Echiko Ohira

LOS ANGELES Craft Contemporary For me, the hallmarks of singularity in an art object are to be found in certain manifested obsessions, idiosyncratic techniques, and animating tensions. Echiko Ohira’s complexly reductive works declare that singularity by way of a compulsive tropism toward simple, repetitive, labor-intensive techniques.

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“Alice, Neeme & Jass”

HELSINKI Kunsthalle Helsinki
The unassuming title could not have been any more paradoxical, effectively belying the vitality of the work created by Alice Kask, Neeme Külm, and Jass Kaselaan, three Estonian artists. Their objects not only played off each other, but also responded astutely to the spaces in which they were set.

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The Webster Court Project

NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS When Christopher and Joelle Zakak purchased a late 19th-century Queen Anne Victorian house in Newton, Massachusetts, they intended to demolish the aged relic and rebuild on the site. Local zoning regulations, however, required that they wait one year. Being artists, as well as enterprising developers, they began using the empty rooms as studios.

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Maya Lin

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN Grand Rapids Art Museum From the meteoric launch of her artistic career in 1981 to the present, Maya Lin has harnessed an elegantly Minimalist vocabulary to convey potent messages, frequently using her work to demonstrate humanity’s impact on the natural environment. “Flow,” Lin’s recent exhibition, was devoted to sculptural works addressing the need to be more mindful of water.

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New Orleans and the Art of Labor

Considering the long-held view that, for ordinary people, manufacturing jobs hold the key to the American dream, there is something almost elegiac about the often reported fading fortunes of blue-collar workers. But is material, or physical, labor really a thing of the past to the extent that so many seem to think?

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Jessica Straus

BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery
“TransAtlantic,” Jessica Straus’s recent exhibition at Boston Sculptors Gallery, consisted of an immersive, room-filling, mixed-media installation that viewers could enter and roam around. Parts of the floor and wall were covered with World War II-era maps mounted on plywood tiles, showing the coastlines of North America and Western Europe, with the Atlantic Ocean stretching in between.

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Margaret Meehan

DALLAS, TEXAS Conduit Gallery
We like to imagine that the arc of history follows some kind of trajectory, like a book or a movie. Artists like Margaret Meehan, however, recognize that there is no clear chain of events, that history is illogical, directionless, and unpredictable.

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