CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA The New Gallery “To talk to the worms and the stars,” a line from Arthur Evans’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, recently found new life as a whimsical incantation and the title of a group exhibition. Each visitor repeated the words when entering the show on the night of the opening and throughout its duration, drawing a linguistically ceremonious line around the space and the featured works.
“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon”
NEW YORK New Museum The provocatively titled “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” took on the politics of gender and identity with works by 40 artists, groups, and collectives. Avoiding the trap of using sexual orientation as an organizing principle and throwing out heteronormative or binary definitions of gendered identity in favor of a more fluid, inclusive, and performative model–one that refused limits and boundaries–the show’s organizer, Johanna Burton, with the assistance of Sara O’Keeffe and Natalie Bell, proposed a more activist curatorial model for how art about gender circulates in contemporary life.
Michael Johansson
WASENAAR, THE NETHERLANDS Museum Voorlinden A first look at Michael Johansson’s work suggests that he might be quoting other contemporary artists a bit too literally. His well-ordered stacks of household objects variously recall Jackie Winsor’s Post-Minimal cubes, Jannis Kounellis’s niche-filling accumulations, and Tom Wessel – mann’s Pop Art Interior (1964), a wall piece that fuses working domestic items and painting to create a hybrid and not-so-quiet vision of quietude.
Forging Histories of Past and Present: A Conversation with Mariana Castillo Deball
Mariana Castillo Deball works with a range of materials and processes bearing a strong relationship to archaeology and history. Her transformative approach and deep visual understanding result in rich and resonant works that merge historical accounts and personal experience.
Albert Paley
TACOMA, WASHINGTON Museum of Glass “Complementary Contrasts,” a survey of Albert Paley’s glass and steel sculptures since his initial residency at Pilchuck Glass School in 1998 (on view through September 3, 2018), brings together a body of work that bolsters his reputation as a maker of more than large-scale public art. The 29 works on show reveal a surprising intimacy of scale and delicacy of line and mass.
John Greer
CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, CANDADA Confederation Centre Art Gallery Nova Scotia sculptor John Greer is primarily known for large works in stone and bronze, including several public commissions in Canada, Italy, South Korea, Switzerland, and the U.S. A major figure in Canadian sculpture for over four decades, he was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. For the first few decades of his career, however, he was primarily a conceptual artist, using humor, ephemeral or humble materials, photography, and text to create wry, intelligent, and disconcerting objects and installations.
Ishmael Randall Weeks
NEW YORK Van Doren Waxter
Solange Pessoa
LOS ANGELES Blum & Poe Dictionaries define a fetish as a spirit attached to a material object; if nothing else, the oddly configured, misshapen, and obsessional pieces made by the Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa count as such. Her sculptures look as if they have a job to do in the service of divination or magic. The work is deeply suffused with metaphysics, mystery, loss, and sorrow.
Jason J. Ferguson
HAMNTRAMCK, MICHIGAN Public Pool Art Space You go through a door, and you’re faced with the very same door. When you pass through that second door and turn into a room, you see what appears to be an anatomically perfect skull, but as you approach, you gradually realize that it is, in fact, horribly distorted. This is not a dimly remembered dream, but the initiation into “One-man (freak) show,” Jason J. Ferguson’s fascinating exhibition situated at the intersection of technology and the uncanny.
“Age of Terror: Art since 9/11”
LONDON Imperial War Museum In order to reach the Imperial War Museum’s landmark “Age of Terror” exhibition, you had to negotiate its astonishing atrium, complete with a suspended jet plane and rocket. Underfoot, James Bridle’s Drone Shadow lurked as a white outline on the floor. IWM has commissioned contemporary artists to go to war zones since its founding 100 years ago. Its collections include 20,000 works of art, in addition to thousands of war-related artifacts that combine a big-picture view with intimate personal stories.
