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BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE @ BROOKLYN MUSUEM By Kate Laurel Burgess Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art is an encyclopedic exhibition that defines feminist art to those who are already familiar with its definition, but falls short for those who have not studied the context of the featured works. Those looking to gain a visual definition of the term need look no further. Burning Down the House looks like a chapter from an art history textbook; over 40 works fill…
NATURE THEATER @ THE ICA By Chelsey Philpot Do not go see Nature Theater of Oklahoma expecting to see a performance about trees. In fact, do not go to one of their shows anticipating a night of pure dance, theater or comedy; the act is not that simple. What does the Nature Theater of Oklahoma actually do? After seeing them perform for the first time at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), I’m still not sure. What I do know is that what they are doing is like nothing I have seen…
MISAKI KAWAI @ LAMONTAGNE GALLERY By David O. Avruch The paintings, sculptures and collages of “Kung Fu Forest,” Misaki Kawai’s current show at the LaMontagne Gallery, are simultaneously awesome and awkward, simplistic and compelling, endearing and inscrutable. Despite its insanely bright acrylic palette and undertones of violence, the show manages to be adorable, a testament to Kawai’s trademark ability to infuse everything she creates with pure levity. As genderless humanoids and anthropomorphized forest creatures populate a variety of quasi-narrative situations, mostly to comic effect, Kawai’s eye for detail adds texture and balance…
DEBORAH WING-SPROUL & LING-WEN TSAI @ SPACE By Elena Sarni There were no discernable signs of the country’s economic crisis among the crowded, music-filled streets of Portland, ME during this month’s First Friday Art Walk. My destination was SPACE, an alternative gallery that in its own words “presents contemporary, emerging and unconventional arts, artists and ideas.” The video performance exhibition One/Another definitely fits the unconventional bill. It is the product of a collaboration between Deborah Wing-Sproul and Taiwan born Ling-Wen Tsai, part of the international exhibition series: Here, There and Everywhere, Anticipating the…
“THE WHITE CUBE” By Thomas Marquet #45: He’s like the Yakov Smirnoff of the framing industry. Thomas Marquet is a cartoonist, sculptor, and critic, based in Brooklyn, New York, which is an admittedly unoriginal place to be pursuing any of these things. Get The White Cube every day at Tom’s blog.
ARTISTS & WRITERS; CANARIES By Judy Kermis Blotnick In his book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink predicts that the future will belong to the right-brained. His research shows that the people who have run the world of business and finance, of technology and medicine have made tremendous strides in improving life on the planet but it is those very accomplishments that have brought us up against a brick wall now. In order to continue evolving, to jumpstart the flaccid economy, the burden now falls on the shoulders of the intuitive thinkers,…
A REPORT FROM THE PHANTOM ZONE By Steve Aishman “In a creative argument both parties are more interested in finding the truth or solving the problem than in being right. ” Michael A. Gilbert In philosophy, an argument is a claim that is backed by reason and should be sharply contrasted against a fight. A fight is a struggle for dominance and actually has more to do with power/ego relationships while an argument is concerned more with the creative development of ideas. When entering into a dialog, some people confuse an argument with…
BRUCE CONKLE & MARNE LUCAS @ ART GYM, MARYLHURST, OR By Micah J. Malone In Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas’s exhibition, “Warlord Sun Kind: The Genesis of Eco-Baroque”, the artists have evoked the similarities between the natural world and the Baroque era of King Louis XIV of France and “the culture of decadence and hubris that flourished under his rule” as writer and artist Ryan Pierce noted in the catalog essay. The juxtapositions are strikingly humorous as photographs of “Burl forests” are presented in competition with the excesses of King Louis XIV. Indeed,…