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Spring Blooms and Evening Heat Bring, Beautifully, “No Regrets”

April 15, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

from Club Tularosa
feat. Megan Sutherland

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/02-No-Regrets-Ft-Megan-Sutherland-feat.-Megan-Sutherland.m4a

“No Regrets”

newly released on Me Me Me
.

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

The Great Perfection: A Perspective on Dzogchen

March 9, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

In his new book, Entering the Mind, C von Hassett takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state, where he shows us how to recognize it within ourselves, then realize it through holistic, wholly committed practice. “EtM is a singular accomplishment, remarkable for its clarity as well as its richly poetic delivery. The text is all the more essential for its practitioner’s insight into what is considered to be the highest wisdom practice known to man – that of Dzogchen.”

Below is an excerpt from Entering the Mind.

Entering the Mind
by C von Hassett
Waterside Productions, 173pp., $12.95

The Great Perfection

Dzogchen is like the highest point of a monastery, the golden top-ornament: above it, there is nothing but sky.
–Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Dzogchen, or atiyoga, is a profound body of teachings that point us directly toward the recognition of our own mind in its natural state. This state, what in the Tibetan tradition is known as rigpa, is naturally pure and nakedly aware. It is, in other words, awakened, and this already awakened state is present within each of us, is always accessible to us, and through clear instruction it is also easy to identify. In seeing it, we are literally in witness of our own luminous path to liberation, this with one subtle though skillful shift in perspective. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Entering the Mind, Mind, Thought

The View Into Your Already Awakened Mind

March 2, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

In his new book, Entering the Mind, C von Hassett takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state, where he shows us how to recognize it within ourselves, then realize it through holistic, wholly committed practice. “EtM is a singular accomplishment, remarkable for its clarity as well as its richly poetic delivery. The text is all the more essential for its practitioner’s insight into what is considered to be the highest wisdom practice known to man – that of Dzogchen.”

Below is an excerpt from Entering the Mind.

Entering the Mind
by C von Hassett
Waterside Productions, 173pp., $12.95

The View

There is a road leading into the Grand Canyon, Highway 64, that takes you straight into the heart of some of the most magnificent views on the planet. They are literally breathtaking, these views, looking out as they do on both space and split plateaus that plunge deep through the earth and through stratas of time into the Río Colorado below. One could say these views are to die for, for they deliver you headlong into the contemplation of your own imminent death. This contemplation isn’t necessarily a philosophical one, though it can certainly be that as well. Rather, it is one which is immediate and visceral and borne entirely of a fall, for you cannot look over the edge of the Grand Canyon without considering your own fall into that great abyss of emptiness. It is this very abyss which gives rise to the canyon’s ineffable beauty, as well as highlighting by way of counterpoint the sheer sanctity of the riven land. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Entering the Mind, Mind, The Line, Thought

Entering the Mind, A Dzogchen Text

February 22, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Riot Material Presents

Entering the Mind
by C von Hassett

|     PURCHASE    |     3-PART PODCAST    |     THE TOUR    |

Entering the Mind, by C von Hassett (front cover)
Entering the Mind, by C von Hassett (back cover)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Entering the Mind, Mind, Riot Material Presents

The Boundary Stone

February 21, 2022 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

The Boundary Stone
by C von Hassett

PURCHASE
.

Nothing of you but breakage,
scattered bone, a length of which
I lift.

Black, charred, one with all else, 

its drippings run with light,
its marrows the fats of luminous night…
.

And so begins The Boundary Stone.

The Boundary Stone, by C von Hassett (Front cover)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The New Word

Angela Davis On What It Means To Be A Revolutionary

March 20, 2019 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

One of the videos on view at the entrance of The Broad’s exceptional new exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (opening March 23), is Angela Davis speaking to the idea of what it means to be a revolutionary. It is a timely reminder and an historical call to hone once-again one’s revolutionary teeth. A review of Soul of a Nation is forthcoming.

Angela Davis (1972)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Video

Nan Goldin Breathes Word Into Her Seminal Work, The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency

November 16, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

On view at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles, are a selection of photographs from Nan Goldin’s hypnotic and haunting series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which in its original format is a 48 minute slideshow documenting Goldin’s life in over 700 photographs and 30 songs, the text of which, those songs, acting as the narrative for the “film.”

