BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery The retinal dazzle of Op Art came and went decades ago—as with many fads, it caught the eye, and then there seemed little more to say. But here it is again, mobile and in three dimensions, in the metal work of Nancy Selvage. This time, it appears to have many more possibilities.
Laura Santini
MONTREAL McCord Museum Laura Santini’s recent installation, sited within an exhibition of Innu art, consisted of a polar bear made from oyster shells collected at Montreal seafood restaurants. The project began modestly enough as Santini brought home a bag or two from each restaurant visit.
Vibha Galhotra: Hidden in Plain Sight
Vibha Galhotra’s first exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery began dramatically with Neo Camouflage (2008), an installation in which four mannequins dressed in military garb stood guard before a large photo mural of Old Delhi rooftops. The panoramic vista, seen from a tower of the Jama Masjid mosque (the city’s highest spot), casts a god-like omnipresence
Bharti Kher
NEW YORK Hauser & Wirth Born in London, living in Delhi for 20 years, Bharti Kher creates powerful conceptual works that draw on different aspects of her personal experience. Often multivalent in presentation, her symbolic, sometimes allegorical sculptures incorporate old and new themes, enlarging myth and legend through visual tropes that engage our freer speculations.
Turning Dross to Gold: Zeke Moores
Zeke Moores’s work interrogates the mass-produced object and the hand-crafted work of art. Focusing on the detritus of contemporary life, he replicates dumpsters, cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, pylons, and the leftovers of our modern industrial society in materials that challenge and confound how we assign value and gauge aesthetic beauty.
Micah Lexier and Kelly Mark
OSHAWA, CANADA Robert McLaughlin Gallery Words, numbers, and signatures—the hallmarks of the art world as it is measured—formed the conceptual basis of this show pairing works by two Nova Scotia College of Art and Design graduates. Like the two television screens that face each other in The Kiss (Light Box) (2009), Micah Lexier and Kelly Mark are conceptual artists who complement each other brilliantly.
Julianne Swartz
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Is it possible for an exhibition that includes blocks of cast cement to be too subtle? In her retrospective “How Deep Is Your,” Julianne Swartz worked primarily with gossamer, mirrors, sound, clockworks, and magnets, in addition to cement. It was not an installation for the hurried visitor, nor for the hard of hearing or for those with difficulty seeing.
Inspired by the Faroe Islands: Tróndur Patursson
The birds were soon to migrate across the Atlantic, from the village of Kirkjubø on Streymoy Island to North America—their destination, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Created by Faroese sculptor Tróndur Patursson, these birds are made of glass.
2012 Whitney Biennial
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art The 2012 Whitney Biennial was a modest affair. Whether by choice or necessity, this economy of means resulted in a refreshingly accessible exhibition with a personal, DIY aesthetic, one that acknowledged the downsized ambitions and reduced funding of the Great Recession while remaining intent on taking the pulse of the contemporary art world.
Cathy Wilkes
PITTSBURGH Carnegie Museum of Art Cathy Wilkes, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid-’80s and then helped to fuel the city’s art scene in the 1990s, has become known for enigmatic, sometimes poignant installations fabricated from sculpted and appropriated found objects. In 2008, the Belfast-born artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in the summer of 2011, she had her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. at the Aspen Art Museum.
