WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint gallery Anthony Cervino’s “Ejecta” exhibition combined well-crafted sculptures with a pointed narrative and a book of insightful conversations between artist and curator. The role of the curator is to balance objective decision-making distance and intimate knowledge of the work. In its best form, the relationship between artist and curator works as a true co-dependency, one crutch holding the other up, but at its worst, it becomes a distraction obfuscating the artist’s intent.
Archive
Ricky Swallow
LOS ANGELES David Kordansky Gallery Ricky Swallow’s work alludes to the real while posing as abstraction. As per the title of his recent exhibition, “Skews,” his intimately scaled bronzes “skew” reality so that their material representation performs a different version of factuality. Interacting with them requires putting into play something the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as “looking awry.” When you confront these objects directly, objectively, you see a collection of mis- matched, somewhat crudely assembled elements drawn from daily life.
Robert Thiele
MIAMI MDC Museum of ART + Design Robert Thiele, who splits his time between Miami and Brooklyn, has been making art since the mid-1960s. Simultaneously sculptural and painterly, obfuscating and revealing, his works, which range from small, wall-mounted pieces to tall, imposing sculptures, abound with paradoxes. “Untitled (3 for 8),” a selection of works from the early 1980s to the present, revealed Thiele’s dialectics — intimacy/monumentality, surface/depth, dependence/autonomy, old/new — to be part of the same continuum.
Weaving Time and Place: Roger Rigorth
Roger Rigorth’s sculptures integrate cultural variables with natural materials to create a sense of history and of place and time. There is a suggestion that these hybrid quasi-craft forms could have had a function. They might even have a symbolic purpose, but what, and for what culture?
All That Glitters Is Not What It Seems: A Conversation with Sokari Douglas
Born in the Niger Delta, Sokari Douglas Camp is well aware of the harmful effects of environmental pollution in the region. She has made this subject her primary focus, combining it with other challenging issues related to Nigeria and the broader world in works made with her preferred material—steel.
The Matter of Energy: A Conversation with Damián Ortega
Narratives about Damián Ortega highlight his early shift from political cartoonist to artist, thereby conjoining his wit and sense of playfulness to incisive critique and intellectual rigor. Even more interesting, however, are the variety of forms and wide range of materials that Ortega uses as a sculptor and installation artist and how these two aspects
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
MEXICO CITY Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC) Art has borrowed from science since the beginning: we need only recall the adoption of linear perspective in the Renaissance or the rise of photography. The bond between artistic endeavors and technology, to be specific, is so strong that sometimes they seem to be one and the same—a perception that led many artists in the 1960s to explore the possibilities of introducing state-of-the-art materials and techniques, from optical effects to video projections, passing through algorithms, radar, and all kinds of elaborate mechanical devices along the way.
Shaping Time: A Conversation with Carlos Irijalba
Inquiry into the role of space and time in artistic practice has been a constant regardless of medium. The same applies to the intent of capturing time in the work itself, a philosophical quest that has occupied more than a few artists.
Hitoshi Nomura: Stretching Mortal Time
Hitoshi Nomura, one of Japan’s most esteemed artists, though he is comparatively unknown in the West, finally received significant attention in the United States with two fall 2015 exhibitions: a one-person show at Fergus McCaffrey Gallery in Chelsea and inclusion in “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography 1968–1979,” curated
Denis Versweyveld
RUTLAND, VERMONT Castleton Downtown Gallery Denis Versweyveld’s sculptures and drawings view familiar household objects and minimal houses through a meditative lens. Each form, executed in plaster, lath, and cast concrete, is pared down to its essence. Signs of this process, like fine etching lines, remain in the exquisite surfaces. The forms are either miniaturized or human scale, portraits of what we live with every day: a cup, a pitcher, a bowl. The sense of the maker’s hand is ever-present in the dialectic between materiality and refinement, texture and reductive form.
