The Unspecific (But Straining) Politics of Joan Jonas
Long an idiosyncratic priestess of the limbo between myth and art, Joan Jonas has moved into pagan revivalism. They Come to Us Without a…
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Evasion and Euphemism: The Guggenheim Underintellectualizes and Depoliticizes László Moholy-Nagy
In 1921, the Hungarian expat László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), then in Berlin, signed a “Call for Elementarist Art,” alongside Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, and…
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In the Skin of a Gallery: Sylvie Bélanger’s Challenge to Photography
The image disputes the presence of the thing. In the image, the thing is not content simply to be; the image shows that the…
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A Parallel Landscape: Ned Pratt’s Abstract Sublime
In Canadian art’s long and unswift adaptation of an avant-garde, landscape painting yielded to an important reduction, an essentializing that rendered place ancillary, and…
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Troubling Self-Care in a Selfie World: The Photographs of Karen Asher
Karen Asher has always photographed people, from those she knows intimately to the strangers she meets in passing. As portraits, they fall within an…
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The “Fuck Em” Sex and Class Reversals of Alicia Gibson
A blind date is unfolding at Canada Gallery, in Alicia Gibson’s painting My Mom Set Me Up With a Redneck (2016). If, like me,…
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Vancouver Art Gallery’s “MashUp” Too Limited in its Understanding
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s survey exhibition MashUp is a missed opportunity. To be clear, that’s not because the artworks are “bad” (they’re not) or…
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The Pantomimed Fellowship of Nicole Eisenman’s “Al-ugh-ories”
Nicole Eisenman – beloved New York painter, now MacArthur-certified “Genius” – has just opened a show at the New Museum with the jokey title, “Al-ugh-ories.” The single-floor showing…
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The Archive is a Set of Relations, Not a Record of History: Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner
Pockmarked moons and missiles at launch, astronauts in profile, and dark-suited men eying fighter jets in take-off. Scrawled archival notes map the surface of…
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The Depressing Power of Art in Raphaëlle de Groot’s “Summit Meetings”
Between 2009 and 2012, Raphaëlle de Groot invited people to give her objects that they no longer wanted but couldn’t get rid of. As…
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