Luke Butler

SILVERMAN GALLERY
804 Sutter Street @ the corner of Jones
March 23–May 5

Luke Butler, Landing Party IV, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 28".

Now more than ever, it can seem that media is eternal: Most any film or classic television series will stream dead shows, live, at our summoning, from vast digital archives. Luke Butler’s work is an emphatically analog illustration of mediated mortality and masculinity. In previous works, he’s depicted male crew members from the original Star Trek series in painted film-still moments of struggle and vulnerability—when characters have been felled by nearly lethal rays. In this exhibition, these characters, sharply painted in acrylic, tangle against flat gray backgrounds or, in the case of Landing Party IV (all works 2012), on a stagy lunar landscape: Captain Kirk, in his signature mustard-colored ’60s-style tunic, kneels before a Spock character, sprawled faceup on the ground, dressed in red. Alert viewers will notice that in this near-death moment, Spock’s visage is replaced with an image of the artist’s face. Younger actors, it seems, are perpetually available, as is the show’s fantasy world, which is seemingly eternal.

The show’s largest painting, The End III, is a recurrent image of conclusion, those words emblazoned over crashing surf, as they have been in countless films. There’s a timelessness to the artist’s typography; an uninflected sans serif that reads A LUKE BUTLER PICTURE is a second-line reference to painting as much as auteurship. In this and two other “End” works, the Roman numerals representing specific years from the 1970s are inscribed, marking a golden age of both trashy television, and Conceptual art, in which lines were wryly blurred between reality and representation. Butler changes channel for Gail, in which the Starsky and Hutch duo is configured into a tender, oddly religious pose with a woman in a white nightgown. They form a soft triangle, a human recycling symbol that suggests that even if their narrative is shot through with trauma, they’ll be back.

— Glen Helfand

Bessma Khalaf

STEVEN WOLF FINE ARTS
2747 19th Street, Suite A
April 20–May 19

Bessma Khalaf, The Long Goodbye, 2012, still from an HD video, 12 hours.

Those who give credence to the Mayan eschatological prophecy that the world will end this year can shop nearly until Christmas to prepare for the apocalypse. This sort of humorous and mundane magick is the sly subject of Bessma Khalaf’s mostly monochromatic photographs, videos, and sculptures in her latest exhibition, “Re-Enchanter.” The show reveals an intoxicating mix of tonal ingredients, not the least of which is a base of witty theatricality. Take the self-descriptive, elegantly composed black-and-white photograph Still Life with Le Creuset (all works 2012), which repurposes a pricey Dutch oven as bubbling cauldron (with a web of unruly hair seeping out the side). It’s anyone’s guess what this dish will invoke. Iraq-born Khalaf is inspired by ancient Chaldean traditions of witchcraft, but she adds pinches of postmodern thought (à la Suzi Gablik) throughout, along with pop-cultural nods to mainstream cinema, fiction, and heavy metal.

As with her previous video work and photography, Khalaf merges sight gags with durational performance. In the twelve-hour video The Long Goodbye (titled after the Raymond Chandler novel), a hand tips a lit candle that drips wax into the bottom of the frame, slowly accruing into a crinkly, painterly surface that eventually fills the entire frame, as if the artist is ritualistically interning herself. Khalaf, wearing a hoodie, performs the grim reaper in several works, most humorously in the projected video Plein Air Drifter, in which a theatrically ominous figure silently glides through verdant forests on a Segway scooter, a tongue-in-cheek gesture with an artistic sleight of hand that infuses dark arts, and dour times, with a little light.

— Glen Helfand

Rineke Dijkstra

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
151 Third Street
February 18–May 28

Rineke Dijkstra, The Buzzclub, Liverpool, England, March 3, 1995, color photograph, 18 7/8 x 13 3/4".

The sociological output of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra appears simple enough on the surface. Yet, as this retrospective emphasizes, her enigmatic work is continually strengthened by what it eloquently conceals. Since the early 1990s, Dijkstra’s subjects have been mostly young, “ordinary” people from around the world, whom she captures in the middle of a transition of some sort—joining the military, or having a baby, or merely changing from childhood into adulthood. While the casual poses and environments in which Dijkstra captures her subjects evince their everyday realities, there is nonetheless an austerity to the figures as they are fixed within her neutral frame. This tension that the portraits craft between the natural and the composed subject is exaggerated in some of her most celebrated images, namely her series of adolescents on beaches. The unaffected approachability of Dijkstra’s subjects renders them at once common and stoic, which also explains why these works in particular have so often been compared to the portraiture of Dutch Masters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer.

The ample supply of pieces on view in this show make it clear that Dijkstra’s exclusion of personal, bespoke backgrounds and her focus on physical traits imbues these portraits with both an immense human fragility and an air of restraint. This duality is perhaps best summed up in a wall label adjacent to two images taken in 1995 at a nightclub in Liverpool, which describes her subjects as, “perform[ing] for her camera and for themselves.” It is precisely Dijkstra’s key ability to parse the overlap between one’s performance for others and one’s performance for oneself that heightens the intriguing discord that lies beneath her simple surfaces.

— Courtney Malick

“Manitoba Museum of Finds Art”

WILL BROWN
3041 24th Street
April 28–June 2

View of “Manitoba Museum of Finds Art,” 2012.

It’s a bit incredible: From 1974 to 1978, the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art (MMoFA) held exhibitions, acquired a permanent collection, commissioned artworks, hosted performances and fund-raisers, and maintained a membership program, all just outside the office of then San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Henry T. Hopkins. Alberta Mayo, who was the executive assistant to Hopkins and Deputy Director Michael McCone, ran the museum from her administrative office in Room 305 in the War Memorial Veterans Building (which was SF MoMA’s first home; exhibitions continued after Mayo moved to the San Francisco Art Institute). The museum’s collection and ephemera are now on view at Will Brown gallery, a new exhibition space operating in the vein of Philadelphia’s Triple Candie, if the venture’s first three projects are any indication.

The museum’s collection is displayed on two shelves on one wall of the gallery, mimicking Mayo’s original installation just behind her desk, with works also hung on the opposite wall. The collection grew organically over the years, mostly through gifts from artists, and is accretive, idiosyncratic, and mnemonic in the way that the pinboard aesthetic of a personal archive is, even one on the cubicle wall. Here, Henry Hopkins’s Rolodexes share space with Stephen Kornhauser’s glass jar of cotton balls used to clean the museum’s Jean Arp sculpture, a pot holder printed with a mushroom cloud, and all manner of moose-themed collectibles (a favorite of Mayo’s). Ephemera for MMoFA exhibitions featuring George Herms, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sol LeWitt, and many others appear throughout the gallery, which also features an extensive gift shop. One notable event was the Bruce Conner look-alike contest and bake sale, the judges for which, the flyer tells us, have seen Conner many times. Mayo’s intention was to show artists not included in that “other museum.” “I’m not official,” she once said, “I’m unofficial. Unofficially, they let me indulge myself.” Not only does this unofficial endeavor inflect current calls to occupy museums and problematize standard definitions of institutional critique in one fell swoop, but it also demonstrates the importance and affect of alternative archives, particularly when so closely aligned with institutional ones.

— Tara McDowell

Jean-Luc Moulène

DIA:BEACON
3 Beekman Street
December 1–December 31

Jean-Luc Moulène, Météo (Weather), 2009, plastic hoses, 14 x 25 1/2 x 10 1/4".

Jean-Luc Moulène’s yearlong exhibition “Opus + One” comprises three distinct modules dispersed throughout the vast building. The most beguiling of all is the large gallery of objects titled “Opus,” 1995–. Resting on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and placed on tables that are so delicate they nearly float in space, thirty-five sculptures––made across the span of sixteen years––fill the cavernous space. The materials, though crude, never quite give themselves away; Lycra resembles liquid glass, water hoses twist and torque into perfect ellipses, and fiberglass takes on the appearance of dehydrated cartilage. No bigger than the human body, or what the human body might be able to cradle, these opuses are propositions rather than determinations, each with its own unique set of terms and conditions. The +1 suffix in the exhibition’s title alludes to this endlessly additive equation, which not only begins at zero, but replicates at the most comprehensible pace possible.

The other galleries take on unique strategies. Two adjoined rooms house Moulène’s photographic series “La Vigie” (Lookout Man), 2004–11, in which two stacked rows (totaling nearly three hundred images) snake around the walls. They picture the same rogue weed––sprouted from a Parisian sidewalk in front of the country’s Ministry for the Economy, Industry, and Employment––as it blooms and retreats in a hostile environment over many years. In the back gallery, a large, opalescent aluminum sculpture, titled Body, 2011, stands alone. Built to order by Renault, the piece takes a smaller opus made by Moulène and enlarges it to the power of several hundred. While its leguminous figure and hyper-glossed surface are sexy, the overall slickness of the form is counterproductive to Moulène’s project: His art is most successful when the work teeters at the brink of potential and failure, as structural models that will never quite be realized.

— Carmen Winant

“State of Mind”

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE (BAM/PFA)
2626 Bancroft Way
February 29–June 17

Bonnie Sherk, Portable Park II, 1970. Performance view.

There are perpetual rumblings about ballot initiatives to split California in half, somewhere in the middle of this vast landmass. It’s exactly the kind of crackpot idea or pipe-dream hyperbole that makes the Golden State (and its residents) so appealing. “State of Mind” is the only exhibition of the Getty-sponsored, Los Angeles-centric “Pacific Standard Time” lot to migrate north, and it serves the vital function of expanding the program’s geographic purview to include NorCal artists. Perhaps even more important is that it demonstrates (as the title asserts) that there is indeed a broader mindset in this part of the country. Curators Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss note the inadequacy of any codified regional aesthetic, yet they use a tight historical window—in and around 1970—to illustrate California’s unique confluence of conditions: youth culture, political activism, feminism, a focus on the body, film, and the freeing sense that, at the time, no one bought art here.

The exhibition focuses primarily on Conceptual practices, which had a more whimsical and confrontational flavor here than East Coast brands did. John Baldessari’s California Map Project Part 1, 1969/2009, serves as an emblematic work, both crunchy and smart, in that it literally surveys the entire state: For the work Baldessari made giant letters (out of rocks, paint, and sand) on the landscape where they fell on a printed map. The show also wisely includes well-chosen works by not quite as iconic but equally notable artists: James Melchert, Gary Beydler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Bonnie Sherk, and pranksterish collectives like Asco and Sam’s Café give the show its real cerebral kick.

With its numerous videos, slide shows, and films displayed alongside ephemera, performance documentation, installations, and reconstructed sculptural works, “State” makes a case for California’s enduring influence on contemporary art, particularly social and relational practices. Forty years ago artworks taking the form of urban farms (Sherk), flash mob activism (collectively Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson, and Alfred Young), lengthy walks (Bas Jan Ader), and performative occupation of space (Lynn Hershman Leeson, Allen Ruppersberg, Linda Mary Montano) existed on the margins, but as the show demonstrates, these West Coast impulses were way ahead of their time.

