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Glenn Hardy’s Who Am I If I Don’t Represent?

March 17, 2023 By Eve Wood

at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (through 11 February 2023)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Glenn Hardy’s second solo exhibition, aptly title Who Am I If I Don’t Represent? — at Charlie James Gallery in LA’s Chinatown — comprises a visual investigation into the complex nature of black identity while also standing as positive visual documents of daily activities, personal victories, triumphs, and moments of deep introspection as well. Hardy is a master of the nuanced narrative, telling stories of seemingly ordinary occurrences, like playing basketball, for instance, or drinking Pina Coladas in the pool, or enjoying a day in the sun at a family reunion. Yet beneath the surface of these apparent innocuous actions is, on the part of the artist, an abiding commitment to social justice. Deeply affected by the barrage of negative images that horribly misrepresent the black experience within social media, Hardy has chosen to amplify the positive aspects of his own lived human experience, declaring a personal and communal commitment to reassert his personal identity and to “live unapologetically and without fear” within today’s troublingly present moment. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Luminosities Beyond the Eye in Yehonatan Koenig’s Ink on Paper

January 15, 2023 By Eve Wood

at The BAG, Los Angeles (through 19 February)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Yehonatan Koenig’s luminous ink drawings are studies in both absence and presence, suspension and saturation, death and rebirth. The patterns he creates in his drawings repudiate any obvious associations one might have when considering the act of mark-making and, indeed, the process by which he creates these works is in-and-of-itself an act of both defiance and meditation. One might attempt to configure a story from these images, or at the very least, contrive some kind of skeletal narrative. However, the beauty of Koenig’s process insists upon a commitment to the unknown, and the ability, on the part of the viewer, to completely surrender to the idea, famously penned by Gertrude Stein, that “there is no there there.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

December 2, 2022 By Eve Wood

Henry Taylor: B Side
at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023)

Reviewed by Eve Wood

Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B sides were not the reason you bought the album, but they were perhaps a more authentic representation of the artist’s vision, and every so often a great B side would feel akin to unearthing gold. Henry Taylor’s thirty-year retrospective at MOCA Grand pays homage to the unexpected, the visceral, and the odd man out, and like any successful B side, you want to keep listening. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Conjuring a Divine Silence in Georganne Deen’s The Lyric Escape

July 5, 2022 By Eve Wood

at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate of daily hate crimes, bigotry and mass shootings. Let’s face it — if you happen to have been born into a corporeal, human existence, you will inevitably suffer some sort of trauma, either real or imagined, over the course of your lifetime. Hell, even the act of being born, is enough to scare any living creature back into the womb. Still, we persist because, in the end, as Camus suggests, we must all take solace in the smallest mundane tasks that frame our lives and make them bearable. It’s rare that an artist is a direct conduit to both grief and absurdity simultaneously, yet Georganne Deen is exactly that, relishing in the absolute bizarreness that often encompasses a life well lived. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Supremely Humanistic Hand of Julian Schnabel

June 1, 2022 By Eve Wood

For Esmé – With Love and Squalor, at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (through 21 May 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How does one represent, let alone quantify hope, hate, grief, love, joy, tragedy, or anything, for that matter, which stands in opposition to something else? Throughout his illustrious career, Julian Schnabel has always been one to take chances, both materially and metaphorically, and this, his newest exhibition at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles, is no exception. Working with molding paste, oil and spray paint on velvet, these thirteen largely abstract paintings function much like a scream under water, their metaphoric power mitigated by abstraction. The result is that, when looking at them, we experience a wide array of emotional responses while all-the-while the deeper hidden content somehow eludes us, yet it is this elusive quality specifically that makes these paintings so ambitious and so unnerving. They are at once abstract yet perniciously narrative. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns: Head, Kisses, Battles

June 1, 2022 By Eve Wood

at Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, France (through 23 October 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Art is never made in a vacuum, as all visual iterations must derive from something: a momentary glimpse of refracted light, a train pulling out of the station, a woman lying languorously on a bed. Whatever it is we are witness to, at least in the context of art, it has been done before. The trick is to create a compelling conversation between the ‘now’ and the ‘then,’ to find threads of association, of understanding and celebration.

