"Davie is best known for her iconic large-scale stripey wave and coil paintings that undulate, bulge and recede. Their trippy sense of animated movement gives them a living, breathing presence. It’s as if a current courses through them, pushing out at viewers and sucking us in. These embodied sensations recall the artist’s own movements in making the work; a structuring tool that engenders not just form but emotion and idea. It’s this incursion into the space of the observer that reveals Davie’s subversive use of the stripe as a catalyst for more than just optical tricks." https://www.milesmcenery.com/publications/karin-davie
MY CONVERSATION WITH RAVEN CHACON FOR URSULA MAGAZINE (w/ALEX PROVAN)
In recent years, Raven Chacon has emerged as one of the most quietly radical voices in contemporary music and sound art. A composer and performer who moves between graphic scores, noise improvisation and site-specific compositions, Chacon became the first Native American artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022. Chacon grew up on the Diné Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, where he began making noise music in the desert with friends, experimenting with the sonic possibilities of the land.
I CURATED A SURVEY OF EARLY WORK BY LAURA PARNES AT ANTHOLOGY ARCHIVES
This series presents a survey of early works by the artist Laura Parnes, known for her critically acclaimed films and installations that fuse comedy with pathos. Featuring both shorts and feature-length works, the three programs chart the artist’s evolving style, from her early appropriation techniques and experiments with digital rotoscoping to her highly stylized, multi-platform works. Throughout her practice, Parnes has cast real-life artists, musicians, and other downtown luminaries in works that consistently blur the lines between experimental and narrative cinema. https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/59293
MY FEATURE IN FRIEZE ON NEW YORK GALLERIES SHAPING THE SCENE
KAJE is located on 15th Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn, an industrial area that has yet to be gentrified – visibly, at least. Walking down 3rd Avenue to visit the non-profit space and talk with its co-directors, Kate Levant and Elizaveta Shneyderman, I pass shuttered sheet-metal fabricators and empty buildings. Hanging above a nearby section of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway is a massive sign for Bruno Truck Sales, a lonely beacon of the neighbourhood’s former past as a thriving hub of cement works, machine shops, chemical plants and other manufacturing…KAJE sits on the far fringes of such enclaves. Established in 2018 as an ambitious, experimental art space, KAJE is dedicated to ‘forms of investigation the market over- looks or deems unprofitable’, according to its website. Fittingly, you’d never know it was there unless you were looking for it.
CHECK OUT MY FLASH FICTION + VERNACULAR PIX ON EVERGREEN JOURNAL
INTRO: “There was a place on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a giant street-level warehouse of junk that I used to wade through in the early 1990s. Sid, the Hasidic guy who ran it, was one of those people who would pick up stuff people left behind when they moved or died, mostly ‘estates’ of the working class. Clothes, furniture, household appliances, toys. You name it, he would take it. One day a couple of boxes caught my eye, they were full of loose snapshots and old family albums. I remember my fascination, the mix of sadness and curiosity as I began to pore through them.”
Read moreI reviewed the film Baby Girl (dir: Halina Reijn, 2024) for Frieze
“Instead of exploring the intricacies of submission, consent and trust that circumscribe actual BDSM relationships, we are immersed in a poorly executed plot of intrigue that tries to upend power and gender dynamics in the workplace in a reversal of roles that feels about as feminist as Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), if better acted.”
My BOMB Interview with Alannah Farrell
“Alannah Farrell is one of those rare artists who is both humble and brave, reminding us that without vulnerability there is no courage, no ground gained, no evolution. I’ve long been a fan of their intimate and psychologically charged portraits of queer friends: painstakingly rendered paintings that marry a sense of deep interiority with stage-like drama. More than just a documentation of their trans and gender-nonconforming community, these works allude to a lived reality inextricably tethered to fantasies of self-actualization. The resulting mix of the otherworldly and the quietly sardonic feels like a reflection of—and an antidote to—this troubling moment when trans rights are being aggressively and systemically eroded.“
Read moreI Interviewed Ai Weiwei on the occasion of his FAURSCHOU exhibition
“AT A TIME WHEN DIALOGUE IN THE ART WORLD IS INCREASINGLY FRAUGHT AND POLARIZED, ESPECIALLY WHERE “POLITICS” ARE CONCERNED, THE ABILITY TO HAVE A DEEPLY THOUGHTFUL CONVERSATION WITH AI WEIWEI—ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST PROMINENT ARTIST-DISSIDENTS—FEELS LIKE A MOMENTOUS OCCASION. CENTERED AROUND THE WORKS ON VIEW AT FAURSCHOU, OUR EXCHANGE CONSIDERS THE ROLE OF ART HISTORY, CONSUMER READYMADES, POETRY AND NATURE, AMONG OTHER PREVALENT THEMES THAT HAVE LONG DEFINED AI’S PRACTICE. WHAT EMERGES IS AN ARTIST WHO STILL PUTS ACTIVISM AHEAD OF FAME, AND WHOSE DEDICATION TO CIVILITY AND GRACE EMBODIES A GENEROSITY THE WORLD IS IN DIRE NEED OF.”
Read moreMy Frieze review of the Jenny Holzer show at the Guggenheim
“The violent machismo of Trumpism lurks everywhere (‘SEND THEM AWAY GAGGING, OR SOBBING IF THEY’RE SOFTHEARTED’), though in true Holzer fashion, the lack of attribution makes the origins and intentions of many slippery by design. You could just as easily imagine a statement such as ‘ACTION WILL BRING THE EVIDENCE TO YOUR DOORSTEP’ coming from the mouth of a radical climate activist as from a Bible-thumping preacher. During my visit, one patron sat on one of the marble Truism benches placed nearby to read them more closely and was quickly shooed away. The authority of such a corrective felt ironic in the context of the room’s messaging – an insidious reminder that no one escapes institutional power.”
