A.L. Steiner’s Personal Archive: Underground Heroes, Everyday Lovers, and Global Catastrophe
Underground heroes. I’ve had many. Some of them I stole from the high shelves and long racks of chain bookshops. Novels and art catalogues,…
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The Outsider That Invites Us In: Jordan Maclachlan’s “Ways of Living”
The fantastical meets the hackneyed in Jordan Maclachlan’s expansive Ways of Living, a detailed menagerie of other-worldly creatures, animals, and humans, too. The clay figures that…
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Grey Skies Over Melancholy Bay: Creative Antagonism and Cultural Preservation on the West Coast
A call for action rang out in Vancouver this spring when members of the art community rallied together and voiced opposition to the sited…
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Nothing is Absolute: The Fairy-Winged Failure of “Absolute Beauty: Neoacademicism in Saint Petersburg”
Absolute Beauty’s curators Ekaterina Andreeva and Andrei Khlobystin have tasked themselves with an unsolvable puzzle: how to capture, in a medium-sized exhibition with limited…
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What Gets Revealed When Iris Häussler Finally Owns Her Name
It’s not easy to write about Iris Häussler. I’ve been avoiding it, though desiring it, since her daring He Named Her Amber (2008) subsumed the…
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Bodies Beholden: The Changed Corporeality of David Salle’s New Paintings
In a 2008 commercial for the Swiffer SweeperVac, a conservatively clad woman weaves back and forth with the futuristic device, apparently engaged in an…
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Mary Heilmann and David Reed’s “Two By Two” at the Hamburger Bahnhof Floats Towards Americana
Once a train station, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum now facilitates transportive experiences. There in a large hall, forty-five paintings currently hang in pairs, one…
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This Is Where It Ends: The Denouement of Post-Internet Art in Jon Rafman’s Deep Web
In a recent essay for Artforum, Jon Rafman described his early work as “romantic.” Specifically, he cited his virtual safaris of Kool-Aid Man in…
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Simon Denny’s Trade Show Overkill at MoMA PS1
I’d always thought of the word “disruptive” as a negative term before immersing myself in Simon Denny’s quasi-retrospective at MoMA PS1. The exhibition takes…
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Space is the Plane: Chris Curreri Explodes His Medium at the Gardiner Museum
Walking into the foyer of the Gardiner Museum, one comes face-to-face with what appears to be a segment taken directly from an archaeological dig, or…
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