On the Cover:
Sarah Oppenheimer, S-011110, 2017. Aluminum, steel, glass, and existing architecture, dimensions variable. Photo: Dan Fontanelli and Heinrich Schmidt.
Editor’s Letter:
Art is often thought to stand at some remove from the everyday world of people and their interactions; the artists in this issue, however, rove the boundaries between things and their social roles or environments. Nari Ward, for instance, relies on what Kay Whitney, who interviews him here, calls the “lived history of race, poverty, and consumer culture,” to animate the found objects he employs in his practice. In her diverse efforts, which range from video and installation to sculptural objects, Celeste Martínez Abburrá considers, as she puts it, “how to deepen concepts around the organic and social dimensions of the body.” John Court produces performances and installations that focus on text, or language, as an object rather than exclusively as a medium of communication. His work can be seen as externalizing internal limits. Sarah Oppenheimer has long created wry and engaging architectural interventions, and in doing so, she says, “I have explored what it means to be inside architecture. Our material envelope is a dynamic organism—it performs as the bodily boundary of our social whole.” Interestingly, the border between organism and environment, or the lack thereof, is also a major topic of thought for Dean Kenning, who creates lo-fi robots or moving sculptures. Art, these makers suggest, isn’t found “out there,” rather it helps form the environments that we inhabit. Of course, it is found in here, in these pages, too, waiting to delight you. —Daniel Kunitz
