BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Entering the Brattleboro Museum’s Mary Sommer Room project space and encountering Carolyn Enz Hack’s Change Your Mind was an experience that clearly called for opening one’s perception. The enormous spiral form, suspended on filament, filled the room like a magical life unfurling before one’s eyes, somewhat akin to a fiddlehead fern in spring. The form was so continuous that it seemed as if it would go on traveling through space.
NEW YORK Marc Straus Gallery Entang Wiharso, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Rhode Island, titled his recent show “Promising Land.” It’s not clear if this referenced terrain is American or Indonesian, but most likely Wiharso is referring to the dream of affluence and ease identified with the U.S. and now emulated around the world. His recent work has increasingly turned toward a critique of the Americanization of global culture, looking askance at the heightened materialism that threatens to overwhelm the spiritual insight associated with Asian tradition.
LOS ANGELES Hammer Museum
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery “Introjection,” the title of Gehard Demetz’s recent exhibition, is a psychoanalytic term that refers to how people subconsciously absorb and identify with the beliefs and actions of others, particularly children internalizing their perceptions of parental behavior. Demetz’s rubric makes the pre-pubescent figures in the work particularly chilling. The Third Way (2017), for example, depicts a middleschool- age youngster staring disconsolately into space.
Naomi Campbell’s work fuses the art of science and the science of art. Starting with nature’s sculpted forms, she introduces new definitions of the organic and the synthetic through fragmented objects and hybridized systems that follow the concepts and connotations of natural systems.
ROME MARCA (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Alfredo Pirri’s recent exhibition, “i pesci non portano fucili” (“Fish Don’t Carry Guns”), was curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and Ludovico Pratesi. The show was the final stage of a project with the same name initiated in November 2016 with an exhibition (“RWD– FWD”) at Pirri’s studio/archive. Pirri chose the title as a tribute to Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion (1981), which imagines an unarmed society, fluid like the open sea, where one can be immersed and re-emerge, giving shape to multiform events.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster are, like their contemporaries Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Damien Hirst, defined by their subversiveness, as artists and individuals. The pair have collaborated since their college days in the late 1980s.
NEW DELHI Talwar Gallery If there is one word that describes Ranjani Shettar’s installations and sculptures, it is “happy.” There is something bubbly, fun, and enthusiastic about her work, and it is infectious. Shettar herself laughingly says, “Someone remarked quite early in my working days as to why my works looked happy and not otherwise.” This happiness, however, does not interfere with the work’s ability to provoke thought. The narrative of her recent show, “Bubble trap and a double bow,” concerned nature.
NEW YORK ART100 New York Sometimes the intentions of artists do not fit the categories assigned to their mediums. There can be cross-overs between sculpture and painting, for instance, in which the connecting link is about content rather than form. Such was the case with “Hearts and Bones,” a show that featured installations and drawings by Judy Pfaff and paintings by Kharis Kennedy.
There is a system of interconnected concepts expressed through steel–the skyscraper, the automobile, modernity itself. Bearing its own language and history, it’s also the “steel trap,” the “steel hand in the velvet glove,” the “city forged from steel.”
