WASHINGTON, DC Hillyer Art Space Heather Theresa Clark comes to artmaking from the unusual background of urban planning, green development, and ecology. Every component of her installation, Maintenance, was carefully engineered to critique “exurban” life as she experiences it in Northern Virginia, being, in her words, “embedded in a landscape that feeds on cultural neurosis.” Clark posits that this neurosis derives from detaching labor from the basic survival needs of shelter, food, and clothing, instead basing exurban planning on consumer consumption.
Robert Morris
BEACON, NEW YORK Dia:Beacon Minimal Art evolved into prominence in the early 1960s. At the outset, the major sculptors included Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris. I recall the term “epistemological Minimalism” associated with these five, coming from a critical essay by Robert Pincus-Witten. LeWitt soon made it clear that he was a “conceptual artist,” as noted in his well-known series of propositions published in 1967. Similarly, Judd, who worked as a critic at the outset of his career, thought of his sculpture as “empiricist,” not minimal—a refinement on his important 1965 essay, “Specific Objects.”
Ann Hamilton
PHILADELPHIA Fabric Workshop and Museum In an interview published by Phila – delphia’s FringeArts (2016), Ann Hamil ton described the dual impulses behind her four-decadelong practice and the multi-site exhibition she had recently mounted in the city: “Watching a raw material become a single thread, join other thread to become a warp or weft of a cloth or carpet, holds for me all the possibilities for making; sewing and writing are for me two parts of the same hand.”
Nicole Salimbene
WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint Gallery Mending comes alive in Nicole Salim – bene’s breathtaking work, awakening complex sensations of loss, empathy, and healing. An obsolete or forgotten activity for some, for others, it endures as a cultural norm born of economic necessity. In Salimbene’s vision, participatory installations incorporating thread, needles, and seating invite viewers to experience mending as a hands-on, multivalent art medium, rich in metaphor and ritual.
Jackie Brookner
BRONX, NEW YORK
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
NEW YORK Catinca Tabacaru Gallery Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels re-built the floor and walls of the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery as part of her powerful installation. It seemed spare while I studied it before the opening, but not after many hundreds of people jammed inside the relatively small space—and kept coming. The exhibition title, “a DEFECT // to DEFECT,” and its question, “How do we learn to change for a future we can’t imagine?” perfectly expressed the Trump election jitters experienced by many New Yorkers.
Jochen Brandt
HILLSCHEID, GERMANY Kunstraum am Limes Combining a conceptual foundation with elements of outsider art and archaic sculptural forms, Jochen Brandt’s retrospective charted 20 years of multifaceted paths through six discrete installations. Each section presented ideas so highly concentrated and self-referential that subsequent galleries literally demonstrated the show’s enigmatic title, “beyond this case.” Brandt’s mainly ceramic work stems from a creative process in which formal decisions are based on given material circumstances.
Eli Gur Arie
TEL AVIV Tel Aviv Museum of Art Hairless albino squirrels, darting here and there across a crowded floor or nibbling on quasi-scientific paraphernalia, formed a visual connection across the startling installations, freestanding assemblages, and zany reliefs in Eli Gur Arie’s recent exhibition “Growth Engines.” These sinister rodents, together with robotic metallic dogs, reflect the artist’s unrelenting interest in genetic engineering and post-apocalyptic life; in this show, they played an unsettling role in an alarming, yet visually gratifying drama.
Ant Farm and LST
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Pioneer Works Sustainability received an ironic spin in “The Present is the Form of All Life,” an exploration of time capsule works created by Ant Farm and LST. Shown at Pioneer Works, a nonprofit space dedicated to fostering crossdisciplinary practice, community, and collaboration, the exhibition took a nostalgic look at Ant Farm’s 1970s projects, even as it argued for the group’s continuing relevance as LST.
“From Space to Field”
HOUSTON The Silos at Sawyer Yards The Silos at Sawyer Yards are slightly eerie. More than 30 vertical cylinders reach 80 feet into the yawning blackness of the warehouse’s ceiling. Scarred floors and walls speak to former industry, but the building manages to combine inhuman vastness with the more intimate scale of the individual silos. The honeycomb arrangement of the soaring tubes leaves the casual viewer slightly disoriented. In other words, the “white cube” model of an art space could not be further from Houston’s newest arts venue.
