Exhibition Review
Tina Girouard at CARA, Magenta Plains, and Anat Ebgi
Art Monthly | November 2024
In May 1971, on a pier under the Manhattan base of the Brooklyn Bridge, Tina Girouard swept the plentiful dirt and debris into piled lines that traced the floor plan of a home. Girouard based the work on childhood memories of imaginary play, so it was fitting that she recruited a group of local kids – who had been vandalising other art projects – to help her scavenge furnishings and appliances for the ‘house’. Girouard’s ephemeral project literalised homemaking, turning the oft-gendered labour of maintenance and upkeep into a structural foundation. It’s also an early example of how the artist found, or made, home and community wherever she went.
Installation view of Jenna Bliss’s “Basic Cable” at Amant, Brooklyn, NY.
Exhibition Review
Jenna Bliss’s “Basic Cable” at Amant
e-flux Criticism | October 15, 2024
Armed with her camera, native-New Yorker Jenna Bliss roams the narrow canyons of Lower Manhattan. Her unsteady lens lingers on passersby and commercial storefronts; gazes skyward to scale gleaming towers; and hovers, from afar, on the skyline’s iconic, yet ever-morphing silhouette. With the September 11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic as inflection points, Bliss blends fact with fiction, past and present, to probe our collective perception of Wall Street as a place and an idea—from the ground up.
Installation view of Joanna Piotrowska’s “unseeing eyes, restless bodies” at ICA, Philadelphia.
Exhibition Review
Joanna Piotrowska’s “unseeing eyes, restless bodies” at ICA Philadelphia
ArtReview | October 2024
Hands predominate in Joanna Piotrowska’s black-and-white photographs of staged human interactions: they caress, comfort, hold and protect, but they also grab and intrude and maybe even abuse. The tension in the Polish artist’s images stems from the ambiguous nature of the physical contact she portrays. The hand that tightly grasps a woman’s shoulder in Untitled (2014), for instance, could be passionate, consoling, possessive or violent.
Installation view of Christopher Wool at 101 Greenwich Street, NY.
Exhibition Review
Christopher Wool’s “See Stop Run” at 101 Greenwich Street
Art in America | July 3, 2024
Christopher Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his pictures, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that refutes clarity and orderliness, he is once again testing his art’s resilience and adaptability.
Installation view of Tolia Astakhishvili’s “between father and mother” at SculptureCenter, NY.
Exhibition Review
Tolia Astakhishvili’s “between father and mother” at SculptureCenter
e-flux Criticism | June 18, 2024
Built from conventional architectural materials including drywall and cement, and later stained with coffee, dirt, and pigment to mimic the wear and tear of time, Tolia Astakhishvili’s installations hover between construction and destruction. […] Having previously explored the mutability of domestic spaces, and how they accumulate the marks and alterations of their inhabitants, Astakhishvili here contends with a formerly industrial site, while still remaining focused on what spaces tell us about humans come and gone.
Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #8 (Singles’ Mixer) (2005–06), The Brant Foundation, NY.
Exhibition Review
Mike Kelley’s “Singles’ Mixer” at The Brant Foundation
Frieze | June 18, 2024
Photographs are often tasked with encapsulating an event, reducing it to a freeze-frame moment. For the series ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction’ (2000–11), Mike Kelley worked in reverse, developing fictionalized screenplays from individual images plucked from his stockpile of high school yearbook photos depicting carnivalesque teenage rituals: hazings, dress-up days, pageants.
Installation view of Diane Simpson, “1977–1980,” at James Cohan, New York.
Exhibition Review
Diane Simpson’s “1977–1980” at James Cohan
Sculpture | March 20, 2024
Simpson initially resisted moving into sculpture on the grounds that there was nothing wrong with illusion. With her cardboard sculptures, she was clearly trying to put illusion and actual form in tension. Chaise (1979), a warped lounge chair in powder blue archival board, is one of her most extreme and successful efforts along these lines. The shaded grid on the board’s surface imitates tufted leather upholstery (with real and hand-drawn screws in place of buttons), and fabricated shadows create the impression of depth, a fold or joint where there is none.
Installation view of Mary Helena Clark, “Conveyor,” at Bridget Donahue, with Monitors and Brooder 2, both 2024
Exhibition Review
Mary Helena Clark’s “Conveyor” at Bridget Donahue
e-flux Criticism | March 15, 2024
The conveyor of the exhibition’s title could be a communicator, like an artist, but it can also describe a transference from one place to another, as if through a threshold. The door, for Clark, represents both a wall and an invitation, a structure that withholds and protects but also provides access—like the orangutan’s window, the incubator’s aperture, or our own skin, which the artist frequently probes to show us views of our mysterious interiors. What happens, though, when the locks are disabled (or repurposed) and barriers are breached?
Installation view of Jane Dickson’s “Promised Land” at Karma, with Rage, 2023
Exhibition Review
Jane Dickson’s “Promised Land” at Karma
Artforum | November 2023
Dickson plays with the ambiguity and duplicity of marketing language. What is “promised” by the roadside billboard in Promised Land 2—fittingly displayed in the gallery’s storefront window—is not paradise, but fast cash in exchange for the house you can no longer afford. Bargain, a luminous, seemingly backlit painting on royal-blue felt of a sign festooned with plastic car-lot flags, seems to ask what is gained in any deal, and what, of course, is lost.