BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Entering the Brattleboro Museum’s Mary Sommer Room project space and encountering Carolyn Enz Hack’s Change Your Mind was an experience that clearly called for opening one’s perception. The enormous spiral form, suspended on filament, filled the room like a magical life unfurling before one’s eyes, somewhat akin to a fiddlehead fern in spring. The form was so continuous that it seemed as if it would go on traveling through space.
Entang Wiharso
NEW YORK Marc Straus Gallery Entang Wiharso, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Rhode Island, titled his recent show “Promising Land.” It’s not clear if this referenced terrain is American or Indonesian, but most likely Wiharso is referring to the dream of affluence and ease identified with the U.S. and now emulated around the world. His recent work has increasingly turned toward a critique of the Americanization of global culture, looking askance at the heightened materialism that threatens to overwhelm the spiritual insight associated with Asian tradition.
Jimmie Durham
LOS ANGELES Hammer Museum
Gehard Demetz
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery “Introjection,” the title of Gehard Demetz’s recent exhibition, is a psychoanalytic term that refers to how people subconsciously absorb and identify with the beliefs and actions of others, particularly children internalizing their perceptions of parental behavior. Demetz’s rubric makes the pre-pubescent figures in the work particularly chilling. The Third Way (2017), for example, depicts a middleschool- age youngster staring disconsolately into space.
Alfredo Pirri
ROME MARCA (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Alfredo Pirri’s recent exhibition, “i pesci non portano fucili” (“Fish Don’t Carry Guns”), was curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and Ludovico Pratesi. The show was the final stage of a project with the same name initiated in November 2016 with an exhibition (“RWD– FWD”) at Pirri’s studio/archive. Pirri chose the title as a tribute to Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion (1981), which imagines an unarmed society, fluid like the open sea, where one can be immersed and re-emerge, giving shape to multiform events.
Ranjani Shettar
NEW DELHI Talwar Gallery If there is one word that describes Ranjani Shettar’s installations and sculptures, it is “happy.” There is something bubbly, fun, and enthusiastic about her work, and it is infectious. Shettar herself laughingly says, “Someone remarked quite early in my working days as to why my works looked happy and not otherwise.” This happiness, however, does not interfere with the work’s ability to provoke thought. The narrative of her recent show, “Bubble trap and a double bow,” concerned nature.
“Hearts and Bones”
NEW YORK ART100 New York Sometimes the intentions of artists do not fit the categories assigned to their mediums. There can be cross-overs between sculpture and painting, for instance, in which the connecting link is about content rather than form. Such was the case with “Hearts and Bones,” a show that featured installations and drawings by Judy Pfaff and paintings by Kharis Kennedy.
Mario Petrirena
ATLANTA Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia With a manner analogous to literary stream-of-consciousness, Mario Petrirena juxtaposes “things” simply because they resonate with chords deep within. His work is therefore a kind of self-portrait, not of his appearance, but of his inner life, making concrete those often wispy, evanescent memories that can define a person even more definitively than his features. Composed of ceramic, collage, and found-object works, his recent show unfolded in four galleries, each with a particular focus: personal narrative, politics, beauty and transcendence, and finally, mortality. Largely autobiographical, the first room “introduced” Petrirena as a Cuban-American who came to the U.S. during the ’60s in the aftermath of Castro’s takeover, followed almost a year later by his parents. A battered tricycle next to a ceramic hand, daddy come ride with me (1987) is a poignant appeal to his hard-working but undemonstrative father, who lost several fingers in a sugar mill accident in Belle Glade, Florida. …see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
Franka Hörnschemeyer
BERLIN Galerie Nordenhake
Carlos Rolón
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA Big Car Collaborative — Tube Factor artspace With the seasonal spectacles of the Indianapolis 500, NFL football, and NBA and NCAA basketball ingrained into the cityscape, Indianapolis often identifies as a “sports town,” perhaps to the exclusion of other aspects of culture. Given Big Car Collaborative’s mission regarding place-making and cultural inclusion, Carlos Rolón’s recent exhibition, “50 Grand,” was calculated not only to introduce quality work by a rising artist, but also to attract a widely diverse audience, including sports aficionados and Latino viewers.
