“Now and When”

SAN FRANCISCO ARTS COMMISSION GALLERY
401 Van Ness Ave.
June 4–September 4

View of “Now and When,” 2010.

Art exhibitions are built upon packets of time; they mark an artist’s “moment” or a curatorial conceit, which often quickly vanishes. For one of ten commissioned time-capsule projects to commemorate this civic gallery’s fortieth anniversary, Joseph del Pesco unearthed a dozen rare art magazines produced in the Bay Area over the past forty years, and he created a website with them to present snapshots of the region’s art activity. While not the most visually commanding piece in this boisterous exhibition, it functions well conceptually as an archive of activity and community. So does Lynn Hershman Leeson’s digital video time line of feminist art history, presented on a flat-screen monitor, for her forthcoming film !Women Art Revolution.

Other works portray family and community in more personal and private ways. Through a Calderesque mobile, Gay Outlaw and Bob Schmitz create a handsome, if unwieldy, portrait of their son with enlarged versions of his toy-box treasures. Packard Jennings gathered artist pals to spend his honorarium on a pricy restaurant meal (he framed the receipt) and recorded their dinner conversation––an insular yet revealing document of conceptual-art concerns that may or may not age well. The pillow talk intimacy of Ken Lo’s interviews with gallery staff and those closely affiliated with the space about how they met their mate or lost lovers is uncomfortably personal, and the interpretive objects that result (plaques, a bronzed towel, a T-shirt) are cheeky memorials. More contained are the Bureau of Urban Secrets’s DIY time capsules, envelopes to facilitate donated archives. These seem fittingly ephemeral—as if acknowledging that this show too will fade into memory and myth, until another ripe moment makes the past worth pondering.

— Glen Helfand

Michael Guidetti

JANCAR JONES GALLERY
965 Mission, Suite 120
September 10–October 9

View of “Bell, Book, and Candle,” 2010.

“Bell, Book, and Candle,” Michael Guidetti’s second solo exhibition at Jancar Jones, transforms the gallery’s compact space into an elaborate though decidedly lo-fi special effects lab. The walls are covered in chroma-key green and punctuated with height markers and motion tracking balls. Gathered at the center of the room are several gadgets that monitor environmental shifts, including temperature, magnetic fields, light levels, and audio and video signals. On a small laptop, various digital renderings, virtual mappings, and animations of the space rotate continuously: Some feature floating particles that could be either atoms or wayward sprites. But despite this overabundance of data, the overall effect is one of suspension and loaded anticipation.

It is never entirely clear what we’re waiting for, nor whether it will ever materialize—but that might be the kicker. As with previous efforts, Guidetti is interested in simply mapping the parameters of the exhibition space as a formal exercise. A few decades earlier, this would have been called “institutional critique,” but that doesn’t quite capture the mood of his current endeavor, which is much more concrete. Rather than enact semantic games, Guidetti plays with experiential objectivity, which is ultimately much more indebted to the history of monochrome painting. As a type of encompassing color field, the green screen set up cleverly approaches the visual intensities of Ryman or Rothko, but filtered through a technocratic context. The elegant turn of the exhibition lies in its ability to move through the nuts and bolts into a state of pure, nearly transcendent potential that has more to do with Ghost Hunters than Avatar. For as the show’s title suggests, Guidetti playfully engages the idea of artmaking as a form of divination or conjuring. Indeed, his work finds more allegiances with Bruce Nauman and his alchemies of process, documented in videos like Bouncing in the Corner, 1968, or Mapping the Studio, 2001 (the latter, incidentally, is also rendered a uniform green by its night vision camera). Guidetti’s faux high-tech gadgetry ultimately attests to the inexhaustible richness of mundane gestures—which, come to think of it, is more a type of magic than a special effect.

— Franklin Melendez

Elisheva Biernoff

TRIPLE BASE GALLERY
3041 24th Street
September 10–October 10

Elisheva Biernoff, Folly, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

A seemingly empty storefront with fall leaves strewn on the floor is not such an anomaly these economically parched days, but in Elisheva Biernoff’s trompe l’oeil installation, which mulls over perpetually troublesome nature versus culture tensions, they’re props, a paper confetti of handcrafted debris. The dead plants, along with crumpled gum wrappers, cigarette butts, religious brochures, and pinecones, are all attentively remade with authentic artificiality. Indeed, the artist’s painted plaster stones are so intricately detailed that they invoke Vija Celmins’s rock replicas in To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977–82.

Biernoff’s two-story installation is titled Folly, 2010, a term that suggests breeziness, but also recklessly daft visions. Her bittersweet project hints at the unsustainable (plants and animals of various unrelated regions make comingled appearances here), as well as the inefficient (there’s something wonderfully nuts about carefully crafting soiled tissues in fixed form). While the artifice of the work could tilt toward theme park, the installation plays like an immersive elegy. To this end, Biernoff presents an archaeology of handpainted floral wallpapers on a seemingly excised living room corner—a Gordon Matta-Clark with an eye toward decorated domesticity––to reveal a fraying sense of natural history through ornament. The base layer is a bucolic design of Neoclassical ruins, while other sections present an array of posies or a 1950s pattern of ordered daisies.

Biernoff provides other illusory windows into the landscape—effectively created in video, audio, and backlit cut paper. The approach is highly theatrical, but the installation is austere enough to make this folly less a diversion than a seductive setting within which to ponder the visual splendors of collapse.

— Glen Helfand

Tammy Rae Carland

SILVERMAN GALLERY
804 Sutter Street @ the corner of Jones
September 10–October 23

Tammy Rae Carland, Funny Face, I Love You, 2010, ceramic-cast and hand-built objects, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In her latest solo exhibition, “Funny Face, I Love You,” Tammy Rae Carland’s commentary on the social role of female comedians evolves into a layered and reflexive statement on artistic perfomativity and audience participation. “Tragedy,” Mel Brooks once claimed, “is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” In either case, the body becomes the site on which such actions take place. Indeed, a focus on embodiment is an appropriate theme for Carland, who has spent much of her career dealing with issues of gender and identity.

And yet, for her current show, it is the use of physical absence that reveals, via reduction and isolation, the mechanisms of humor and representation. In a suite of large-scale photographs titled “I’m Dying Up Here” (all works 2010), some images depict solo figures with obscured faces while others are emptied of human presence altogether. The lack of visible physiognomic expressions in the former works draws attention to the body; here connotations of physical vulnerability add to Carland’s scrutiny of stand-up as something that is nothing short of a gladiatorial Roman holiday. And in Punch Line, phrases from routines by well-known female comedians, including Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers, are redacted by the use of mats and frames, producing a severed effect similar to that of the faceless images by drawing attention to the surrounding web of projected cultural meaning on which humor relies.

