ArtSeen
SANNA KANNISTO Fieldwork
By Alexis ClementsThe work of Finnish photographer Sanna Kannisto explores the complex space that exists between the natural world and those humans who desire to isolate, possess, and understand it in some way.
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN New Sculpture
By Michael StrausDespite Roberta Smith’s gushing review of this show—finding the works “stately,” “architectural,” fairly “erupt[ing]” from the gallery’s floors—my own feeling was, “Poor John Chamberlain, how did he fall so far?”
MICHAEL E. SMITH
By Lynn CrawfordIn the film Chinatown, Roman Polanski (playing “man with a knife”) slices the nose of Jack Nicholson’s character, Jake, requiring the detective to work with a white bandage covering the center of his face.
BYE BYE KITTY!!!
By Gail QuagliataWhat could possibly be cuter than a mouthless, anthropomorphic cat with an improbably giant head, donning a festive hair bow and wee overalls? Well, how about two of them, eternally guarding your cherished pet’s tomb in unblinking vigil?
RYOJI IKEDA Goes Big, Really Big
By Erin LindholmBy any standards, Ryoji Ikeda has been given an all-access pass worthy of rock star status: A pair of 40-foot tall screens for his black-and-white visuals; all 55,000 square feet of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to fill with his stripped-down, sonic sounds; and the blessing of the Park Avenue Armory’s president and executive producer, Rebecca Robertson, to get loud.
![Installation view of Ryoji Ikeda’s “test pattern [nº 3],” a version of which is on view at the Park Avenue Armory as part of his digital and sonic installation the “transfinite.” Image courtesy Théâtre de Gennevilliers.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/8060/lindholm-web1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
DAVID DEUTSCH Nothing Real
By Charles SchultzWhy is it easy to conceptualize a physical sensation but incredibly challenging to feel a concept? As an example consider movement, or more specifically, moving along in a vehicle, a car let’s say.
ØYSTEIN AASAN
By David RhodesAs the source of the Berlin-based Norwegian artist Øystein Aassan’s second solo exhibition at PSM Gallery, a quote from Barnett Newman is cited: “The painting should give man a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, because in that sense I was there.” Aasan achieves this sense of place through a very literal emphasis on making and context.
MORE THAN THAT: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson
By Cora FisherA floor apart from the mid-career retrospective of Glen Ligon at the Whitney Museum, a gallery-turned-sanctum offers its own glimpse into black experience—in a manner apart from the literalism of Ligon’s neon signs flickering “AMERICA.”
INFLUENCE OR AFFINITY? Case in Paint: Soutine and Bacon
By Robert C. MorganI honestly can’t say if the Soutine / Bacon exhibition is a great one, but it clearly reveals something about the enigma of painting. More specifically, it is the kind of enigma that slides between representation and abstraction, yet still manages to hold its painterly ground on all sides.
Brooklyn Dispatches
By James KalmMost of us toil away, day by day, grinding out an existence, our lives punctuated occasionally by small events.
GILLIAN WEARING People
By Kara L. RooneyThe work of British artist Gillian Wearing resides somewhere in the intermediary space between documentary staging and the complex aesthetics that categorize contemporary fine art.
MATTHEW MILLER
"The magic black of an open barn door on a really sunny summer day, when you just cannot see into it."
By Cassandra Neyenesch
When I first saw Matthew Miller’s portraits at a group show at Centotto, I thought they seemed to combine aspects of northern Renaissance portraiture and Mexican black velvet paintings.
ALAN SHIELDS
Something Goin' On & On
By Anne Sherwood Pundyk
Alan Shields’s operative medium is pure color. His passive, infused, or diluted application of paint through tints, prints, stains, and stencils leaves his work vulnerable to the conditions under which it is viewed, bringing to mind the seacoast or a broad expanse of field where the light and weather are in perpetual flux.
DIY Bushwick
Characterized by industrial zones, live chicken coops, and large, open spaces, Bushwick, Brooklyn can feel like a semi-agrarian environment where rising financial pressures have forced New York-based artists further east. But that’s old news.
JUDY LEDGERWOOD April Showers
By John YauThere are two parts to this exhibition. In the main gallery space Judy Ledgerwood has hung eight paintings, all 60” x 60”, while in the north gallery she has completed a painting in tempera on three walls.
ABSTRACT PAINTING: The New Casualists
By Sharon L. ButlerIn the competitive maelstrom of 20th century art, philosophies became dogmas, and the dogmas outright manifestos. In the new century, many abstract painters are saying goodbye to all that didactic thinking and exuding a kind of calculated tentativeness.
JAMES FRANCO Collage
By Patricia MilderWhen casually recounting—in person, to friends—stories about this or that performance last night, I have often been teased about my proclivity for starting with the less immediately relevant details about who was there, how many, which audience members left halfway through, and whether someone looked back to tell me to please stop talking so they could more fully enjoy David Parsons.
WEBBED OUT
Cory Arcangel Goes Old School
By Allese Thomson Baker
On any given weekday, hacker turned artist Cory Arcangel—famous for burning the videogame aesthetic into the contemporary art canon—can be found hunched over a long table in his Brooklyn studio, staring into one of his three massive computer screens.
ELLEN HARVEY in Dust to Settle
By David St.-LascauxAround the time Goethe wrote his first bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther (and Thomas Paine Common Sense), a bizarre device became popular among tourists in the natural world: William Gilpin’s “Claude glass,” or black mirror.
SINGAPORE BIENNALE 2011: Open House
By Sherman SamQuite unlike the Whitney Biennial, the Tate Triennial, or the British Art show (a quinquennale), which are summations of a moment in a specific place, most biennials—Venice aside—are dialogues or contrasts between the local and the international.
