artist’s choice to work in installation is pointed; this medium permits a living space and requests bodily interaction from the viewer, while also denying reality and existing only in simulation. From afar, the forms and colors of these sets suggest an atmosphere laden with familiarity.

The artist is explicit in his pretense, orienting these mirage-like sets so completely towards one angle that they are immediately disrupted by the sight of a wooden backdrop’s unpainted backside or the view of the projectors from the side. As one’s engagement with the works inevitably deviates from the preferred perspective, one approaches an illusion that intentionally falls flat.

Such compositions and details belie the familiarity of these scenes — spaces accessed either on the screen or in real life — and removes illusionism from this world. Leavitt’s sets motion at action without permitting or even tempting use; the stage is not set for life, but for one’s gaze upon it. Leavitt captures the idea of the house that is not a home, an engagement with the familiar that is detached, functioning as a telemeter — a device that transmits environmental readings from afar — to communicate intimacy in distance. The closer viewers approach and the more they yearn to enter the world that Leavitt paints, the more it collapses before that desiring gaze. In Telemetry Set, a slick, modern seat solidifies into a cushion smudged with dirty handprints. A multi-stemmed lamp to the chair’s left is the same kind sold at my corner store. Leavitt furthers the superficial references latent in these articles of furniture with a pointed interest in formal correspondences. In Telemetry Set, the thick boughs and rosy leaves of an artificial tropical plant are mirrored in the branching metal limbs and pink tone of the floor lamp that stands beside it. An analogous correspondence exists between the bamboo posts and a striated cylinder to the far left. These symmetries, immediately evident in color and form, bridge the binary of interior and exterior that these objects contain.

In this synthesis of spaces, bringing the unstable identity of the installation in dialogue with the extant environment of the gallery, Leavitt weaves a collage of locations that is clear in both drawn and sculptural works. In large part, the transparency of this union emerges from the contrast of the elements brought together; the gallery is set in opposition to clear signifiers of home, laboratory, and outer space. The clarity of this spatial fragmentation allows Leavitt to compose pseudo-collages out of partial environments. The exhibition follows the mood set by drawings such as Landscape with Exercycle and Interior (1991), which create conscious confusions within the space represented. In this pastel drawing, three different kinds of spaces are spliced, bringing together a landscape of mountains, a view of a forest, and a curving modern interior. An exercise machine hovers in the foreground, bridging the space between the forest and the interior but belonging to neither. This exercycle cannot exist in simultaneity with the architectural elements and landscape that are detailed beside it. Nonetheless, Leavitt brings them incongruously together to signal the uncertainty of the space in which they exist. The projections in Telemetry Set function similarly, presenting a shifting orientation and confusing the space represented in installation with images of garden plants and ceiling fans.

Leavitt makes no attempt to veil the discontinuities of space: the lights that frame A Small Laboratory are plain to see, the cut-out quality of Arctic Earth is immediately evident. Leavitt’s interest lies in the union of these intertwined spaces, in the transparency of the simulacrum. Arctic Earth directly addresses this discrepancy of time and space, abandoning mimesis for magic and imagination. Raised from the cold concrete of the gallery floor by wooden platforms, slats guide viewers into this pretended space. Both distant and close, a rotating planet is visible through open French doors on a projected screen that is partially obscured by dark, heavy curtains. Behind, the planet Earth rotates sideways on its axis, the sun glinting coldly in the distance. Though the image is compelling and suggests the narrative of science fiction, viewers are never wholly taken in, nor are they meant to be. Leavitt manipulates space as another medium that may bring its own formal qualities to a composition. In spite of their impossibility, these sets also necessarily engage a narrative structure, implying actions that go unfulfilled. In eroding realistic representation, Leavitt returns the set to its purpose as a space in which viewers may suspend their own reality in order to enter one of possibility and alterity.

The post Screen Life or Real: William Leavitt’s “Telemetry” at Greene Naftali appeared first on artcritical.