By various degrees, Carland subtracts from the performative body until we are left with its skeletal form. Sharing the exhibition title, a ceramic replica of the comedic trinity (stool, mic with stand, bottle of water) positioned in the gallery window awaits both an unseen audience and a performer. Carland, in this third act, reveals by their very absence the necessary participation of objectification and subjection implicit in comedic performance. Indeed, for comedy to succeed, someone has to be the butt of a joke.

— Joseph Akel

Koki Tanaka

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS
701 Mission Street
September 25–November 28

View of “Nothing related, but something could be associated,” 2010.

Both physical comedy and the parti-colored stock of ninety-nine-cent stores can be found nearly anywhere in the world, and both, in a sense, transcend language barriers, wordlessly communicating their appeal. By combining the two elements, Japanese artist Koki Tanaka manages to allude to art history and the physical and emotional architecture of households. “Nothing related, but something could be associated,” his first US solo exhibition of witty, offhand sculpture, video, and drawing, finds him making varied use of cheap plastic commodities and putting them through paces, creating temporary frameworks from the throwaway. Tanaka makes messy marks with such actions as haphazardly piling up chairs to create a makeshift ladder from yard to roof (in the video Approach to an Old House, 2008), or painting a circle on the ground with soda that gushes from a bottle (Simple Gesture and Temporary Sculpture, 2008). All the works are displayed in a mazelike plywood structure that doubles back on itself, thwarting white-cube cleanliness and providing nooks that contain crumpled plastic cups.

There is nomadic appeal here as well—Tanaka created most of this show in San Francisco, scouring thrift stores, Home Depots, and gallery storage closets for parts. He coerced local stylists into participating in the video a haircut by 9 hairdressers at once (second attempt), 2010, a chatty United Nations–like affair reveling in negotiated disarray. His practice is seriocomic and semiathletic, in the manner of Jacques Tati, Erwin Wurm, and Kate Gilmore. In a series of drawings, however, Tanaka also interrogates Japanese art history with his own bemused detachment. In depicting works by antecedents such as Yoko Ono and Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tanaka manages to look at a whole other layer of cultural export that may require more detailed translation.

— Glen Helfand

“Huckleberry Finn”

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
1111 8th Street
September 28–December 11

Kara Walker, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom—Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors, 2010, cut paper and eight framed gouache paintings, dimensions variable.

The third and final installment in the Wattis’s trilogy of exhibitions inspired by iconic American novels (preceded by “The Wizard of Oz” in 2008 and “Moby Dick” in 2009), “Huckleberry Finn” is as engaging and controversial as its source material. No curator is noted in the gallery’s wall text, yet the project bears the unmistakable imprint of Wattis director Jens Hoffmann, who trumps Mark Twain as the impresario behind the curtain. The show offers American-style portions of material, a sort of all-you-can-eat buffet where viewers can piece together a narrative from Hoffmann’s characteristically expansive range of historical artifacts, documents, silent film footage (including Twain having tea with his daughters), preexisting modern and contemporary works (notably by Andy Warhol, David Hammons, and Glenn Ligon), and fourteen new commissions (standouts include Edgar Arceneaux, Geoffrey Farmer, and Ellen Gallagher).

The latter are, not surprisingly, the most satisfying, as these artists directly respond to the novel. Kara Walker offers a sweeping cut-paper work, whose title, Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of Your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom—Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry with Condolences to the Author (all works cited, 2010), encapsulates one semisnarky thread of the exhibition’s curatorial direction, while Simon Fujiwara’s pointedly hilarious video Artists’ Book Club: Hukuruberri Fuin no Monogatari adds international scope as it channels troublesome, eroticized cultural stereotypes. The exhibition may teeter on its own oversimplifications: Displays of slave ownership documents, photographs and news clippings on Malcolm X and MLK, and Emory Douglas’s graphics for the Black Panther––apparently intended to highlight what the show brochure notes as “the violent biases beneath [Huck and Jim’s] roiling adventures”––come off as reductive. Each of the exhibitions have trodden a delicate balance between the literary and literal, and “Finn” succeeds by being as picaresque as the book, redeeming itself with provocative inclusions around every curve.

— Glen Helfand

iona rozeal brown

SALTWORKS
664 11TH ST NW
September 25–November 6

iona rozeal brown, a children’s story, 2009, mixed media on panel, 60 x 48”.

Having first garnered attention for her “a³” series, 2001–2006 (the three a’s stand for “afro-asiatic allegories”), iona rozeal brown is well known for exploring the appropriation of hip-hop culture by Japanese youth. This early work was marked by a representational style with colorful yet flatly painted surfaces influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. While her more recent output retains much of that style, her subject matter has expanded to take a more global look at the negative influence of hip-hop culture on young women.

The artist conveys this concern through a complex mythological narrative woven throughout the paintings. She traces the journey of a few adolescent girls during the treacherous transition to womanhood, with hustlers and material culture constantly tempting girls to stray from what they know to be right. Her complex cast of characters includes these adolescents, whom brown refers to as “saplings,” and those who revolve around them: older female “deities” who watch over them; female “warriors” who protect them; and both male and female “villains” who expose them to various vices.

In a children’s story, 2009, the male demon “E.I.N.” (everything I’m not), disguised as a seductress, and his accomplices the “hoochie putti,” evil cherublike figures with engorged breasts and buttocks, try to coax the young sapling “anna mei” into life as sexual object. In another work, the council of voices speaks (“that’s it, i got it, i’m gone”), 2010, the deities sense danger for one of the saplings and they dispatch the warrior “yoshi” to protect her. Hip and engaging, the paintings present visual parables about the temptations that face today’s adolescent girls and the community that is needed to protect and guide them to adulthood.

— Rebecca Dimling Cochran

Corin Hewitt

FIREHOUSE CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
135 Church Street
July 2–September 4

Corin Hewitt, The Grey Flame and the Brown Light, 2010, scanners, color printer, computers, soil, ash, rock, forest materials, gymnasium flooring, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Vermont native Corin Hewitt has described his latest backwoods memory trip of an installation as a “prequel” to his 2008 solo exhibition “Seed Stage” at the Whitney Museum. The latter was a decidedly indoor affair, reconfiguring the museum’s lobby-level gallery with a white-cube structure whose pristine exterior afforded visitors narrow-windowed glimpses into a messy ongoing experiment that was part hydroponic, part culinary, and part multimedia performance. The same preoccupation with the studio as the site for cycles of consumption, representation, and display is at work in the new show, but the waft of pine-scented air that hits you as you enter the gallery is just the first indication that this is a far more sylvan affair.

