Online at Field Projects in New York and at Outer Roominations in Eureka, California Nancy Tobin’s sculptural installations were recently on view in “Afterlight Online,” on the Field Projects website, and at Outer Roominations, a festival of outdoor sculpture and installation in rural northern California.
George Rickey
NEW YORK Park Avenue and Kasmin Sculpture Garden By the beginning of the 1950s, Rickey started to prioritize sculpture. He marketed a Calder-like, do-it-yourself mobile kit (Mobikit, 1952). His eureka moment came when he realized that he could build kinetic sculptures unlike Calder’s works, and mobile in more controlled ways, by applying engineering skills learned from his father and grandfather and practiced during his military stint.
Lygia Pape
LOS ANGELES Hauser & Wirth Underscoring sensory experience, its sensuality and embodiment, the show was presented in near-total darkness, with individual works picked out by spotlights that magnified their dramatic beauty and other-worldliness. Like Neolithic caves and Romanesque churches, such dimly lit environments can become metaphorical arenas of awe and spirituality; but they can also reduce the liminal to the merely theatrical.
Liz Magor
VANCOUVER Catriona Jeffries Liz Magor’s dramatic installations encapsulate the chaos of our times, piecing together puzzles in which everyday objects enact confounding and disturbing narratives. Born in Winnipeg, Magor has resided in Vancouver most of her life. She speaks fondly of her Vancouver childhood, recalling its seaside harbor as a “wild, cranky, beautiful type of place,” which might also describe the bewitching mix of the beauteous and the abject in her work.
Wallace Chan
VENICE Fondaco Marcello There is a commentary on the interconnectedness of community, but also on our internalized fragmentations, our duplicitous natures. We might know of Janus, the two-faced god, but these deities have multiple faces, features that slip and merge unrelentingly into one another.
Jennifer Wen Ma
NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT New Britain Museum of American Art Viewers first absorb Jennifer Wen Ma’s An Inward Sea (on view through October 24, 2021) as a lyrical, room-filling composition of waves set under a full moon. But that initial response quickly shifts, as synchronized sound and mechanized elements intensify with charged momentum.
“Playing with Fire: Ceramics of the Extraordinary”
VANCOUVER Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia I don’t always find the switch between “anthropological” and “art” objects dissonant, but “Playing with Fire” cast a raking light on those problematic distinctions.
Mick Peter
ARBROATH, SCOTLAND Hospitalfield A small cartoon boy stands on a sketchy sculpture of a reclining figure, while a girl reaches out to touch the figure’s head. A man, presumably dad, looks on—not at his actively curious children but at the flattened approximation of a Henry Moore.
“Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945”
WEST BRETTON, WAKEFIELD, U.K. Yorkshire Sculpture Park “Breaking the Mould” features the work of 50 postwar female sculptors—from early examples by Elisabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth, Karin Jonzen, and Rosemary Young to recent pieces by Phyllida Barlow, Holly Hendry, Jessie Flood-Paddock, and Grace Schwindt—all selected from the Arts Council Collection, which holds around 250 sculptures by more than 150 women.
Veronica Ryan
BRISTOL, U.K. Spike Island “Along a Spectrum,” Veronica Ryan’s most ambitious U.K. show to date (on view through September 5, 2021), features a new body of work created during a two-year residency at Spike Island. Viewers entering the light and airy gallery space encounter a beguiling array of forms, many held within sumptuously colored netting in shades of orange, yellow, and lime-green.