March 24 to May 1, 2016
143b Orchard Street (between Delancey and Rivington)
New York, 212 533 4670

In their two-person installation at Louis B. James Matthew and Katy Fischer have created pieces that evoke another time and place, one that does not and cannot exist. While Matthew’s paintings attempt to capture the complexity of an impossible environment in representation, Katy’s ceramics suggest a whole that is not real. These are works that aggregate, excavate, and re-collect the indifferent details of today and yesterday, and that also re-imagine them in a playful and inventive disorientation.

Functioning as vibrant windows, the bright, unadulterated colors of Matthew’s paintings are points of natural illumination in the austere whiteness of the gallery. In canvases suffused with swiftly applied swaths, atmosphere is communicated in simplicity. The linear division between two blocks of paint serves to illustrate a horizon and convey the sensorial saturation of a landscape. These abstract compositions are ambiguous cross-sections of the natural world in which our perspective is never made clear; viewers are left with the uncertainty of whether we are in it or on it, above it or below it. Nothing can be as it should, as you expect it, in a representation of landscape where the horizon is made vertical.

The artist exploits the spatial coding of found materials to disrupt the comfortable aloofness of the gallery space. Paris, 1907 (2015) engages viewers corporeally by pressing a chair seat, the place meant to hold a body, against the wall, as one’s actual, upright flesh exists as floor in relation to the chair’s legs. A painted canvas is suspended from the bottom limbs, presenting a slanting line between straw-yellow and a cool brown. A window onto a sloping hill? Turned earth? An abstract painting? Self (knowledge) and for Cathy (both 2016) provide a more generous contrast to the sense of inversion created by Paris, 1907, opening onto the viewer in a way that evokes action; spines of books prompt one to read, a mirror presents the opportunity to view the work and the gallery from a position otherwise impossible. Altogether, these painted structures are simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, engaging a viewer’s physical presence while subtly dominating the gallery’s limited space. Rather than existing as an oppressive force, however, these sculptural works present fragmented images, flattened awkwardly into a confusion of fleeting sensations and orientations.

While Matthew’s paintings recode the gallery in relation to a viewer’s body, Katy’s ceramics discourage interaction. Although painstaking in their idiosyncrasy and handmade precision, these miniature works resist the viewer’s temptation to slip them easily into a pocket or to handle them absentmindedly between thumb and forefinger. The components of the Shards (2016) series demand care and attention for their own preservation but also for yours; implications of intimacy are interrupted by fine points and rigid forms. Arranged in systems that are suggestive of an order that is not revealed, these various pieces come together as a puzzle that lacks direct correspondence.

Katy’s ceramic compositions layer the unexceptional relics of daily life with the overbearing operations of exhibition.The fragments, some recognizable, others invented, are a confusion of scale in which figures reminiscent of a miniature traffic cone and a scaled-down scythe are placed beside those of a solitary die, a fishing hook and a screw. In spite of their familiarity, these recognizable pieces are given no pride of place above the unrecognizable geometric slivers and chips that cluster in the spaces between. These ceramic objects adhere to the logics of sea glass and arrowheads, serving a purpose that has since been forgotten or made obsolete. Presented in rows on pedestals or on a wood-and-Plexi vitrine — in manners particular to museums with their attendant overtones of classification and determination — the ceramic components seek to preserve that which is not precious. There is a certain illogic to creating objects that are never meant to be complete, especially ones such as these that seem to memorialize the litter of contemporary urban spaces in a medium that could endure for centuries.

In both bodies, the mode of presentation comes as a point of rupture rather than stability in the relationship between the works and the space that they occupy. In suggestive symbolism and their rootedness elsewhere, these ceramics and paintings fit uncomfortably in the gallery, drawing attention to the unreality and emptiness of such a space. In the awkwardness of their occupation, these works provide the viewer with an escape route into the impossible space that they themselves are dreaming of.