The artist—whose father, Frank Hewitt, taught art at the University of Vermont—has constructed an off-kilter wooden floor, interrupted by inscrutable bands of muted color and gaps through which pedestals hoisting scanners stuffed with dirt and other natural materials stick up their heads like well-fed groundhogs. But what’s really going on here is underground: Beneath the stage is a subterranean forest laboratory strewn with leaves and mulch, pillared by truncated conifers, and wired with computers, cameras, and lights. The artist is in residence here several days a week, collecting, scanning, and digitally manipulating images of organic materials—the whole process is projected on a video screen in an adjoining gallery space—digitally distilling each dirty, earthy scan until it reaches the point of bright Color Field–esque abstraction. These are printed out and reintroduced to the pine needles, leaves, and compost on the floor: a figure for the complex, reiterative loops of memory and perception, and an elliptical homecoming.

— Alexander Keefe

Roger Brown

HYDE PARK ART CENTER
5020 S. Cornell Ave.
June 20–October 3

Roger Brown, Virtual Still Life #15 Waterfalls and Pitchers, 1995, mixed media, 37 1/2 x 50”.

This absorbing exhibition demonstrates that Roger Brown’s interests went far beyond the making of his own vibrantly idiosyncratic paintings. Among numerous other pursuits, Brown was an avid collector of quirky ceramic curios––bowls, dishes, vases, and other vessels by anonymous makers of varying skill levels––that appealed to the artist precisely because of their aberrant or iconoclastic qualities. In the late 1970s, Brown, an Alabama-born, Chicago-based artist associated with the latter city’s trend-bucking Imagist group of representational painters, moved to La Conchita, a small Southern California beach community, to escape the Midwest’s notoriously harsh winters. While the title of this exhibition, “Calif USA,” refers to the geographic region where Brown lived until his death in 1997, it could just as easily be read as alluding to the artist’s expansive state of mind during his fruitful last decade.

Central to the exhibition is the 1995–96 series of his “virtual still life paintings” made in California. In these works, Brown arranged ceramic objects from his collections on small wooden trays affixed directly to his canvases. Functioning as both shrines and shelves, Brown’s still lifes celebrate the revelatory qualities of the everyday; yet unlike their traditional counterparts, they take humorous advantage of the genre’s inherently theatrical nature. In one, the undulating outline of a row of earthenware mugs is echoed and amplified by the eerily luminous mountain range depicted in the painting. Elsewhere, three-dimensional ceramic pitchers serve as figurative receptacles for the painted waterfalls behind them. Arguably, however, Brown’s uniquely synergistic approach to art, life, and vernacular culture found its most profound expression in his own home, through wildly imaginative salon-style arrangements of his collections—arrangements that are reconfigured in situ throughout the exhibition galleries.

— Claudine Ise

Deborah Stratman

GAHLBERG GALLERY AT THE COLLEGE OF DUPAGE
425 Fawell Blvd.,
August 26–October 16

Deborah Stratman, Tactical Uses of a Belief in the Unseen, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Deborah Stratman’s latest installation, Tactical Uses of a Belief in the Unseen, 2010, draws on urban crowd control strategies that were used by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Audio Harassment Division during the Vietnam War. These tactics—which the CIA nicknamed the Urban Funk Campaign—involved the deployment of helicopter-mounted public announcement systems known as “curdlers” to repel people from restricted areas and keep them psychologically off-kilter. When linked to a strong enough amplifier, the curdler could drop a nearly 11,500-foot-long cone of sound onto Vietcong forces in the jungle below, invisibly circumscribing the parameters of human movement as effectively as anything Jeremy Bentham once imagined.

At the entrance to Stratman’s installation, a drab, gray-carpeted floor rises into a series of sharply faceted inclines. As visitors navigate this uneven terrain, sounds projected from a rotating ceiling-mounted speaker shift from barely noticeable hums and buzzes to sweeping siren wails, thrumming engines, and the droning whug whug whug of helicopter propellers. A point of narrative climax arrives when all noises abruptly cease. The silence brings no relief, only escalating anxiety. Several long seconds later, the cacophony resumes with a series of slow, pounding thuds. It’s impossible to tell whether the sound is moving closer or farther away.

Created with composer Jen Wang, Stratman’s dislocated soundscape literally seeps into the skin through the vibrations emitted by several speakers placed under the floor. Despite the palpable sense of dread this inspires, it’s clear that Stratman intends the installation as a piece of theater—a device to reveal modern sonic warfare as a terrorism of the ordinary, amplified to untenable levels.

— Claudine Ise

Stephanie Syjuco

GALLERY 400
University of Illinois at Chicago, 400 South Peoria Street (MC 034)
September 7–October 23

View of “Particulate Matter: Things, Thingys, Thingies,” 2010.

The whimsical sculptures in Stephanie Syjuco’s exhibition “Particulate Matter: Things, Thingys, Thingies” are based on designs that were never meant to have a material form. Each of the fifty-four pieces on view represents Syjuco’s attempt to physically render one of hundreds of virtual objects made with Google SketchUp, a free 3-D modeling program favored by amateur designers for its user-friendliness. (The exhibition also includes a video projection of these objects as they appear in digital form). While SketchUp designers can upload their creations to a shared database categorized by function (architecture, commercial interiors, gaming), a surprisingly large number of the uploaded objects have no apparent utility. Syjuco has industriously remade what are essentially three-dimensional doodles out of white foamcore, colored paper, and other basic craft materials and placed them on wooden pallets in the manner of manufactured prototypes or goods in transit.

Quirky yet exactingly realized, Syjuco’s polyglot “thingies” inhabit an epistemological gray zone: They are not quite copies of things, and the designs from which they are derived have no real-world referent. This leads to some amusing nomenclatural conundrums that Syjuco’s titles (which follow those given by the SketchUp designers) foreground. A 2010 model named Pointy Thing, for example, is described thusly by its SketchUp author: “It’s a pointy thing.” Syjuco’s handmade follies are at once pure sculpture and bastard offshoot, their delicacy and meticulous crafting a testament to the artist’s belief in the essential worth of ideas, however indeterminate that value may be.