In her introduction to the book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes:

I was eleven when my sister committed suicide. This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, Interview, The Line, Video

The Seditious, Colorless Eye Of Richard Avedon and James Baldwin

November 13, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

1964. Richard Avedon and James Baldwin publish their spare yet radical treatise shot through to the arrow’s heart of America and much-adored Americana. Their collection, perhaps even more radically, was titled  Nothing Personal, and nothing at the time could have been further from the blood-slaked truth. One can only imagine how so very personal, and how lacerating, these images must have been in the high epoch of Jim Crow, where the unsilenced shot of pistol, the swift stroke of knife, the snap of rope, the strike of skin-crackling fire were the unmitigated and unmediated means of cage-keeping of the day. This fall Taschen will republish a facsimile edition of  Nothing Personal, with unpublished photographs and a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als. Als’ introduction is excerpted below. An exhibition of images from Nothing Personal will be on view at Pace Gallery, NYC, from 17 November through 13 January, 2018. — CvH

Nothing Personal
by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin
Introduced by Hilton Als

I am about thirteen years old and my body and mind are carried along by the energy that thinking engenders in me—the nearly phosphorescent ideas and possibilities I find in books, looking at pictures, and whenever I visit a museum. Some of the photo books I covet the most can’t be checked out from the Brooklyn Public Library, so, day after day, I duck out of my junior high school, in Crown Heights, and, walking past the Brooklyn Museum, then through the Botanic Garden, I go to look at them in the stacks. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, Image, The Line, Thought

The New Avant-Garde: David Lynch’s Glorious Late-Career Vision

August 24, 2017 By C von Hassett 5 Comments

Episode 3
by C von Hassett

The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized.

Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3
Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3

Less dream (or dreamy) than earlier movements into surrealist expression, the first quarter of Episode 3, for instance, shows Lynch, in an extraordinary way, to be as clear-eyed and sure-footed as he’s ever been in these ghostly yet thoroughly gripping realms. It’s as if, rather than imagining, some doppelgänger of himself now inhabits these realms, sending in return faint coordinates and word; or Lynch, figuratively, has set foot in them himself, excursioned through them in a near-corporeal way, and now with intimate familiarity he is able to speak cinematically to their airy constructions, and he does this with such nuance that they feel like alternate extents of consciousness and being: expansive, elusive, wholly mercurial states of mind-borne self. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

David Lynch’s The Amputee

July 13, 2017 By C von Hassett 2 Comments

1973. David Lynch had been shooting Eraserhead for roughly one year when he ran out of cash. The film was suddenly and indefinitely on hold. It was, he says, “a depressing time.” Yet it was also this time that the American Film Institute asked a friend of his, Fred, to shoot a test using two different black and white video stocks to determine which stock was best, because, as Lynch tells it, “they were going to buy a bunch.” Lynch says when he heard AFI was buying video tapes, “it gave me a sadness, and I worried they were going to have to change the name of the place” (from American Film Institute to American Video Institute). “So I looked at Fred, and I got an idea, and I said, um, ‘Fred, does it matter what you shoot?’ And he said, ‘Well, what are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘Could you shoot anything you want? Twice. One with one stock and one with the other, and go like that, for the test?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’ So I said, ‘Could I write something and make something for tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’”

That evening Lynch wrote The Amputee. The next day he shot this video:

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line, Video

The 1978 Paper That Predicted Our Nearing “Disaster”

July 12, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

C von

If the greenhouse warming effect of the resultant increasing atmospheric CO2 is as great as the most advanced current models suggest, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress. De­glaciation would probably be rapid once it had started, and when complete would have led to a rise in sea level of about 5m along most coasts.  

–Prof. John H. Mercer, 26 January 1978

12 July 2017

A trillion-ton iceberg totaling 2,240 square miles, or 12% of the Antarctic peninsula, and 40 trillion cubic feet of ice — a volume twice that of Lake Erie — today broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, today’s calving further weakens the entire continental glacier and sets in motion what scientist believe is the first stage of total glacial collapse. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World, Thought

Cracked Actor To Cracked Actor

June 29, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

David Bowie's 1974 Cracked Actor Tour can be seen and listened to at Riot Material, LA's premier Arts and Culture magazine.

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https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1-10-Cracked-Actor-Live.mp3

Cracked Actor (Live, Los Angeles ’74)

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1-05-Sweet-Thing_Candidate_Sweet-Thing-Reprise-Live.mp3

Sweet Thing/Candidate (Live, Los Angeles ’74)

.♦

In honor and in celebration of Cracked Actor, the new live release from David Bowie’s infamously depraved yet musically stellar ’74 tour, Riot Material scratched up a BBC documentary from that same tour — titled Cracked Actor: A Film About David Bowie. The 1975 film, viewable in four parts below, is directed by Alan Yentob. The new album narrows in on one evening, his September 5th show at Los Angeles’s Universal Amphitheater. Above are two tracks from the Cracked Actor release. 