Nicole Eisenman has always been a renegade maker of things that are at once luminous and sardonic. She is an artist who asks the questions we are too afraid to ponder, and then she answers them for us – with wit, grace and infinite wisdom. Her answers may not always be what we want to hear, but rest assured they are true. Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles establishes what the catalogue essay describes as an unprecedented dialogue between the artist’s own oeuvre and that of twenty-seven modern artists, including (and perhaps most importantly) Vincent Van Gogh. This, to be sure, is not an easy task, and it is one that could easily have slipped into sentimentality were it not for the fact that there is not one sentimental bone in Eisenman’s body. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

January 14, 2022 By Eve Wood

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 aftermaths of raging tornadoes, biblical floods and the myriad other requisite depictions of an apocalypse surely at hand. We’re all, it seems, arriving at the unfortunate knowing of a planet changing much-too rapidly due none other than to our own arrogance and our earth-devouring tendencies toward near-total consumption. Climate change, in other words, is now a very real and terrifying reality. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

November 18, 2021 By Eve Wood

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…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Liquidity of Ourselves: Amoako Boafo’s Singular Duality: Me Can Make We

September 22, 2021 By Eve Wood

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through November 6, 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Amoako Boafo’s second exhibition at Roberts Projects, Singular Duality: Me Can Make We, represents an exploration into personal identity and the dualities that comprise and shape our human existence. On the surface, this exhibition both examines and celebrates the theme of Blackness, as each image is suggestive of empowerment and individuality. Yet upon deeper reflection, we see the artist pushing the limits of materiality and content in new and exciting ways. The result is a powerful and persuasive body of work, one which serves as a compelling visual testament to the beauty of the Black experience. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Recalibrating Awareness in Rebecca Campbell Infinite Density, Infinite Light

June 12, 2021 By Eve Wood

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…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Ferrari Sheppard: Positions of Power

April 28, 2021 By Eve Wood

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 Black community whose works have affected him. These paintings suggest less a topography of place and time and more a personal lexicon of strength, love and friendship in the face of injustice. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Excellence and Thrilling Abundance in LA Louver’s 45 at 45

November 5, 2020 By Eve Wood

at LA Louver, Los Angeles (through 16 January 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

45 at 45, currently on view at LA Louver in Venice, is an exhibition of epic proportions, not only because of the sheer number of artists included but also because it signifies and celebrates four-and-a-half decades of LA Louver’s luminous and expansive vision. Big group shows can be difficult to navigate, especially if they constitute more of a retrospective-like approach; yet when done right, the plethora of works included create what feels like a variety of intimate conversations. Such is the case here where artworks by represented gallery artists like Matt Wedel and Rebecca Campbell create insightful and sometimes deeply moving interchanges with works by artists the gallery does not necessarily represent but have shown in the past. The breadth of this exhibition is truly impressive, as is the range of work represented, some of which are representational and some of which are not. Either way, the thru line here appears, simply, to be excellence.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Another Week in the Death of America

June 1, 2020 By Eve Wood

Samantha Fields, American Dreaming
at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a description one would associate with the sunny, carefree lifestyle that has become emblematic of the quintessential California experience. Ultimately the song is a lament, a yearning to return to a brighter, more hopeful landscape, if only in the songwriter’s mind. Samantha Fields solo exhibition, American Dreaming, could be said to expand on this longing, albeit taking a darker more ominous approach. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Triangulations Of The Black Cat: Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe Black Like Me

February 8, 2020 By Eve Wood

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through March 7)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Ghanian artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s gorgeously rendered oil paintings, on view at Roberts Projects, are stunning both in terms of their visual content and the literal application of the paint. One can make obvious allusions to artists like Kehinde Wiley or Wangechi Mutu, but these would only represent fleeting similarities as Quaicoe’s vision is very much his own. These paintings could be described as straightforward portraits, yet that would not account for their profound luminescence and the verifiable presence of Quaicoe in seemingly every brushstroke. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

