BUENOS AIRES Centro Cultural Recoleta In “The First Day,” Augusto Zanela— an architect, photographer, and teacher—highlights some of the concerns that have driven his work since 1996, when he began investigating the processes of image formation as applied to photography, video, and installation. He is particularly interested in optical tricks and structures created in the viewer’s space—both physical and mental. Following a rigorous plan, his recent exhibition of three installations established a dialogue across words, colors, and forms through the effects of light.
LeRone Wilson
NEW YORK gallery nine5 LeRone Wilson’s encaustic sculpture is abstract, Minimalist, and geometric yet loaded with individualizing touches. The highly textured and boldly colored surfaces are intense. The titles, such as Divine Circle, Stars Rained on Me, Homage to Ra (Sun), Distinction Between One Color, Universal Journey, and Footsteps of My Ancestor’s Harkhuf, refer to spiritual, mythological, and philosophical concepts. “Universal Journey,” the exhibition title, alludes to human history in general, and more specifically, to historic Egyptian uses of encaustic.
Doreen McCarthy
NEW YORK LMAKgallery Four pretzel-like, inflated tubular shapes hung just overhead in a backyard “garden,” held in place by clear monofilament fishing line. Colored yellow, pink, red, and light blue, each form ranged between three and four feet in size. The red one, Voice Inversion, revealed the most complex entanglement of inverted twists, forming a continuous Möbius strip of sorts. Though the other forms were completely monochromatic, the red piece featured a transparent section. These works might be thought of as super weird beach balls—a good selection for a summer show.
Renee Magnanti
NEW YORK Art Mora Renee Magnanti is a highly gifted artist who carves encaustic to reveal layers of wax, often with a brightly hued background. Her work relates to the women’s decorative art movement, part of the feminist art drive of the 1970s and ’80s, when she was recently out of art school. Her carvings frequently include phrases or sentences about women from the faraway textile cultures whose patterns she sometimes borrows. Inevitably, her work brings up the question of craft and the long clichéd debate over whether decorative art can be taken seriously.
Dennis Oppenheim
NEW WINDSOR, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Over a long and productive career, Dennis Oppenheim produced conceptual art, body art, earthworks, and sculpture. Now, five years after his death, the many phases of his artistic life are being celebrated as never before, in a perfect setting. His evolution from performance artist to creator of land projects and sculptural installations has found full-scale realization at Storm King Art Center (through November 13). Grassy fields accommodate several land projects, originally designed in the 1960s and positioned outdoors for the first time.
Mags Harries
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery and Gallery Kayafas Mags Harries’s recent Boston exhibitions attacked complacency toward the mounting consequences of melting polar ice. She charmed viewers with familiar nautical forms, wittily anthropomorphized, mimicking other materials, or inverted in scale. The shows included found and cast objects, installations, videos, and a series of digital prints and three-dimensional reproductions. Seductiveness alternated with terror, as we perceived the actors’ imminent peril to be our own.
Yașam Șașmazer
TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA Torrance Art Museum In art, the task of the body is to perform some signifying act of emotion; the representation of this act has been sculpture’s job for centuries. As ideas regarding representation have evolved, the kind of emotion and the nature of the body on display have varied with the prevailing culture. Forty years ago, when artists’ resistance to theater and narrative disappeared, the revival of figuration produced an ongoing critique of history and civilization expressed through the figure. Yașam Șașmazer’s critique involves a dramatic, noir-esque enactment of anomie—a vision of the body as emptied out, gutted by experience.
“Wonder”
WASHINGTON, DC Renwick Gallery From kaleidoscopic prisms to twinkling LED lights, nine room-size installations inaugurated the Renwick’s second reboot since its opening in 1859. Natural references and the importance of labor prevailed, as did explorations of growth and accumulation with materials of everyday life. By featuring contemporary artists Jennifer Angus, Chakaia Booker, Gabriel Dawe, Tara Donovan, Patrick Dougherty, John Grade, Janet Echelman, Maya Lin, and Leo Villareal, the Renwick opted to revitalize its original mission—it was the first private museum in the U.S. dedicated to the visual arts.
Sudarshan Shetty
NEW DELHI National Gallery of Modern Art Sudarshan Shetty, describing his recent installation, Shoonya Ghar (emptiness is the house), has said that it “challeng[es] my own relationship with the market as an artist. Since it is a museum show, this is an opportunity to push those boundaries in my work rather than doing a retrospective, which is what I was offered.” And push boundaries he did, with élan, combining diverse mediums and materials to seamlessly blend the distant past with the present. The inspiration for this body of work came from the great 12th-century Nirgun poet, Gorakhnath, specifically his dohas, or couplets, that speak hauntingly of inhabitants in settlements and places.
Xiaojing Yan
STOUFFVILLE, ONTARIO, CANADA The Latcham Gallery Cloud Cell, the central component in Xiaojing Yan’s recent exhibition “Hybrid Vigour,” is a splendidly ethereal and luminescent installation. Constructed of thousands of freshwater pearls suspended on monofilament between two aluminum squares, this cloud-like rendering uses light and space to great effect. As in the contemplation of clouds, there are many interpretations. Yan’s references include the scholars’ rocks prevalent in Chinese gardens, which have been used as objects of meditation since ancient times.