— Glen Helfand

Cheyney Thompson

MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
20 Ames Street E15
February 10–April 8

View of “Cheyney Thompson: metric, pedestal, landlord, cabengo, recit,” 2012.

Cheyney Thompson’s art touches on such wide-ranging subjects as the art market, temporality, and the French archetypal villain Robert Macaire—sometimes within the space of a single work. For his first US museum survey, the artist’s rhizomatic research is highlighted through paintings made in the past six years. The thirteen canvases from his glistening, jubilant “Chronochromes” series, 2009–11, are unified along a color spectrum that documents its own creation: With every hour of production, contrasting color pairs were shifted in hue, and brushstrokes’ saturation levels changed with each passing month. Time is reflected in the ebb and flow of vaguely arabesque color patches that seem painted more through a precise mechanical apparatus than by the artist’s hand.

The serial works “4 Colors Subtracting Light from the Room in 6 Degrees of Intensity Repeated 4 Times,” 2006, consist of eight portraits of Thompson’s studio’s landlords. The grouping was produced according to the four-color CMYK process used in commercial printing, and this restrictive scheme gives the figures a ghostly, degraded presence. With the seriality of a Warhol portrait and the faded pastels of a Kinkade landscape, the series effectively represents two individuals while voiding any aura of individuality.

There is an impenetrability to Thompson’s art, which is unexpected given that his references and methods are so extensive and clearly elucidated. Alongside the paintings and sculptures are bound copies of the artist’s research journals, documenting topics such as the Munsell color system, James Rousseau’s 1842 novel on Robert Macaire, and graphic male initiation rites. Inadvertently or not, this dispersal of references both informs and veils the ideas underpinning Thompson’s art. Ultimately, however, the nearly three-inch-thick tomes avoid digression and apply an additional medium to Thompson’s expanding practice.

— Nicolas Linnert

Michael Cooper

FULLER CRAFT MUSEUM
455 Oak Street
November 12–May 13

Michael Cooper, Trainer Tricycle III, 1993, wenge, sycamore, 29 x 30 x 26”.

The line drawn between art and craft is in some sense analogous to the one drawn between theater and sport. Where the latter terms promise the visceral thrill of technical facility and execution—often within an immediately clear interpretative frame—the former are thought to be naturally more hermeneutic and resistant. Different expectations are ascribed to each, and as a result we often find ourselves marveling at the unexpected presence of the one within the other—as when a good game is praised as “great theater,” or an artist is noted, almost incidentally, as a craftsperson. Thus, though it is as art that I wish to praise Michael Cooper’s work, its “art-ness” emerges slowly, counterintuitively, almost at the edges of what is, at center, a truly breathtaking display of sculptural dexterity. With the marvelously intricate machines he produces, each individual engine element and fuel line carved impossibly cleanly from a different kind of wood, Cooper’s achievement is, first of all, that his hot rods, oversize tricycles, and similar go-mobiles seem like working replicas. Only when we start tracing the various imbrications, as in Trainer Tricycle III, 1993, are we startled to find that where the pistons should be are instead the chamber and muzzle of an oversize revolver—both perplexing and sinister. Cooper’s choices are not subtle, but while it would be one thing to speak about the American affection for well-engineered violence, it is another to engineer affectionately, with supreme attention to detail, physical hybrids of guns and cars. These not only are dazzling to behold but, at their best, suspend their apparent function somewhere between speed, craft, and destruction—distinctions we don’t often realize we’ve lost.

— Stephen Squibb

Sharon Hayes

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
111 South Michigan Avenue
November 10–March 11

Sharon Hayes, Parole, 2010, still from HD single-channel video, 36 minutes.

Love, like politics, longs to speak through us, and we, reciprocally, long to be heard and to speak: to feel as though on some basic level our hopes, fears, and desires register somewhere amid the forces that bind us to history and to one another. Sharon Hayes’s work negotiates this territory while effectively disrupting the amalgamation of public and private identities. Her practice affords us a pause to reflect on the meaning of the classic feminist slogan “The personal is political”—both in a general sense and also, more specifically, in relation to LGBT rights today.

In Hayes’s solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, curated by Lisa Dorin, we are presented with a tripartite show that includes Parole, 2010, first exhibited in the Whitney Biennial; In the Near Future, 2005–2009; and An Ear to the Sounds of Our History, 2011. Together, the pieces are more than the sum of their parts, and they reveal an artist working through various modalities of publicness in order to find the self and selves, authentic or otherwise. In the four-channel video installation Parole, actress Becca Blackwell proffers a countenance that is a near-blank slate; equipped with a microphone, she performs the work of a quasi-psychoanalyst probing the world. Through vignettes of her listening in the street, a classroom, her apartment, and a dance studio, the viewer is left to ponder how these encounters affect or construct her and, by extension, ourselves.

Hayes’s references and source materials here include James Baldwin’s 1974 lecture at Berkeley, Lauren Berlant’s theorization of sentimentality, a 1904 Anna Rüling speech, a dancer rehearsing, and Hayes’s own declarations of love. Throughout this exhibition, the audience is made to feel privy to that which, taken collectively, might be best characterized as a type of prayer—one that is spoken against the odds that it will ever be answered but perseveres all the same, defiant in its resignation

— Zachary Cahill

André Butzer

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY
118 North Peoria Street
January 27–March 17

André Butzer, Untitled, 2011, oil on canvas, 59 x 83".

In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, the prolific German painter André Butzer provides a concise and gripping recapitulation of his recent work with six canvases painted between 2008 and 2011, ranging from about three by five feet to five by eight feet, interspersed with six smaller works on paper. The show offers those new to Butzer a chance to experience the work for which he is best known: cartoonish knots and circuits of surface color, figural motifs that echo across multiple canvases––flesh-toned, carcasslike masses weigh heavily at the center of both La Chasse (Mis en bouteille au chateau) (The Hunt [Bottled at the Estate]), 2011, and Tote Kühe im Himmel (Néo-Cézannismus) (Dead Cows in the Sky [Neo-Cézannism]), 2011––and a keen, often mischievous play with art-historical precedents such as Matisse and Miró.

Even those well acquainted with the painter may be startled by one canvas in particular, Untitled, 2011: a mottled gray ground of roughly five by seven feet, with two hollow black rectangles not quite aligned at the upper right-hand corner. At first, it looks like an abandonment of the concerns laid out in the first rooms of the gallery. Instead of color, gray and black; instead of a spray of varied figuration, tight, repetitive abstraction; instead of Cézanne—Minimalism? But Untitled is far from a one-off; nor is it a departure. Rather, it is one of a series of over forty works that Butzer calls “N” paintings, ranging from under two feet to over twelve feet tall, all comprising the same paired rectangles. These paintings (of which Untitled is the sole example in the show) dangle a formalist bait and then, on closer inspection, contain ranges of color swallowed in the gray and catalogues of painterly touch beyond the surface abstraction. Compared with paintings like Planetarium Lucky Luke (Neo-Cézannismus), 2010, in which slick, glossy rails of bright yellow and pink paint slide the eye from one corner to the other, protruding as much as an inch off the canvas, the “N” series produces a more muted effect, with more restrained means. But Butzer’s mixture of playful mayhem and deep research into the expressive capacities of paint remains consistent; only the proportions have changed.

— Julia Langbein

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

CORBETT VS DEMPSEY
1120 N. Ashland Avenue, 3rd Floor
February 3–March 17

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Venomous, with four pairs of arms, 2008–11, oil, collage, glitter, and wire on panel, 19 x 23”.

With the literally downcast and well-nigh comic gesture of adhering vinyl signage to the floor of her latest exhibition, “Negative Joy,” Molly Zuckerman-Hartung announces a paradigmatic shift in her work with abstract painting. The totality of works presented convincingly bring together her interests in writing, critical theory, feminism, punk aesthetics, and sexuality—concerns that have previously only been adjacent to her investigations into abstraction. In several paintings, notably Venomous, with Four Pairs of Arms, 2008–11, the artist has introduced elements of collaged and painted-over pornographic imagery. Strangely beautiful, the work features an almost phosphorescent purple octopus moving through large swaths of inky paint and amorous couples. By juxtaposing sexual representation with the bodily facture of abstract painting, Zuckerman-Hartung lends a hint of mystery to both painting and sex.

Drips, stains, and tears all combine with the pornography to invoke a number of art-historical precedents from Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines to Lynda Benglis’s infamous Artforum ad as well as her early pour pieces. Yet beyond art-historical referents (or perhaps because of them), the exhibition pulses with what Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists might term jouissance, the point at which an excess of pleasure turns painful. This phenomenon could be likened to the way in which a pop song, having been heard once, gets stuck in one’s head and ceases to be enjoyable. Anti-Expeditious, 2011, no doubt exhibits a painterly jouissance through all of its brightly colored gestural marks: Each seems infused with a critical menace that lurks just beneath the surface, evidenced in the black-and-white image of a preacher who has “taken up serpents” at the work’s base. Positioned at the foundation of this unwieldy painting, the image gestures at the snake pit of visual culture, a field in which high and low culture vie for our attention, where well-worn tropes of abstract painting can often repeat to the point of collapse—here mingling with the pornography to become something new, something like “negative joy.”

— Zachary Cahill

Carrie Schneider

MONIQUEMELOCHE
2154 W. Division
March 31–May 12

Carrie Schneider, Burning House (July, sunset), 2011, C-print, 40 x 50".

For her new collection of photographs, “Burning House,” 2010–11, Carrie Schneider returned twelve times to a small island in the center of a rural Wisconsin lake. On each visit, she hauled or canoed a small house with her, and then set it on fire before submitting it to the panoramic sweep of her lens. The resulting pictures are by turns unsettling, inviting, and enigmatic.

While the exhibition’s press release assures us that Schneider’s take on the well-worn genre of landscape includes some deep performative element, and that the pictures hark back to Monet’s studies of light in the French countryside, the work isn’t as exotic as all that and, indeed, is rooted in the richer terrain of Schneider’s American predecessors. In Burning House (December, midday), 2011, for instance, one sees no traces of fire—only a warm, inviting glow across a sheet of winter ice on which the artist’s footprints can be made out. Each of these single images is pure Walden or, for a contemporary audience, maybe a nod to the cabin in the woods where Bon Iver cut its first album.

Taken together, the pictures tell a layered story—but it is not the studied record of optical changes familiar to the Impressionist tradition. Instead, modulation of angle, distance, time, and season all suggest grander historical cycles straight out of Thomas Cole’s reuse of a mountainscape for his 1836 “The Course of Empire” and its suggestion of an American cultural zenith followed by decadence and ruin. And the piercing oranges and unctuous borealis effects recall the acidic landscapes of Ed Ruscha, who himself painted the LACMA in flames. But where Cole and Ruscha each worked in a more allegorical register, Schneider’s pictures hit so hard during this long season of austerity precisely because they are, literally, close to home. The American landscape represents providence and safe haven, but here we are met only with a house on fire, over and over again.

