Riot Material

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books

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Provokes an Imp

Review by James McWilliams

Breath Like the Wind at Dawn
by Devin Jacobsen
Sagging Meniscus Press, 200 pp., $16.80

One doesn’t really enjoy a novel with a protagonist whose distinguishing feature is a passion for watching people take their last breath. And given that these last gasps are not gentle expirations after a life well lived but rather throat throttles at the hands of the protagonist, well, let’s just say Breath Like the Wind at Dawn is not what anyone would call a lyrical, feel-good novel. It’s safe to say it did not make any “summer must read” lists.  [Read More…]

art

Recalibrating Awareness in Rebecca Campbell Infinite Density, Infinite Light

At LA Louver (through 2 July 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How does an artist adequately describe in paint the concept of love? One could say that even the idea of attempting to capture this ineffable human attribute seems schmaltzy and somehow embarrassing, yet most of us have at some point or other lived and died by the sword of passion- jilted, exalted, or both simultaneously. Each person’s personal history is also the history of humanity in that within each life’s unique and spectacular set of personal associations, images, affinities and biases, there also exists a common thread of communion, of universal likeness and of love. We all want it. We all have lost it. We all somehow find it again, and if we don’t, our lives speak endlessly to the pain of this loss. [Read More…]

♥

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books

The Beautiful and the Damned: Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind A Door

Reviewed by John Biscello

A Door Behind A Door
by Yelena Moskovich
Two Dollar Radio, 188 pp., $16.99

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there’ll be Hell to pay
—The Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hell”

Look out there. In the distance, toward the horizon. Can you see it? More importantly, can you feel it? A solitary rowboat adrift at sea, the waves like scallop-fringed wraiths from a Japanese woodblock beginning to gather around it, and the individual in that boat, brave and terrified and lost and found all at once, continues what has been called the “awful rowing toward God.” Here, now, comes the soundtrack, as if the silver linings in clouds host angels porcelain voices: Row row row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily merrily merrily merrily / Life is a but a dream. Or nightmare. Track #2 is is the remix of another cheery children’s tune: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…. Will the wheels ever stop? What kind of bus is this? Is there a way to get off? Where is it going, really? And the bus driver, with the missing eye and wax-slicked moustache and non-existent lips, why doesn’t he ever say a word? Just leers into the rearview from time to time, where you can’t tell if his one good eye is full of malice or mischief or both. These, and other liminally hazardous forms of travel, constitute the transit inner-verse as constructed by Yelena Moskovich. [Read More…]

film

A Quiet Place Part II Delivers Everything You’d Want For This Horror Sequel

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

A Quiet Place was one of the most exhilarating cinematic experiences of the last decade, unfurling a unique vision of horror that weaponized audience screams against them. Often when watching a scary movie, a good scream can release the tension that’s brewing as your spine tingles. However, while watching this 2018 monster tale in which a single peep could get you ripped into ribbons, a scream unleashed only made viewers feel more unnerved. This clever device paired with a stellar cast made John Krasinski’s horror offering a twisted crowd-pleaser and a smashing success. Three years later, he’s back with his co-writers and cast for A Quiet Place Part II, a supremely scary and satisfying sequel. [Read More…]

art

Aidan Salakhova’s The Dust Became The Breath

at Gazelli Art House, London (through 6 June 2021)
Reviewed by Niccy Hallifax

Walking into a London gallery again after a year of restrictions and lock-downs was strange but uplifting for the soul. More uplifting still was seeing an artist I have long admired, ever since I saw her work at the Saatchi gallery many years before. The Dust Became The Breath, at Gazelli Art House, is a solo exhibition for Aidan Salakhova, the prominent Azeri artist. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Christoph Waltz’s Savagely Clever Directorial Debut In Georgetown

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko At 53, Austrian-German actor Christoph Waltz became an unlikely Hollywood star. After decades working in German film and television, he broke through with Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. Despite being an unknown stateside, despite starring opposite A-lister Brad Pitt, despite being tasked with playing a ruthless and giddily zealous Nazi, Waltz stole the spotlight, then earned his first Academy Award.  … [Read More...]

Ferrari Sheppard: Positions of Power

At UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (through 15 May 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood The history of portrait painting is long and star-studded from the stunningly humanist portraits of Alice Neel to the politically charged monolithic works of Kehinde Wiley; artists have, for centuries, endeavored to capture the essence of their times and the people who mattered through the lens of figuration. Ferrari Sheppard, like so many artists before him, has created a visual mapping of his life that includes not only friends and family but also artists like Tupac Shakur, Jimi Hendrix and other artists in the … [Read More...]

The Line

It Floods the Womb Until One Drowns

Reviewed Brandon M. Terry

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright, 612 pp., $27.52
NYRB

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety. Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud toward its deadly conclusion. [Read More…]

In Conversation: Andrej Dubravsky and Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky, Aggressive Slav + Friendly Slav, at LAUNCH F18, NYC
by Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky speaks to Sam Trioli about his new paintings for his current dual exhibition at LAUNCH F18, Aggressive Slav and  Friendly Slav. Created from his countryside home in rural Slovakia, Andrej shares the effects on his work and life with returning to nature.

SAM TRIOLI: This exhibition highlights a new series of paintings for you. How did the Aggressive Slav/Friendly Slav series first begin?

ANDREJ DUBRAVSKY: I don’t even know if it’s a particular “series” with an exact start and end, to be honest. I just keep working all year long on various subjects in parallel, no matter if there’s any show coming up next month or in the next six months. Sometime before the works had to be shipped to New York City, I lined up many paintings outside in my garden and I picked from all of these paintings and sort of curated them in a way that would make a sense. This show makes it my first solo show in New York City.  [Read More…]

For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams and The Colony

by Lisa Zeiger

“All I can see is the frame.”
–Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past

The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring ritual, and ambivalent traditions of the artist’s native Iran. Long gone from another country, Neshat exalts its beauty in the photographs, video installations and feature films she has been making since the early 1990s. To paraphrase Henry James, she is someone on whom nothing is lost, least of all the lessons and losses of her own life, in particular the chasm of her exile from Iran. [Read More…]

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (ended 1 November 2020)
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle
an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art,
November 20, 2020–February 7, 2021;
the Seattle Art Museum,
February 25–May 23, 2021;
and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.,
June 26–September 19, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly.
Peabody Essex Museum/University of Washington Press,
188 pp., $45.00
NYRB

As we were waiting on line at the Metropolitan Museum to get into the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, I told my friend that one reason why Lawrence, though long an esteemed name in American art, has a rather modest presence in our museums may derive from his not having made oil paintings. In a long career that stretched from the late 1930s, when he was barely in his twenties, through the late 1990s—he died in 2000, at eighty-two—he primarily used gouache (which is sometimes referred to as poster paint) or tempera. [Read More…]

Lettering The Yet Known: The Arcane Calligraphs of David D. Oquendo

by Lisa Zeiger

“I dream of a new alphabet.”  — Marcel Broodthaers, 1974

When considering the merit of a work of art, should the biography of its maker matter? Should we train the tentacles of personality upon the armature of art? When I first saw images of David D. Oquendo’s calligraphic paintings on Instagram (@monkpuppy) I had no ideas about the age, identity or ethnicity of their maker. The paintings were all sign rather than signature, solemn instances of regal yet anonymous beauty, not unlike that of many hieroglyphic writings made in ancient Egypt. Such was the imposing presence of these unfamiliar letters that, while I wondered if they conveyed a meaning, I didn’t care. As I would later learn, a friend of Oquendo’s told him, “You have not created a language, but language.” [Read More…]