“Still Life with Table consists of pieces, without a hierarchy. It’s not just an arrangement of objects; the thing that it sits on is also part of the sculpture. I have all these forms and parts—things that I make, things that I’ve collected and altered—and they sit around, sometimes for years.”
BUFFALO, NEW YORK Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center A revised reality, a rebirth, a second act—whatever you call the new existence that Katie Bell creates for the multitude of discarded building materials that she uses in her site-specific installations, one thing is certain: these materials, manufactured for a specific purpose, have broken free from their original identities and uses, taking on entirely new reasons for being.
For more than two decades, Pablo Lehmann, who teaches at Argentina’s National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires, has produced obsessively complicated works in which patience, attention to detail, and technical knowledge come together in dense overlays that defy distinctions between text and image.
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art Rachel Harrison’s sculptures possess a wild and perplexing eclecticism that makes it difficult to ascertain the exact meaning and emotional tenor of her imagery. In her assemblages—which could be called monuments since they memorialize both a series of actions and a juxtaposition of things on a large scale—ideas and processes coming out of sculpture, painting, architecture, popular culture, and the banality of everyday life are placed side by side or on top of each other, without, or at least rarely, becoming one.
Claude Monet saw painting entirely as an act of abstraction, even with his easel rooted en plein air, saying of representation, “Try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field.
Elana Herzog’s work explores how civilizations merge, overlap, and sometimes become as threadbare as a piece of cloth. Her practice involves subtraction and addition, deconstructing everyday materials then adding patterns, staple tracks, and other gestures to create uniquely tactile objects.
REYKJAVÍK Reykjavík Art Museum Shoplifter’s complex sculptures, murals, drawings, and intimate installations numinously transform the places that contain them. Her themes vary from beauty to fashion, mythology, and more recently, the earth.
Sculptor and social practice artist Ramekon O’Arwisters has lived in the Bay Area since the early 1990s, but he was born and raised in North Carolina. In 2012, his deep connection to African American craft traditions led him to develop the Crochet Jam, an experience of shared making using outsize crochet hooks and strips of
Little things mean a lot to Sarah Sze. In her kaleidoscopic installations teeming with found objects, disjunctive arrays of familiar ephemera—tied, clamped, taped, and cantilevered with deft architectural and engineering savvy—hold aloft fragile universes. Sze’s work is about the finite and the infinite, the mundane and the sublime, time and timelessness.
LONDON Tate Modern Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus, created for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, is a brilliantly trenchant and brutal anti-monument to Britain’s shameful, often overlooked role in the slave trade.
