My Fourth One to Watch column for Flash Art, Extinction and Extraction: Archival Politics in the Work of Jumana Mann

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.”

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My review of the Shikego Kubota show at MoMA for Frieze magazine (now online and in forthcoming March issue)

EXCERPT: By the time Shigeko Kubota left Japan for the US in 1964, she had already met John Cage and Yoko Ono, and had her first solo exhibition at Naiqua Gallery, Tokyo, in 1963. Titled ‘1st Love, 2nd Love …’, the show comprised an interactive sculptural installation that, despite Kubota being a feted member of Tokyo’s avant garde, no one wrote about. (She was a woman, after all.) So, when fluxus leader George Maciunas invited her to join him in New York that year, she came without hesitation in the hope of gaining critical recognition. (Shortly after her arrival, Maciunas declared her vice chairman of the group.) There, in the shadow of her far more famous husband, Nam June Paik, she embarked on a series of experiments that culminated in what she described as ‘video sculpture’: video monitors incorporated into three-dimensional structures.

‘Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), highlights this pivotal period in the artist’s career, showcasing seven video works – six of which are sculptural – made between 1976 and 1985.

https://www.frieze.com/shigeko-kubota-liquid-reality-2021-review

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My interview with Kang Seung Lee for Foundwork journal in advance of his participation in New Museum Triennial

INTRO: Kang Seung Lee mines queer archives to underscore the power of legacy, excavating in particular the histories of artistic figures—known and unknown—who lost their lives to AIDs. As acts of preservation, imagination, and resistance, these excavations remind us that even in queer circles, even in 2021, white Western biases still prevail. The question of whom we remember and whom we don’t, like drawing, remains central to Lee’s multimedia practice, as does his desire to forge intergenerational connections.

The artist employs drawing as both a tool of appropriation and an embodiment of loss. His meticulous reproductions of artworks, documents, photographs, and objects limn not just his subject’s individual contributions to queer art and activism, but how their stories intersect with others across time and place. Such yoking reveals the archive’s potential to bring people together in a utopian vision of community that José Esteban Muñoz deemed “queer futurity.” In the conversation that follows, Lee shares how growing up in the generation after AIDs, in a South Korea entrenched in homophobia, influenced his work, helping him find in the archive the possibility of activism and belonging.

https://foundwork.art/dialogues/kang-seung-lee

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My Afterword for "Tension: Rupture" (Tupelo Press, 2021), a book coupling paintings by Michael Haight with poems by Cutter Streeby

EXCERPT: “how memory : the flesh of our world : unravels”

Michael Haight’s series, Alcoholic Crepuscules, 2017-2021, features fluid, dissolving figures in space that map the physical and emotional terrain of youth. Rendered in watercolor, tempera, and gouache, the scenes he limns recall his coming of age in the streets of California’s Inland Empire where sunsets and drinking go hand in hand. 

A fancy word for twilight, crepusucle - as Haight reminds me - can refer to sunrise as well as sunset, to the golden hour and the blue hour. Not surprisingly, yellow and blue figure prominently in his surburban landscapes, and the houses, curbs, and yards he depicts where he and his friends drank. These places have the shapeshifting contours of daydreams and nightmares alike, and while some are based on photographs, they are like palimpsests seen through the shimmer of memory. 

The figures that inhabit them have the essence of vapor too, dissolving and forming in response to their environments, and reflecting the transience of their re-membering. The story they tell is one of wild abandon, an adolescent rite of passage familiar to so many, rife with the giddy pleasures of boozing it up, of garrulous insights and outsized gestures. Their hyperbolic, mythic sense of communion is paradoxically sacred and false. These drunken moments are wanly expressed throughout, tinged with the anticipation of what will almost inevitably follow: that ugly reckoning of self with self that can no longer be forestalled by a seemingly endless night. This dissolution is amplified by the wobbly beer can towers his figures build, and the cars they turn into impromptu clubs, none of which were built to last. 

