QUEENS, NEW YORK MoMA PS1 Carolee Schneemann, speaking at the press conference for her touring retrospective, recalled the days when the art world labeled her unabashed use of her body to disrupt misogynist attitudes toward women as “lewd” and “narcissistic.”
Open To Association: A Conversation with James Shrosbree
James Shrosbree’s recent work is unexpected, un-designed, and “un-art-like.” His ceramic objects have low, lumbering, often ungainly shapes, at times buoyant and swelling, more frequently drooping as if pulled down by gravity. Some works appear clumsy and awkward, their monochrome glazes of unlovely yellows or greens slightly off; others are startlingly erotic in strangely bold
Caviar and Excrement: A Conversation with Wilfredo Prieto
A beautiful but wilting flower hangs in a noose, an egg sits next to an eight ball, and caviar enfolds excrement. Wilfredo Prieto’s works use simple, precise juxtapositions to tease out intriguing, open-ended metaphors. He often employs basic materials, projecting a certain poetry that at times recalls Minimalism and Arte Povera.
The Happy Effect: A Conversation with Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir
Hair is an extension of our identity, persona, and character. It can be added to, colored, and formed. It draws us in to look, to feel. Hair can also be a mechanism for attraction or disgust.
Doerte Weber
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.