— Ian Bourland

Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger

TONY WIGHT GALLERY
845 West Washington Boulevard
April 20–May 25

Sreshta Rit Premnath, The Last Image #4, 2012, photographic C-print, 45 x 30".

A property developer in Bangalore named M. S. Ramaiah purportedly believed that he could stave off death with endless site construction, a conceit that, along with the figure of Ramaiah himself, haunts Sreshta Rit Premnath’s solo exhibition “The Last Image.” The silhouette of a bronze bust of the magnate undergoes a layered process of construction and destruction in a series of three-and-a-half-by-four-foot C-prints on view, also titled “The Last Image.” The Last Image #4, 2012, is a photograph of a photographic print into which the contours of the bust have been slashed, revealing slivers of the blue screen beneath. The ripples in the buckling, glossy paper darkly recall the volume of the absent memorial. One scrutinizes these palimpsests in an attempt to match the detritus of destruction and loss (the scars of the artist’s cuts and scrapes) to the process of building and creation (the pictorial data of gloss and flatness) visually rehearsing Ramaiah’s quixotic belief.

It is easy to imagine footprints in construction-site dust tracking from “The Last Image” to “Backdrop”––Matthew Metzger’s adjacent solo show. The exhibition features five paintings from his ongoing “Guard” series, which depicts the rubber mudflaps that hang behind truck wheels. These paintings are records both of chance—the spraying, caking, and dripping of the dirt that accrue on the rubber in transit—and of precision, in the exquisite illusionism in oil and acrylic of the surface textures of rubber, oil, dust, and rust. The descriptor trompe l’oeil comes to mind when observing the “Guard” series or his other masterfully conjured textures, such as the shiny brass panel depicted by Kickplate, 2012. Yet this fails to account entirely for Metzger’s practice, which does not trick the eye into seeing illusory depth, but rather pushes paint’s illusory capacity to the surface.

— Julia Langbein

“This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s”

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue
February 11–June 3

View of “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s,” 2012.

“This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s” examines artists’ responses to that decade’s cultural upheavals, including the rise of gender politics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cold War anxieties, and President Ronald Reagan’s malign indifference to the AIDS epidemic. Spanning the years 1979–92, it features approximately one hundred artists’ works, which are grouped into four thematic sections, each addressing a different area of cultural conflict: “Gender Trouble,” “Democracy,” “Desire and Longing,” and “The End Is Near.”

This framework successfully vivifies major thematic concerns of the ’80s: The impassioned calls for gender inclusivity and HIV/AIDS action expressed through posters and bus billboards made by groups like the Guerrilla Girls and Gran Fury are amplified when assembled alongside other like-minded works in “Democracy.” Conversely, when two, typically large, neo-expressionist paintings by Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl—each depicting an attenuated male figure—are placed within the feminist-themed “Gender Trouble” section, they gain fresh relevance as signifiers of “masculinist” culture’s decline in the ’80s and of the American male’s diminishing economic prospects today.

In her catalogue introduction, guest curator Helen Molesworth of the ICA Boston summarizes the standard rap on ’80s art: too bombastic, too ideological, all in all “too much.” Yet the exhibition shows that those same “excessive” qualities also infused the decade’s best art with lasting vitality. A case in point is David Hammons’s How Ya Like Me Now?, 1988, its title crudely spray-painted across a blonde, blue-eyed, light-skinned portrait of then presidential candidate Jesse Jackson hung behind a flaccid American flag and a fence formed from sledgehammers and wire. The piece is just as aggressively provocative now as it was then, but it has also grown richer in complexity over time.

— Claudine Ise

“Feast: Radical Hospitality in Art”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
February 16–June 10

Ana Prvacki, The Greeting Committee, 2011–, performance view.

“Feast” greets its visitors with a photograph by Laura Letinsky: Untitled #8, Rome, 2009, which shows the aftermath of a sumptuous banquet: a lace table cloth, scattered ornate dishes, a stack of empty cockleshells so crisply in focus one can almost hear them clink. It’s a smart appetizer for an exhibition that considers the shared meal as medium, because viewers will find they are often early or late to the feast and must imaginatively reconstitute it through documented projections or aftermath. The show displays instructions for meals such as Filippo Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook and Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch, 1969, a Fluxus “score” for a tuna sandwich like the one she habitually ate at her local diner. Just as often, “Feast” showcases crusty remnants, including Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Pad Thai, 1990, which features a battered wok, unwashed since Tiravanija prepared the titular dish at Paula Allen Gallery in New York in 1990.

The exhibition invites viewers as if to a party: “Enjoy your time here, with this art and with each other,” exhorts the wall text. One is primed for communal enjoyment by Ana Prvacki’s The Greeting Committee, 2011–, a station just outside the show’s doors (a literal hors d’oeuvre) where staff offer a teaspoon of slatko, a sweet jelly with traditional symbolic meaning for Serbians, from humble mason jars arranged around a tarnished silver tray. The Greeting Committee disarms by communicating simply and directly through the sensory, delivering an experience of Prvacki’s Serbia in a sweet zing on the tongue. The conceit of the meal-as-medium swings between these poles of an immediate appeal to perceptual enjoyment and a heightened demand on the critical and imaginative faculties that must re-create the meal––in the future or the past.

— Julia Langbein

Latifa Echakhch

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART
480 East Broad Street
January 13–April 1

View of “Currents: Latifa Echakhch,” 2012.

Tumbleweeds are uncanny things—dead yet animated, rooted yet mobile. When resources run dry, they surrender their lives to the wind in order to find new, richer ground where they can lay down their seeds and start again. They are at once harbingers of despair and hope. Latifa Echakhch has scattered scores of these ghostly beings throughout the galleries of the Columbus Museum of Art. She offsets their fragile minimalism and slow, sneaking movements with a set of lithographic stones, precariously perched on the gallery’s walls—they are small slabs, but their brute weight threatens to pull down the plaster and nails from which they hang. Like the delicate plants that cower beneath them, they, too, are ghosts. Their surfaces have been washed clean of all of the countless images they may have once held, yet each has been titled with the name of a print from the museum’s Schiller Collection that would fit neatly in the boundaries of the corresponding stone. The titles are enigmatic and poetic—Southern Night, The Perception of Non-Possession, Sun and Dust. No amount of searching in the stones’ glossy surfaces will reveal the images belonging to those titles, which are depictions of harrowing life in the 1930s—lynch mobs, panhandlers, and Dust Bowl landscapes. The heaviness of the stones resides as much in their history and potential futures as in their thickness. Echakhch’s installation gracefully invokes Michael Fried’s observation that Minimalist objects “crowd” and “distance” the viewer with their silent, embodied presences. Here, the threatening force of the lithographic stones pushes the viewer from the wall and backward toward the delicate tumbleweeds that need only the slightest touch to crumble or scatter. While the Rust Belt is a bit far to the northeast for Dust Bowl narratives and itinerant tumbleweeds, they seem eerily at home among the abandoned homes and silent factories of the region’s shrinking cities. Echakhch proposes the present as an anxious and fraught space, caught between the heavy and the light, the seeded and the fallow, the desperate and the hopeful, the forceful and the fragile, the indecisive and the ready for action.

— Kris Paulsen

Mark Manders

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART
1717 North Harwood
January 15–April 15

Mark Manders, In Figure with Three Piles of Sand, 2010, painted bronze, wood, iron, rope, sand, leather, 3' 6" x 3' 9" x 11' 3".

Mark Manders is fascinated by the potential meanings embedded in objects. Displaying a sensitivity to the relationship of objects to one another, and the relationship of forms to their environment, Manders crafts and arranges his ambiguous sculptural aggregates as thought-provoking machines. That’s not to suggest that he is merely combining disparate elements in some empty game of neo-surrealism. Instead, his organizing principle is the notion of a self-portrait as a building. Manders’s individual sculptures are precisely conceived and function as parts in a larger and perpetually expanding whole. Manders carefully governs the presentation of his art as a means to expose the interiority of a self––a portrait of the artist revealed in the tangential relationships he creates. The range of materials he uses, including midcentury modern furniture (mostly cast and remade by the artist), large claylike figures (suggesting Greek kouroi), and abraded fragments of wood, allows Manders’s art to register as both historical and atemporal.

In Figure with Three Piles of Sand, 2010, Manders creates a palpable tension by balancing a fractured human form, tethered like a drawn arrow within a bow, upon a cross of iron-strapped planks of wood. Teetering on the edge of dissolution, this sculpture exists in a delicate stasis. Manders’s description of this particular piece as “both cruel and peaceful” seems an adequate summation of his entire oeuvre. There is a frozen and desperate silence to his art, and we view this work with something akin to the distance we feel when regarding art of ancient cultures; we recognize ourselves, but only across a chasm. Essentially, Manders’s art is an act of existential marking––placing objects in a relational proximity that redirects their individual meanings toward ourselves, unifiying and heightening their suggestive potency.

— Matthew Bourbon

Lila Jang

LUX ART INSTITUTE
1550 South El Camino Real
January 12–March 3

View of “Lila Jang,” 2012.

“Tea Parties Gone Wild” would be an apt alternate title for Lila Jang’s eponymous US solo debut. The ten sculptures here are inspired by Louis XIV–style furniture; when they were shown in Paris in 2009, they made waves and amassed online celebrity for their ingenue sculptor. Reconvened for this show, the salon suite forms a frothy yet foreboding tableau.

A duo of nightstands begin a descent into liquid while white lamps levitate against the purgatorial landscape of an arid exterior. These works, which the artist calls “ghosts,” have titles drawn from myth or French history, which strengthens the notion that historical cohorts haunt Jang’s miscreant movables. The debauchery of this 2009 group features Charlotte, in which three hanging tables feign a chandelier, and twins Lisa and Mawu, who bronze phototropically. Queen Anne-Marie, a Baroque throne with implants, embodies excesses she reigned with and is, like her ottoman Aude, engorged to almost to explosion.

However doused in arabesque ornamentation, the cast exudes ominous functionality. For example, as Canape, 2008, crawls up the walls, she shatters the otherwise sanguine setting with a perpendicular posture that illustrates one aching subjugation of a body to the cramped lifestyles demanded by increasingly overpopulated cities. Other traditional pieces of furniture attain reincarnation as fantasy equipment to ascend teensy lifts or duck under stairs. Haenir, 2009, a cheeky and compact commode, sticks out his long tongue to assert that these Rococo flashbacks (or nightmares of future dimensionality) seek communication. Throughout this show, their provocations drum up tensions that are evocative of the tumultuous era to which these pieces allude.