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My Bookforum Review of Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography (SKIRA/Jack Shainman Gallery)

EXCERPT: In one of the last interviews he did, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) chafed at the presumption that identity politics was central to his work: “Anything a black person does in terms of the ‘figure’ is put into a ‘political’ category. Let’s not fall into that stupid racial quicksand.” Skira’s five-volume survey of Hendricks’s work, copublished with Jack Shainman Gallery, seems designed to correct that limited view. Each installment is focused on a different part of his multivalent practice: works on paper, landscape paintings, basketball. The penultimate volume, BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: PHOTOGRAPHY (SKIRA/Jack Shainman Gallery, $25), highlights subjects and media long eclipsed by the Black Power–era portraits Hendricks is famous for. His full-length realist paintings of mostly Black figures set against monochromatic backgrounds are celebrated for their sartorial swagger. But between 1984 and 2002, the artist stopped making these works. Instead, as these books bring to the fore, his output was dominated by other equally compelling interests, which the photography installment beautifully conveys.

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2803/the-season-s-outstanding-art-books-24606

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My Catalogue Essay for the group show, "Mirror, Mirror", at Nathalie Karg featuring Whitney Hubbs, Tommy Kha, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Illona Swarc

INTRO: The primacy of self-presentation as self-creation has become a hallmark of our social media age where selfies reign supreme. To be seen, literally and figuratively (“I see you”), is not only confirmation of one’s existence and value, but a necessary performance of self that must be staged again and again. Smartphone technology amplifies this endless loop of narcissism, cultivating an objectified, idealized, branded self that is now de rigueur. From pop stars to the pope, no one escapes the look-at-me pull of the selfie as they mug and preen behind the length of an arm for fans and followers. 

Designed for public circulation rather than private consumption, the selfie can be distinguished from the art historical tradition of self-portraiture where searching the depths of one’s reflection was a reckoning above all with time and character. Yet its impact on contemporary photographers can be felt in the work of Whitney Hubbs, Tommy Kha, Ilona Szwarc, and Paul Sepuya, who negate, expose, and subvert its narcissistic gaze. Invoking the Greek superstition that it was unlucky or even fatal to see one’s own reflection, from which the myth of Narcissus arose, these artists above all employ evasion, surrogacy, and confusion to serve anything but face. Instead, identity is conjured as a slippery, troubling, mnemonic experience as unreliable as the photographic medium that would try and fasten it. Its flimsy construction is revealed for the viewer through mirrors, flash-wash, cut-outs, studio props, and interlocutors who question the very idea of a self-portrait. 

https://nathaliekarg.com/exhibitions/25-mirror-mirror-whitney-hubbs-tommy-kha-paul-mpagi-sepuya-ilona/press_release_text/

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My BOMB Magazine Interview with Abigail Deville on her Pioneer Works installation

INTRO: New Materialism, Afrofuturism, and revisionist history are all radical forms of agency and authorship that allow artists to reconceive truth beyond the binary of “fact” and “fiction.” Abigail DeVille brilliantly engages all three, working in the interface of matter and metaphysics, fantasy and archive, the canonical and the heretical. Excavating what she calls the “invisible histories” buried by racism, neglect, and greed, her architectonic assemblages explore various sites through materials salvaged from archives and dumpsters alike. Ongoing themes in her work include the legacy of slavery in communities of color, patterns of cultural migration and gentrification, the rhetorical power of historical monuments, and the aesthetics of “yard art.” In her current exhibition at Pioneer Works (part of the three-person show Brand New Heavies), these themes are manifest through the potent symbol of the US Capitol Building, which was attacked earlier this year by anti-democratic forces.

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/fault-lines-abigail-deville-interviewed/

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I'm moderating a panel on soft sculpture for SOHO HOUSE

Date: Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Time: 6:30pm

Title: Soft Bodies
Panel Guests: Ryan Wilde, Rose Nestler, Joy Curtis
Moderator: Jane Ursula Harris

Please join us on Wednesday, June 2 at Ludlow House for “Soft Bodies,” an artist panel moderated by Jane Ursula Harris. Artists Ryan Wilde, Rose Nestler and Joy Curtis discuss their individual takes on soft sculpture and the vulnerability of working with a gendered media; how the ephemeral and social connotations of textiles affect their practices; how soft sculpture relates to the body; and how they came to work in this unusual form of sculpture that is gaining widespread recognition and newfound appreciation.

