Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for August 2022

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

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Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On
at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm)

by Julie Adler

I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, direct, I thought, “wow, what a master,” and also “ouch,” but in a good way. We became friends there, and a few years later she brought out some drawings at a meal we were having, of people, animals with wide eyes, craggy lines. Sparse, comical and awkward, eyes staring back at you or away. Up until that point I had no idea Eve was also a visual artist. I had come from a performance art background but was also starting to get more engaged in 2 dimensions. She was eager to do a trade. It seemed we shared a similar concern for the human condition. And because we humans are funny in our grotesqueness, our derangement, our folly, we didn’t think it unusual to portray that. We also felt the comradery of being outsiders, even though we both grew up here in LA and went to art school here.

So, when Eve asked me to interview her for this publication, I did not hesitate. It’s been wonderful to burrow in with her on the ways and means of her process. She’s really not an outsider (nor am I.) She is as inside as it gets. [Read more…]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

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Reviewed by Cintra Wilson

The History of Bones: A Memoir
by John Lurie
Random House, 435 pp., $28.00
NYRB

It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing by. It was a charming, homemade ad, shot on grainy video, full of beautiful women dressed in international garb like they were animatronic dolls in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. [Read more…]

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

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open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite for a kiss in a nearly abstract closeup, Kissed. The subject of a Turkish Girl exhibits her vulva by holding up her legs at an unlikely angle. Finally, in the small loose drawing About Heaven, unidentified objects are flanked by a Dumas poem about death and eroticism. The visitor is warned: the exhibition shows sexually explicit works, contemplates issues of our common humanity such as race, and does not shrink from the esoteric. Anyone seeking a comfortable experience better turn back. [Read more…]

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Água Viva
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing
88pp., $14.95

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing
864pp., $29.95

The word is my fourth dimension
–Clarice Lispector

And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. Maybe the music of that name was more pure music and vivid living syntax, and less history and persona. Or maybe Clarice Lispector’s innate capacity to shape-shift, from lantern-eyed panther to clucking hen to hothouse orchid, demands to be perceived as multiform epiphanies in an infinity of mirrors. Possibly, maybe resides at the Bjorkian core of Clarice Lispector’s output and purview. As an existential Lou Costello, she questioned with rabid circuitous intensity, again and again: Who’s on first? Who, exactly? And as a literary high priestess with a lifelong crush on void, she understood clearly that everything knows everything … we are a species of kissing cousins in a grammarless whirlpool. From mortar to manna, Lispector’s legacy in prose is one of paradoxes and trap-doors, rococo balconies kissing sea air, perfumed arias and empty cola bottles, gutted mermaids on dusty streets bleeding out brackish emeralds. In her world, silence favors its motives and heaven commits the meek to memory. [Read more…]

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

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at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence victim, they pack a sucker punch directly to the gut. [Read more…]