— James Eischen

“Utopia/Dystopia”

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
1001 Bissonnet
March 11–June 10

Joel Lederer, 200804012143, 2009, ink-jet print, 24 x 30".

With over one hundred photo and photomontage works from the past 150 years assembled in a single room, “Utopia/Dystopia,” taken as a whole, is as much a study in jarring ruptures and envisioned continuities as the images and objects displayed are. The Kunstkammer-like installation ranges across modern political aspirations and private reverie, as well as their darker complements, in various cut-and-paste styles. The cartoonish critique of John Heartfield’s rotogravure German Natural History, published August 16, 1934, in the magazine AIZ, in which the heads of Weimar Republic leaders are superimposed over metamorphosing pupae, meets the Surrealist cinematic beauty of Toshiko Okanoue’s little-shown collages like Falling, 1956, in which a headless female torso parachutes through the open floor of a rat-infested locker room to a cityscape below. Rare archival documents, such as Esaki Reiji’s proto-Photoshop advertisement of a multitude of infants, Collage of Babies, 1893, mix with contemporary fantasies like Josh Bernstein’s triptych After Four Days, 2011, a reimagining of imperiled Gulf Coast conquistador Cabeza de Vaca through mixed-media self-portraiture.

The unabashedly synthetic approach, both on the level of the exhibition and the individual works, emphasizes the paradox of separating utopian and dystopian vision. Often the difference is a matter of (historical) perspective or mutually dependent proximity. Throughout the exhibition, the promise to remake the world is never far from the threat of undoing it, and often these impulses appear, juxtaposed, in the same work. The timely inclusion of Arata Isozaki’s ink, gouache, and gelatin silver print Re-ruined Hiroshima, project, Hiroshima, Japan, Perspective, 1968, shows haunting remedial architectural constructions that simultaneously seem to emerge from and return to a postnuclear Japanese landscape. Even the most idyllic views, such as Joel Lederer’s digital compositing of Second Life greenery in the ink-jet print 200804012143, 2009, take on cautionary undertones in the close company of other images that reveal, and perhaps once helped conceal, tragic realities.

— Kurt Mueller

Carl Ostendarp

HERBERT F. JOHNSON MUSEUM OF ART
Cornell University, Central and University Avenues
January 27–March 25

View of “Carl Ostendarp: Fat Cakes/Myopic Void,” 2012.

In subversive institutional interventions, Carl Ostendarp transforms two of the Johnson Museum’s galleries with offbeat art selections, intensely pigmented murals, and pulsing music. Following curatorial incursions like Andy Warhol’s “Raid the Icebox,” 1970, and Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, 1992, Ostendarp’s installations incorporate—and thereby recontextualize—works from the museum’s collections. The resulting Fat Cakes and Myopic Void (all works 2012) occupy galleries on different floors of the I. M. Pei–designed building, and challenge the site’s material austerity and white walls. Ostendarp’s critique aims beyond physical contexts to challenge modernist metanarratives. With Fat Cakes, he reframes Op, Pop, Abstract Expressionist, and hard-edge prints, and, with Myopic Void, he turns his attention to paintings and sculptures selected from the Johnson’s collections—all in terms of sex, jazz, funk, and psychedelia. These are complex motivations, subcultures, and lifestyles that artists working in past decades often recall in colloquial conversation, but that become whitewashed in formalist discourse. With few women artists featured and most cultural “otherness” found in the music, the visual selections bespeak the hegemonic white American masculinity underlying these GI Bill generations. Ostendarp’s inclusion of works by luminaries and lesser-knowns—John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Dan Christensen, Nicholas Krushenick, and their peers—tell of both New York City’s cultural preeminence and a regional museum’s historic biases.

Following the comic biomorphs of Ostendarp’s previously exhibited canvases, Myopic Void’s floor-to-ceiling murals in two pink shades create a womblike space that recalls the world of a John Wesley painting. The lava-lamp lines and hot colors undercut and visually destabilize the paintings. The similar horizon separating the teals of Fat Cakes is less obtrusive at knee height, and appears beneath a crowded installation of prints lined up at eye level. Ostendarp lovingly curates a stoned-guitar and grand-funk-psychedelic sound track for Myopic Void and a soul- and acid-jazz playlist for Fat Cakes (songs from the two genres yield the works’ respective titles). Ostendarp’s mixtapes offer the idea that curating is a common activity, yet he never loses sight of the fact that expert selections, juxtapositions, and well-chosen themes are required for smartly arranging both art and music—and, in his case, for mustering nostalgia for bygone artistic cultures and attitudes.

— William Ganis

Nancy Holt

TUFTS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
Aidekman Arts Center, 40 Talbot Avenue
January 19–April 1

Nancy Holt, Hydra’s Head, 1974, concrete, water, dimensions variable. Installation view, Artpark, Lewiston, New York.

The first survey of Nancy Holt’s work is now on view at the art gallery of her alma mater, where she majored in biology in the late 1950s. It is a kind of homecoming for an artist whose engagement with the postwar American landscape has taken her far afield and expanded the horizon of sculpture in turn. The show is accompanied by a lavish monograph—the first on the artist thus far—which was published last year, when the survey debuted at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery.

The pieces on view were made between 1966 and 1980, and include photographs and videos of well-known Earthworks such as Sun Tunnels, 1976, as well as little-known artist’s books. Surprisingly, the 1960s works reveal a completely new early Holt. Crossword Work, 1966, for instance, is a crossword puzzle on a sheet of graph paper with self-reflexive clues such as WHAT A NAUMAN WORK SOMETIMES APPEARS TO BE (ALSO A MATERIAL IN HESSE’S WORK). In dialogue with the remnants of the modernist grid and concrete poetry, these pieces testify to Holt’s early preoccupation with abstraction. Here, that abstraction is language; shortly after she made these pieces, it would move off the page and out of the gallery, rediscovering the map, the star constellation, and the surveyor’s tools.

Even as Holt expands sculpture’s possibilities, she returns us to the origins of photography. The circle, which structures so much of her work, evokes photography’s first frame, before the rectangular box disciplined the oculus of the camera obscura. The photographic trope produces a spatially disorientating experience, as if the viewer could be either surveying through a telescope or peering into a keyhole. Newly evident, as well, is how Holt’s work consistently sets us on the ground, only to have us look up at the sky, as in the site-specific Hydra’s Head, 1974, whose arrangement of concrete cylinders in a riverbank corresponds to the eponymous constellation above.

— Jordan Troeller

Paul Cowan

MICHAEL JON GALLERY
20 NE 41st Street, Suite 2
January 21–February 25

View of “Paul Cowan,” 2012.

As a regional counterposition to the aesthetic lingua franca, vernacular painting is often populist to a fault. However, with the transatlantic popularity of Cologne-style “bad” painting, the distinction between local and global has been muddied. Realizing this, the Chicago-based artist Paul Cowan celebrates the myriad ways of imagemaking by dressing the conceptual ploys of recent painting––rapacious de-skilling, outsourcing of production, and presentation within a diffuse environment bordering on installation––with visual mores of Main Street USA. The results, generous and wily, would seem at home in the Lower East Side and in Lake Wobegon.

For this show, Cowan contracted a sign painter to re-create the stylistic flourishes adorning advertisements on bodega and deli windows sans the ads themselves. On four small white canvases hung in the gallery, the stripes, whirls, and zigzags recall the diverse styles of museum-worthy paintings yet cannot help but blush with humble origins. Similarly, the void left by the absent text equally signifies a tundra of painterly anxiety and the unfulfilled desire to offer a discount on corned beef.

The work is installed amid slowly deflating balloons that have drifted to the floor and a piped-in jazz tune, Bobbi Humphrey’s “Blacks and Blues,” which is just unobtrusive enough to become Muzak. Cowan’s network of dissemination, thus draped in kitsch, is topped off by a sponge painting. Untitled (Lincoln Park Zoo), 2012, is a happenstance pattern of sponge prints spread evenly across the gallery window. With its allover and geometric nod to art history, it also summons the glass barriers at many zoos, which are similarly painted to acclimate the animals to captivity. In this way, Untitled ironically quarantines the gallery from external systems and earnestly links the white cube and the zoo, two sites of intellectual elucidation and places of weekend leisure.

— Hunter Braithwaite

Fernando Mastrangelo

CHAREST-WEINBERG GALLERY, LLC
250 NW 23rd Street, 408
November 29–February 29

Fernando Mastrangelo, Stella (2), 2011, gunpowder, 10' 1 1/2" x 7' 1" x 2".

Fernando Mastrangelo has spent the past few years condensing powders into bricks of social critique. He pressed corn meal pressed into an Aztec calendar criticizing NAFTA. Human ash became MS-13 gang tattoos in a blend of violence and religious iconography. Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine became a sculpture of life-size Colombian coca farmer Felix, 2009. All of these represent an exact pairing of content and meaning, and a direct relationship between the piece and how it should be understood. Now, in a look back at the cold war’s existential dread and ideological infighting, Mastrangelo presents “Black Sculpture”—three-dimensional renderings of work by Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt cast from compressed gunpowder.

The sculptures aren’t a precise chromatic black. A close look reveals subtle gradation and crystallization in the gunpowder, itself on the precipice of a bright flash and cloud of smoke. As such, Mastrangelo’s black hues primarily relate to their cultural connotation: negation. While not overly necrotic, they do present the act of painting today as a destructive, or at least disruptive, process. Is black the lack of information, as in a blackout, or is it the product of every piece of information ever, printed line upon line until the paper becomes a solid textual wall (everything) and a void (nothing)? Whereas with Wade Guyton, for instance, the black of an Epson printer is both painterly information and our ability to communicate it, Mastrangelo’s monochrome, in turn, connotes the height of modernist dogma—a complete flow of Greenbergian thought and the seizure of contrary opinion. His use of incendiary material only increases the tension between something and nothing.

One can easily compare the warring camps of modernity and cold war diplomacy, especially when one considers the role of CIA patronage in that chapter of American artmaking. As such, gunpowder is an apt medium to reflect this tumultuous period. If black signifies both everything and nothing, information and its transmission, it also represents historical lineage and its abdication. These sculptures are both in line with midcentury heroics (a virtue often found on the battlefield) and combatively at odds with the summoned past.

— Hunter Braithwaite

“The Woodmans”

GALLERY DIET
174 NW 23rd Street
February 17–March 31

View of “The Woodmans,” 2012.