Ryan Wilde (b. 1980) is a New York City-based visual artist whose practice is informed by and
an extension of her career in millinery. Wilde received a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from Queens College. Wilde is represented by Harper’s and will mount a solo exhibition at Harper’s Chelsea in June 2021. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Harper’s, East Hampton (2021); Hesse Flatow, New York (2021); RUSCHMAN, Chicago, IL (2021); EXPO Chicago, online (2021); and Deanna Evans Projects, Brooklyn (2019). Her work as both artist and designer has been featured in ArtMaze, The Cut, and Forbes, among other publications. Wilde will present her first solo exhibition at Harper’s Chelsea, opening on June 10, 2021.

Rose Nestler (b. 1983 in Spokane, WA, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College. Nestler has exhibited in the United States and internationally, including exhibitions at König Galerie (Berlin, GER), Projet Pangeé (Montreal, QC), Public Gallery (London, UK), Fisher Parrish (Brooklyn), Thierry Goldberg (New York, NY) and BRIC (Brooklyn). Her work was curated in a two-person show at Spring/Break in 2019 and she was a Lighthouse Works Fellow in 2018. She will be an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2022. Upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Public Gallery (London, UK) in 2021 and at Mrs. Gallery (NY, USA) in 2022. Her work has been featured and reviewed in Juxtapoz, Vulture, Maake, and Metal Magazine.

Joy Curtis (b. Valparaiso, IN) received her MFA in sculpture from Ohio University in 2002 and, since then, has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY. In 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at Stoneleaf Retreat. She is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, NY, where she has had 5 solo shows. Recent exhibitions include: With Every Fiber, Pelham Art Center; Cult of the Crimson Queen, Ceysson and Bénétière; Found Outside at the Aldrich Museum (CT); Weight Over Time, T.S.A (Brooklyn); The Working Title, The Bronx River Art Center; Tensile Strength, ZieherSmith; Object ‘Hood, Leslie Heller; Eternal Return, Nurture Art; The Finishers, The Wassaic Project (NY); and Greater Brooklyn, CRG. Curtis is the recipient of fellowships from Socrates Sculpture Park and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, and Saatchi Online, and featured on Gorky’s Granddaughter and James Kalm’s Rough Cut video blogs.

Jane Ursula Harris is a Brooklyn-based writer who has contributed to Artforum,Art in America, Bookforum, BOMB, Cultured Magazine, The Paris Review, Flash Art, Frieze, The Believer, GARAGE, and the Village Voice, among other publications. Her essays appear in catalogues including Carnegie Mellon’s forthcoming Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth; Participant Inc.'s NegroGothic: M. Lamar; Hatje Cantz's Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability; Kerber Verlag’s Marc Lüders: The East Side Gallery; Phaidon’s Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon’s Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting; Universe-Rizzoli’s Curve: The Female Nude Now; and Twin Palms' Anthony Goicolea. Harris curates on a freelance basis, and is an art history faculty member at the School of Visual Arts.

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I wrote about Laura Aguilar for Frieze Magazine

https://www.frieze.com/article/laura-aguilar-show-and-tell-2021-review

EXCERPT: Laura Aguilar – who died in 2018 at the age of 59 – was a lesbian, working-class, Chicanx artist who, in Sybil Venegas’s essay ‘Connected to the Land’ (2018), is quoted saying that she ‘grew up on the edge of nothingness’ in California’s South San Gabriel Valley. Struggles with auditory dyslexia – a disability that went undiagnosed – and the death of her beloved grandmother marked her early years with a profound sense of isolation and self-loathing: ‘For as long as I can remember,’ the photographer darkly recalled in her video, The Body 2 (1995), ‘I have always thought I should be dead.’ Clinical depression and an increase in body weight followed – issues that helped fuel a decades-long practice, rooted in the politics of self-love, which has only in recent years received its due attention.

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My feature interview - "Against Passive Seeing" - with Shaun Leonardo for Flash Art

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EXCERPT: Exploring issues of race and masculinity, Shaun Leonardo’s multimedia practice exposes and redresses the white supremacist power structures that oppress and violate Black and brown bodies. In visual and performance works alike, the artist foregoes the trauma porn that has long shaped such subjects, employing conflict resolution, dialogue, and empathy instead.

Whether bringing together people with opposing views on gun control (Primitive Games, 2018), conducting self-defense workshops (I Can’t Breathe, 2014–17), or acting as lead educator for an artist-led program for court-involved youth (Recess, 2017–ongoing), his commitment to community activism and outreach has been widely acclaimed. https://flash---art.com/article/shaun-leonardo/

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