— Claudine Ise

Dana DeGiulio, Marie Torbensdatter Hermann, and Anders Ruhwald

DEVENING PROJECTS + EDITIONS
3039 West Carroll, 3rd Floor
October 24–November 27

View of “Dana DeGiulio, Marie Torbensdatter Hermann, and Anders Ruhwald,” 2010. Foreground: Marie Torbensdatter Hermann, You Will #4, 2010. Middle ground: Anders Ruhwald, Beginning and Ending (version 4), 2010. Background: Dana DeGiulio, Amor vacui (detail), 2010.

This collaborative exhibition of works by Chicago-based painter Dana DeGiulio and Danish ceramists Marie Torbensdatter Hermann and Anders Ruhwald is the latest installment in “Kabinett,” a yearlong series of shows at Devening Projects + Editions featuring local, national, and international artists. In this particular instance, the extent of the exchange among the three participating artists feels a bit underplayed, even tentative, but when things do start to heat up between them, the results are inspired and invigorating.

The artworks keep discreetly to themselves in the first room. On the walls, the elegantly angsty brushwork of DeGiulio’s white, gray, and oily black canvases finds its expressive potential muffled by comical splats and bandagelike swaths of paint. On the floor, Ruhwald’s canary yellow sculpture suggests a ridiculously outsize bird feeder or an elongated megaphone turned on its side, but the absence of holes makes the functions associated with either object impossible. Hermann’s glazed white vessels evoke oft-handled kitchen items such as cups, saltshakers, or cruets. Displayed on a custom-made earthenware shelf, these objects bear the marks of human touch on their pinched and prodded surfaces, yet they, too, have no utility.

Only in the second room do the artists truly mix it up. Hermann’s sculptures come off their shelves and expand to a larger scale than usual for this artist, taking the form of floor-bound clouds and solid lampshades. As if to free her gestural marks from their canvases, DeGiulio has adhered flexible black acrylic paint peels and bits of studio detritus directly to the walls, creating a physically dynamic, three-dimensional collage that also acts as a frame for the sculptures on the floor. Hermann’s and DeGiulio’s attempts to “stretch” the boundaries of their practices adds a new level of poignancy to Ruhwald’s sculptures, especially Beginning and Ending (Version 4), 2010, a sculpture where the methodically hand-wrought outlines of a chair echo the willful self-determination of DeGiulio’s line and Hermann’s sensuous handling of her materials.

— Claudine Ise

Jennifer West

CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON
5216 Montrose Boulevard
July 16–September 26

Jennifer West, Daisies Roll Up Film (16mm color and b&w film neg rolled with hard boiled eggs, oranges, lemons, avocados, pickles, green apples, milk and watermelon – a remake of a scene from Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film, Daisies – rolling off the bed performances by: Mariah Csepanyi, Finn West & Jwest, lit with black light & strobe light), 2008, still from a color film in 16 mm, 5 minutes 53 seconds.

Jennifer West’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States comprises five experimental short films in which she documents the traces of allegorical and alchemical performance actions. Hypnotic and chromatically saturated, these nonlinear works are created through and in response to singular repetitive gestures. West draws inspiration equally from popular recreation (darts puncture clear film leader, snowboarders shred on a film of a moonlit sky, and a wild session of Guitar Hero is seen through acidic washes) and high art (two films re-create, respectively, Pollock’s 1950 Lavender Mist and a scene from Věra Chytilová’s 1966 Czech New Wave film Daisies). Like her experimental predecessors, West forgoes narrative cohesion in favor of creating jumpy cuts and abstract visual collages––splicing, rolling, and drenching the celluloid using materials from Mylar tape to pickle juice, whiskey to candle smoke.

For this exhibition, West transferred her films to digital prints so they might be projected with ease. Yet the lushness that is lost in the transition to the digital medium is reconstituted in West’s evocative titles. Her lists of eccentric materials in long parentheticals bridge a conceptual gap, revealing a diaristic and tongue-in-cheek approach to her work. For instance, West “transforms” Lavender Mist not only allegorically, by liberally rubbing the leader with hallucinogenic jimson weed, but also through subversive mark-making strategies. She achieves the effect of Pollock’s signature drips and splatters through spray paint and nail polish: a double middle-finger salute to Greenbergian formalism in the materials of urban vandalism, on the one hand, and decorative feminine primping, on the other. West’s work is most satisfying when she combines knowing irony and punk aesthetics, lending a riot grrrl feminist sensibility to the boys’ club legacy of experimental film.

— Wendy Vogel

Yevgeniy Fiks

TEMPLE GALLERY
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, 12th and Norris Streets
September 8–November 6

View of “Communist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums,” 2010.

The most intriguing piece on view in the latest exhibition by the Russian-born, New York–based artist Yevgeniy Fiks is Stalin’s Directive on Modern Art (all works 2010). Two vitrines display documents fabricated by the artist that speculate on the notorious leader’s interest in art. One page bears a famous statement attributed to Stalin that appeared in an article written by Eleanor Jewett for the Chicago Tribune in 1955, in which Stalin urged artists to “create confusion,” among other suggestions, in order to contribute to the collapse of Western society. Fiks also presents numerous photographs of artists and other intellectuals involved with communism––for example, MoMA’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. visiting official USSR artist Yevgeny Kibrik in Moscow in 1959.

This work sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition, which is appropriately titled “Communist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums,” after the name of a 1952 speech by Republican congressman George A. Dondero. A related piece, Tour of MoMA with Congressman Dondero, is a posterlike series of twenty-one sentences from Dondero’s 1952 and 1956 speeches as culled from congressional records. Among handmade reproductions of legendary communist figures’ portraits—including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—originally drawn by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, there is also Communist Tour of MoMA, seven red canvases offering declarations from artists such as Picasso, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera regarding their commitment to communism alongside their distinctive signatures. There is, for instance, a quote in which Kahlo compared herself to Rivera, her husband: I WAS A MEMBER OF THE PARTY BEFORE I MET DIEGO AND I THINK I AM A BETTER COMMUNIST THAN HE IS OR EVER WILL BE. Intelligently bringing together cold war politics and artistic agency, this exhibition presents Fiks’s critical examination of the historical intertwining of ideology and aesthetics in the twentieth century.

— Miguel Amado

Erin Shirreff

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA
University of Pennsylvania, 118 South 36th Street
September 15–December 5

View of “Still, Flat, and Far,” 2010.