This exhibition presents the prodigious output of the talented Woodman family––parents George and Betty, son Charlie, and daughter Francesca, who committed suicide at the age of twenty-two and is arguably the most famous. Rather than underscoring the familial, the assemblage of work here shifts the discussion to the formal, specifically each artist’s penchant for troubling medium-specificity. For instance, Betty’s freestanding ceramic pieces function as both paintings and sculptures. Rendered on the upright, flat side of the two fragmented pieces of Spring in Athens, 2011, is a Greek black-figure vase filled with flowers painted in vivid greens, reds, and purples; the obverses of these flat surfaces elegantly morph into sculptural ceramic vases that are just as bold. Charles’s Table of Elements, 2012, is a digital video loop playing on two side-by-side displays that blur the line between painting and film. Each channel presents the same natural scene from slightly different vantage points—the movement of clouds, for example, is shown slightly sped up, creating the feel of a moving John Constable cloud painting.

George’s black-and-white photographs of nude women are often embellished with oil paint, usually sparingly. In Shanti: In the Mirror with a Mirror, 2006, bands of green, yellow, and red echo some of his early paintings exploring color. In Francesca’s two self-portraits, each known as Untitled (New York), 1979–80, her celebrated use of long exposure creates a tension between stillness and movement that has often been described as a marker of the artist’s emotional state. Indeed, Francesca’s suicide often haunts the critical discourse on her work and also on that of her family, particularly George’s; clearly, biography remains a powerful lens through which the art world gauges an artist’s—and in this case a family’s—output. This exhibition, however, suggests readings that, while not necessarily divorced from authorship, are also not intimately tied to it.

— Alpesh Kantilal Patel

“Practices Remain”

NORWEGIAN WOOD BUILDING
99 NE 39th Street
March 10–April 8

View of “Practices Remain,” 2012.

“Practices Remain” features work by thirteen Miami-based artists who critique the act of artmaking and the finished object, complicating the interdependence of both. The provisional truce these artists sometimes arrive at takes several forms; the first is a retreat to sloppy formalism. The show’s curators––Alexandra Hopf, Odalis Valdivieso, and Marcos Valella––contribute spartan works of their own, in which a priority is placed on geometry. Hopf’s Posters, 2012, have the most basic visual skeleton of a street poster. Valdivieso’s printed abstract photographs are made on paper that she has mutilated with a razor blade. Valella’s four untitled canvases from 2012 are sullied monochromes stretched over other paintings, bulging at painting’s limits while dodging any definitive gesture. The crooked lines, mangled surfaces, and muddied color fields fail to align themselves with mathematic clarity, revealing a pronounced frustration with, yet love for, medium-specificity.

For other artists, medium isn’t a trap but a type of transportation. For instance, Gean Moreno’s two untitled paintings are diagrams for generic shipping modules overlaid with sheets of colored plastic and lo-res JPEGs of lava, which seemingly represents the flow of information and its tendency to alter the surrounding landscape. Another trend in the show involves the found object––a counterintuitive yet successful gambit. Jim Drain’s Sister Act 2, 2012, is a neon cathedral of plastic beads, ropes, and chains. For Beaver Tails, 2011, Christy Gast re-creates the rodent appendage out of homemade afghans. The blankets are so alienated from their original surroundings that, although once complete on the level of use-value and product placement, they become ontologically marooned. Much of the work in “Practices Remain” constantly threatens to unravel or congeal. This precariousness, though, leads not to exasperation but to a state of potential.

— Hunter Braithwaite

“Absentee Landlord”

WALKER ART CENTER
1750 Hennepin Avenue
June 11–March 7

View of “Absentee Landlord,” 2011. From left: Donald Moffett, Lot 091195.03, 1995/2003; Jack Pierson, Silver Jackie with Pink Spot, 1991; Jess Von der Ahe, Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, 2006; Willem de Kooning, Woman, ca. 1952.

If we consider the title “Absentee Landlord,” we might get the suspicion that this exhibition foregrounds its curator, John Waters. And in many ways it does. Invited by the Walker to rearrange its permanent collection, Waters works from the premise that “the entire museum-going experience is in need of intervention.”

The conceit of the show is that Waters is the landlord, the galleries are rental apartments, and the eighty or so artworks are the tenants. As a whole it stands as a witty iteration of institutional critique; the curatorial structuring is reflexive, and the architectural interventions are site-specific. Visitors who dial up the audio tour can listen to Waters describe the works on view in pig latin—his comic riposte to the obscurity of critical jargon. Such considered irreverence, the curator’s signature, is repeated throughout the exhibition in a series of low blows, as in the glory hole he drilled in the men’s bathroom, or in his decision to hang de Kooning’s Woman, ca. 1952, just inches off the ground. Above and to the left of it, at eye level, is the small painting by Jess von der Ahe titled Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, 2006, which depicts a passive-looking man, swooning in bed. The artist painted it with her own menstrual blood. Shot, reverse shot.

Counterpoints like this predominate, often with the display of works by Waters himself. As he does in his films, here too as an artist-curator he activates the low as a space from which to sully the profundity of others, to give us pause, to make us laugh. Posing saucy juxtapositions and offbeat questions, he encourages us to think about art history in novel ways, and leaves us with the provocation: “Can artworks sexually attract each other? Does Minimalism make Pop horny?”

— Jonathan Thomas

“The Sports Show”

THE MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS
2400 Third Avenue South
February 19–May 3

Irving Penn, Duesek Brothers, New York, 1948, black-and-white photograph, dimensions variable.

The straightforward title chosen for this predominantly photographic survey of the sporting life reflects David Little’s appealingly balanced curation. Those attending the exhibition for the sport rather than for the art will be amply entertained, while the wide range of superb historic and contemporary images will reward museumgoers who prefer A&E to ESPN.

Photography has long been a strength of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and for this sprawling show Little has selected a wide range of images from the nineteenth century to the present. That makes this a welcome opportunity to, for example, encounter Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1976 portrait of a Mr. Universe–era Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same room as Irving Penn’s Duesek Brothers, New York, 1948—burly men with their bare limbs entwined in a knotty four-way embrace. A few big pieces of video art have been shoehorned among this stately assemblage of images. Paul Pfeiffer’s The Saints, 2007, for example, is situated in a near-empty room and roars with the chants of a Filipino crowd impersonating the British hordes at the 1966 World Cup final. Although the film lends an appropriate sound track to the adjoining galleries, its provocative use of media is such an incongruous accompaniment for the conventional photography that comprises the bulk of the show that here, Pfieffer’s work is more apt to confuse than to challenge.

While the exhibition’s tone is generally celebratory, explicit and implicit critiques of the culture(s) of sport can be found throughout—particularly in the final gallery, called “Spectacle.” Tim Davis’s three-channel video installation The Upstate New York Olympics, 2010–11, fiercely satirizes the games’ international pomp: In this carefully refereed match between art and sport, Davis lands a punch below the belt.

— Jay Gabler

“The Workers”

MASSACHUSETTS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (MASS MOCA)
87 Marshall Street
May 29–March 15

Oded Hirsch, Tochka, 2010, still from a single-channel video, 14 minutes 20 seconds.

In Oded Hirsch’s fourteen-minute video Tochka, 2010, a dozen men build a rickety bridge across a shallow gorge in a lush green landscape. Dressed in blue workmen’s uniforms with white hats pulled low over their eyes and yellow buckets strung from their hips, the men toil with a ridiculous assortment of tools and materials––sticks, shovels, mud, rope, an enormous steel spool––to create a contraption that looks more like a medieval catapult than a practical overpass and which, in the end, nearly collapses when they cross. One of the more striking pieces in this ten-month-long exhibition on the pleasures, sorrows, and increasingly precarious conditions of work, Tochka also offers the most poetic interpretation of the show’s multiple and competing themes.

“The Workers” is an expanded version of an earlier show, “En cada instante, ruptura” (In Every Instant, Rupture), curated by Carla Herrera-Prats for the Sale de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City. While the previous project focused on the strategies to which artists are turning to render visible the devastating changes to the landscape of labor, the current exhibition, curated by Herrera-Prats and MASS MoCA’s Susan Cross, not only illustrates but also embodies how people work (piecemeal) today. With admirable modesty and impressive subtlety, “The Workers” narrows the gap between artists and workers who would otherwise eye each other suspiciously across a chasm of privilege, complicity, or purity of purpose. From the artists Emily Jacir and Mircea Cantor documenting ephemeral, high-stakes action to the day laborers in Adrian Paci’s Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Detention Center), 2007, and from the street vendors in Oliver Ressler’s Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?, 2010, to the factory workers who collaborated with Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre to create Maquilapolis, 2006, there is common cause among members of the new global “precariat,” whether they come from manufacturing, the knowledge economy, or the wageless workforce of contemporary art.

Hirsch’s bridge in Tochka––crafty, nostalgic, highly inefficient yet still somehow emancipatory and sublime––provides an apt metaphor for the exhibition, in which we see the confluence of the creative and collaborative process and the labor of art at large. More concretely, works by Mary Lum, Camel Collective, and Laboratorio 060 address the history of the site––down to the last labor contract negotiated there––and MASS MoCA’s ambiguous role in turning a former factory town into a tourist destination. Maybe because the exhibition is up for so long, it has created an interesting, albeit distant, echo chamber, coinciding with the New Museum’s exhibition “Ostalgia,” e-flux’s reader Are You Working Too Much?, and Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation, to say nothing of the convergence of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, all of which are rooted in unemployment and exploitation. In the exhibition’s forthcoming catalogue, the curators and the labor historian Andrew Ross issue tentative calls for greater political mobilization and collective action. They may see them answered sooner, and louder, than any of us thought.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Jennifer Bolande

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA
University of Pennsylvania, 118 South 36th Street
January 11–March 11

View of “Jennifer Bolande Landmarks,” 2012. From left: Side Show, 1991, cibachrome, frame, 55 x 32"; Aerial Phonograph, 1991/2010, cibachrome on record album, formica base, turntable with motor, 28 x 16 x 16".

Working between photography and sculpture, Jennifer Bolande collapses objects into images and creates photographs that resist the medium’s flatness. Bolande, now based in Los Angeles, came of age in New York during the late 1970s. With an emphasis on the artist’s relatively lo-fi aesthetic and funky material choices, “Landmarks” celebrates Bolande’s absurd humor, an aspect that can often be overshadowed in the historicization of her Pictures generation peers.

Some of her best riffs appropriate the work of her fellow artists. Aerial Phonograph, 1991/2010, an homage to Jack Goldstein’s records, shows an image of skydivers, shot from above, slowly spinning on a silent vinyl record. Smoke Screen #1, 2007, resembles a print of one of Sherrie Levine’s knot paintings, with halftone images of smoke replacing the knots.

Bolande’s found-object sculptures that hug the walls in bas-relief––incorporating photographic details of her compositions among assemblages of materials such as Marshall amps and vintage refrigerator doors––become an exercise in looking. This play between image and object extends to upending the hierarchy between content and form in Cascade, 1987, where a clichéd image of a cliff at sunset is pinned vertically to the wall from which it “cascades” into a crumpled mess on the floor. Rounding of Corners, 1991/2010, a standout work, exemplifies this punny logic on the photographic plane. Utilizing the compositional logic of the nesting doll, a picture of a woman’s headless torso framed by shoulder pads is photographed within a cardboard frame physically buttressed by shoulder pads; the resulting photograph is then shown in the same frame, a metaphor for levels of institutional framing and scrutiny of the feminine image.