The post “Inventive Disorientation”: Katy and Matthew Fischer at Louis B. James appeared first on artcritical.

March 11 to May 29, 2016
701 Mission Street (at 3rd Street)
San Francisco, 415 978 2787

In her recent exhibition at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Samara Golden captures the eerie feeling of glancing into your neighbor’s apartment to realize that its floor plan is identical to your own but in reverse. For “A Trap in Soft Division,” Golden has appropriated the Center’s natural skylights, iterating the same set of furnishings across the 18 lit alcoves, making three groupings of six installations. Each furniture set is mounted upside down in a skylight, visible in a large, tiled mirror placed below the entire installation. Structured identically throughout — with a couch bookended by table lamps facing a low-coffee table and, behind, floor-to-ceiling windows — divisions between the three sets are denoted by minor transformations of light and ornamentation.

Although illuminated by the natural light from the real windows in each room, the character of each space is dramatically altered by the shift from that existing warmth to the cool tones introduced by the additional artificial light. The decorations surrounding the windows further the divide, defining each room’s style and classing it atmospherically and temporally. The array of rooms may be read either as a single space across a span of time or as six different chambers occupied in different ways. Strewn-about ornaments confer the semblance of life on these spaces, which are at once alien and uncannily familiar.

The unexceptional essentials of life are concentrated into these cubicles of space — disparate tasks brought into an unusual proximity. The arrangement of the accessories hazards a casual tone, one set by a computer, in one variation, which is open and ever so slightly askew, or by a blanket tossed nonchalantly across the stiff back of the sofa in another. Details like an abandoned plate of pasta, still slathered with cooling food, create a space that has just been absented, caught in physical and temporal states of suspension. However much these small gestures are intended to open these spaces to us, their rigidity and uniformity rebuff entry. We are warmly invited into a space that we cannot occupy, in a literal sense, because of its inverted orientation, but also because it is not plastic enough to accommodate the multiplicity of our forms.

The resultant rooms seem to speak in the aesthetics of urban living, of existing carefully on the surface of a space without putting down roots. But they also engage in the wider phenomenon of standardized form: you sit, alone, in an architecture shared by hundreds of others in the tens of blocks surrounding your own. You start at the noise of your alarm, only to relax apprehensively with the realization that the sound has emanated through your floor from the apartment below. The objects that occupy these in-between spaces are as signs that become representative of their makers, expressions of identity as subtle (or as blatant) as laptop-stickers. These are the materialized inscriptions that allow us to lay claim to mass-produced forms. The discomfort of Golden’s show is in the recognition of how uneasily and superficially these assertions of individuality lie.

“A Trap in Soft Division” speaks to cultural standardization that begins in tract housing and apartment blocks and proceeds into the minutiae of our lives, from our electronics to the shirts that we wear. Peering over the barrier into the magic mirror, we are bestowed with an omniscient understanding of the ubiquitous forms that rule our world; the computer built into this upside-down installation could very well be the tiny laptop into which I am now typing these very words. The exhibition’s title speaks to this sense of complacent, comfortable limitation. It’s a trap because we are not truly given a choice, yet it is not so restrictive as to force a change.

Golden sees her own work as a solution to the problem that it proposes, which “effectively breaks through the solitude it is meant to depict, fleetingly carving out a space that brings visitors together through a joint experience.” While persuaded by the alienation that the artist has captured so thoroughly in her representation of contemporary existence, I remain unconvinced by the community that I am meant to have joined; rather than inspiring a lonely companionship, “A Trap In Soft Division” heightens my sense of distance from those strangers whose curious eyes I avoid in the cold surface of the mirror.

