from the new release The Clearing
out now on NNA Tapes
Stutter as Point Zero in the Revolution of Self: JJJJJErome Ellis’s “Loops of Retreat”
out now on NNA Tapes
Archives for November 2021
out now on NNA Tapes
Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy
Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s impassioned commitment to learning and to literacy specifically, Akpojotor has fashioned a series of deeply intimate portraits that insist on knowledge as an essential means of crafting an individual’s sense of self and how to operate within the greater world at large. [Read more…]
Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here
at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021)
by Danielle Dewar
The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows for a quick glimpse into a unique psyche while highlighting our collective societal fears. Brooklyn-based artist Rachael Tarravechia delivers just that in her new, exciting body of work currently on view at Launch F18 in Manhattan. [Read more…]
The Staccato Cat: New Work from Jeff Parker
“Suffolk”
on Anthem / Nonesuch Records
Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God
at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold in both color and story, backed by lengthy titles which are equally vivid and emotive in their humor and wit. Using his imagined “Frenglish Empire” as key players in a revisionist history, Rashid uses biting humor to question, underline, and undermine contemporary and historical issues around the construction of race and class, the perpetual cycle of colonial violence, the historical erasure and survivance of Los Angeles’ Tongva and Chumash people, and the legacies of imperialism that haunt the present and future. Building on a practice of about 18 years, En Garde/On God moves Rashid’s work into decidedly new territory. [Read more…]
A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello
Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis
My Monticello
By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49
NYT
In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” [Read more…]
A Sonic Key to the Unbound in “Open the Gates”
The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth
Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48
NYRB
Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath you. Now imagine lying in a field, or on the forest floor. The same applies, though we rarely think of it: the dirt beneath you, whether a mile or a foot deep, is teeming with more organisms than researchers can quantify. Their best guess is that there are as many as one billion microbes in a single teaspoon of soil. Plant roots plunge and swerve like superhighways with an infinite number of on-ramps. And everywhere there are probing fungi. [Read more…]
Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties
Reviewed by Mike Jay
Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
by Dr. Carl L. Hart
Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94
NYRB
The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only around 1900 that it developed a more specialized meaning, uniting what had previously been a disparate group of pharmaceutical products, chemicals used in medical research, and herbal intoxicants. Initially, this new usage of “drugs” referred to toxic and addictive substances that were to be taken only under the direction of a physician. Once the trade in these substances was criminalized in the early twentieth century, the word connoted illegality. [Read more…]