January 12 to February 11, 2018
106 Forsyth Street, between Grand and Broome streets
New York City, lylesandking.com

Technological singularity—the point at which the velocity of advancement reaches infinity—is, some say, close at hand. The manner in which innovation accelerates, with new discoveries speeding up further progress, is similar, perhaps not coincidentally, to compound interest. Moore’s Law predicted a doubling of circuit transistor density every two years, a trend that—despite pesky limitations like the size of individual atoms—seems accurate for the foreseeable future. The human body, in comparison, naturally advances on an evolutionary timescale, measured by incremental changes over thousands or millions of years. How can humanity compete with this insane pace? Are we doomed to become slaves to our creations as in so many sci-fi dystopias? Rather than seeing this scenario as a conflict between man and machine, these advancements could be thought of as augmenting our humanity, as in transhumanism, or as an indistinguishable addition to the increasingly meaningless category of “the human” as in some lines of posthumanist thought. Chris Dorland’s work, on view at Lyles & King, seems to be in line with this latter interpretation. His Alumacore prints and video works, created using layers of images altered by digital glitches, merge human and digital actions into a single substance is neither one nor the other.

Openness to chance occurrences is hardly new in art: Building on Dada and Surrealist experimentation, Francis Bacon threw handfuls of paint at his canvases to disrupt his existing imagery while John Cage performed on prepared pianos designed to produce random sounds. A glitch isn’t simple randomness, however: it is the intersection and confusion of multiple processes, like a machine misinterpreting data meant for some other use, or a circuit that allows its signal to be altered by outside noise. In whatever way a specific glitch may have been cultivated, it represents the “will” of digital processes altering, if not overpowering, that of the humans who created such systems in the first place. Dorland’s broken and hacked machines are his co-creators, and while the artist ultimately has the final say on how each piece turns out, these decisions are influenced by their non-human digital labor.

Can Dorland’s human touch be visibly distinguished from the digital logic of a machine? Untitled (Overclock) (2017) features a woman’s eyeless face, seemingly lifted from a makeup ad, distorted in a manner indicating that it was moved around while being scanned. This is the only recognizable image in the piece: Everything else is abstract. and while it seems to follow a certain logic (such as the vertical division between fields of red and blue), any larger human meaning is lost in an inscrutable pile of digital artifacts. Untitled (Drone Psychic) (2017) practically forces an abstract reading of its imagery, lacking any clues to the sources of its densely-layered and distorted material. There are several painterly passages in which skeins of acidic color ooze and flow together, but what these “brushstrokes” may actually be must remain a mystery, with any identifying information having been corrupted or deleted in the piece’s creation.

Played on a TV leaning against the wall, Dorland’s video Untitled (memory cortex) (2017) is a montage of glitched imagery in motion. Snippets of occasionally legible text—computer code and Japanese message board comments—float above footage from a first-person shooter video game as its color palette jumps between the red, green, and blue channels of computer graphics output. Any details about the game’s narrative are hidden in a swirling mass of images and text overlaying the already distorted footage.

Dorland’s work can be appreciated as abstraction, but pieces of images hint at deeper processes behind their generation. Untitled (Drift Upload) (2017) has bits of racecars splayed across its surface, disrupted by red blocks and horizontal black lines. A spiderweb of shattered glass, like the cracked screen of a smartphone, breaks the picture’s upper-right corner. Most of the prints feature such fractures, reminders of the broken border between the two worlds we regularly inhabit. The world depicted through Dorland’s work isn’t a cyberpunk dystopia as popularized in sci-fi, but it isn’t the utopia-for-profit envisioned by Silicon Valley “tech bros” either. It is more akin to an atopia, a place without borders or boundaries, like a broken screen trying, and failing, to keep separate the “real” and the “digital.”