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Entering the Mind Global Radio and Podcast Tour: Follow at Riot Material

Riot Material Founding Editor, C von Hassett, takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state. Learn More Here.

Filed Under: Film, Interview, Records, The Line, Video

Savage And Lovely: The Bad Batch

June 23, 2017 By C von Hassett 1 Comment

Reviewed by C von Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives. 

We first meet our protagonist, a wordless Arlen May Johnson, aka Inmate 5040, as guards walk her to desert’s edge, to the kingdom’s unceremonial gate (American chain link), to literally lock her away from fair society. She stands, indifferent to her plight, with only a backpack, a burger (which she promptly eats) and a half-filled jug of water. Ignored is the wooded post which reads: 

Warning: Beyond this fence is no longer the territory of Texas. That hereafter no person within the territory beyond this fence is a resident of the United States of America or shall be acknowledged, recognized or governed by the laws and governing bodies therein. Good luck. 

There, she is loosed into a blistering landscape of sand and sunbaked clay, and she walks straight in as would a schoolgirl through a noonday park, though there is little question here of her arrival into something far more suspect. Arlen’s first encounter is with a tribe of desert body builders — a brutish, body-ripped band in need, naturally, of good supply of protein. Stray travelers seem their sole course, and these luckless lie chained and limbless in what unremittingly comes as another feed, one body part at a time. Arlen, freshly snatched from the feral barrens, no sooner meets with a hacksaw than she wiles a witting escape, and face-up to the blazing sun, a snapped up skateboard as her ride, she pushes into a fevered dream one foot, and only one foot, at a time. What follows is a love story.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Lovely New Work From Kamasi Washington: “Truth”

April 17, 2017 By C von Hassett 1 Comment

Though New York for years has had an inspiringly lively and progressive jazz scene, Kamasi Washington, approaching the American cultural front, is singlehandedly making the form relevant once more. His forthcoming EP, Harmony of Difference, currently (and exclusively heard) in its own room at the Whitney, will surely set the stage for the long in coming Jazz Renaissance. 

Hands down the best collaborative work at this year’s Biennial, and in fact the single best piece in the exhibition (no diss on an otherwise excellent affair, particularly floor 6), is Washington’s stellar “Truth” and the equally affecting film in accompaniment, Harmony of Difference, written and directed by AG Rojas.

— the video, as you can see below, has been scrubbed from the internet, so below is the actual track —

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/06-Truth.m4a

Kamasi Washington, “Truth”

 

According to the Whitney press release, “Harmony of Difference is an original six-movement suite that explores the philosophical possibilities of the musical technique known as counterpoint, which Washington defines as ‘the art of balancing similarity and difference to create harmony between separate melodies.’

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, The Line

Painting The Elephant In The Room: A Conversation With Justin Lyons

March 8, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Justin Lyons is a mixed media artist living in the Florida panhandle. We spoke with him on the eve of his solo exhibition at the Bruce Lurie Gallery in Los Angeles.

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: Before addressing your most recent work, I wanted to briefly touch on a few signature elements in what is considered to be pivotal career pieces, elements which not only define but help flesh out your global visual language. This language, by the way, initially and superficially registers as being quite primitive, even crude, but upon spending time with these pieces it becomes apparent that something more thoughtful and sophisticated is taking place. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

An Interview With Neville Wakefield, Curator Of Desert X

February 22, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Neville Wakefield is the Curator and Artistic Director of Desert X, a site-specific contemporary art exhibition
 ongoing throughout the Coachella Valley from February 25 to April 30, 2017. RIOT MATERIAL spoke with Neville on the eve of Desert X’s launch. 

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: What is it about these artists you’ve selected for Desert X that speak to you personally, or speak to a greater vision you’re trying to articulate through the exhibition, and I refer to them more as an inter-connective group as opposed to distinct individuals?  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

An Envisioned Aftermath: Four Years Into A State of DTs

December 11, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

In 2012 Justice David Souter anticipated an “invasion of ignorance” which a mere four years on, at the close of 2016, bares its unsightly teeth. RIOT MATERIAL, lacking all the foresight of the good judge, holds out its own prognosticatory lens and aims it four years further. That lens, naturally, peers through art, and though art has the timeless ability to show the way forward, it can equally enlighten as to which way we should not go. 

Below is one scenario of a nation, 2020, gone prophetically grate.  

Many thanks to the great artist Roger Ballen for this apocalyptic short, Outland.