Erin Shirreff has created a delicate balance between form and image for her exhibition “Still, Flat, and Far,” a literal title that is indicative of the structures she has arranged. Four sculptures made from compressed ash and Hydrocal, a white gypsum cement, lean against the walls and, in one case, jut up from the floor at an angle. The material composite gives these sculptures a sullen color and a surface that confirms fabrication. Adorning the walls, six photographs are presented in wooden frames like those in which butterfly collections might be displayed. These black-and-white newsprint images are fastened in place, one pin in each upper corner so the bottom edges curl, casting shadows. Such physical details typify the materiality imbued in Shirreff’s show. The images depict landscapes; the most potent captures two people squeezed on the extreme left of the photograph, the rest of the shot dominated by a monumental Tony Smith sculpture.

Through her photography and sculpture, Shirreff investigates the material nature of these media and calls attention to how we read them. The connective tissue is Moon, 2010, a video in which an image of the moon is illuminated from various angles, highlighting the extreme readings one might make of a still image placed in variable lighting contexts. The thingness of this particular work is further emphasized by the screen on which it is projected. Like the linear planes of the sculptures, the screen protrudes from the wall, creating a triangle with its the far right edge at the greatest distance from the wall. Thus, the projected image, in which lighting is the key to transformation, is also physically transformed by a compelling golden glow at the edge of the screen.

— Kathleen Madden

Michael Brophy

LAURA RUSSO GALLERY
805 NW 21st Avenue,
September 2–October 2

Michael Brophy, Sound, 2010, oil on canvas, 54 x 66”.

In this exhibition of large- and small-scale landscapes, the Portland, Oregon–based painter Michael Brophy continues his study of the Pacific Northwest’s natural environment, both qua nature and as a sometimes disturbing register of human history. Unlike the artist’s previous work, in which he painted landscapes of clear-cut forests and “portraits” of burned-out snags influenced by painters such as Velázquez and Manet, these recent works were made in close consideration of photographic source material collected by the artist, often out the window of his car. Brophy’s latest output conjoins snapshot photography’s familiar perspective with the haptic sensuality of paint, resulting in visions of place that elicit a tingling sense of déjà vu.

In the large seascape Sound (all works cited, 2010), Brophy captures the presence of light on the cold, gray water of Puget Sound. The viewer is positioned at the edge of a driftwood-strewn shore, embraced by the magnificent calm of the scene and the exquisite texture of the painting’s surface. Across the water, unfettered brushstrokes cohere into scintillating reflections. A striking band of hazy sunlight blankets the horizon, which is surrounded by fading mountains. The work’s reverential serenity suggests the inevitability of death and the mystery of the spirit.

All of the works in this show contain passages of similar beauty and sensitivity. In Ship, for instance, the phosphorescence of a vessel’s work lights illuminates the deep indigo of the Pacific at night. Human beings are absent from these works. It is the presence of the artist with which the viewer identifies. Brophy masterfully represents the sensation of vision, within the long, slow unfolding of time.

— Stephanie Snyder

Charles Atlas

PICA - THE PORTLAND INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART AT WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL
531 SE 14th Ave.
September 9–October 17

View of “Tornado Warning,” 2010.

“Human Being” is the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s feast of art offerings curated by Kristan Kennedy as part of the nonprofit organization’s eighth annual Time-Based Art Festival. A disused public high school serves as the locus solus of the exhibitions, among them “Tornado Warning,” an immersive two-room video installation by New York–based artist and longtime Merce Cunningham collaborator Charles Atlas.

The installation’s back-to-back interiors consist of five-walled “stages” that envelope the viewer within two radically dichotomous sensory experiences. (Atlas describes each room as the “inside out” of the other.) On the one hand is Tornado Warning (all works 2008–10), a churning storm of photographic imagery and surreal graphics, swirling and pulsing to the sound of rumbling winds, tornado alarms, crying babies, and a plaintive cow––Atlas’s homage to the homespun terror of The Wizard of Oz.

On the other hand is Plato’s Alley, a cerebral exploration of the orderly and seemingly nonhuman aspects of mathematical expression. Plato’s Alley is a meditative phantasmagoria wherein six white vertical bands slowly morph into a Tron-like grid populated by the numbers one through six. Cycling and shifting, the entire grid eventually swirls into blackness, swept into oblivion by an invisible hand.

Communicating like two hemispheres of the same brain, the works generate sensations and memories richer than the sum of their interdependent parts. As a whole, “Tornado Warning” speaks urgently to the psychic and environmental conditions––the changes in the weather––that have become the central metaphors, and the most pressing issues, of our time.

— Stephanie Snyder

Beryl Korot

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM
258 Main Street
June 27–January 2

Beryl Korot, Babel: The 7 Minute Scroll, 2006, still from a color video, 7 minutes 14 seconds. Installation view.

In this miniretrospective, Beryl Korot, cofounder and editor of the seminal 1970s video periodical Radical Software, demonstrates her career-long commitment to technology, language, and the history that binds the two together. Korot’s video pieces on view anchor the technologies of the medium, and in particular animation, to an older practice—the first computer on earth, so to speak: the hand loom. In Babel: The 7 Minute Scroll, 2006, Korot creates an animated hand-scroll weaving that depicts, with text and images, the movement from an ancient alphabet-centered language to a more contemporary visually based vocabulary. In Florence, 2008–2009, blocks of text by Florence Nightingale drop quietly over interlaced video footage of snowstorms and waterfalls.

As if to bind her own personal history to her pieces, Korot’s multichannel video installation Text and Commentary (originally exhibited at Leo Castelli in 1977) is reinstalled in a private room. The alternating channels show Korot prepping the loom, and, at varying distances, the threads as they combine to form a pattern. Five gray, black, and white weavings hang directly across from the monitors, each exhibiting slight changes in patterns that otherwise mirror those formed by the threads in the videos. Pictograms describing the organization of the video channels and drawings of the tapestries line the walls.

Text and Commentary can be seen as a variety of interleaved information systems—both literal and abstract threads: The monitors themselves are single channels that when placed together create a visual experience of the warp and the weft. The tapestries mirror the monitors in their pattern, while the pictograms reveal the underlying structure of the videos. Each work encodes and decodes another, line by line—an act of representation so basic it can be traced back to the beginnings of human language. With Text and Commentary and in her more recent works, Korot transforms bundles of information, the very material of the video signal, into profound meditations on the various systems of communication.