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When art historians speak of “the Nude,” they are generally referencing the classical tradition of representing the unclothed, usually female, body in painting and sculpture. The Nude is an academic exercise in restraint in which the body is separated from its sexuality and subjectivity in favor of a detached view of it as an aesthetic object. “Nudes,” as the term is used today in reference to erotic selfies, operate essentially in reverse, oozing sexual affect but lacking overt aesthetic pretensions. While nudes are functional digital objects, their purposes are as varied as the people who send and receive them. Some nudes are used teasingly or flirtatiously, perhaps in the context of a long-distance relationship, or sent unsolicited as a form of harassment; some may be created for an exhibitionistic thrill, while others become “revenge porn” leaked online in a betrayal of trust. Frances Waite’s drawings, on view at Elijah Wheat Showroom in Bushwick, depict the artist posing in various states of undress. Drawn from photographs that are left unseen and featuring paintings that don’t exist, her work operates at the intersection of the Nude and nudes, using her technical abilities in depicting the former to explore the provocative power of the latter.

Frances Waite has been working in this manner for a few years: Previously she solicited anonymous donations of selfies and nudes as source material for a series of drawings. This project got some online press coverage that emphasized its sensationalistic overtones—the “look what kids these days are doing” school of clickbait journalism—or played to the trope of the artist as savior, framing Waite’s intention as being to elevate these images from sinful internet garbage to valuable, “real” art. Whatever the interpretation, selfies became drawings and were moved from the camera roll to the gallery wall, and in that transformation glancing snapshots of body parts were solidified into line and tone through the artist’s hand. Whether this is an elevation or a lateral shift in context is up for debate.

In the years since, Waite has turned inward to focus on images and representations of herself. Elijah Wheat Showroom’s largest wall holds an arrangement of her drawings that recalls a phone’s camera roll. Within the pictorial space of each drawing are images of paintings she never made, a mise-en-abyme scenario of pictures in pictures in pictures. Some of the hypothetical paintings are done in a charming illustrative style that Waite has cultivated alongside her other bodies of work, as in Me Waiting to be Fucked by a Boy That Wants to Love Me Under A Painting I Never Made Called “She Said Yes” (2017), which depicts the naturalistically-rendered, topless artist posed rear-up beneath a large painting that features a penis-headed man holding his hands over a naked woman’s mouth.

Another drawing, Cumshot That’s Not Interested in Landing on a Painting I Never Made of Nothing In Particular (2017), shows a view from the other side of the proverbial looking glass in which a realistic drawing of the artist kneeling on the sofa hangs in a perspectivally-unique bedroom, to be used as a cartoon character’s onanistic inspiration. Probably Born to Take Care of You with a Painting I Never Made Called “Something About Men Always Making Me Into a Mommy by Any Means Necessary” (2017) shows what might be a tender moment between two worlds in which the artist, sitting awkwardly on the back of a sofa, offers her breast to a figure in the painting next to her. Ultimately, neither of these dimensions can be considered the “real” one, as they are both fictional to us on this side of the frame.

It would be cliché to suggest that the variety and density of imagery in Waite’s drawings is emblematic of our time, but it’s difficult to see her work outside the context of the post-Weinstein moment. In contorting ourselves to see them as something else, perhaps as unaffecting aesthetic objects or as unartistic post-internet pastiche, their complexity and tension falls out of view. Waite has put her body on display in a show of public intimacy, and the resulting images, drawn by her own hand, have been twice filtered through her subjectivity. Sharing pictorial space with her imagined and unrealized paintings, she presents herself on her own terms, something that many “Nude” models, or some subjects of “nudes,” aren’t able to do.

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39 White Street
September 13 to October 7, 2017

Frustrated vision can actually be fun: Take Peekaboo for example, a “game” exploiting a child’s anxiety over the apparent loss of a caregiver and subsequent joy over their sudden return. A possibly more mature version of this, depending on who you ask, would be striptease. There, the eroticism is not found in the “strip” side of the equation — in the visibility of the performer’s body — but in the “tease,” the increase, release, and frustration of tension between things visible and concealed. Rachel Rickert’s paintings, on view at E.TAY Gallery in TriBeCa, play within these parameters, via the stripping and/or covering of the female body, and through the painterly materiality of the works themselves.

The figures in Rickert’s paintings are shown neither fully nude nor fully dressed. Each one is somewhere between those two states, in the process of removing or putting on a shirt (or tights in the case of Damsel in Distress). In a series of five small canvases this action is frozen at a vulnerable moment in which the model’s head is cocooned in fabric, blocking her vision while opening up her body to the viewer’s gaze. Devour depicts a moment of claustrophobia through an impression of the eyes, nose, and mouth visible through the tight fabric that encases the model’s head. In the painting to its left, Veil, the figure’s breasts and left arm are exposed while her head and right arm strain against a garment that looks liable to rip apart at any moment.