— Wendy Vogel

“Five Acts: Chronicles of Dissent”

MARGINAL UTILITY
319 North 11th Street, Second Floor
January 6–March 18

Yael Bartana, Wild Seeds, 2005, still from a color two-channel video, 6 minutes 39 seconds.

“Five Acts: Chronicles of Dissent” brings together five artists who shrewdly deconstruct the language of revolt. In a baroque scene that animates aspects of Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799, Yael Bartana’s two-channel video and sound installation Wild Seeds, 2005, crafts a fable of displacement in modern-day Israel. Shot in slow motion with rich colors and suspenseful music, the work features pacifist teenagers enacting a game of evacuator and evacuee. The action is alternately ludic and demonic, with picaresque elements that are continually destabilized by captions like I CAN’T BREATHE and VERY LOUD SCREAMING.

Andrea Bowers’s video Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training—Tree Sitting Forest Defense, 2009, entrenches itself in the practicalities of environmental protest. Focusing on the sheer amount of gear, skill, and stamina required of would-be tree sitters, Bowers produces a technical manual laced with the anxiety of operating alone. As her documentary lens zooms in on specialty knots, she nervously rehearses the crucial procedures that will enable her to subsist by herself—perhaps for weeks—in the tree worth saving.

Sharon Hayes’s audio and text piece I March in the Parade of Liberty but as Long as I Love You I’m Not Free, 2007–2008, intones a similar commitment to preservation. In a love letter addressed to viewers, Hayes recites slogans salvaged from iconic LGBTQ rights protests, repurposed here to form a ballad of the lone dissenter. She laments our fleeting interest in protests abroad (“The moment that you’ve long ago forgotten is happening to me right now”) and asks us to consider why we get involved or why we don’t (“What do we want? When do we want it?”). Drawing on Oscar Wilde’s love letters written from jail, Hayes reminds us that “there is no prison in any world into which love cannot force an entrance.” Keeping the faith with Wilde, Hayes promises to find us and love us—forcefully articulating the possibility for intimacy nestled at the heart of public complaint.

— Katherine Rochester

Zoe Strauss

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
January 14–April 22

Zoe Strauss, Daddy Tattoo, Philadelphia, 2004
, ink-jet print, 
12 x 16".

The anonymous voice who previewed this show last November in the New York Times intoned that the subject of Zoe Strauss’s photography is “poor people.” The word choice belies the radical politics at the heart of Strauss’s project on view in this anarchic retrospective. Consisting of a selection of images made over the last decade, “Zoe Strauss: Ten Years” was organized by the Philadelphia Museum as a sprawling survey that spills out into the city itself.

Strauss is known in her hometown of Philadelphia for staging annual exhibitions of her photographs (with prints available for five dollars each) under a section of Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia since 2002. On view are 170 of these images, picturing people, urban scenes, and landscapes that Strauss has encountered in her everyday life. In her attention to the material realities of her surroundings, Strauss taps into the rich legacy of documentary photography from Walker Evans to Allan Sekula. The salon-style hanging encourages viewers to make connections and hints at the vast production behind this careful edit; three slide shows running side by side present even more pictures and also foreground the artist’s interest in time and sequence.

Strauss’s stated ambition as an artist is “to create an epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life,” and the much-abused word epic truly animates this project, invoking Homer but also modernist echoes such as James Joyce and Bertolt Brecht. The artist is keenly attuned to the production of dialogue: The exhibition includes a library and reading room (designed by Strauss’s friends in the Philadelphia collective Megawords) where visitors can hang out and talk; an extensive series of public programs (including a lecture by Strauss on Bruce Springsteen); and “office hours” during which the artist meets with visitors (appointments can be scheduled online). The show also extends out into the city: Fifty-four billboards are currently displaying Strauss photographs, carefully selected by the artist according to location, orientation, and surroundings. In one, a woman known only as Antoinette looks down magisterially, her face framed by sky, and the I-95 project has been radically inverted: Instead of physically bringing viewers down into the unseen spaces of the city, the billboards make us look up at Strauss’s world, newly elevated into the sky.

— Megan Heuer

Jennifer Bartlett

LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South
April 20–May 25

Bartlett, Jennifer, 5725 East Ocean Boulevard, 1977, enamel over silk-screen grid on ninety-nine baked enamel steel plates, 77 x 350".

The titles of Jennifer Bartlett’s large-scale paintings on square plates of baked enamel steel—from Rhapsody, 1975–76, to the more recent Song, 2007, and Recitative, 2009–10—undoubtedly intend to invoke music and melody. Critics have also described these and similar works in terms of speech and syntax, calling them “novelistic.” Her latest exhibition, “Addresses (1976–78),” comprising four major plate works supplemented by notes, sketches, and drawings on graph paper, shifts the focus to a subdued but ubiquitous theme in Bartlett’s work: location.

Throughout her career, Bartlett has offered generalized images of bodies of water (oceans, lakes, swimming pools) as well as schematic renderings of trees, mountains, and houses. The ninety-nine plates of the nearly twenty-nine-foot-long 5725 East Ocean Boulevard, 1976–77, does not literally depict the artist’s childhood home in Long Beach, California; instead, it enigmatically presents eight versions of the same archetypal house—a horizontally oriented rectangle topped with a triangular roof—that has appeared in her work since 1970. This singular structure, formed by smooth, thickly translucent enamel paint, may not offer biographical clues, but Bartlett provides effervescent pleasure by charmingly combining, in each section, four related hues—such as banana yellow, sunflower, tangerine, and blood orange—using brushstrokes that resemble brisk snow flurries or darting schools of fish.

Another lengthy piece, Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street, 1976, represents major phases of Bartlett’s life in Long Beach, New Haven, and SoHo, but you wouldn’t know that from her five treatments of that same house. On the left side of 27 Howard Street: Day and Night, 1977–78, named for the Manhattan address where a friend lived, what looks like ribbed vaults or fireworks soar above a dotted building; on the right, a sky full of trestles reigns over a house whose underlying colors are nearly covered with smears of black paint. Such is the mystery of Bartlett’s conceptual portraiture.

— Christopher Howard

Duncan Campbell

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART
4400 Forbes Avenue
April 28–July 8

Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2011, still from a black-and-white and color film in 16 mm, 37 minutes.

In his latest exhibition—comprising three films and a set of screenprints— Duncan Campbell juxtaposes television network footage with dramatic reenactments while using structuralist techniques, for instance incorporating scratched film and garbled audiotape, to undercut intimate biographical monologues. The effect arrived at is a kind of melancholic antiportrait, one whose viewers may well understand Campbell’s subjects less and less as the films progress. Best illustrating this point is Bernadette, 2008, one of the three films on view, which takes on Bernadette Devlin—the Irish republican activist who, in 1969, attained a parliamentary seat on her twenty-second birthday. Devlin, called “Fidel Castro in a mini-skirt” by Time magazine, captivated the media when she punched the conservative speaker of the house for implying that the British army had acted in self-defense on Bloody Sunday. After an attempt was made on her life in 1981, she mostly disappeared from the public eye, but she still lingers in its imagination, serving as the subject of political murals in Northern Ireland, several documentary films, and a recently announced Hollywood biopic. Campbell’s film, however, is less about Devlin and more about the little we actually know of her. In the striking opening sequence of the film, we are given a glimpse of splayed female toes on a sofa; this image is casually followed by hair blowing in the wind, then a beautiful pair of eyes, and a gappy set of front teeth. The audio then pops in and our heroine pronounces the unromantic line “one of the plans of the people’s democracy.” After watching the three films on view—Bernadette; Make It New John, 2009 (which takes on John DeLorean); and Arbeit, 2011 (about Hans Tietmeyer)—we have the feeling not of having digested these characters but, on the contrary, of having been made complicit in their very creation.

— Emily Newman

Joe Thurston

ELIZABETH LEACH GALLERY
417 N.W. 9th Avenue
February 2–March 31

View of “Joe Thurston,” 2012.

Portland artist Joe Thurston’s recent freestanding floor sculptures have familiar proportions, resembling cargo crates, sarcophagi, or homemade luggage. The character of each “container”—as Thurston calls them—is different; each object reads as something created to enclose, transport, shelter, or perhaps imprison something else. The resonant indexicality of the works’ geometries suggests histories of exchange. And in fact the accompanying text reveals that the works contain objects we cannot see, such as eyeglasses, letters, and older paintings by the artist. These objects emerge as specters of personal value and connection as soon as their invisible presence is revealed, and though they are just inside each container, they somehow seem uncomfortably far away.

There is another layer of meaning between the interiors and exteriors of Thurston’s objects. Each container is enveloped in a compelling stratum of cork, wood glue, and putty. Dripped lines and brusquely scraped splotches of pigment are woven into assemblages that embrace each crevasse of the container. The reassuring formality of the sculptures’ shape is inflected and personalized across these moody, energized surfaces.

Thurston’s installation of twenty-nine sculptures feels like a deeply empathetic and personal, and concrete, response to the world’s current woes, possessing a sense of humility and thrift. Inside each object sits a piece of the artist’s life, its human value enclosed within the question of the object’s value as a work of art. Thurston offers us the opportunity—with each piece’s painterly force field acting as a psychic oasis—to contemplate the importance of history and the challenge of letting go.

— Stephanie Snyder

Robert Hanson

PORTLAND ART MUSEUM
1219 SW Park Avenue
January 7–April 29

Robert Hanson, Untitled (July 9, 2011), 2011, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 12 x 9".

The late Portland-based artist Robert Hanson is not especially well known beyond the Pacific Northwest; this is due in large part to his unwavering dedication to figure drawing. Hanson has never been concerned with the art world’s attraction to the new. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, he was devoted to abstract painting, but in 1995 he retired his brushes for graphite, colored pencil, and chalk and began his modest practice of drawing seated female models in his studio, seldom spending more than an hour on a single work. His gentle and perceptive oeuvre has always elicited some essential aspect of his subject’s character, in a similar fashion to Alice Neel’s beloved works. And yet Hanson never said that his output belonged to the genre of portraiture, but rather that his pieces presented opportunities for formal experimentation––which just so happen to take the female figure as their point of departure.