A Man’s History As Passing Shadow In John Sonsini’s Cowboy Stories & New Paintings

January 20, 2020 By Eve Wood

at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles (through February 22)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The iconic and often brutal mythology that informs images of the American West is unreliable at best, specifically as it relates to the larger-than-life stereotype of the cowboy. Forged in the fires of patriarchy, the familiarity of the gritty, rugged lone cowboy making his way on horseback across the prairie, persists to this day. He exemplifies the myth that has become synonymous with our image of American culture, yet this image is simplistic and problematic in that it privileges one culture over another and leaves no room for shared human experience. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Testaments To Treachery And The Trampling Of Souls In C von Hassett’s Don’t Repeat Don’t Repeat

January 17, 2020 By Eve Wood

at MASH Gallery, Los Angeles (through 1 February)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” Which is to say, the realization of Man’s or any man’s greatest achievements comes at often dire costs and, perhaps requisitely, at the ravaging expense of the masses. C von Hassett understands this better than most, as his solo exhibition at MASH Gallery reads like a primer for the dispossessed, a lexicon of dark and sinister images that are ominous yet also humorous in a wryly sardonic kind of way. Tackling topics like mass murder, starvation, lynching and, well, Adolf Hitler, Hassett’s images function not so much as dark harbingers from the past or warnings of things to come, but as testaments to the treachery inherent in the human character, which is its own kind of warning. These paintings feel more urgent than ever, as there is an almost palpable sense of dread in the world today, and Hassett does not shy away from the gritty, unnerving truth of where we are and what we’ve come to. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Philipp Kremer: With Lovers

December 27, 2019 By Eve Wood

at Nicodem Gallery, Los Angeles (through February 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Imagine a faceless orgy, a concupiscence of bodies – colliding, embracing, penetrating, wherein the entirety of the surrounding picture plane is reduced to a senseless expanse of writhing and roiling flesh. In Philipp Kremer’s work, the notion of desire is determined by an exploration into genderless ideation. Sex is not strictly sex, nor is this beauteous lovemaking, but an electrified and energized landscape of human intersections – hand in hand, arm over arm, face into face, thigh across thigh, torsos twisting and contorting in a vaguely nihilistic expanse where no two people ever seem to truly connect. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Wangari Methenge’s Aura of Quiet

October 25, 2019 By Eve Wood

at Roberts Projects (through November 16)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How do artists convey silence within two-dimensional space? I would argue that it is difficult to create an authentic connection between the subject and the viewer, and it is even more difficult to create a space of quietude and self-reflection even as the artist is in the active process of divining another person’s inner life. Yet all great portraiture is as much about the artist as it is the subject. There are many great examples of artists who have successfully explored their own personal connections to their subjects and, by extension, their viewers. Alice Neel, for example, whose portraits of friends and family are extraordinary in that they encapsulate not only a specific character but the breadth and tempo of the artist’s relationship with that specific person. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End

September 28, 2019 By Eve Wood

at AF Projects, Los Angeles (through October 12)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Robert Gunderman’s current exhibition at AF Projects could be understood as both a meditation on the nature of time and an investigation into the elusiveness of memory. The title of the exhibition, This End, powerfully yet simply encapsulates and personalizes the idea of transition and death, how each of us, burdened as we are within our own physical vessels, must contend with the ever-impending notion that we too will pass. Gunderman sees this “passing” as an opportunity for self-awareness and exploration wherein the “end” might just become yet another beginning. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Sacraments Of Splendor In Naudline Pierre’s For I Am with You Until the End of Time

September 19, 2019 By Eve Wood

at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (through 26 October)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

No doubt Brooklyn based artist Naudline Pierre keeps the sacraments, though not necessarily the ones decried by the Almighty Himself, living instead, I would imagine, according to a more personal but none less rigorous code of ethics informed more by beauty and love than by traditions and dogma. Her first exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian, aptly titled For I Am with You Until the End of Time, which is from the King James Bible Matthew 28:20 which cautions the reader to observe all of God’s teachings no matter the evident cost. This statement could also be considered comforting, or a means by which us mere mortals might soothe our aching souls, knowing that we are connected somehow to the divine. One thing is clear for sure – Pierre believes in the healing powers of love – most importantly our own innate ability to transform dark and disturbing experiences into something more joyous. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

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The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Detail of Henry Taylor, "Warning shots not required," 2011. At Riot Material magazine.