A gold patterned shower curtain shows up in a suite of three paintings: Soft Boundaries has it drawn to one side to reveal a nearly life-sized nude woman standing in a bathtub, struggling — as in the smaller paintings — to extricate her head from a damp shirt. On the opposite end of the gallery is Verge, a painting of similar scale that shows the curtain pulled closed, save for the bath tile peeking out from around its edges. The third piece, Border, is the smallest painting in the show and focuses on a fragment of the curtain’s gold diamond pattern. A similar motif is echoed in another large painting, the aforementioned Damsel in Distress, which doesn’t feature the curtain itself but has a blue diamond-patterned mattress, flopped against a wall, as a backdrop for the figure’s battle against a pair of black tights.

The curtain represents a physical boundary beyond which sight is frustrated or negated altogether. There are a few pieces in the show that implore the viewer to maintain a similar distance. Two large paintings depicting close-up views of lingerie — Nude and Big Girl — feature delicate lace that only coalesces into recognizability from afar; moving closer to the canvases collapses the patterns into abstract swirls of pink or black. One might assume that a close-up examination, scrutinizing every detail, would reveal more than a glance from across the room, but these paintings frustrate that expectation, like trying to view the Nazca Lines (pre-Columbian geoglyphs in Peru) from ground level rather than from the air.

The strange pleasure that comes from visual frustration is a recurring theme in this exhibition. While Soft Boundaries and Verge present its two extremes with the curtain drawn and closed, respectively, and the body completely exposed or concealed, there are any number of intermediaries between those states: the smaller shirt paintings, for instance, with exposure and concealment superimposed on each other in a state of indeterminacy. The lingerie paintings give this dynamic a material basis, encouraging the viewer’s interaction with the painting to find a “sweet spot” from which to view it. Even from an optimal position one cannot see everything, but that’s part of the fun: If everything were perfectly visible, what pleasure would there be in looking?

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August 3 to 19, 2017
254 Broome Street, between Orchard and Ludlow streets
New York City, castorgallery.com

Upon meeting for the first time, even before greetings are exchanged, strangers form conscious or subconscious impressions of each other. Accurate or not, these momentary decision based on visual cues color further interactions. Castor Gallery’s aptly-named summer exhibition, Strangers, curated by Emma Frank, presents a room full of faces and figures where none of the engagement of traditional portraiture has been allowed. The viewer is obstructed and frustrated by a variety of visual devices that prevent the depicted subjects from returning their gaze.

Jesse Draxler uses a traditional portrait format — showing the sitter’s head and shoulders — but his “portraits” are non-functional beyond this formal coincidence. All of his subjects have their heads turned from the viewer: Some barely shift from a profile view, and others almost totally face away. All of the heads are presented in silhouette, painted black and lacking any obvious markers of sex, ethnicity, or personality. The subject’s head in Consciousness Antenna III (2017), turned away and looking down, appears to be covered by a skintight hood; a black line runs from the base of the skull down the figure’s spine. The left-hand figure in Living with a Ghost (2017) has the same stripe, but the nearly identical figure to its right — its doppelgänger — is painted completely black, a shadow standing in the foreground.

In her large-scale painting Tell Me You Love Me (2017), Krista Louise Smith likewise presents a double “portrait” with a disruptive twist. An exquisitely-painted nude, rendered in oils from groin to neck, embraces a second woman tentatively carved out of negative space. The leftmost figure’s breasts and depilated vulva are presented in detail, yet her head lies teasingly outside of the frame in an inversion of traditional portraiture and its focus on the face’s expressiveness. The ghostly figure serves as an opposite: She is shorter, has pubic hair, her face is in the frame, and she stands in profile rather than facing the viewer. The edge of a painted hand is wrapped around her belly, a loose embrace that prevents her from slipping out of reach.

The figure in Smith’s painting appears ghostly, but two other artists use literal translucency in their work: Anthony Goicolea’s Anonymous Self Portrait (2016) depicts the artist removing (or possibly putting on) an opaque shirt on an otherwise see-through resin panel. The shadows painted on the panel mingle with the literal shadows cast by the light passing through it. Juan Miguel Palacios also uses translucency in his work, but his panels are layered on top of damaged sheets of drywall. His Wound series of paintings show the figures’ heads floating on layers of vinyl atop a literally wounded ground in a tense fusion of the spectral and the material.