Sadly, this deserved survey of Hanson’s most recent work at the Portland Art Museum also documents his final output; the artist passed away a few weeks prior to the show’s opening. But these dozens of drawings, which often seem like collections of individual marks rather than whole images, honor his memory and vision. In The Red Shirt (all works cited, 2011), a blond model dons a red and black flannel shirt and, almost protectively, laces her fingers across it. While her posture implies a strong emotional presence, Hanson zeroes in on the warm red of the blouse, allowing the remaining visual details to dissipate into faint sketching. Elsewhere, the artist’s abstract impulses help convey a sitter’s mood. In The Glance, the trajectory and force of a woman’s gaze is captured in a pair of ovoid shapes that telegraph swift motion, resembling a pair of fish swimming across her face. The tender Untitled, July 23, 2011 pairs the slumping, vulnerable stance of its model, whose bare knee peeks from under her skirt, with the somewhere-else preoccupation in her eyes. Taken together, though, the real portrait that emerges is of Hanson: a deeply sensitive artist who fused formalism and figuration in a distinctive, personal way.

— John Motley

Spencer Finch

MUSEUM OF ART - RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN (RISD)
224 Benefit Street
February 24–July 29

Spencer Finch, 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume) (detail), 2008, 28 watercolors on paper, dimensions variable.

As a graduate student at RISD, Spencer Finch copied Claude Monet’s Basin at Argenteuil, 1874, on a dare. The replica is now on view several paces from the original, in “Painting Air,” an exhibition staged by Finch that features his own work alongside pieces from the university’s collection. His choice of Monet is telling, reminding us that Finch—a maker of minimal and often abstract watercolors, photographs, and installations—is in fact a conceptual landscape painter. Like Monet before him, Finch probes his optical experience of the natural world—and the subjective limits of his perceptions. To describe the sublime qualities of atmosphere, light, reflectivity, and color is to wrestle with paradox; the poignancy of Finch’s work lies in his steadfast aim to quantify these phenomenological conditions at once fugitive and singular.

In the first of the show’s two sections, Finch has arranged others’ pieces—ranging from Peruvian textiles to Willem de Kooning abstractions. The grouping is unusual and provocative, and the connections to the artist’s own practice are not immediately apparent. The second space houses Finch’s own work from the past five years. His wall-size 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume), 2008, comprises twenty-eight sheets of twenty-two-by-thirty-inch paper. In making the piece, based on a thought experiment posed by philosopher David Hume, Finch diluted blue inks one drop at a time, creating with every drip a unique shade that he then applied to each successive panel. The resulting grid seems as straightforward as it is unfathomable. The exhibition shares its title with the largest and perhaps most ambitious work on view: a site-specific installation of over one hundred square sheets of glass, hanging from a grid in the ceiling, and surrounded by a mural of colors based on Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. One person walking by is enough: A zephyr gently orbits the pieces of glass on their axes, and their surfaces swell in turn with reflective color. With “Painting Air” Finch not only describes the intangible quality of light, but transforms it into substantive material.

— Carmen Winant

“economy of means: toward humility in contemporary sculpture”

SCOTTSDALE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
7374 East Second Street
January 21–April 29

Martin Soto Climent, Delivery, 2006–, paper bags and ink stamp, dimensions variable.

For this show, curator Cassandra Coblentz has organized thirty-two sculptures by nineteen artists around five interrelated concepts: seriality (sic), circulation, chance, balance, and narrative implications. The works range from Minimalist groupings of found objects such as Martin Soto Climent’s Delivery, 2006–, a miniature housing estate where high-rises are represented by upside-down paper bags, to Beth Campbell’s Lamps, 2010, an elaborate production comprising four identical table lamps in various stages of liquefaction. Practically all these objects highlight the discrepancy between the anticipated and the actual behavior of their materials––emphasizing their physical limitations––and require viewers to suspend their disbelief. For example, Ara Dymond’s perilous Rug, 2011, which consists of a sequence of glass strips wedged sharp end up into a Ranger board, challenges the viewer to bridge the ontological gap between the signifier and the signified.

Felipe Cohen’s Tape, 2009, a sculpture composed of satin tape and basalt, appears to be simply a ribbon arranged to show two kinks along its yard-and-a-half smooth span. In reality, the hard stone, which shapes the kinks, challenges the sense of the ribbon as malleable, asserting the sculpture’s underlying rigidity. Likewise, Cohen’s Untitled, from the midday, 2010, a cardboard box, takes on near-architectural airs through its black basalt base. Here, the implied fragility of cardboard disappears as the box’s shadow turns out to be rendered in basalt, making the work literally rock-solid.

Combining optical veracity and visual trickery with improbable objects suggests a new “economy of means”; by deluding material expectations, these works lead the viewers to reconceptualize them, offering endless interpretive strategies to those willing to engage.

— Julia Friedman

Mel Bochner

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
November 6–April 29

Mel Bochner,
Master of the Universe, 2010, oil and acrylic on two canvases, 100 x 75".

The latest “In the Tower” exhibition, part of an ongoing series highlighting individual artists of the postwar period, teems with words. This is not altogether surprising: Language has been central to Mel Bochner’s art since the mid-1960s, and here a selection of his early works pairs with his more recent thesaurus paintings of 2003–11. The show, curated by James Meyer, examines Bochner’s interest in linguistic systems, focusing on his use of the thesaurus as a generative compositional tool. “The thesaurus,” according to Bochner, “presents each word as an endlessly branching tree of family resemblances, planted in a neighborhood where meanings overlap.” Indeed, such overlaps—and related fissures—are on full view in distinct moments in Bochner’s work.

A smaller gallery collects early text-based drawings from 1966–68, including restrained portraits of Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, in addition to numerous works on paper related to the larger thesaurus canvases. Bochner’s Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966, composed of expanding rings of synonyms for the word wrap, figures on both walls, as he remade the work in charcoal in 2001, sparking a return to the strategy of synonymy. Even in black and white, Bochner’s recent work appears looser, his 2008 and 2009 lists peppered with bubbles and arrows containing additional terms and phrases nestled into his word studies.

The canvases in the main gallery methodically parse individual words and phrases, with language often sliding into colloquial speech by the lower portion of the compositions. Bochner’s use of color, however, complicates straightforward reading. With increasing chromatic variety, to the point of distinct hues chosen for each individual hand-painted letter in his 2010 and 2011 pieces, text itself becomes an all-over composition. This coloristic variation and semantic doubling pry language apart twice over, and Bochner’s words pulse with everyday meanings tumbling beyond them.

— Edward Vazquez

Colby Caldwell

HEMPHILL
1515 14th Street NW, Suite 300
March 24–May 25

Colby Caldwell, blind (2) [fall], 2011, waxed archival pigment print, 28 1/4 x 34 3/4".

The southern gothic is a trope in American photography, and it has a long history in Washington, DC, well beyond the many exhibitions bearing the theme that have appeared in the capital, such as shows by William Eggleston, Sally Mann, and William Christenberry. Colby Caldwell, with his latest solo exhibitions at Hemphill and Civilian Art Projects, strives to prove that dilapidated antebellum structures still constitute a relevant subject and an integral component of the American photographic canon.

Caldwell’s series “spent,” 2009–12, divided between both galleries, presents oversize, highly detailed photographs of spent shotgun casings. At Hemphill, an untitled, roughly seven-foot-tall image of what appears to be a dead Baltimore oriole’s wing looks, under Caldwell’s theatrical lighting and backdrop, like a heraldic banner—a vanitas treatment of the hunter that upends the South’s hazy visual vernacular through electric, even credulity-straining color. Elsewhere in the gallery, Caldwell shows his latest images from an ongoing series, “how to survive your own death,” 2001–, in which he captures stills from a corrupted photo file; though these accidental abstractions bear no relation to his larger concern with southern still lifes, they demonstrate his range with color. (Caldwell prints his own work.) At Civilian, the shotgun-shell prints take on a different connotation. Several are presented without Caldwell’s handsome custom spalted oak frames. His photographs emphasize the impossible physics that leaves shotgun shells splintered and blistered—to the point that they look altered by biomorphic decay. In these works, every shell is impossibly individual.

Out of both shows, it is Caldwell’s landscape shots of Maryland that shine––these photographs, on view at Hemphill, are detailed to the point of appearing three-dimensional. Perhaps that is his solution for how to keep the southern gothic alive: Locate within it the brightest bandwidth of color.

This exhibition is also on view at Civilian Art Projects, 1019 7th Street NW, until May 5.

— Kriston Capps

Valérie Blass

MUSÉE D'’ART CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTRÉAL
185 Sainte-Catherine Ouest
February 2–April 22

Valérie Blass, Femme panier (Basket Woman), 2010, fiberglass and resin mannequin, basket, fishnet stockings, polyester shirt, wood, cement, paint, 50 x 59 x 28”.

Valérie Blass’s clever sculptures engage viewers in an engrossing but disconcerting guessing game, suggesting familiar forms while purposefully resisting easy recognition. Comprising almost thirty works, Blass’s largest exhibition to date provides an overdue survey of the artist’s recent (the earliest work dates from 2005) but prolific practice. Curator Lesley Johnstone has assembled some of Blass’s strongest pieces here, including a wide array of her arresting, life-size human-animal hybrids that combine traditional sculpting materials with found objects.

Blass’s works are not discordant assemblages of consumer detritus, but familiar if otherworldly creatures that seem to spring fully formed from an imaginative limbo to somewhere between figuration and abstraction. In Femme panier (Basket Woman), 2010, for instance, a female figure built from parts of a mannequin, a basket, and a gaudy polyester shirt is poised as if ready to leap and pirouette out of the gallery. Nearby, L’Homme Souci (Worry Man), 2009, presents an undulating form wrought from synthetic black hair that stands defiantly in a pair of patent leather Miu Miu booties. In both works, the trappings of luxury—the basket woman’s fishnet stockings, the hairy figure’s designer shoes—suggest these inanimate objects have personalities and aspirations of their own.

In the artist’s smaller works, this tension between the familiar and alien becomes more acute. Midnight Viper, 2009, is a Michelangelo-like bust of a young man that has been rendered nearly unrecognizable through the addition of teapots, vases, and kitten-shaped creamers on the surface of his face, all clad in a slick black enamel finish. Here, mass-produced kitsch objects become the biological mutations of Blass’s figures—growths and orifices that seem organic and yet disturbingly abstract.

— Gabrielle Moser

“Chronicles of a Disappearance”

DHC/ART
451 & 465, Saint-Jean
January 19–May 15

Teresa Margolles, Plancha (Iron), 2010, ten heated steel plates, rubber tubes, water, each plate 23 5/8 x 23 5/8".

Spread across two neighboring exhibition spaces, this show takes its name from the Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s acclaimed first feature film, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996). The show’s title is subtly alterated to reflect the contributions, in a variety of media, from five artists of different national origins.

Taryn Simon’s stylish 2007 photographic series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” dominates one gallery, and her haunting still Zahra/Farah, 2007, made for Brian De Palma’s film Redacted (2007) about the gang rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl by US soldiers, provides its chilling coda. Two Minimalist, conceptual installations––Opus, 2005, by Cuban artist José Toirac, and Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s Plancha (Iron), 2010––transform the disembodied into the visible and allow parts to stand for the whole. In the former, numbers uttered by Fidel Castro during a political speech are taken out of their context and projected onto a video screen, whereas in the latter, drips of water collected from a morgue fall from the ceiling and dissolve to form rusted traces on the surface of heated metal plates.