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

Henry Taylor: B Side at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023) Reviewed by Eve Wood Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

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 […]

Marlene Dumas, "Losing (Her Meaning)," 1988. At Riot Material magazine.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

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 […]

Clarice Lispector

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

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. […]

Donna Ferrato "Diamond, Minneapolis, MN 1987." At Riot Material magazine

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

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 […]

Darcilio Lima Unknown Lithograph, 1972. At Riot Material magazine.

Magia Protetora: The Art of Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos and Darcilio Lima

at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Cleveland OH (through 30 September 2022) Curated by Stephen Romano Gallery Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The extension of a lineage occurs not merely by the repetition of form, but by the intersection of conservation and revolution. Transformation is fundamental to preserving the essence of a given tradition’s rituals and […]

Eve Wood's A Cadence for Redemption, written in the fictive voice of Abraham Lincoln, is excerpted at Riot Material magazine.

Songs For Our Higher Selves

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln by Eve Wood Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99 Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who […]

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

Crimes of the Future Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller Neon NYRB A line from Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have […]

Georganne Deen, How to prepare people for your weirdness (Painting for a gifted child) 2022

Conjuring a Divine Silence in Georganne Deen’s The Lyric Escape

at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August) Reviewed by Eve Wood Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate […]

Pesticides in our foods inevitably enter the body and will have the intended effect of killing the organism. Which is to say you are certain to become diseased and evenutally die from the longterm ingestion of industrial pesticides.

A Strictly Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

A chapter excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to an ageless way of resting the mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already Awakened state. Yet to do this successfully, we must first cleanse the body of its myriad mind-fogging toxins taken in through […]

Milton’s Quotidian Paradise, Lost

By Catherine Nicholson Katie Kadue: Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton Timothy M. Harrison: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton Joe Moshenska: Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton NYRB Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic […]

Foucault in Warsaw and the Shapeless, Shaping Gaze of the Surveillance State

Reviewed by Marcel Radosław Garboś Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński  translated by Sean Gasper Bye Open Letter Books, 220pp., $15.95 Harvard Review Since Poland’s state socialist system collapsed in 1989, the records of its police agencies and security services have gone to a government commission entrusted with the “prosecution of crimes against the Polish […]

Noah Davis, Untitled (2015)

The Haunt of One Yet Faintly Present: Noah Davis, Still at Home

Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles Reviewed by Ricky Amadour Directly across from the entrance, an opening statement to Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, reads “many of the paintings you are about to see were painted in this space.” Smudges, dribbles, and droplets on the floor embody the physical notion of Davis […]

Julian Schnabel, The Chimes of Freedom Flashing (detail), 2022

The Supremely Humanistic Hand of Julian Schnabel

For Esmé – With Love and Squalor, at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (through 21 May 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood How does one represent, let alone quantify hope, hate, grief, love, joy, tragedy, or anything, for that matter, which stands in opposition to something else? Throughout his illustrious career, Julian Schnabel has always been one to […]

Rose Wylie, "I Like To Be" (2020)

In Full Surrender to the Wylie Eye

Rose Wylie: Which One, at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 June) Reviewed by David Salle Rose Wylie: Which One by Rose Wylie; with Barry Schwabsky, Judith Bernstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist David Zwirner Books, 196pp., $75.00 NYRB Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven, has been painting in the same rural studio in Kent, England, since […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

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Writers

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  • Ann Landi
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