Mercedes Helnwein’s oil pastel works on paper present a different variety of ghostliness than the aforementioned paintings: She draws from vintage photographs and plays up the nostalgic sensations found within, yet subverts their narrative qualities with brightly-colored interventions. Queen of the Underground (2015) plays up the contrast between an illuminated figure and the shadowy background that surrounds her. The only substantial color to be found is a pink smear across her face, a mask that shows her eyes yet prevents the viewer from interpreting any expression she may have. Tiffany (2017) exhibits a similar tension: Helnwein has again layered a brightly-colored mass on top of the subject’s face. The vibrant orange scotoma hovering in front of her face doesn’t completely obscure her expression, but her glassy-eyed stare raises the question of whether she sees it, as well.

Even after spending ample time with these paintings, the figures depicted continue to resist recognition and remain strangers.. In this respect, the work in Strangers provides an amnesiac version of the experience of meeting someone for the first time, with its attendant anxieties and excitement, allowing the viewer to introduce themselves again and again.

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July 14 to 30, 2017
56 Bogart Street, between Grattan Street and Harrison Place
Brooklyn, blackandwhiteartgallery.com

“Synthesis” is a word with many context-dependent meanings: One can synthesize a chemical compound, wear a sweater made from synthetic fibers, or listen to electronic music generated by a synthesizer. Generally, though, the term implies the merger of two different things, as in the Hegelian dialectic, in which two opposing ideas — the thesis and antithesis — are resolved in their synthesis. Crossover, an exhibition of collaboratively-created work by Crystal Gregory and Alexa Williams, is synthetic in more ways than one. The work uses a variety of artificial materials whose properties clash with each other, only finding a tenuous resolution in the configurations on view in the gallery. On a deeper level, the show is a synthesis of the the two artists themselves, a duo with a working process that has become so collaborative that the question of “who made what?” is unanswerably meaningless.

Braids of metal wire — Crossover (2017) — span the gallery, blocking access to the center of the space. This divides the gallery in two, with each part made accessible by ducking under the cables at their highest points on either wall. They are slack and partially unwound, making apparent their new roles as art objects. Rather than holding up a suspension bridge, these cables hold the show together, linking the sides of the space and determining the visitor’s course through the exhibition.

Large concrete sculptures sit on either side of the cables. At the far end of the gallery is Both (2017), a duo of painted concrete rings tied together with a length of delicate red string. While the materiality of the rings is overwhelming — they could have been salvaged from an abandoned storm sewer — the thin string is the piece’s point of tension. Each ring leans away from the other, held together by this little wisp of lovingly tied thread that keeps them from both tumbling down. The other concrete piece is Curving (2017), a ring broken in two and dusted with fluorescent orange construction chalk. The halves of the ring rest on top of each other, tied together with another length of string that prevents it from becoming whole again. Both of these sculptures have a dual construction, whether it involves two rings or a single one broken in half. The two parts are awkwardly forced to become one, but this tenuous union could catastrophically collapse with the slightest provocation.

The installation piece Glory (2017) continues the theme of material juxtaposition, consisting of ceramic tubes of varying length placed atop a bed of construction chalk and leaned against the wall. The soft and fluffy chalk threatens to spread around the gallery space, liable to be tracked all over by careless visitors who wander too close. The ceramic tubes, for their part, look prone to double-over and snap in half. Their present precarious placement tells the story of their past malleability from before they were solidified in the controlled inferno of the kiln. These same fires activated the shiny black glaze on the exteriors of the tubes, giving them an illusory coating of gunmetal. This disguise, though, is interrupted by hints of their ceramic reality found in places where the glaze dripped or didn’t stick. Glory places the solid and the soft in a tense equilibrium, a balance that could be shattered by a sudden sneeze or a stray gust of air.