— Katie Geha

“Kurt”

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM
1300 First Avenue
May 13–September 6

Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, 1996, color photograph, 30 1/2 x 30 1/2”.

When approaching “Kurt,” an exhibition about the influence of Kurt Cobain, one may at first feel skeptical. Memorabilia and other artifacts attempting to preserve the late rock star’s legacy, however, are entirely absent, a welcome indication that the pitfalls of sentimental kitsch are far away—which is not to say that sentimentality itself has been omitted. Gretchen Bennett’s video I Don’t Blame You, 2009, features a hand maneuvering a snapdragon flower, and a sound track of Bennett playing a tender Cat Power ballad that is widely considered to be about Cobain. In preparation for the piece, Bennett spent months practicing her vocals and learning the simple piano chords to the song. Her mimicry pays homage to Cobain by taking to heart the touching sympathy of the song’s lyrics: “What a cruel price you thought that you had to pay.”

Another compassionate work is Evan Holloway’s foam carving Left-Handed Guitarist, 1998, which shows Cobain hunched over, presumably due to his recurring back and stomach problems. Douglas Gordon’s photograph Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, 1996, seems to suggest that Cobain is but one of several icons that can be conjured with a blond wig and wryly insinuates how each icon’s platinum hair contributes to the circulation of his or her image. Cobain’s reproducibility is explored further in Slater Bradley’s Phantom Release, 2003, for which the artist created fictional concert footage with a camcorder and a Cobain look-alike.

The idea that Cobain can now be adapted to meet various people’s needs, in seemingly infinite ways, is the exhibition’s most pervasive theme. Even the title of the show implies that an intimate relationship has been established. This is a sure sign that Cobain’s identity has become permanently intertwined with public consciousness. The sight of artists utilizing Cobain’s ultimate malleability comes off as equal parts exploitive, humorous, reverent, empathetic, and undignified.

— Micah Malone

“Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture”

HENRY ART GALLERY
15th Avenue NE & NE 41st Street, Box 351410
October 2–January 23

Erika Vogt, I arrive when I am foreign (Centennial Tin), 2006, color photograph, 46 x 92”.

As the title of this group exhibition asserts, today’s open source visual culture treats pictures—whether found, manipulated, translated into another medium, or generated by the artist—as just another material resource. Where the work of the Pictures generation sought to teach viewers to read images critically, the twelve artists here are similarly instructive, demonstrating how to deploy images with culturally aware reflexivity. Importantly, nearly all of them were born in the mid-1970s: old enough to have come of age before the Internet, but young enough to have spent the majority of their adult lives online. Thus the act of dislodging images from their original contexts—for aesthetic ends or as shorthand signifiers—is second nature, but tempered by historical perspective. Though all the work showcases this generational vantage, the most illuminating pieces explicitly comment on the psychological implications of living in today’s eminently visual culture.

In I arrive when I am foreign (Centennial Tin), 2006, Erika Vogt creates a space of fantastic self-involvement. The piece is a large-scale print of a video still, in which Vogt faces away from the viewer, holding a camera behind her back with its lens pointed down, and snapping a picture. Beneath her, a life-size photograph of the artist responds with a vexing near-symmetry: In that image within an image, she lies on her back, holding a camera at her waist that is taking a flash photograph of her upright double. The spatial inconsistency of the ostensible mirror image suggests there are disembodying consequences to the ubiquitous representation of self and others. Amanda Ross-Ho’s Camera (Aerial View), 2008, a series of mirrored domes installed on the ceiling of each room, implicates the viewer in this lust for a reflected and serially documented self. Though viewers assume that their movement through the space is recorded via unseen surveillance, these domes merely reflect—which hardly prevents viewers from peering up inquisitively, or smiling eagerly for the imagined camera.

— John Motley

Robert Ryman

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
1600 21st Street, NW
June 5–September 12

Robert Ryman, Painting with Steel 15 1/8 x 13 5/8”, 1978, 
oil stick on paper, white painted steel frame with round bolts, 15 1/8 x 13 5/8” overall.

Robert Ryman’s “Variations and Improvisations,” his first-ever solo exhibition in Washington, DC, finds the artist exercising a seemingly quiet theme with considerable muscularity. Over the course of twenty-six paintings produced between the 1960s and the present, Ryman explores the white square, a subject he has worked with for his entire career. Several of the pieces on view are straightforward compositions, but the greater number reveal an irreverence that runs contrary to the white-square abstractions of artists like Malevich or Rothko. For Spectrum VIII, 1984, Ryman’s signature (plus the number 84) fills an aluminum square. Writ large, his last name stands in the place of the gestural abstraction seen elsewhere in the show. In the context of the exhibition, the empty space that his name occupies—a witty comment on the necessity of the signature—is the white square. An even more playful example, titled Spectrum V, 1984, features the word RYMAN along the perimeter, via marks that would seem to measure something missing from the aluminum panel—like the numbers on the face of a clock or the side of a measuring glass.

A white-on-white square from 2007 nearly invites the viewer into the kind of contemplative space that Ryman’s early AbEx contemporaries like Rothko had in mind. Yet Ryman’s serene brushstroke carries no more spiritual weight in the context of the show than Untitled #33, 1963, a crumpled strip of raw, ungessoed canvas covered with gloopy, comical dabs of white oil. Ryman’s overriding interest in defying the psychic connotations of the white plane is abundantly clear here: His white squares give no glimpse of the subconscious or metaphysical sublime. In works like Painting with Steel 15 1/8 x 13 5/8”, 1978—which features white oil stick on paper in a steel frame bounded by four built-in bolts—the square serves as the means to his formalist ends. Ryman’s series of variations takes an epic Abstract Expressionist trope and transforms it into a Minimalist parlor game.

— Kriston Capps

Kara Uzelman

MERCER UNION, A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
1286 Bloor Street West
October 29–December 4

Kara Uzelman, Field Tent and Antenna, 2010, nylon sails, aluminium poles, wood, twine, bolts, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Kara Uzelman’s exploration of telecommunications history and acoustic landscapes in this exhibition-cum-residency fittingly takes its title from an arcane communiqué. “If you receive this, you will soon bask in glory” is a translation of the first message relayed from Lille to Paris by Claude Chappe’s semaphore telegraph in 1791. At the time, Chappe’s network of pulley-operated blades atop towers across France was a telecommunications innovation, but by the mid–nineteenth century, it had been rendered obsolete by the arrival of the telegraph. Like Chappe, Uzelman resists latter-day technology in favor of a DIY approach. In the works on view, the artist demonstrates an idiosyncratic material language by salvaging and reassembling twentieth-century refuse into functional, talismanic objects coded as part of a rigorous pseudoscience.