MY PROFILE ON JA'TOVIA GARY IN URSULA MAGAZINE (IN PRINT AND ONLINE)
The idea of speculative time, in which past, present and future remain open to perpetual revision, has become a hallmark of Gary’s work. Known for poetic, experimental films that engage with and trouble notions of the archive, Gary uses a documentarian’s instincts to underscore the fallibility of the historical record, bringing a radical subjectivity to Black femme concerns. Her work is intrinsically reparative, redressing the distortions that underpin America’s racial imaginary.
I CURATED AN EXHIBITION FOR THE NEW MUSEUM'S NEWINC FEATURING ITZIAR BARRIO AND JANET BIGGS
"Particles and Digital Serfs” features a series of multichannel, transmedia works by Itziar Barrio and Janet Biggs that explore the compelling intersections of science, art, labor, and robotics. Evoking technology’s ever-shifting role as collaborator, servant, and master, the works in this exhibition consider issues of identity and bodily control in an emergent AI world.
My Review of Cauleen Smith's exhibition at 52 Walker for Frieze magazine ( in print and online)
EXCERPT: Wanda Coleman is a poet’s poet, known for her biting lyricism and deeply felt explorations of the quotidian and personal. Alternately dubbed ‘the LA Blueswoman’ (by poet Tim Joyce) and ‘LA’s unofficial poet laureate’ (by the Los Angeles Times in her 2013 obituary), her raw vulnerability and unwavering resilience recently inspired artist Cauleen Smith to turn Coleman’s work into a collaborative songbook.
MY FEATURE INTERVIEW IN BOMB MAGAZINE WITH PUPPIES PUPPIES ON HER SHOW AT THE NEW MUSEUM!
I’M ON A PANEL AT NYU FALES LIBRARY FOR KATHE BURKHART’S EXHIBITION
NEW YORK TIMES PREVIEW OF THE E.JANE/MHYSHA PERFORMANCE I CURATED FOR PIONEER WORKS
My Frieze review of the bleak and lyrical film, War Pony (2022) - my first film review in ages ! →
Excerpt: Shot on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, War Pony (2022) documents such abject poverty – chronic joblessness, addiction, shed-like trailer homes, bands of kids left to fend for themselves – that it might almost seem gratuitous, were it not for the fact that the region is one of the poorest in America. This hardscrabble land, long forsaken by the US government, is home to the Oglala band of Lakota Sioux and sits adjacent to Wounded Knee, the infamous site where, in 1890, federal soldiers massacred almost 300 Lakota. While never overtly addressed, the spectre of this genocide, alongside many other injustices, looms large throughout this bleak yet lyrical film.
“Shot on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, War Pony (2022) documents such abject poverty – chronic joblessness, addiction, shed-like trailer homes, bands of kids left to fend for themselves – that it might almost seem gratuitous, were it not for the fact that the region is one of the poorest in America. This hardscrabble land, long forsaken by the US government, is home to the Oglala band of Lakota Sioux and sits adjacent to Wounded Knee, the infamous site where, in 1890, federal soldiers massacred almost 300 Lakota. While never overtly addressed, the spectre of this genocide, alongside many other injustices, looms large throughout this bleak yet lyrical film.”
Read moreThrilled to Interview Derrick Adams for Frieze magazine!
“When Derrick Adams began representing Black joy on canvas in the 1990s, I was reminded of the uplifting images created by artists of the interwar Harlem renaissance, whose art affirmed the power of ‘racial respect and race pride as an instrument of change, and as a visual embodiment of cultural emancipation1.’ At a time when Black figurative art was often taken to be synonymous with the social realism of Black trauma, Adams’s insistence on creating images of Black refuge, celebration and leisure felt revelatory. Since then many artists have followed suit. Sola Olulode’s Bed Series (2022–ongoing) is devoted to Black queer couples in states of quiet languor, and projects like Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s Black Power Naps (2019–ongoing) are currently being celebrated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”
Read moreMy fourth and final One to Watch column for Flash Art:
The Palestinian-born artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna’s explorations into land rights, plant taxonomies, and the ongoing struggles for sovereignty in the Middle East implicate this same colonial mindset in the twenty- first century. “Throughout her work, she reveals the consequences of an archival impulse to procure and control not just nature, but culture and knowledge as well. Speaking of her film Wild Relatives (2018), for example, which considers the power dynamics of centralized seed banks and industrial agriculture, Manna reminds us that Catlin’s disturbing sentiment is still very much with us: “They are another manifestation of this classical modernist contradiction of the urge to preserve the very thing being erased, and this has been a red thread in much of my work.”
Read moreMy essay on Lynn Hershman Leeson for Arkive Museum just posted online!
‘Leeson’s “Phantom Limb” series similarly reflects the ways in which, as women, our self-perceptions are shaped by mass media’s inevitable pull. Yet the solitary, model-like women in her photographs, who are so seamlessly integrated with their machinery, suggest a naturalized intimacy between the body and machine that can no longer be disentangled…Made just as this deeply confessional project was getting underway, Seduction, 1985, is perhaps the quintessential representation of Leeson’s “Phantom Limb” series and its cyberfeminist leanings. It depicts a young femme fatale lying across a bed in a tight black dress, her come-hither pose, long legs, pointy-toed heels, and outstretched arms beckoning us closer. Inside the TV set that encases and replaces her head, a pair of enlarged eyes, closed in erotic contemplation, replete with Dali-esque eyelashes, fills the screen.”
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