JERSEY CITY, NJ visual ARts Gallery, New Jersey City University Hackensack Dreaming, Nancy Cohen’s powerful, affecting installation, attempted to salvage a bit of nature from the depredations of manmade interventions at Mill Creek Marsh near the Hackensack River. Cohen characterizes the site as among the ugliest in the state, a concrete jungle that leads nowhere. At the same time, life persists—specifically in the stumps of a former cedar forest, which provide an unlikely home for plants and birds. The confluence of these two environments—one manmade and dominant and the other natural and determined to survive—is key to Cohen’s work.
Peter Bahouth
ATLANTA Hagedorn Foundation Gallery Bathed in red light and filled with space-themed music, Peter Bahouth’s installation Birth of a Red Planet offered an otherworldly environment that blended past and present, boyish wonder and adult concern for planetary ills. Dioramas, stereoscopic images, viewing stands, archival prints, and relics from Bahouth’s childhood toy collection told the story of a young boy who builds a spaceship and flees earth in search of a better life. Bahouth, a stereoscopic photographer, worked as a prominent environmental activist before turning his attention to creating three-dimensional illusions of space.
Wayne White
FORT MYERS, FLORIDA Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, Florida Southwestern State College Wayne White’s recent exhibition opened with a puppet performance by the artist that paid homage to the gallery’s namesake. Best known for his Emmy Award-winning sets and puppets for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” White has had a foot in the art world since the beginning of his career. Here, he brought the playful gestures of a comedian and prankster into the gallery, transforming it into an immersive space. Viewers were greeted by a logo painted on the wall outside the space—the Florida Southwestern college mascot morphed into White’s image.
Mary Shaffer
WASHINGTON, DC Katzen Arts Center, American University Recognized as a pioneer in the American Studio Glass Movement during the 1970s and honored as a Visionary by the Museum of Arts and Design, like many women of her generation, Mary Shaffer has followed a curvilinear career and life path. Born in South Carolina, she grew up in Central America and Europe, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and moved many times with her family before establishing her current base camps in Taos, New Mexico, and Marfa, Texas.
Anthony Cervino
WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint gallery Anthony Cervino’s “Ejecta” exhibition combined well-crafted sculptures with a pointed narrative and a book of insightful conversations between artist and curator. The role of the curator is to balance objective decision-making distance and intimate knowledge of the work. In its best form, the relationship between artist and curator works as a true co-dependency, one crutch holding the other up, but at its worst, it becomes a distraction obfuscating the artist’s intent.
Ricky Swallow
LOS ANGELES David Kordansky Gallery Ricky Swallow’s work alludes to the real while posing as abstraction. As per the title of his recent exhibition, “Skews,” his intimately scaled bronzes “skew” reality so that their material representation performs a different version of factuality. Interacting with them requires putting into play something the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as “looking awry.” When you confront these objects directly, objectively, you see a collection of mis- matched, somewhat crudely assembled elements drawn from daily life.
Robert Thiele
MIAMI MDC Museum of ART + Design Robert Thiele, who splits his time between Miami and Brooklyn, has been making art since the mid-1960s. Simultaneously sculptural and painterly, obfuscating and revealing, his works, which range from small, wall-mounted pieces to tall, imposing sculptures, abound with paradoxes. “Untitled (3 for 8),” a selection of works from the early 1980s to the present, revealed Thiele’s dialectics — intimacy/monumentality, surface/depth, dependence/autonomy, old/new — to be part of the same continuum.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
MEXICO CITY Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC) Art has borrowed from science since the beginning: we need only recall the adoption of linear perspective in the Renaissance or the rise of photography. The bond between artistic endeavors and technology, to be specific, is so strong that sometimes they seem to be one and the same—a perception that led many artists in the 1960s to explore the possibilities of introducing state-of-the-art materials and techniques, from optical effects to video projections, passing through algorithms, radar, and all kinds of elaborate mechanical devices along the way.
Denis Versweyveld
RUTLAND, VERMONT Castleton Downtown Gallery Denis Versweyveld’s sculptures and drawings view familiar household objects and minimal houses through a meditative lens. Each form, executed in plaster, lath, and cast concrete, is pared down to its essence. Signs of this process, like fine etching lines, remain in the exquisite surfaces. The forms are either miniaturized or human scale, portraits of what we live with every day: a cup, a pitcher, a bowl. The sense of the maker’s hand is ever-present in the dialectic between materiality and refinement, texture and reductive form.
Martin Boyce
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND RISD Museum Four small photographs (Interiors, 1992) served as a motif for Martin Boyce’s recent survey exhibition. Seen in isolation, these grainy colored stills excerpted from the 1985 crime thriller Jagged Edge, are unremarkable; but as a mood-inducing setting for eerie suspense, they become full of foreboding. “When Now Is Night” was a paean to paranoia, a meditation on the menace of ordinary things. Boyce is an aficionado of film noir and of 1970s horror films, as well as the genres they have spawned. His work rests on an underlying theme of unease about the disparity between clean-lined 20th-century design and the uncertain reality of contemporary cities and contemporary life.