No amount of analysis of this show can answer the seemingly simple question of “who made what?” While the work was made collaboratively, neither artist has her metaphorical fingerprints on any given part of it. Each is an accomplished artist in her own right, and the work they made for this show isn’t characteristic of either artist’s larger body of work. Crossover, rather, represents a synthesis of their abilities, personalities, and individual artistic practices; a surprise reaction that has produced an unexpected yet welcome result.

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June 7 to July 9, 2017
250 Broome St, New York, NY

The word “person” can be traced back to the Latin “persona,” the word for “mask.” The person, the ultimate self-sovereign subject, is ironically named after a theatrical device that perpetuates fictions and falsehoods. Masks and theatricality are themes at play in Mehryl Levisse’s current show at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, an installation of two intertwined bodies of work in an immersive exhibition space. His photographs and masks allow both the artist and viewer to inhabit both sides of the division of power fetishized in BDSM subculture and expressed through the baroque theater.

BDSM has its own unique theatrical form: each participant takes on a dominant or submissive “role,” after all. Beyond such linguistic coincidences, it embraces a similar magic circle as the theater, in which the audience knows that a performance on stage is a fictional spectacle rather than a real event. While the pain inflicted on the submissive body during a scene is certainly real, it becomes theatrical because it has been inflicted according to an agreement set forth by the scene’s participants. This pact between the dominant and submissive participants resembles the fourth wall that separates the performers on stage from the audience gazing upon them.

Levisse’s show features a literal stage of its own, a platform in the center of the gallery space bordered by bare globular light bulbs. On this stage are six metal poles, and mounted atop each pole is a mask. These masks visually reference fetish gear worn by participants in BDSM scenes, but instead of latex or leather, they have been constructed from costume and upholstery materials: embroidered fabric, golden tassels, feathers, fur and beads. Their baroque ornamentation renders them nonfunctional in an actual fetish setting, as they appear ready to disintegrate with the touch of a finger, much less the crack of a whip. Two additional masks of more functional construction, along with peach-colored bodysuits, were worn by performers during the show’s opening. Lounging on a windowsill facing outside or towards the crowd gathered in the gallery, their bodies were in a state of superimposition: While displaying symbols of submission to the artist’s vision, by exerting their own agency over the performance they inhabited both sides of theater’s dualistic divide.

As with the material non-functionality of the masks, Levisse’s photographs transpose a classical or baroque sensibility to a contemporary setting. They contain references to art history: The model in le lieu reposé du chevreuil (2013) strikes the same pose as the famous nude in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. In Levisse’s version, the figure’s orientation has been flipped in more ways than one, with a male body facing to the left rather than the right-facing female figure from the original. Instead of the woman’s knowing gaze, the face of Levisse’s model is hidden by a shock of blue hair topped with a horned animal skull that stares through the viewer with its dead, empty eyes. Another photograph, marée basse sur table d’élevage (2015) shows a model lounging, odalisque-style, on a mound of mussel shells on a table; further shells are attached to the wall, forming a frame within the frame. The figure wears a mask of even more shells that leaves just the side of the mouth visible. The shells support the body, frame it, and obscure selected parts of it in a surreal striptease that recalls Marcel Broodthaers.

What, then, are the dominant and submissive roles in this exhibition? Is the viewer dominant, exerting power by gazing at the fragmented bodies in the photographs and the empty masks on the stage? Or does the viewer submit to the will of the artist, seeing what he desires to show and nothing beyond that? As with the performers during the show’s opening, this balance of power is just that: an oscillation that switches polarities with every blink of the viewer’s eye, leaving neither the artist nor the audience totally in control or completely malleable. In the space of Levisse’s show, as in the baroque theater and the BDSM dungeon, the artifice of the entire endeavor is agreed upon by all parties involved, no matter what side of the stage they may inhabit at a given moment. The fact that everything is fictional, however, doesn’t make the feelings, physical or emotional, generated on or in front of the stage any less real.

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Echo, a group exhibition curated by Azita Moradkhani, at Gallery Kayafas
May 26 to July 8, 2017
450 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA

With the recent surge of identity-driven art, exhibitions featuring work grounded in the particular identities are becoming commonplace. An example of this would be the various “Nasty Women” shows of female-identified artists that sprung up following last year’s presidential election, or any number of shows that unite artists from one marginalized group or another based on a singular commonality. Echo, on view at Gallery Kayafas in Boston, would appear at first to check two such identity boxes, as the seven artists featured in the show — along with its curator Azita Moradkhani and composer Bahar Royaee, who wrote the music performed at the opening and closing receptions — are all women of Iranian extraction. Rather than adhering to trendy clichés, however, Echo takes the sex and heritage of its participants as coincidental and explores themes of hybridity, with each artist combining multiple sources of imagery, materiality, and identity.

