The notion of thing-ness is central to Nina Nowak’s interdisciplinary practice, yet, for her, a thing is never just one thing. In her works, which are often composed as symphonies of objects and situations, the social and historical meanings of things—carpets, wood, dust—converge with their physical realities and properties.
Jyoti Duwadi
BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON Western Gallery, Western Washington University Born in Nepal to a family of reformist intellectuals, politicians, and poets, Jyoti Duwadi turned to art full-time after receiving his doctorate in political science from Claremont Graduate University in California in 1979.
Object Lessons: Raven Halfmoon
The Caddo Confederacy was formerly located in a vast area centered around the great bend of the Red River, which is the modern-day boundary between Texas and Oklahoma. Within the Tribe, the Caddo women traditionally held great prominence, managing agricultural elements of the villages, including crop production, and producing the beautiful and popular Caddo pottery vessels, as well as many other important duties.
Julia Haft-Candell
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA, AND LOS ANGELES Pitzer College Art Galleries and Night Gallery One of the most interesting aspects of Julia Haft-Candell’s multifaceted work is how she conceptualizes its function in the world.
Isa Genzken
BERLIN Neue Nationalgalerie Much like the late John Ashbery, whose poems late in his career became increasingly bold in their experimentation (the polar opposite of the stereotype so many harbor of the elderly, who are supposed to become more conservative and closed off to the world year by year), Genzken only grows wilder and more fearless as she ages.
Martha Russo
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery, Ent Center for the Arts No longer tied to a practical function of erosion control and landscape stabilization, Russo’s wattles become dynamic, occasionally leaving the ground as they flow through a hallway, spill over from a tall ledge, and nudge their way into the gallery itself.
Robert Benson
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA Goudi’ni Native American Arts Gallery Benson’s approach to found timbers that have been preshaped by natural forces is consonant with the way that trails get inscribed, step by step, into the land. Address to materials is guided by a perception of latent form.
Sense of Suspension: A Conversation with Grace Woodcock
Fabrications of future fossils, pre-human remnants, or abandoned exoskeletons of as-yet-unknown present-day species—Grace Woodcock’s baffling sculptures belong to all times and no time in particular. Anomalies, they represent a culmination of organic objects from across pre-, current and post-human histories, where body morphosis, necessary for environmental adaptation, shapes physical form and determines who and what
James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee
LONDON Michael Werner Gallery Unlike Lee, who grew up in a unified Korea under Japanese rule and whose work demonstrates a complicated, ambivalent attitude toward what had been an oppressive culture, Byars welcomed it, immersing himself in traditional Japanese arts and the aesthetic traditions of Shinto and Zen.
Lateral Thinking: A Conversation with Shiho Kagabu
Japanese artist Shiho Kagabu employs industrial and organic materials, often installing her work in rough, run-down environments. In many ways, she shares the contemporary predisposition for the fragment rather than the whole, but her positioning of these parts in space is unique.
