Our world is more connected now than ever before. Yet most of our experiences of art take place through virtual means, accompanied by broad strokes of information. As we try to classify objects without meaningful spatial interactions, our perspectives are irrevocably shifting.
Frank McEntire
Salt Lake City Nox Contemporary Car crashes and forest fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks all make our world more violent. As such events continue to increase, we will need tools to comprehend and mourn such events.
Adel Abidin
Helsinki Ateneum Art Museum “History Wipes,” a survey of Adel Abidin’s recent sculpture and video, confronted unpalatable events with works that ranged from the elegiac to the distressing. Set within the stately confines of the Ateneum Art Museum, which is dedicated to historical Finnish art, the show juxtaposed the century-old Finnish Civil War with much
Toshiaki Noda
San Francisco Patricia Sweetow Gallery Toshiaki Noda’s clay sculptures present themselves as decorative yet functional works melded back into, or partially emerged from, their organic state. Smashed cans and vessels, egg cartons, and flattened stubs ooze and bubble, as they fold and collapse into themselves.
Terry Adkins
New York Lévy Gorvy Gallery The work of Terry Adkins, who died in 2014, is nothing less than visually embodied philosophy—it conjoins the poetic and the political in objects that fuse the aural with the visible.
“Individual Gravities”
Philadelphia Tiger Strikes Asteroid “Individual Gravities,” an exhibition at the artist-run space Tiger Strikes Asteroid, featured new work in sculpture by Alexis Granwell, Elana Herzog, and Trish Tillman. All three artists investigate the visual culture of undoing, literally and abstractly.
Huma Bhabha
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art In We Come in Peace, Huma Bhabha’s Cantor Roof commission for the Met (on view through October 28, 2018), a monumental figure stands 12 feet tall, its five-sided head staring in all directions.
Ranjani Shettar
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Though Ranjani Shettar, who turned 40 last year, is a mid-career artist (at least by Western standards), her work remains youthfully lyrical, and close to nature in ways that evade her closest American counterpart Sarah Sze, whose work is busier and more mechanical.
Rebecca Belmore
LandMarks 2017 The journey to Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound in Banff National Park in Alberta required considerable effort. Located on a promontory called Centre Point on the shores of Lake Minnewanka, a cerulean blue glacial lake flanked by tall subalpine mountains, the work was more than two hours from the nearest city.
Dineo Seshee Bopape
Rotterdam Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Lerole: footnotes (The struggle of memory against forgetting), a recent large-scale installation by South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape, combined visceral materiality with historical accounts of pre-colonial revolts across the African continent to voice centuries of resistance against European invasion.