In the middle of the gallery, a tent made of recycled sailcloth offers a provisional workspace for Uzelman’s real-time excavations of aural detritus. A receiver built from handmade components—such as beer bottle solenoids, mason jar batteries filled with bleach, and scraps of pipe lashed together to make an antenna—picks up and broadcasts natural radio waves and electronic interference as an eerie score of clicks and squeaks. Nearby is a papercrete stele and Chappe’s superfluous message spelled out in his runic alphabet; both are compelling anachronistic markers. Throughout the show, Uzelman reconsiders history as a fluid source to borrow from, but her interceptions sift through the clutter and give value to everyday debris.

— Jen Hutton

Shary Boyle

ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
317 Dundas Street West
September 15–December 5

Shary Boyle, Live Old, 2009, porcelain, china paint, beads, luster glaze, 12 x 10 x 8 1/2”.

Inside one of several recessed vitrines in a darkened gallery, a tiny polymer clay figurine titled Birth, 2008, by Shary Boyle, depicts a young woman moments after labor, on her knees and still tethered to her baby via an umbilical cord, her face seeming blankly indifferent toward the life form that has just emerged from her body. Though it is one of the smallest works on view, Birth is a poignant key to the underlying themes of Boyle’s exhibition, titled “Flesh and Blood,” as it is these substantial yet abject components of human existence that she employs to denote both the alien and the familiar. This exhibition of recent work superbly demonstrates the artist’s diverse, underrated output, ranging from wall works and large installations to more intimate porcelain sculptures. Ornament prevails as Boyle ably straddles the line between beauty and grotesquerie while hovering in an escapist’s fantasy. Her works scale those monumental themes of humanity—sex, desire, birth, and death—with a skewed yet shockingly honest feminist politic.

In one gallery, the artist appropriates the techniques and display conventions of eighteenth-century porcelain in her own exquisite sculptures. These gilded tableaux—such as a feminized Ganesh figure wading in a pool of beads (Live Old, 2009)—are vehicles for her allegorical imaginings. In another gallery, butterflies are a recurrent motif, appearing in the colorful psychedelic pattern projected onto the sculptural body of a Hellenistic maiden in Virus (White Wedding), 2009. Nearby, a small, prone female figure shrouded in butterflies (Untitled, 2002) is simultaneously beautiful and perverse. While Boyle’s larger installations are striking, it is smaller pieces like these that are ultimately more potent.

— Jen Hutton

Geoffrey Farmer

1875 POWELL STREET AT VICTORIA DRIVE

November 15–November 14

View of "Every Letter in the Alphabet," 2009–10.

Geoffrey Farmer’s yearlong project Every Letter in the Alphabet, 2009–10, examines two of his aesthetic preoccupations: language and performance. Farmer opened a storefront for the piece, which was commissioned by the city of Vancouver as part of a series of public artworks in conjunction with the 2010 Olympics. Farmer in turn commissioned twenty-six language-based works by twenty-six different artists, and the projects range from spoken-word performances to posters or signs, while the storefront acts as a public space and reading room. Each of these commissions, as one might have guessed, stands in for one of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Jeremy Shaw, for example, reprinted promotional posters from Expo ’86, the World’s Fair that Vancouver hosted in 1986. These reproductions were exhibited in Every Letter along with a vitrine displaying the fair’s mascot, Expo Ernie. Other events that have taken place as part of the project include specifically commissioned performances, magazine launch parties, and simultaneous readings of seven translations of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

Every Letter hovers among a series of recognizable contemporary art tropes but never lands on any—it is neither an artist-as-curator project nor a relational work. The storefront becomes a site for whatever language-based works may be presented, which recalls another thematic element of Farmer’s work: the representation of performance. As such, Every Letter is ultimately a space that makes for an unlikely but compelling work.

— Aaron Peck

Stephen Waddell

MONTE CLARK GALLERY
2339 Granville Street
November 4–December 4

Stephen Waddell, Wrestlers, 2010, color photograph, 96 x 119”.

Stephen Waddell’s current exhibition, comprising seven pictures, examines the complexities of the photographic gaze. The most notable work, Wrestlers, 2010, presents an intricate series of sightlines. Measuring 96 by 119 inches, Wrestlers could very well be the only photograph of its size ever produced entirely by hand. In this work, a crowd of spectators in front of the Altes Museum in Berlin watches a Mongolian wresting match (in an allusion to Henri-Cartier Bresson’s Wrestlers on Independence Day, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 1958). The two figures in the right-hand corner of the foreground observe the wrestlers locked in combat, while the wrestlers look away from one another, the camera, and the crowd. The two spectators in the foreground appear just larger than life, but the middle ground, which includes the crowd and the wrestlers, was developed at a lifelike size, so that the scale of the photograph is bifurcated. Many of Waddell’s pictures consider the medium of photography; Wrestlers is the most successful of these in both content and execution.

The other six images further explore Waddell’s photographic interests. While six of the seven photographs depict a human subject, only one of those figures––in Man in Green Mask, 2009––looks in the direction of the camera. In Kurfurstendam 225, 2009, a woman leans against a doorway, looking to the right of the frame. As if by negation, in this work, much like in Wrestlers, one is reminded of the way in which a viewer is implicated in the photograph. This subtle self-reflexivity makes the images seem unconcerned with anything but their own pictorial logic, yet their complexity makes them all the more contemporary.

— Aaron Peck

“The Traveling Show”

FUNDACIÓN / COLECCIÓN JUMEX
Vía Morelos 272, Colonia Santa María Tulpetlac
April 15–September 5

View of “The Traveling Show,” 2010. From left: Diego Pérez, Biblioteca de Nezahualcoyotl (Nezahualcoyotl Library), 2004–2006; Carlos Huffmann, Untitled, 2009; Fernando Ortega, Untitled, 2008; Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck, Reconstrucción ideal de una ceremonia prehispánica, (Reconstruction of a Pre-Hispanic Ceremony), 1826–36.

Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, this sizable show explores and makes troublesome art’s relationship to the notion of travel. It opens with four works from nineteenth-century Europeans––Octavio D’Alvimar, Henri Pierre León Pharamond Blanchard, Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros, and Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck––that offer a romantic archaeology of Mexico. For Pedrosa this exhibition––and all exhibitions––begins with a journey. “The artworks migrate from the artist’s studio or from a collection to a gallery or museum,” he writes in the press release; “they are regrouped, recontextualized, juxtaposed to others. Everything here has suffered some sort of displacement.”

