September 10 to October 17, 2015
521 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11 avenues)
New York, 212 414 4144

Sarah Sze makes art from a sci-fi future. Though we recognize objects, they seem to have evolved past our understanding, to be organized by unfamiliar principles, and bound by forces we cannot see. During a conversation with the artist on October 3 at Tanya Bonakdar gallery, curator Russell Ferguson compared her work to “a scientific experiment run off the rails.” Sze is known for employing everyday materials: Q-tips, water bottles, matchbooks, loose change, aspirin, and so on. But this exhibition presents an uncharacteristic embrace of both technology (sound and video), and traditional art materials such as chalk, wood, glassine, and paint. A delicate work on the gallery’s second floor, made of stones, steel, paper and a solitary branch, titled Night Standing (all works 2015), looks like the kind of pet a robot would make for company after all the humans are gone.

Paint is front, center, and all over the sides of this show. Acrylic on various plywood, newspaper, or plastic supports stands, leans, or dribbles on to the floor. Lacy white sheets of it hang from crossbars, mirroring and good-naturedly mocking the “white cube” of gallery walls, and a great swath on the floor at the entrance resembles a rather messy installation in progress, deliberately confusing visitors who often pause, thinking the show not open yet.

This ambiguity is deliberate. Sze believes her work is most interesting when our understanding teeters in a precarious way — and she courts our uncertainty accordingly. That is the moment when the work ceases to be in conversation only with its maker, and starts to interact with the viewer.

The gallery visitor is set several challenges in this show. Not only must he or she tread lightly and carefully around the seemingly fragile works (a limited number of people are allowed into the exhibition at one time), but once in, one must embark on the conceptual unpacking of these deconstructed paintings. In Mirror with Landscape Leaning (Fragment Series) a torn picture of pink clouds in a blue sky floats on a wall while organized lines of white paint trail from plywood balanced on a chair. In Lost Image Standing there is practically no paint at all, yet scraps of archival prints of sunsets clamped to a large rectangle formed of stainless steel rods seem to indicate a refreshing new kind of landscape.

Art about artmaking is a difficult enterprise but Sze succeeds in connecting the artist’s challenges — and those she sets the viewer — with our greater challenges as a species. No answers are given, so understanding is not easy.

Upstairs, Sze’s focus expands from interaction with art to interaction with the Earth and the cosmos. Occasionally we see this literally as the artist’s hand in the making, as in the case of a glazed ceramic sculpture titled Grey Matter, where peeled and twisted shavings of clay have been wrested from a squarish block and litter the floor around it — an intervention that seems almost violent. A hammock called Hammock (inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1955 combine, Bed) conjures the idea of a comfy rest, but a closer look reveals that the hammock’s strings are already occupied by a smattering pattern of acrylic paint. In Measuring Stick, a desk previously used by Sze for video and sound editing is now densely clustered with steel armatures supporting assorted unsettling objects, including broken glass and an egg, and video projectors positioned amongst the clutter stream NASA’s feed from the Voyager 1, our only lonely spacecraft in interstellar space. The desk is both the site and the evidence of the creative process, and the NASA feed, of creation itself. Outside Measuring Stick’s dark room, smooth grey rocks are neatly bifurcated and lined up by size, a secret bird’s nest made out of archival prints, branches, stone, thread, and enamel is hidden in a skylight, and blue chalk dust liberally dusted over the floor functions as a visual signifier of water, doubly so when gallery goers blithely wander into it as they did one recent rainy day, tracking blue footprints all over the gallery, down the stairs, and out into the street.

The post Cosmos of the Quotidian: Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar appeared first on artcritical.

To refer to Do Ho Suh’s works on paper as “drawings” is not quite right. Yes, paper and sometimes pencil are involved, but in his employ these materials alchemically morph into sculpture, while the tools of sculpture — blueprints and string — flatten into two dimensions. This refusal to conform to the dictates of medium and space is gentle — a question rather than an edict. The artist’s thoughtful investigations into personal, communal and historical conceptions of home and memory have always been similarly untethered by gravity and undaunted by scale.

The artist’s oeuvre is gathered for the first time into an English-language monograph, with essays by Clara Kim, Elizabeth A.T. Smith, and Rochelle Steiner, and published in conjunction with dual exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin’s 26^th street and Chrystie street locations. The catalogue and shows are focused around Suh’s drawing: renderings and sketches of projects, poignantly wavery thread on paper, and the labor-intensive “Rubbing/Loving” series.

Throughout his work, Suh has recreated the physical environs of the various homes he’s lived in, reinterpreting the house he grew up in (a traditional Korean hanok); his first apartment in the US, in Providence, Rhode Island; and many more after that. They are reincarnated in translucent organdy-like fabric, suspended from the ceiling or as a tiny cottage crashing into the space between industrial buildings in Liverpool or a rooftop at UC San Diego. Sometimes, as in the series of colored-pencil-on-paper “Self-Portraits,” on view in the Chrystie Street gallery, the homes literally emerge from the head or the heart of the artist, bifurcating the chest cavity or sprouting from the frontal lobe — the meaning of place exemplified as biological organic extension of self.

