Cooling Heat In Nicolas Jaar’s “Mi Mujer”

February 10, 2019 By CvH Leave a Comment

from the Time For Us ep

on Wolf + Lamb Records

Audacious Digs In Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech

at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Reviewed by Seren Sensei In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing […]

Lightly Through The Looking Glass With Apple’s [AR]T Walk

By Mayne Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five […]

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

Reviewed by John Payne Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, […]

Corrosion And Other Maladies In Peter Doig’s Latest, Paintings

Paintings, at Michael Werner Gallery, London (16 November) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones With Peter Doig – who has a collection of new paintings on show at the Michael Werner Gallery, London – corrosion is paramount. His paintings seek to overturn themselves from within, alluding to altered states, to dreams and hallucinations. His paint has become […]

A Movable Feast In The Dystopic The Platform

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Imagine: you awake in a cold, concrete prison cell. There are no windows, no doors, one cellmate, and a big, square hole in the center of the floor. Should you peek down into it, you’d see a cell below the same as yours. And beneath that lie so many more that […]

Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End

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 […]

The Lodge Offers a Chilling Follow-Up To Goodnight Mommy

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is […]

Takashi Miike’s First Love Is A Delightfully Earnest Rom-Com Set To An Onslaught Of Slaughter

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge […]

Samuelle Richardson And Joy Ray In Beyond/Within

at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through September 28) Reviewed by Genie Davis The two-person exhibition now at Launch LA on La Brea literally and figuratively soars. Curated by MOAH’s Andi Campognone, Beyond/Within features the work of artists Samuelle Richardson and Joy Ray. The exhibition is uniquely paired. Both have utilized paint and fabric, create textile art, […]

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

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 […]

Maria Lassnig’s Ways of Being

at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx In the self portrait Du oder Ich (You Or Me), Maria Lassnig points one gun at the viewer, the other at herself. Either I kill you or I kill myself, or both. Her face expresses fear, dismay, perhaps disgust, but not aggression. If […]

A Pitch-Black Comedic Masterwork In Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho has been thrilling critics and genre fans since 2006, when he unleashed his rambunctious yet heartbreaking creature-feature The Host. He’s awed us again and again with marvelous movies like the mind-bending murder-mystery Mother, the star-stuffed dystopian drama Snowpiercer, and the whimsical yet brutal fantasy-adventure Okja. By […]

Activating Absence In Lenz Geerk’s Mixed Blessings

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through 12 October) Reviewed by Eve Wood It’s very difficult to create a cohesive and engaging narrative with a suite of only five paintings. It’s inevitable that some works appear more central to the narrative structure than others, and in many cases the viewer is left out of the narrative […]

In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali

Reviewed by John Biscello In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali by Sue Roe Penguin, 295pp., $28.50 A fish rides a bicycle into the Seine. The fish begins to drown and then remembers that it is a fish and starts to fly off into the pipe-smoke colony of clouds. The […]

Richard Stanley Returns With Sci-Fi Head-Spinner, Color Out Of Space

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Richard Stanley is a filmmaker arguably less famous than infamous. Though he’s directed a pair of thrillers, three docs, and a string of music videos, he might be best known for being fired from the helm of the 1996 studio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Savagely Sharp, One Cut Of The Dead Is So Much More Than Its Buzz Suggests

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko “You have to see it,” I was told again and again by ardent admirers of One Cut Of The Dead. This Japanese zombie-comedy has been bouncing all over the world from one film festival to the next, picking up praise with every stop. But the breathless buzz was strangely, annoyingly vague. There were […]

Taikai Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit Is A Bold But Fumbled Entry In His Lost Boy Trilogy

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Taika Waititi loves a lost boy. His latest, Jojo Rabbit, is the third coming-of-age comedy the Kiwi filmmaker has crafted that centers on a young boy facing trauma by embracing fantasy. 2010’s Boy ollowed a bullied 11-year-old, who fantasizes that his absentee father isn’t the despicable criminal everyone says, but instead a mix […]

Embracing The (Untitled) Void In Lester Monzon’s Fail Better

at Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles (through October 26) Reviewed by Eve Wood I’ve always been partial to exhibitions with oddly self-depreciating titles, and Lester Monzon’s Fail Better is definitely a doozie. A phrase from Samuel Beckett’s novella, Worstward Ho, the original quote reads “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” […]

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