BROOKLYN Undercurrent Gallery “Myoptic,” a sculptural video installation by Carl Lee, contemplated the intricate twining of spectatorship, memory, and technology. The title, a play on the word “myopic,” strongly underscores this notion: “myopic” means nearsighted, not being able to see the wider view without some sort of corrective lens; “myoptic” seems to indicate a more personal spectatorship, the nostalgic lens through which we each, individually, experience the past.
Video: Celebrating the Work of Alan Constable
Alan Constable’s singular sculptures of cameras, telescopes, projectors, and binoculars are imbued with a heightened tactility and inner life. Legally blind and deaf, Constable began constructing replicas of cameras from cereal cartons and glue at the age of eight.
Spatial Language: A Conversation with Ragen Moss
“I am interested in sculpture as the medium that can teach us what space is and why space is important. I come at this because I see each of us as being an awkward, bumbling biological body that is also inscribed by language. This friction between being a physical spatial being and also a thinking, relational spatial being is what generates my work.”
Lydia Okumura
LONDON Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Okumura has stated that “geometry is an intelligent way to express the concept of multi-dimensionality, an aspect of the truth of life.” This exhibition therefore provided an opportunity to re-evaluate the intricate multi-dimensionality of a group of five key sculptures from the 1984 show, which exemplified a decisive year in her artistic trajectory.
Brendan Fernandes
CHICAGO Monique Meloche Brendan Fernandes’s new works cast bondage in bronze. His current exhibition, “Restrain” (on view through January 11, 2020), features bronze coils suspended by leather straps from live-edge walnut supports. Titles inject context, connecting these looping suspensions to the formations of kinbaku, or “tight binding,” the Japanese practice of aestheticized bondage.
Object Lessons: Melvin Edwards
Agricole, the suspended plow form, comes from the French for “agriculture.” Human beings didn’t start out in cities. Cities originated as places of exchange, and now they’ve gotten to the point where something that used to happen once a week or once a month—the trading of goods and services—becomes the dominator.
Simone Leigh in New York
Like the braided clay that adorns some of her ceramic sculptures, Leigh’s practice articulates a richly interwoven narrative of recuperation, resistance, restitution, and healing that directly addresses this core viewership even as it puts the broader public on notice.
Pae White: Material History
Pae White’s primary material might well be the history of applied arts. In a new show at the San José Museum of Art (on view through January 19, 2020), she draws on at least 2,000 years of artistic practice, from goldwork to carpet weaving, bookbinding, printmaking, and painting.
Tradition and Independence: A Conversation with Lin Yan
Lin Yan belongs to a distinguished line of Chinese artists. Her grandfather and grandmother were pioneers of modern art in China, and her parents, Lin Gang and Pang Tao, opened the Central Academy of Fine Art oil painting studio in the 1980s.
“Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now”
PARIS Fondation Cartier
Thomas Delamarre, senior curator for the Fondation Cartier, didn’t know what he would learn when he visited 200 European artists who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall. How, he wondered, did the still politically charged landscape of today shape their perspectives and impact their work?