Hybridity is literal in the paintings and sculptures of Samira Abbassy which merge human and animal attributes, as found in mythologies from throughout history and across the world: the Sphinx, the Minotaur, and the Lamassu, to name a few. Mythological Creature (Lioness) (2013) depicts a being with the body of a lion and a human head that, in turn, sprouts fourteen smaller heads as its mane. The human heads resemble Persian miniature paintings, while the body could have been appropriated from a cave painting, petroglyph, or Grecian urn. These familiar yet monstrous creatures are echoed in Roya Farassat’s “Menagerie” series. Each of these nineteen pieces was created using mutually exclusive processes. Farassat bleached toned paper with a unique pattern resembling a Rorschach inkblot, and then, expanding on the dissolved areas, added ornamentation in white acrylic paint to create a hybrid of negative and positive processes and space. The resulting figures resemble chimeric combinations of insects and human beings: The King (2013) could be a moth wearing royal robes, and Tribal Dancer (2013) seems to have the features of a mantis along with a bra, tutu, and tiara.

On the wall facing Farassat’s work is an installation of biomorphic sculptures by Anahita Vossoughi. Ranging in size from tiny polyps on shelves to the almost human-scale of Reclining Figure (2014) in the gallery’s window, Vossoughi embraces a pluralistic materiality that merges clay, plaster, wax, wood, pins, fabric, resin, found objects, paint, and other substances to create a variety of forms that could be organs, living beings, or something in between: organs without bodies. Armita Raafat’s wall-mounted sculptures are less biological and more architectural. Similarly crafted from a variety of media, including clay, fabric, and fragments of mirrors, her work is informed by modular forms of Islamic architecture, particularly Murqamas, “honeycomb” or “stalactite” structures that adorn the domed ceilings of such masterpieces as the Alhambra. Reduced from public spectacle to a more intimate scale, her three sculptures are installed here in such a way that each can be seen in the shattered reflection of another. Her pieces create an “echo” throughout the entire space, allowing the viewer’s gaze to bounce from one piece to the next.

Maryam Hoseini’s paintings depict abstracted female figures — rendered in flat monochrome — interacting with each other in geometrically nonsensical spaces. In the diptych Princess And Princess In Garden (Horizon) (2017) plants grow into, or out from, the figures’ orifices, either violating the autonomy of their bodies or expanding their limits and boundaries. This sense of expansion informs the installation of several paintings, such as Sisters In Crime (Horizon) (2017), which features a field of ultramarine that spills out of the frame and onto the wall, creating a geometric expansion of the picture outside of its conventional borders. Elnaz Javani also uses figurative imagery, albeit fragmented limbs rather than coherent bodies. Embroidered on slightly sheer, unstretched fabric, she depicts hands and arms that elongate, break, and flail, emerging from pools and geysers of bloody crimson thread. While Hoseini’s work expands to engulf its environment, Javani’s modest tapestries hold their secrets within themselves. The viewer can see glimpses of excess thread hanging on their reverse sides, the hidden drawings that make the visible imagery possible.

The oil paintings of Sepideh Behrouzian have been executed on pages torn from an Iranian decorating catalog. In Double Cup (2017), a hint of the page’s original picture — the titular pair of metal cups — emerges from a lifeless mountainscape against a cloudless blue sky. The landscape is surrounded by the glossy white of the magazine page and the original image’s title and caption. With an odd number of artists in the show, there is no other work to “echo” these pieces. This seems appropriate, as the world they depict on top of slick images of consumer goods is a silent one devoid of life, with nobody around to hear them.

Of course, no human being has a singular identity, as each of us represents the confluence of any number of threads of history, politics, and culture. While some people seem willing to see themselves distilled to a cherished label or two, others embrace the freedom provided by a hybrid state, much like the work on view in Echo, not fully one thing nor totally another, that can shift through the unstable spaces between borders, identities, and worlds.

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