Though Joan Danziger’s imagery gestures toward Surrealism, her sculpture resists classification. Her visual language is distinctly her own, drawn from observation, dreams, and the intuitive relationship between matter and fantasy. Over the course of more than 60 years, she has constructed not just forms, but an entire cosmology, one in which imagination serves as the
“MONUMENTS”
LOS ANGELES The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick Kara Walker, discussing her work with Hamza Walker last year, asked, “Where does it begin to take on a new life that embodies this question of its use value as a monument, as a holder of White Supremacist desire, as a relic of the Lost Cause? It’s holding all of these ideas that don’t work in the republic that we live in.”
Vulnerability Hangover: A Conversation with Thomas Houseago
There are moments in art when the creative act feels inseparable from survival, a source of sustenance as much as vision. An acute tension between fracture and form, between vulnerability and vigor, runs through the work of Thomas Houseago.
Cal Lane
CAMBRIDGE, ONTARIO, CANADA Cambridge Art Galleries So, if Lane’s work has sundered the claims of the utile, does it represent a frontal attack on the lineage of the Duchampian readymade? Think about it: these pieces have, as their origins, objects that might have been used on a daily basis with nary a second thought.
Phillip Lai
BRISTOL, U.K. Spike Island Lai’s quotidian forms—bowls, basins, trays—signify sustenance and care but are emptied of any metaphorical intent.
Sensory Curiosity: A Conversation with Julia Padilla
Buenos Aires-based Julia Padilla uses sculpture, installation, and performance to rethink the transformative potential of life and matter. Constantly exploring new territories, she sets the organic in dialogue with the artificial, juxtaposing unconscious creativity with reason to produce subtly unsettling hybrid forms that question traditional perspectives on the body, space, and perception while imagining new ways
Anila Quayyum Agha
SEATTLE Asian Art Museum By re-creating patterns and designs found in South Asian shrines, tombs, mosques, and palaces and literally projecting them onto viewers, Agha democratizes motifs that have often been employed in spaces marked by gendered and class-based divisions—arguably more in the spirit of Islam’s original intent than what it has become.
Failure as Methodology: A Conversation with Andrew Gannon
Edinburgh-based Andrew Gannon—along with 2025 Turner Prize winner Nnena Kalu, Daisy Lafarge, and Jo Longhurst, the three other artists currently featured in “We Contain Multitudes” at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland—makes work from a position of disability, in his case a congenital limb difference.
Elisabetta Di Maggio
TURIN Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Di Maggio’s technical language embraces mutability. Her work suggests organic remnant, decorative product, and artwork; and her co-ordination of eye, hand, and sharp-pointed instrument can fool the observer into imagining a machine was involved rather than a human.
