SAN ANTONIO Artpace Doerte Weber grew up in a country divided by a wall. Born in West Germany, she attended university in Berlin (1979–83). To visit her boyfriend in West Germany on the weekends, however, she had to travel through East Germany. Each time Weber crossed the border, she was overcome with emotion as she confronted the formidable wall erected inside a single country, complete with barbed wire and armed guards.
Patricia Cronin
DUBLIN The LAB Gallery Even the crudest structure or site can become a shrine. Once connected to an item or individual deemed sacred, it transfigures into a space conducive to contemplation and rituals of remembrance—activities that keep the enshrined, in some way, alive. Patricia Cronin subverts traditional notions of a shrine to memorialize something that is handled, globally, with systemic disdain and a chronic lack of care.
Sarah Meyers Brent: Natural Disasters
Sarah Meyers Brent’s friends tend to donate their used clothes to her, as if she were a branch of Goodwill. Not that she needs these garments to wear; instead, she uses them to construct complex sculptures in which their colors (faded to bright) and textures (smooth or fuzzy) add essential qualities to finished forms that
Andy Zimmermann
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery The back gallery at Boston Sculptors is small, dim, and oddly shaped. But under the hand of Andy Zimmer – mann, it became vast and colorful— a panorama of construction and destruction, a maze of welded rebar, translucence, imagery, and mirrors that immersed viewers in the illusion of being in the midst of a work site.
Provocation and Insistence: A Conversation with Mithu Sen
Mithu Sen is a provocateur, a risk–taker in deceptively gentle guise. At the heart of her work is a compulsion to peel away received, overt notions of the self and probe beneath them. She typically turns the tables on viewers.
Ydessa Hendeles
TORONTO The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery A palpable sense of unease pervaded Ydessa Hendeles’s “The Milliner’s Daughter,” at least initially. The installations in this decade-long survey broke down into three dimly lit spaces populated by various mannequins and four brighter spaces featuring mechanical toys, panels of illustrated texts, and assorted supplementary images. Lingering in the galleries, that first impression of unease began to erode before reasserting itself. Not only did the heartening impact of the mech – anical toys wane dramatically, but deeper and darker associations also began to emerge.
“The Art of Burning Man”
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA Hermitage Museum & Gardens Since the early 1990s, Burning Man has enticed crews of artists to craft increasingly large, complex, and extravagantly lighted sculptures during a yearly gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The event is not for wimps; everything gets coated in dust and is subject to windstorms and extreme temperatures. Still, artists are drawn to Burning Man by the freedom to go bold with scant censorship and by the atmosphere of radical self-expression and com – munal cooperation.
Jen Durbin
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Art 3 Silas Von Morisse Gallery The title of Jen Durbin’s 11-part installation 90 Moves in Nine Seconds (The Jackie Series 2001–2017) refers to the actions of Jackie Kennedy in the immediate moments after her husband, President John F. Kennedy, was shot in Houston. Durbin’s immensely complicated, immensely ambitious project follows the movements of Jackie’s pillbox hat, as captured in nine seconds of film, in a sequence of sculptures that rise as high as 30 feet.
Niho Kozuru
BOSTON Miller Yezerski Niho Kozuru grew up in a clan of distinguished Japanese ceramists, led by her father, Gen. She tried clay, glass, and metal before settling on the material that has become her signature–cast rubber. Infused with bold hues, it’s translucent and looks good enough to eat, like gummy bears. Based in Boston for most of her career, Kozuru has often used casts of architectural ornaments from old New England houses in her freestanding works, stacking them into towers with distinctive personalities and energy.
Nayland Blake
SAN FRANCISCO 500 Capp Street Foundation Using only a few deceptively simplelooking elements, Workroom, Nay – land Blake’s recent installation in the garage of David Ireland’s former home, transformed a bare concrete cubicle into an imaginary performative environment. A little metal and leather and a temporary fabric wall punctuated with interesting openings succeeded, among other things, in recalling places and spaces largely erased from San Francisco– first by the AIDS epidemic and, later, by relentless gentrification.