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February 26 to March 13, 2016
99 Gansevoort St
New York, 212 570 3600

The Whitney’s elevator doors slid apart to reveal an open room marked by expanse and emptiness, illuminated by the slipping rays of a setting sun. In spite of a modest number of occupants, the space resounded with a roar of commotion. Andrea Fraser’s expansive sound-installation, Down the River (2016), inhabited the fifth floor like a ghost, hovering at the limits of awareness, threatening to become manifest. The audio was recorded in the A-block of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, which, although 32 miles distant from the museum, also looks onto the Hudson River and the landscape beyond.

The deception implicit in the layered sounds of museum and prison was never fully realized by Fraser’s installation. It was only too easy to discern that the recorded audio was not of the museum space, for surely the expected tourists and Chelsea gallery-hoppers were not hammering and shouting across an echoing expanse; it was not the museum’s loudspeaker that echoed through the recording. Content was not the only indication of displacement. Saturated with texture and reverberation, the sounds were overwritten by the spaces in which they were captured. With eyes closed, the clamor of voices and the scrape and clang of metal recreated a place that was almost tangible when you could escape the visual. Walking from one window to the other, I sensed my passage through a variety of spaces: the loudspeaker reflected and mutated, inscrutable in its own echo and attesting a vast scale. A man murmured and the interstices between projection and reverberation indicated that he had spoken to the walls of a small room. Some voices were startling in their appropriateness, seeming too vividly real in contrast with the unnatural character of the other sounds. In their uncanny realism, they threatened to reach out and pull me into that smaller space. In these uncomfortable moments, Fraser brings her viewers the magic of transportation tainted by the shock of realizing the place they have been brought to is one that they never want to be. I felt that if I looked up, I would find myself as a fly on the wall of Sing Sing, as if there was another expanse just beyond the gallery. When I heard voices in the recording, I would involuntarily halt, as though I had been called or spoken to. Because, in a sense, I had.

Should we be fooled? The failure of this recording to alter the museum in which it was housed perhaps necessarily indicates the fundamental incompatibility of these spaces. The emptiness of the floor met the litany in a contrast that expressed that museum halls are never truly empty, are always echoing with implications and suppressions. Fraser’s text attempted to tie the Whitney and Sing Sing in the tradition of institutional critique for which the artist is known. The installation’s title refers explicitly to a slang term for incarceration, “going up the river.” In the same manner that the audio itself transports its listener to the place of the prison, the title reorients its audience; we are asked to consider what it is to be a prisoner who exists in captivity, looking from afar toward the museum, a space which is characterized by influx of attendants who choose to enter and may depart at will. The work is a biting condemnation of the viewers that it addresses, who, in their mere presence, empower the museum and further the distances between these institutions.

Last December at Light Industry, in Brooklyn, Fraser expressed regrets regarding the caustic, joking form that her performances often take; works such as Museum Highlights (1989) and Little Frank and His Carp (2001) condescend not only to the museums that they are executed in, but also, to an extent, to the audience that visits such institutions. Within the group of onlookers there is an even further divide between those who know the insincerity of her behavior and those who accept her actions at face-value. Wearily, Fraser observed that, no matter the ultimate recipient of her critique, the audience always laughed hardest at those of its own members who did not understand her performance for what it was. Joke’s on you. Although this installation is not farcical in the same manner, instead, following the more serious tone of recent works such as L’1% C’est Moi (2011) or There’s No Place Like Home (2012), Fraser continues to manipulate her audience. However, this joke is on all of us, even the artist herself.

I began to walk to the stairs, passing first through the sharper sounds of a single cell, then on to the din of the hall, which was punctuated by the opening and closing of heavy metal gates. I paused. I stood as a single point in the expanse of the Whitney’s fifth floor, an expanse that felt like infinitude and possibility. Diagonally across the wooden floor, a couple walked towards each other, taking pictures that depicted the sequentially closed distance between them. At the massive windows, groups of visitors stand pointing out landmarks of the New York skyline, impervious to the rattles and clanks that shook through the room. Criticism is most painful when it contains glimmers of truth, that some gaps cannot be bridged.

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