Alexander Castro is a freelance writer and journalist based in the Providence/Boston area. His writing has appeared in Big Red & Shiny, Newport Mercury and Art New England. He won First Place in the ‘Arts Review or Criticism’ category at the 2015 Rhode Island Press Association Editorial Awards.
Anna Kunz’s Venus harbors classical ambitions—not only in its name’s obvious mythological reference but in its sweeping aspirations toward spatial, painterly beauty. It was apropos then that during my visit to…
Corridors can be odd spaces in museums, heavily trafficked but not always experienced. Art mounted in these passages can feel like an afterthought. This was not the case with Caleb…
A green, furry fiend lingers in the center of A Brief Case, one of Stuart Diamond’s latest paintings. Behind this Grinch-like ghoul, the scales of justice teeter on an elephant…
Providence artist Allison Paschke can be disobedient in museums. Sometimes, she’ll find a sculpture or object irresistible, and smooth her hand carefully over its surface. In her latest exhibit at…
In One Makes an Instrument of Themselves, and is Estranged Also, collaborators Mimi Cabell and Lindsay Foster probe the “the commercialized self, the marketized private life.” As today’s corporate landscape…
Taylor Clough’s Is, And of The at Occam Projects features an assortment of paintings on canvas and paper, absorbingly and tauntingly saturated. Clough painted people as an undergrad, but her…
Pregnancy and parenting can create serious changes to an artist’s process. As installation maestro Sarah Sze elaborated on a 2012 exhibit in London: “The pieces in this show appear to…
Jessica Deane Rosner can’t discuss the inspiration for her latest exhibit. It might suffice to say that, last September, she experienced a terrible and life-changing event. It forced Rosner to…
A hole can be a portal, a passageway, a point of penetration, an injury, an orifice, a site of leakage. The holes in Linda Leslie Brown’s latest exhibit take the…
“Subtle, persistent revolt” is how GRIN owners and curators Corey Oberlander and Lindsey Stapleton describe their latest exhibit, Besides, on view through February 13. This succinct phrasing suggests small-but-continuous acts…
Paper is the surface, the substrate, the thing acted upon. It buckles (sometimes literally) under the weight of an artist’s wishes, absorbing paint, water, ink, paste. Though it groans with…
Pills are talismans. They are tiny, portable and therapeutic, secular-but-sorcerous objects whose enchantments are swiftly and secretly invoked. Psychoanalyst Ernest Becker wrote, “Pills and pellets are forms of fetishes, ways…