The thematic focus of “Traveling Show” shifts and transforms with pieces from the 1960s and ’70s that introduce ideas of passage (especially in contributions by Vito Acconci and Robert Kinmont), site (On Kawara), and dislocation (Robert Smithson). Other works by contemporary artists engage travel through physical transit (Francis Alÿs), tensions between foreigners and locals (Claire Fontaine), and the inclusion of elements that become the documentation of a journey (Gabriel Orozco and Walead Beshty). Film and video constitute a large part of the show––these are moving images about movement that reinforce the conceptual underpinnings of journey and passage.

— Montserrat Albores Gleason

“Dracula Effect”

MUSEO UNIVERSITARIO DEL CHOPO
Dr. Enrique González Martínez no. 10, col. Santa María la Ribera,
May 19–September 8

View of “Dracula Effect,” 2010.

Premised on the “vampirization” of youth culture as haunted, romantic, and historically established fodder for art, this exhibition is one of three expansive group shows that are reopening the Museo Universitario del Chopo’s architecturally redesigned building in northwest Mexico City. As the weekly home of the massive Il Chopo punk and goth market that originated thirty years ago at the museum, this part of the city is a mecca for alternative culture, and the exhibition itself stands as a site-specific inquiry into its locality’s legacy.

Pulling from the global holdings of local private collections, curator Victor Zamudio Taylor has assembled a gathering of commercially virile artists who have emerged from particular subcultural communities, documented them, or otherwise reflected them in their work. This heavyweight revue (ample with YBAs, slackers, and the 1990s in general) serves best as a contextual backdrop for the Mexico-based artists that are included in equal measure. Across these works, crime and violence recur as timely yet timeless themes, approached symbolically in Patrick Hamilton’s sculpture of nunchakus trammelled by an absurdly long chain. The motif of misconduct is addressed tactically in Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okón’s 1997 video installation that places a block of 120 stolen car stereos purchased on the black market before a looped projection of the artists looting a car themselves. Depicting disinterested art students pacing a fictitious exhibit as they are irrepressibly alienated (in non-diegetic Italian) by didactic aphorisms about art, Adriana Lara’s Art Film 1: Ever present yet ignored, 2006, satirizes the perverted economy at the heart of this show, in which the avant-garde establishment preys on the vanguard generation for inspiration, only to bore them with the results. Here we see, time and time again, how the ideas that emerge from processes like these embody the powerful yet somewhat bloodless condition of being neither dead nor alive.

— Kevin McGarry

“PanAmericana”

KURIMANZUTTO
Mazatlan 5 Depto. T-6, Col. Condesa
July 14–September 11

Wilfredo Prieto, Cuba libre (Free Cuba), 2010, rum, Coca-Cola, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Curated by Jens Hoffmann, this group exhibition presents the work of twenty-two emerging artists from the Americas. After observing, during his travels, the scant communication among Latin American artists, Hoffmann set out to construct a setting for dialogue. Here he also attempts to reactivate the idea of Pan-Americanism, as it was theorized in the early nineteenth century when Latin American colonies were gaining independence, as well as the sense of unity expressed by the revolutionary war heroes Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín. The two equestrian sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas, which were made with the help of César Martins, Alan Legal, and Mariano Marsicano, in The Death of General Lavalle (The Eternal Butterflies) (all works cited 2010), represent such idealistic notions, as well as their ruin. Nearby, Mariana Castillo Deball’s Tu movimiento junta una estatua ficticia (Your Movement Beside a Fictitious Statue) is a fiberglass copy of an ancient sculpture of the Aztec god Coatlicue, which is exhibited at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. This work serves to emphasize Hoffmann’s interest in how “the relics of the past, and their display, interact with the artistic activities of the present,” as he writes in the show’s materials. Hoffmann’s concern for historical displays serves to construct a beautiful exhibition; however, the implications of looking at art from Latin America through the perspective of anthropology generates a feeling of unease. Works like Wilfredo Prieto’s Cuba libre (Free Cuba), which consists of two puddles of rum and Coca-Cola on the floor of the exhibition space, suggest that freedom for Cuba depends on the help of the United States. It therefore prompts the viewer to ponder the implications of the term Pan-Americanism in relation to the Monroe Doctrine, and the consequences of classifying specific artistic practices according to region.

— Montserrat Albores Gleason

“Today I Feel Well”

PROYECTOS MONCLOVA
Gral. León 31, Col. San Miguel Chapultepec
July 29–September 25

François Bucher, Captura holográfica. Tepoztlán (Holographic Capture. Tepoztlán), 2010, found wooden branch, dimensions variable.

This exhibition borrows its title from the microstory “Fecundidad” (Fertility), by writer Augusto Monterroso, and includes works by François Bucher, José León Cerrillo, Mario García Torres, Christian Jankowski, and the Tercerunquinto collective. In its entirety, “Fecundidad” reads: “Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.” Monterroso’s story speaks of the act of writing as well as its history, just as the works in this show reflect on the construction of artwork and the process of perception. Captura holográfica. Tepoztlán (Holographic Capture. Tepoztlán), 2010, a work by Bucher, comprises a serpentine branch exhibited in the gallery; in an artist statement, Bucher equates the artistic act of taking the branch from the Tepozteco mountain with what he deems a spiritual act—capturing a snake while in a “suprasensorial” state. For each work in the series “What I Still Have to Take Care of,” 2010, Jankowski selects one of the items from his to-do list, then uses the words that outline the task to construct a neon text piece. In Borrador (Eraser), 2010, the Tercerunquinto collective reflects on the relationship between gallery and artist by asking the director of Proyectos Monclova to erase three of their drawings. In A continuous present and using everything and beginning again, 2007, Cerrillo reflects on silk screen as a medium and questions the idea of reproducibility. Meanwhile, in a two-channel video, García Torres writes a letter to the viewer in which he ponders his own work methods. The epistle is penned during the three-minute duration of the Super 8 film cartridge registering his deed. The letter finishes with: SO, I WILL JUST START WRITING, AND WHEN THE FILM ENDS, THIS LETTER ENDS TOO. The title of the work is the text of the letter itself, a sort of tautological cycle based on the complementary acts of writing and reading.

— Montserrat Albores Gleason