Suh’s telling of his story of immigration and transience — of leaving home and finding a new or many new ones — invokes universal human histories. We all have left home to make our way, only to carry vestiges with us by design or by accident. This conjuring of collective experience is never more literal than in the “Rubbing/Loving” project, where the artist covers interior and exterior walls of homes with vellum and painstakingly rubs graphite or colored pencil over the surfaces, creating textured tracings of the walls, floors, tiles, light switches, radiators, toilet seats and all. In videos displayed at both galleries, we see the artist and his assistants at work, sometimes blindfolded, crouched in bathtubs, and perched on ladders, shoulder to shoulder, or alone in the rain, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing silently with dirty hands in an unsettlingly compulsive ritual. These projects began with the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, where Suh exhibited three rubbings from housing in the old part of the city as a reference to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, news of which was censored by the government. The blindfold is not a punishment but rather an exercise in disciplined sensory integration — if we can’t see then we can feel and hear and discern together.

At the Chrystie street gallery we see the fruits of these efforts reconfigured in wooden structures: small, freestanding rooms lined with the rubbings made on the other side of the world. The rhythmic scraping sounds of their making are piped in — strange white noise not immediately connectable to the structures themselves. The effect is disconcerting though not altogether unpleasant, allowing the viewer a sense of participation in the making of the work — one can imagine even farther back to a life in the tiny room, living, working, looking out the opaque window through the gallery wall to the city of Gwangju.

In the 26^th street gallery is a ghostly recreation of the artist’s former apartment at 348 West 22^nd street, the open wall facing the street, and blueprint-like rubbings of walls and floor, covering the walls and floor. The apartment space is smaller than the gallery, but mapped out it expands to fill the room, inviting many more visitors than would comfortably fit in the small studio apartment. Apparently the artist took advantage of a gap between tenants to return to his old home with his team of assistants, capturing every mundane detail so that gallery goers might see what he saw every day, to share his space with him for a little while.

Suh’s themes of togetherness and shared past, present, and future recur movingly in his thread and watercolor drawings. Figures sprout other figures from their bodies, continuously mirroring or trailing as colorful ghost shadows. The lines swirl and waver from one body to another and beyond, as though eddying in currents or blown by the wind — hinting at a force beyond the picture, beyond the dimension, beyond our, or these, selves. Many of the works on paper have the word “Karma” in the title, though as expertly explained by Rochelle Steiner in her catalogue essay, “Do Ho Suh’s Karmic Journey,” it is karma not only in the colloquial shorthand definition of cosmic justice but also in a greater sense of the interconnectedness of all times and all people.

The “Drawings” book adeptly traces Suh’s exploration of these connections — person and place, group and individual, inside and outside. We see the evolution of the “Bridge Project,” a never-to-be-realized “perfect home,” situated equidistant from New York and Seoul on an impossible bridge that spans the continental U.S. and the Pacific Ocean, connecting both cities. In every depiction, smoke drifts upward from the tiny chimney. This is not just an unfeasible house — it is an unfeasible home. Another recurring ideal is the legged or many-legged peripatetic house, evoking an oft-quoted desire of the artist to carry his home with him like a snail, though, unlike a snail, in Suh’s depiction he has many helpers.

Suh’s work rewards mindfulness, inviting the viewer to contemplation. Standing in the Chrystie street show, my mind wanders to my own experience of space: of this gallery space and my memories here, and of other spaces in other times throughout my life where I similarly paused, knowing that seemingly fleeting moment would stay with me. We all carry our past places with us, perhaps just not as consciously as Suh.

The post Adventures Close to Home: Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201602483″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson, and Ken Johnson join David Cohen to discuss Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters, Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly, Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

The post September 2011: Berwick, Bronson, and Johnson with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Bronson appears on the panel for the first time while Berwick and Plagens are “repeat offenders.”  Other confirmed guests for the 2011/12 season include Patricia Milder, David Brody, Karen Gover, Ken Johnson, Michèle Cone, Ana Finel Honigman, Anthony Haden-Guest, Christina Kee, Franklin Einspruch, Faye Hirsch, Bill Berkson, Karen Wilkin, Lance Esplund, Maddie Phinney and Barry Schwabsky.

The Review Panel conducted much of its 2010/11 season in an otherwise shuttered Huntington Mansion as the headquarters of the National Academy underwent extensive renovations.  The building is scheduled to reopen to the public in September 2011 with a series of festivities including a retrospective of Will Barnet, the artist, who recently turned 100.

The dates of the panel in the 2011/12 season will be  September 30, October 28, November 18, January 27, February 24, March 30, and April 27.  Cohen will moderate each evening, as he has all panels since the inception of the program in October 2004 when the guests were Ken Johnson, Maureen Mullarkey and Jerry Saltz.

The post The Review Panel: September 30 Launch of Eighth Annual Season appeared first on artcritical.