Newest Features
By THOMAS MARQUET #15: Thomas Marquet’s comic strip about life in a gallery. “The White Cube” comics can be read in series in the Big RED & Shiny Collections section. 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.
By MATTHEW GAMBER Dear March, Spring Break is over, and is time to call the IT guy to change the clock on my computer because I have been living one hour behind everyone else. On the web, I am effectively in Indiana, or parts of it, anyway. Oh yes, and this is our 3rd issue for you this month, bringing the number up to 60. No volumes to account, just a serial, virtual stack of back issues that might reach up to your knees if you printed them page by page (Anyone…
By CHARLES GIULIANO “The show ends this Sunday at 5 pm,” Rachel Perry Welty said as we sat recently for a beer and burger. She was referring to her installation as one of four finalists for the ICA’s Foster Prize for a Boston based artist. “We start to deinstall at 5:01 to make way for a Louise Bourgeois exhibition.” We were discussing the impact of participating in the opening of the new Institute of Contemporary Art which has evoked massive media coverage. While of course she is disappointed not to have won…
By JASON DEAN Approaching the museum from 5th avenue I could see people already lined up across the street, against the wall, facing the MoMA entrance. There was a pretzel vender on the sidewalk, listening to the radio and I thought That must be audio for the piece, until the commercials kicked in. Instead, the city was the soundtrack and at certain points it fit perfectly. I was happy to take my headphones off for once and pay attention to the honking cabs and to the radio on the pretzel cart, it…
By JENNIFER MCMACKON A late afternoon light sifts through a grid of east facing windows revealing the warehouse studio of Carlo Cesta to be a room full of metals. All the utilitarian, shades of silver and grey, iron and aluminum find representation in this space. Ubiquitous overhead vents, sprinkler pipes and clunky, floor hugging radiators go with the territory of a light industrial studio. An assortment of blackened metal jigs strewn on a work table, and a bucket of bending rods down below suggest the industry goes far beyond the architecture. Because…
By STEVE AISHMAN So, I’m at SunTek Chung’s opening @ Samson Projects and I meet this guy. “Where are you from?” I ask him. “Well, I was born in California, but I don’t remember it. I went to high school in Maine, but I usually say I’m from New Orleans even though I only lived there a year …” Midway through not listening to him, realized that I had not asked him a question about a location, I had inadvertently asked him a question about how he defined himself. Apparently, if you…
By BEN SLOAT In the tradition of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Roger Ballen uses the square format black and white photograph to display the provocative trappings of human theater in heightened environments. Body parts, wire lines, animals, crusty walls enter Ballen’s frame in a seemingly endless progression of organized surreality. Formally, the photographs retain the mark making and texture of drawings with the startle and confrontation of flash photography. Ballen’s subjects are impoverished white South Africans in gritty locations assumed to be native to their conditions. Born in New York City and trained…
By JED SPEARE It has been noted here in past pages by Natalie Loveless that a regeneration of performance art is taking place in Boston. Artists and organizers such as Test Performance Art Event and The Present Tense formed their own collective entities and have been producing events in Boston for the past three years. Contaminate II, a festival featuring 16 artists, held at the unfinished “café” space of the redeveloped, post-industrial Midway Studios, March 9th and 10th, was such a joint venture. Their productions must be welcomed and attended given the…