Review: The Armory Show 2019
This year’s iteration of The Armory Show marked its 25th anniversary, placing a considerable amount of pressure on Director Nicole Berry to execute the event at the level stakeholders in the art world have come to expect. First launched in 1994 at the Gramercy Park Hotel, The Gramercy International Art Fair has morphed into New […]
The Womanist Movement: Bridging the Gap
March is nationally celebrated as Women’s History Month. In keeping with its stated mission of eliminating racism and empowering women, the Greater Cincinnati YWCA has mounted an exhibition encompassing the expressive works of nine local women who examine their own attitudes of identity, entitlement and personal experiences of victimization. The exhibiting artists are: Yvonne van […]
From the “California Ideology” to Tiqqun’s “Total War:” Tracing net.art’s Archival Poetics
As a researcher, theorist, and something of a contemporary continental philosophy-bent author in, my interests in new media theory, film studies, and comparative media are necessarily political, often siding with a turn towards “speculative realism,” Quentin Meillassoux’s “correlationism,” or François Laruelle’s “non-standard philosophy” at the expense of affect theory or those “poetics” that salvage media […]
“/just to be alive/ An Exhibition of the Contemporary Female Artist,” 1628 Ltd., through May 31, 2019
I confess. I’m prejudiced against exhibitions of artists lumped together because of traits they can’t change (or only change with much effort), not aesthetics. That puts the focus on the maker not the art. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve just had back-to-back months of such presentations: Black History Month in February and Women’s […]
Artists Break Bans and Bridge Barriers in "Focus Iran 3: Contemporary Photography and Video"
Forty-two photographs and videos present a panoptic view of Persian youth culture in “Focus Iran 3: Contemporary Photography and Video,” the third Iranian photography biennial at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Sponsored primarily by Farhang Foundation, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Iranian art, this sweeping juried exhibition suggests that despite our respective governments’ […]
Letter from Oaxaca: The 18th Biennial of Painting Rufino Tamayo
I recently visited the city of Oaxaca, the capital of the State of Oaxaca, in Mexico and had the chance to view the 18th Biennial of Painting Rufino Tamayo at the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Oaxaca (MACO, Museo of Artes Contemporaneos de Oaxaca). Founded in 1982 by the internationally known Oaxacan artist, one of […]
Conspiratorial Aesthetics at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts: Why does so much new art look conspiratorial?
“Why does so much new art look conspiratorial?” In preparation for attending Conspiratorial Aesthetics at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts I read the curatorial statement. In it the curator, Christopher Reitz, asks the question above. And it’s all I can remember of the statement. Why does so much new art look conspiratorial? Why does […]
Inverting Vulgarity: Harmony Korine’s Florida Films, “Young Twitchy,” and Hauntology
Harmony Korine’s second show at Gagosian Madison in the last six months, closely following “Blockbuster” (which ran from September – October, 2018), “Young Twitchy” (showing from March 14 – April 20, 2019) is a step in both a more formal painterly order and, arguably, in a direction that runs parallel to Korine’s recent filmic interest […]
“Appreciating Our Past and Present Surroundings”
As a city that is 231 years old, Cincinnati has enjoyed numerous buildings of various styles, some of which fortunately still have survived. An exhibition at the Downtown Cincinnati Public Library entitled “Cincinnati Historic Architecture: An Overview of 150 Years of Architectural Styles” will be on-view until April 28 and is worth visiting to appreciate […]
Fotofolio: Sunjoo Lee
“Memorabilia 3” Sunjoo’s statement: I started collecting wrapping papers during my travels around the world. I visited gift shops, and I was taken away by the wrapping papers’ vivid and playful statements. At first, I purchased them on a whim and in fleeting moments, but over time, I became more mindful of each unique sheet […]