NEW YORK Jim Kempner Fine Art “ICED,” Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese’s recent exhibition, had genuine political clout—a real achievement for this collaborating couple, since so much political art in America undermines itself with rhetorical overstatement and callow self-righteousness.
Liliana Porter
NEW YORK Hosfelt Gallery Although many artists incorporate figurines, toys, animals, and signs into their work, Liliana Porter’s take on this strategy stands out for its overtly political, international layers. For example, one work in her recent show, The Intruder, juxtaposes a crowd of over 50 figurines varying in size, era, material, and culture.
Alysia Fischer
CINCINNATI Manifest Gallery Alysia Fischer’s recent exhibition, “Consumption,” featured seven extraordinarily handsome works made from what she calls “diverted materials,” specifically inner tubes from a local landfill.
Paul Swenbeck
PHILADELPHIA Fleisher/Ollman Gallery For more than a decade, Paul Swenbeck has made cross-media work that materially explores the translation of marginalized practices into contemporary culture. His visual and theoretical sources range from the occult (he grew up in Salem, Massachusetts), folk expression, and pre-scientific phenomena to sci-fi illustration and the debunked psychoanalytic experiments of Wilhelm Reich.
Sonny Assu
WEST VANCOUVER, CANADA West Vancouver Museum Sonny Assu, an Aboriginal artist from Vancouver, is gaining attention for his reversal of early 20th-century art history. More than 100 years after Western artists “advanced” art by looking “back” at Aboriginal culture, Assu is turning to Western art to modernize Aboriginal traditions of the Northwest Coast.
Éamonn O’Doherty
DUBLIN Kevin Kavanagh Gallery About two weeks before this exhibition opened, I was sitting at the bedside of Éamonn O’Doherty in a Dublin cancer hospital. He had been given two months to live (though, in the end, he only got three weeks), but he faced dying in the same manner that he broached his sculpture: with impish and iconoclastic good humor, a lunchtime bottle of red wine, and a request that I do a “proper” interview with him, “proper” meaning a no-holds-barred, utterly indiscreet assassination of all those he considered morally contemptible in the world of art.
2011 Asian Art Biennial “Mediation/Meditation”
TAICHUNG, TAIWAN National Museum of Fine Arts “Mediation/Meditation,” the third edition of the Asian Art Biennial, was curated by Iris Shu-ping Huang of the National Museum. The dual theme made an additional allusion to Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae’s theory of the M-shaped society, which describes the global decline of the middle class and its replacement with equal peaks of rich and poor.
Animal Unrest
Adopting a disturbingly human posture, a hare constricts into a hieroglyph of anguish. Choking and gasping, a jackal succumbs to a muscle-locking spasm. Grimacing in a ghastly blend of snarl and plaintive cry, a disheveled possum peevishly limps away.
Eylem Aladogan: Iron Triggers That Could Be Released
Eylem Aladogan’s large-scale sculptural work recently emerged from the Dutch art world like a moth bursting from its cocoon, finding international exposure at the 12th Istanbul Biennial. Though her smaller work has appeared in Paris, Basel, Munich, Los Angeles, and New York, her major pieces had been exhibited only in Netherlands-based art museums such as
Rima Schulkind
WASHINGTON, DC Touchstone Gallery This exhibition of eight complicated assemblages made from a variety of recycled objects marked a departure from Rima Schulkind’s earlier work. Collectively addressing the fertility of human invention and the wastefulness produced by obsolete technology, each “totem” displays a particular category of technological devices, including those used to manipulate numbers, reproduce images, communicate sound, write words, measure time, and record history.
