VANCOUVER Vancouver Aquarium Composed of debris retrieved from the once pristine shores of British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii, “Vortex” tackles the complex contextualizing of the nebulous Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest of several floating plastic garbage gyres around the world and a sprawling, slimy mass of filth.
Bruce Edelstein
ROCHESTER, VERMONT Big Town Gallery A child of two West Coast artists, Bruce Edelstein grew up with a pencil in his hand, and his facility for imaginative form animates the clay sculptures shown in his recent exhibition “Oaxaca.”
Alicja Kwade
IPSWICH, MASSACHUSETTS Castle Hill on the Crane Estate TunnelTeller, Alicja Kwade’s first large-scale, site-specific installation in the U.S., signifies her growing reputation stateside after a recent Public Art Fund project in Central Park and a solo exhibition at 303 Gallery in New York.
Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir
NEW YORK Fort Tryon Park Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir, a highly regarded Icelandic-born artist, is best known for her androgynous figures, which sidestep gender and sexual identity issues in favor of ambiguity.
Annabeth Rosen: Five Conversational Fragments
Something in the totality of Annabeth Rosen’s work does not lend itself to the question/answer format of the formal interview. Her conversational style, like her work, is rich and discursive, gaining in depth and resonance through additions and accumulations.
Romuald Hazoumè
NEW YORK Gagosian Benin-born Romuald Hazoumè brings wit and formal rigor to his assemblage sculptures. His recent exhibition featured bidon, 50-liter plastic storage containers (often used to transport gasoline illegally from Nigeria), refashioned into masks, some spray-painted and others festooned with feathers, pipes, brushes, and even a broom.
Judy Chicago
“I was always interested in fringe techniques. I did formed domes, I did big fiberglass sculptures, I went to autobody school—new form allows for new content. But nobody paid attention to my interest in fringe techniques as long as they were masculine. It was only when I crossed the gender gap into what was forgotten that it became notable.”
Sheila Pepe
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Pepe’s robustly inked drawings, square and intricate, have a macho geometric strength. Though we are not supposed to characterize art as “masculine” or “feminine,” that seems to be exactly the point for this artist; Pepe insists on it by using housewifely materials and crafts to create forceful work.
James Turrell
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS MASS MoCA If people know one thing about James Turrell, it’s his vast Roden Crater project in the desert northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. He acquired the site in 1977 and has been working on it ever since.
Urs Fischer
NEW YORK Gagosian In Jacques Tati’s genre-defying masterpiece Playtime (1967), Mr. Hulot, Tati’s unwitting alter ego, drifts haphazardly through a stylized, ultramodern Paris, interacting with a host of inanimate objects brought to life through technology and camera work within a massive, specially constructed set known as “Tativille.” In many ways, Urs Fischer’s recent exhibition, “PLAY,” with choreography by Madeline Hollander, picks up where Tati left off, but with a major upgrade in technology.