The word chronicles in the exhibition’s title captures the unsettling mix of documentary and drama, fact and fiction, that the two films included here present. Set in California, Philippe Parreno’s stylized linear reenactment of the train journey that transported Bobby Kennedy’s corpse from New York to Washington in June 8, 1968, 2009, contrasts with the complex, looping structure of Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet Is Best, 2011. Fast interweaves restaged footage of his interviews with a Predator drone pilot, who relates the events of his deadly strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with footage of the American Southwest. Disappearance, in this context, may thus be seen as a shorthand for disquiet, dislocation and, ultimately, dissolution.

— Agnieszka Gratza

“Preternatural”

CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE
240 McLeod Street
December 9–March 4

Marie-Jeanne Musiol, The Radiant Forest, 2011, electromagnetic photographic installation, back-lit positives, in two modules of 16 x 96" each. Installation view.

In “Preternatural,” curator Celina Jeffery addresses ways that contemporary art constructs epistemologies beyond the scientific; in so doing, she offers compelling counterexamples to the disconnect between spirituality and contemporary art that art historian James Elkins has observed. Fittingly for a show about unconventional perceptions, this exhibition is framed within three idiosyncratic spaces: a deconsecrated Catholic church, a gallery in a strip mall, and a natural history museum.

A performance installation at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts brings to mind spirit photography— Adrian Göllner conjured fleeting spectral emanations in Handel’s Cloud, 2011, an installation-performance (mounted in December) in which fog rushed from gothic vaulting. Equally elusive, the Patrick Mikhail Gallery’s white box space is interrupted only by the pressed lines of Shin il Kim’s Invisible Masterpiece, 2011. Embossed figure-outlines on colorless paper are animated in a three-channel video that shows these barely perceptible traces becoming even more ghostly as immaterial projections.

At the Canadian Museum of Nature, the artists focus on the sensuality and the sense of wonder in science. Sarah Walko’s installation It is very least what one ever sees, 2011, exists where scientific organization intersects with devotional practice, poetry, and romance. Wall-mounted test tubes become reliquaries for colorful collections of found objects, including bones, feathers, and text, all arranged according to Walko’s personal taxonomy. Live fish and plants in a central biosphere counter the dead, arranged objects. Through Nox Borealis, 2011, Andrew Wright rewrites the natural history diorama in “full-scale” photographic prints mounted on concave supports. His inverted arctic images purposefully disorient viewers; we aren’t exactly sure whether we are looking at minimal sculpture, snow, a heavenly cloudscape, or the lunar surface. In this confusion, he evokes the awe and terror of the arctic night—an environment without landmarks. Marie-Jeanne Musiol, a true believer in human spiritual potential, shows works that are far subtler but no less sublime. She displays electrophotographic light images of leaves—objective evidence of auratic energies discussed in Buddhism, Theosophy, and Scientology. In The Radiant Forest, 2011, she presents small transparencies backlit by a mysterious, dim bioluminescence that “develops” on viewers’ retinas—a metaphoric and demonstrative energy transference. Her works best manifest the exhibition’s theme of extraordinary natural experience.

This exhibition is also on view at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, 302 St. Patrick Street, until February 17.

— William Ganis

“Coming After”

THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
231 Queens Quay West
December 10–March 4

Glen Fogel, Glen from Colorado, 2009, fluorescent lights on powder-coated steel, MP3 player, motion detector, solid state relay, variac, amplifier, speaker, powder-coated steel chair, 100 x 48”.

Spanning installation, drawing, photography, performance, and video, this ambitious exhibition brings together sixteen artists—almost all of whom were born after 1970—whose works reflect on the period of queer radicalism witnessed in North America from the 1980s through the ’90s. Meditating on themes of nostalgia, loss, and latency, the show consistently evokes a feeling of having arrived too late to directly participate in this traumatic but galvanizing political moment.

Curator Jon Davies opens the show with a smartly selected group of video works that link past cultural icons with contemporary queer politics. Aleesa Cohene’s video installation Yes, Angel, 2011, presents a carefully constructed narrative of two intergenerational queer relationships using clips culled from melodramatic films of the 1980s; mobilizing metaphors of contagion that circulated during the AIDS crisis, the piece hints at ways in which complex emotional states are transferred from older queer generations to younger ones, suggesting that affects, like diseases, might be spread through contact transmission. Other works take a queer look at the art history canon; James Richards’s Untitled merchandise (lovers and dealers), 2007, for instance, is a collection of six knitted blankets that depict the names of Keith Haring’s lovers (in pink and blue) and art dealers (in red and yellow). See also Jonathan VanDyke’s performance Obstructed View, 2011, which makes the implicit homoeroticism of much AbEx painting into a blatantly sexual but surprisingly poetic encounter between two men on a locker room bench.

Operating as a coda to these works, which explicitly reflect on the past, the second floor of the exhibition offers a more lyrical take on present queer relationships. Among them is Glen Fogel’s 2009 installation Glen from Colorado, which features a minimalist fluorescent light sculpture in the shape of the name “Glen” that pulses with light in time with the intonations of a robotic voice that dispassionately reads excerpts from letters the artist has received from friends and lovers, at times laudatory and at others, accusatory and cold.

— Gabrielle Moser

Jason de Haan

CLINT ROENISCH GALLERY
944 Queen Street West
March 15–April 21

Jason de Haan, Future Future Age, 2011, driftwood and inset gold ring, 47 x 20 x 11".

Jason de Haan’s solo show takes its title, “Year Zero,” from a moment in time that does not exist. The term is absent from the traditional Anno Domini calendar system but is used by astronomers and science fiction authors to denote a fixed point in time after a significant event, connoting apocalyptic ends as well as cycles of rebirth.

It is a fitting title for a body of work that is obsessively engaged with creating visual records of the deep geologic time of the earth and the speculative future of human development. In the two works that form the centerpiece of the exhibition, New Jerusalem, 2010, and its counterpart, New Jerusalem, Cloud Shrouded, 2012, multicolored, wall-size spheres depict the transformation of a planet at the hands of a futuristic civilization. Collaged from the cover illustrations of more than one thousand sci-fi paperbacks, the first presents a landscape choked with cities, hovering spaceships, and intergalactic plant life, while the second pictures the same planet as a mass of swirling, abstract colors. The relationship between the two worlds is purposefully ambiguous, raising questions about whether the viewer is witnessing the colonization of a newly formed planet, or its destruction through technological overdevelopment.

Alongside these foreboding undertones, de Haan’s exhibition also offers poetic visions of the future that exhibit a dignified sense of calm about the passing of time. City of a Thousand Suns, 2011, sees the title page from the eponymous novel by Samuel R. Delany affixed onto a piece of fluorescent yellow paper, both destined to fade to illegibility after exposure to innumerable hours of future sunlight. Future Future Age, 2011, similarly speculates on natural life cycles by exposing the cross section of a piece of driftwood that includes an inset gold ring among its own growth rings, as though the tree had miraculously grown around this earlier poetic but useless human object. At work in these projects is not a defeatist sense of the impending end, but rather an irrepressible faith in our sometimes overblown representations of the future.

— Gabrielle Moser

Damian Moppett

RENNIE COLLECTION
51 East Pender Street
November 26–April 21

Damian Moppett, Artforum with Mike Kelley's 'Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature', 2003, graphite on paper, 10 x 10".

Call it a hometown coup for Damian Moppett. In the fall of 2009, Bob Rennie, a Vancouver-based collector, real estate marketer, and chair of the North American acquisitions committee for the Tate, opened the eponymous Rennie Collection in Vancouver’s Chinatown to display his private collection, one of the largest in North America. This fall, of the forty artists Rennie collects in depth, Moppett became the first Canadian artist to have an exhibition in the gallery.

Moppett’s representational drawings and paintings are deceptive because the subject of his work is not what is depicted. Viewed all together, these images suggest a meaning that develops through the juxtaposition of the various people and places. In one room, for example, the walls are cluttered with small-scale paintings and drawings, salon style. Their subjects differ: portraits of artists, such as Calder with Maquette of Public Sculpture (all works cited 2005), or Hollis Frampton in His Wittgenstein T-Shirt; scenes of bands performing; vignettes of the Gulf Islands; studies of sculptures in an artist’s studio, like Studio in Basement. What seems to develop, at first, is a portrait of the artist, a mixture of influences and autobiography, all removed from context. However, if this is self-hagiography, there is a certain humor to it. In the middle of the same room in the Rennie Collection appears one of Moppett’s “Stabiles,” reworkings of Alexander Calder and Anthony Caro sculptures that serve as platforms on which Moppett displays his intentionally bad pottery. Further, one notices that some of paintings depict the objects in the gallery. As such, Moppett’s work often refers to its own making, but the absurdity of presenting high modernist sculpture next to amateur craft also suggests parody, or at least humor. Whether the work mythologizes or criticizes the autonomous artist is left ambiguous; it’s never funny enough to be just a joke.

— Aaron Peck

“C.1983 Part II”

PRESENTATION HOUSE GALLERY
333 Chesterfield Avenue
March 23–May 6

Ian Wallace, The Imperial City, 1986, four gelatin silver prints, Plexiglas, each 97 x 24".

It is surprising how fresh an exhibition of film and photography from 1980s Vancouver can feel. It is even more startling, however, that over the intervening decades, the social, political, and even, to a certain degree, artistic concerns have remained the same. The lesser-known works of Share Corsaut, for example, whose colored photograms on view date from 1981, seem to anticipate current trends in abstract photography. Henri Robideau’s photograph July 23, 1983, Giant Crowd of 50,000 People . . . , 1983, documents a massive protest against government cutbacks that reads as particularly apropos in the age of the Occupy movement.

A number of pieces interrogate and juxtapose a past or potential future with the present. Ian Wallace’s Imperial City, 1986, consists of four gelatin silver prints arranged horizontally, with the two outer black-and-white prints depicting Roman sculptures, while the inner archival images of an early-twentieth-century West Coast city are covered with orange Plexiglas. The images thus contrast the aesthetics of imperial Rome with the rustic style of frontier towns. Rodney Graham’s Millennial Project for an Urban Plaza, 1986, a scale model of an oversize camera obscura and accompanying proposal, shows the viewer a work that has not yet been realized but, one can hope, might still be produced. Accompanying the exhibition, documentarian Anu Sahota has collaged ninety minutes of mid-’80s local television coverage from the CBC archives. In one program, a reporter interviews an artist about gentrification and how it may threaten available studio spaces, allowing the entire exhibition to serve as an object lesson for the expression plus ça change . . .

— Aaron Peck