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.
Weaving Time and Place: Roger Rigorth
Roger Rigorth’s sculptures integrate cultural variables with natural materials to create a sense of history and of place and time. There is a suggestion that these hybrid quasi-craft forms could have had a function. They might even have a symbolic purpose, but what, and for what culture?
All That Glitters Is Not What It Seems: A Conversation with Sokari Douglas
Born in the Niger Delta, Sokari Douglas Camp is well aware of the harmful effects of environmental pollution in the region. She has made this subject her primary focus, combining it with other challenging issues related to Nigeria and the broader world in works made with her preferred material—steel.
The Matter of Energy: A Conversation with Damián Ortega
Narratives about Damián Ortega highlight his early shift from political cartoonist to artist, thereby conjoining his wit and sense of playfulness to incisive critique and intellectual rigor. Even more interesting, however, are the variety of forms and wide range of materials that Ortega uses as a sculptor and installation artist and how these two aspects
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.
