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“There is both capricious absurdity and poetic impossibility in the realm of the unconscious lapses of time that constitute dreams.”[1] -Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons While I reflect upon the indeterminacy of global political conditions, I continue to be buoyed by the power and agency of collective action. Two such examples of building community with fellow artists, thinkers, curators, writers, and scholars have materialized for me in the form of work by The Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Faculty Seminar, and the #BlackGirlLit: Between Literature, Performance and Memory performance art series. Founded…
Majas, cambujas y virreinacas by Alida Cervantes, currently on view at the Mills Gallery and curated by Candice Ivy, presents a series of works which integrate Mexico’s racially and socially charged colonial past with personal experiences and investigations of the complexities of crossing borders. The works in the exhibition are a continuation of Cervantes’s former body of work that explored the interracial tension of racial classification demonstrated in casta paintings created in the 18th century in Mexico (designed to keep the white people in power). Her first solo exhibition in the East…
Masculinity and social isolation is a topic of current debate and much speculation. From militias to communities of Internet trolls, American men are forming social ties through aggression, violence, and misogyny. Artist Kenneth Tam’s video Breakfast in Bed (2016), recently on view at the MIT List Visual Art Center, is an offbeat counterpoint. For his video, Tam created a fictitious men’s social club composed of paid participants he recruited over the Internet, and who he loosely directed to perform a series of actions that exist somewhere between team-building exercises, improv, and games.…
Evelyn Rydz’s Floating Artifacts, at the Aidekman Arts Center, is presented as a part of SMFA’s larger project, The Ocean After Nature, which examines the human effects on the ocean. Rydz’s collecting, cataloging, and display of the “floating artifacts” is an ongoing process in which our collective fascination with the open water and our tangled relationship with it is explored. Upon entering the space, visitors are greeted by a clothesline hang of photographs adorning walls—all the same size, containing the same subject matter—while a freestanding wall displays videos across three screens. There…
Suggested for You, the third exhibition curated and organized by localhost, is hosted on the video game platform Minecraft—a game devoted to crafting, building, and rebuilding. The game, which allows users to create entire virtual worlds, transmits the gallery experience and the work contained within using a computer rendered gallery space with white walls, cement flooring, and even a front desk. One navigates the game space from a first-person perspective, using the keyboard and mouse to direct the camera and movement of the player character’s avatar. Though existing entirely online, Suggested for…
Ian Solaski is a graduating senior at the Studio for Interrelated Media at MassArt. I was first exposed to his work as his professor. This encounter was intense; he was developing a performance in which he violently translated the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting that happened in 2013 in his hometown. In the performance, Solaski used his body to clear out a classroom full of chairs, charging and jumping towards the furniture in what seemed as a choreographed self-mutilation exercise that transcended the voyeuristic role of the spectator into a meditative reflexion on…
At first glance, The Split, curated by Amanda Schmitt, feels schizophrenic. The works span media from video to drawing, painting, sound, and sculpture and a diagonal wall physically extenuates the mental dissonance. At first, it is very tempting to read the wall as the split after which the exhibition is titled and to try and find a pattern as to which works belong on which side. But as guest curator, Schmitt reassures in her curatorial statement that the divide is much deeper than it first appears. On the gallery’s desk is a…
Stills from Pierre Huyghe’s 19-minute video, Untitled (Human Mask) have haunted me since its 2014 debut. The image of the ghostly porcelain face touched ever so gently by the impish hairy hand has appeared and reappeared before me in magazines and book covers. So it was with great anticipation that I entered the Bell Gallery through dark, unwelcoming curtains. Entering the gallery, the sensation of near complete darkness was overwhelming, save for the gallery attendant’s lone desk lamp and the dim outline of the suspended screen. Slowly making my way toward the…