DENVER, CO Gildar Gallery Amber Cobb’s exhibition, “Solace,” immersed viewers in a sculptural dialogue of fleshy tones and dichotomously seductive and repulsive forms. Building on a practice rooted in psychological and physical attachments, Cobb probed the space between the decorative and the grotesque, filling both rooms of the gallery with 12 wall-bound sculptures, a series of small figurines, and a large, centrally located sculpture in the round. Cobb gathers and treats a range of domestic objects—blankets, bedding, bath mats, figurines, and bedroom furniture—with silicone, resin, paint, and acrylic media.
Patrick Strzelec
NEW YORK Garth Greenan GalleryPatrick Strzelec’s recent exhibition featured a mature body of work evoking a variety of profound emotions—joy, sadness, fear, recognition, and foreboding. Composed of diverse materials, including plaster, aluminum, epoxy, steel, bronze, ceramic, wood, and detritus, the sculptures collapse recognizable and illogical forms. Strzelec uses postmodern strategies—appropriation, assemblage, and simulacra—but unlike many of his contemporaries, he crafts his work with his own hands. For over two decades, he has worked in numerous studios and foundries and taught sculpture at prestigious universities.
“Interspatial”
WASHINGTON, DC Transformer “Interspatial” was the second collaboration of the pop-up curatorial group Quota. Co-founded by Dawne Langford and Avi Gupta, Quota champions a broad definition of cultural diversity beyond notions of otherness and tokenism. Featuring installations by Rachel Schmidt, Johab Silva, and Levester Williams, the show dialogued in clever and unexpected ways with the architecture of Transformer’s shotgun gallery, as well as with the changing fabric of the neighborhood. Time became fluid in this malleable context, while space, both imagined and real, stretched to encompass in-between spaces and the jarring boundaries that define them.
Jo Israelson
PORTLAND, MAINE Maine Jewish Museum A white taxi sat incongruously on the green lawn outside the Maine Jewish Museum. When visitors took a seat inside the cab, a heavily accented voice began relating a personal story of a journey taken from a far-off place to the streets of Portland, Maine. Irish, Italian, Greek, Eastern European, Bosnian, Somali, and Syrian immigrants have found their way to this northern seaport. Many of them were professionals, teachers, engineers, and physicians in their homelands, and then they found themselves driving cabs through Portland’s narrow streets as they transitioned to new lives in America.
Jeanne Jaffe
GLASSBORO, NJ Rowan University Art Gallery Nikola Tesla, the “genius inventor,” has been brought back to life on the page, stage, and screen; in Jeanne Jaffe’s room-size installation, his “spirit” animates multiple cast resin marionettes (some life-size and some miniature). Each figure references a chapter in Tesla’s life as seen from the outside and imagined from the inside. Created as an interdisciplinary fusion of art, science, history, theater, mythology, and psychology, Elegy for Tesla allows viewers to accompany and interact with “Tesla” by experiencing moments along his life’s journey.
Max Ernst
NEW YORK Paul Kasmin Gallery Chess Figures (1944), the wooden chess set that Max Ernst made while vacationing in Great River, Long Island, greeted visitors to “Max Ernst/Paramyths: Sculpture, 1934– 1967.” Like Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was a player of a game that conscripts intellectual wit to commandeer abstract warriors through never-ending configurations of battle. It’s play, but serious play, and that’s precisely how Ernst regarded his sculptural output—as a spirited interlude to overcome creative block.
Pablo Picasso
NEW YORK Museum of Modern Art Eighty years of Modernist bombast has masked Picasso’s work in hyperbole, diminishing comprehension and neglecting what’s most interesting about it. At this point in time, Picasso’s two-dimensional work is cliché, but his three-dimensional work astonishes. It is insanely compulsive, almost hallucinogenic. Immense biomorphic and figurative abstractions; bulbous, florid surfaces; huge bronzes impressed with irrational patterns; diagrammatic metal structures that resemble folded paper; steel cages—an enormous body of work that’s almost incomprehensible in its variety.
Rodrigo Valenzuela
SALT LAKE CITY CUAC Contemporary Art As presidential candidates muddle around in the public arena, failing to articulate a humane approach to immigration, the American public is left to wonder: Who else can take up the baton and defend the basic rights of migrant workers? We’ve all heard how laborers—from Mexican fruit pickers to Vietnamese salon workers—undertake perilous journeys only to face a profusion of obstacles once here. Perhaps most disconcerting is the apathy of the people around them.
Gregory Miguel Gómez & Rodrigo Nava
BRATTLEBORO, VT
Shawn Smith
ARLINGTON VIRGINIA Artisphere What is our relationship to the digital, and how is the digital impacting us? The answer for Shawn Smith is one pixel at a time. In his recent show, “Pixels, Predators, and Prey,” Smith mapped out the interaction between the natural and the digital, the real and the simulated, in 10 eye-popping sculptures of animals and, for the first time, humans. In his hands, clusters of painted wood sticks mutate into their subjects— a kind of 21st-century, dimensional pointillism on steroids.