Filed Under: Artist, The Line

The Moment Worth Struggling Toward

December 10, 2016 By C von Hassett 1 Comment

The Event of Literature

An Interview with Erin Currier

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: There seems to be an explicit call to action in much of your work, or at the very least the demand that one take note of some supreme injustice in the land or amongst peoples. Yet what I appreciate about your work is that, more than it being mere critique or some one-dimensional, stop-action capture, it instead offers a way forward, and in my mind that way forward is dependably the right way forward. I’m thinking of, as an example, a new work of yours titled American Women (Dismantling the Border). Can you speak more to this idea of there being a constructive framework or, rather, this inherently optimistic baseline level of production which seems not only to shape but lay a distinctive stamp across your entire arc of expression? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

A Tribe Manifesto and Masterwork of the Moment

November 16, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service
Reviewed by C von Hassett

A Tribe Called Quest just dropped their first album in 18 years, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Released mere days after the Great Debacle of 2016, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service is remarkably, if not thrillingly present tense. Wholly animate in both sound and vision, it is a record that is also uniquely relevant — as much for being in essential response to the angst and rancor of the day as it is for inspiring, as good art tends to do, a requisite spark that might yet ignite conscientious action in the days and months ahead.

Theirs, with this exceptional release, is the resounding shot of this new cycle, and it is one which heralds little quarter. Straight-in they reject a presidential promise that unblushingly assures “all you Black folks, you must go / all you Mexicans, you must go / all you poor folks, you must go / Muslims and gays…” The vitriol, borne high on foul national sentiments, amounts to a kind-of maniacal voodoo, to use their image, and they counter the venom with their own dream serum of living in a world inclusive of all, one without division “no matter the skin tone, culture or time zone.” We are long on a grim horizon from there, but in the storm that is surely in approach, “young leaders will rise / in the eyes of despair and adversity.”

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/1-03-Whateva-Will-Be-copy.m4a

Whatever Will Be

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Records, The Line

Pipilotti Rist Dreams Us In Return

November 15, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Pixel Forest
New Museum, NYC

The New Museum’s three-floor exhibition, Pixel Forest, from Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, is an immersive wonder. If you’re looking for an enchanting, into-the-wilds experience where you can literally lie around — beds and floor cushions are in plenty — then this is the show for you.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

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Riot Sounds

Dälek "Decimation (Dis Nation)"

“Decimation (Dis Nation)” is a Visual Stunner

Dälek
Feat MC dälek & Mike Mare

Directed by Will Brooks
.
from Precipice
out now on Ipecac Recordings
.

The Line

Hilary Brace, Drawings and Tapestries, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, […]

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

A film written and directed by Joel Coen Reviewed by James Shapiro NYR Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and overreachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare […]

John Divola, From Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert,1996-98,

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022) Reviewed by Johanna Drucker What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. […]

The Occult Works of Ray Robinson, with an essay by Christopher Ian Lutz, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January) by Christopher Ian Lutz Burn the Sun The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish […]

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

by Ricky Amadour . Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in […]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

by Mark Arax The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax Knopf, 576pp., $25.00 MITTR The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our […]

The Great Flood of 1862

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott. THE FLOOD NEXT TIME In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then […]

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

An excerpt from the first chapter of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, by Benjamin Madley. CALIFORNIA INDIANS BEFORE 1846 Within a few days, eleven little babies of this mission, one after the other, took their flight to heaven. -Fray Junipero Serra, 1774 We were always trembling with fear of […]

Laurie Anderson's "The Weather," is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022)  Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner             “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson             “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose […]

Maria Lassnig Augenglaeser - Autoportraets (1965)

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

at Petzel Gallery, New York City Reviewed by James Quandt Maria Lassnig: Film Works edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00 NYRB Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition […]

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 […]

An interview with Rachael Tarravechia, at Riot Material

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 […]

Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers, exhibition review of En Garde/On God is at Riot Material magazine

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Rashid Johnson, Anxious Red Painting August 20th. At Riot Material

Break//Breathe: Broken Men That Glitter

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand On the coherence of fracture an essay in fragments on fragments * I had a lover once, who self described as a volcano, but fully encased. Make space to let it out sometimes, I told him. That’s why I wanted to see you today, he said.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

An excerpt from a new book W. W. Norton calls “a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.”  Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria W. W. Norton, 256pp., $23.95 There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is […]

Burt Shonberg. A review of "Beyond the Pleasuredome" is at Riot Material magazine

Beyond the Pleasure Dome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg

at Buckland Museum, Cleveland (through 1 November 2021). Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn by Robin Scher “The truth is out there,” that quintessentially quotable tagline from the hit 90s TV series The X Files, reflects an ongoing fascination. The obsession with this statement lies in its absolute nature: the truth, not a truth. This idea speaks to an […]

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