Review

April 21, 2015, 8:59am

JD Banke’s Live Wire: Peasant Dreams at Glass Box Gallery

When I went to see JD Banke’s Peasant Dreams, the paintings were in the middle of a photo shoot. Lighting apparatuses and tripod stands loitered around Glass Box Gallery’s small, jigsawed-together spaces, the artwork’s real-life interrupting its day job of just hanging out. The photographers politely tried to move aside in a space with little room to move, but they didn’t need to; I liked it this way. The comingling of the utilitarian things with the art-things created the best possible space for hearing the most vocal part of Banke’s work—a persistent, self-assured pronouncement of being alive. — Erin Langner, Seattle contributor


JD Banke | Peasant Dreams, 2015, Glass Box Gallery. Photo credit: Tyler Coray.

Listed under: Review

April 17, 2015, 8:39am

Angel Otero: The Scarlet Self

There are entire worlds—entire existences—suspended within there, floating up to gazes which have been detached long enough—or ran down, heaving and glassy eyed, caned and fatigued—to pick up on such things, looming forms ascending like the prophetic pyramid out of the cuttlefish-ink abyssal  underbelly of an 8-ball, rising and falling and materializing out of the blood brume; there are entire continents, cream continents adrift in an angry sea of cadmium, a granular expanse—as if someone chunked up a block of anatomist's arterial wax, dumped it into a pneumatic cannon, and proceeded to broadside raw canvas—ripe for pareidolia. Their borders are fringed, cloudy, a particulate demarcation of crimson gnats, and that fuzz is really what the fuss is all about, an adroit—if blatant, once one sees it—analogue to the fungible nature of perception, memory, and self; there are images contained within the blood brumes, although it is only by the grace of Angel Otero's exposition that we are privy to this, as they have been translated, riven, reconstituted, and then pressed—like a witch!—into their current, beautifully abused form; these were photographs once, the ultimate form of mimesis, until a triturator has placed his hands upon them, riven them, splayed them…and look at the bloody, powdery mess made of ipseity now!  – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor


Angel Otero | I am the place I come back to, 2015, silicone and cadmium pigment on canvas, 96 x 120 x 2 inches. Photo courtesy of Kavi Gupta.

Listed under: Review

April 06, 2015, 10:13am

John Sabraw: Pulchritude from Pollution

There's these streams, these, like … death streams, running all along the hollers and open wounds and scars and deep, dark hills of southeastern Ohio, like in Athens county or Crooksville, Sunday Creek country, these fucking chameleon streams, born crystal virgin pure—a hideous faux-virginity! pure fatality, no other kind of purity suspended in there!—and eventually, running along like Leiningen's ants or pyroclastic flows or Kali, in that dread, beautiful motion, which sweeps life away, they eventually begin blooming into this fabulous reddish-orange, the color of rafflesia petals, and running along with nothing but gravity and iron and sulfuric acid in it, no aquatic life at all. This ichor flows all along the hills, perfectly beautiful and perfectly deadly, a conflation of the earth and the vicious byproducts we left when we entered the earth, gross seeping wounds we didn't bother to cauterize or seal properly when they stopped sustaining us, when the black precious coal could no longer be found, when blood from a stone no longer made economic sense, and after we left the earth cut open, vivisected and scooped out, it sat still and decided to slowly poison us, poison the fish and crawdads and deer, in vengeful retribution. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor


John Sabraw | Arco, 2015, oil on canvas, 96 x 62 inches, Photos courtesy of Thomas McCormick Gallery

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March 30, 2015, 9:01am

Play, Shuffle, Repeat: Annelie McKenzie at CB1

Painting, perhaps more than any other medium, has existed as a site for reconciling the systemic biases of art history, of which a large percentage are encapsulated in painting's own history. Painting has historically referenced previous imagery – subjects of the Renaissance were aesthetic updates to earlier depictions of the myths of the Bible and ancient Greco-Roman cultures found in past sculpture, frescoes, mosaics, manuscripts, textiles, etc. Subsequent derivative idioms, such as the master's copy and homage, have lineages stretching back long before anything could have even been labeled pre-modern. Neoclassicism was an agenda-based, aesthetic do-over by definition; Modernism's brief, valiant attempt at creating a future caught its breath in the late 20th century and painting began, again, to eloquently engage in a conversation with itself about itself. Although in contemporary art this is not unique to any one medium, there is enough cultural resonance specific to painting that it justifies the reflexive nature of artists continuing to investigate its unique position in history. – Jason Ramos, Los Angeles Contributor


Annelie McKenzie, The Enthusiast. Exhibition installation images courtesy of CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles.

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March 18, 2015, 9:03am

Visualizing the Uncanny: Scott Anderson

Sitting huddled around an electric space heater in Scott Anderson’s (NAP #35, #53) studio located in the rural township of La Cienega–about 20 minutes south of Santa Fe–he confessed, “I had these aspirations to be in New Mexico even before I had ever been to New Mexico. My wife and I had this 10 year plan to eventually get to Santa Fe, and drop off the face of the earth–or at least we thought so.” On a day in early March, New Mexico had just seen record snowfall for the year and my drive north from Albuquerque was punctuated with unusually grey skies and the vague threat of new precipitation. Anderson preempted my visit, warning that his enormous studio–originally built to accommodate the large sculptural works fabricated by the building’s previous occupant–would be slow to warm up. – Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor


Scott Anderson | Foyer, 2013, oil on canvas, 60 x 75 inches; image courtesy the artist

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March 17, 2015, 12:13pm

Death Rattle: Philip von Zweck

It's the end of the world, Ragnarok, the apocalypse, and it's coming … well, erratically, in fits and bursts, dives, dips, Archimedean spiraling and humming all the while, fitfully humming, aggravated and unabated, zzzzzzzz the score to the very end, death born upon a cello string … death!, thousand eyed, six-legged, sword-endowed, floccose sickly-sweet smelling death in the personage of a honey bee, listing to one side like the Costa Concordia, vascular window pane wings over its corpse like a widow's umbrella, the victim of colony collapse disorder, laid low by a syndrome we do not understand, a fatal flaw in its system—maybe some sort of inherent vice?—or something wrought by our own machinations, with the little fellow ending up dead regardless; the flowers and crops and agrarian economies wilt, and the apocalypse comes banded black and yellow, apian entropy. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor


Philip von Zweck | Dead Bee, 2015, acrylic and oil on canvas, 9x 11 inches. Photo courtesy of Michelle Harris

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February 26, 2015, 7:39am

Joy of Flighty: Rebecca Shore at Corbett vs Dempsey

Now here is a piece of art with a burlesque sensibility: Rebecca Shore's 20, whose Cambridge blue undercarriage, gartered in a lascivious claret, is thrust out to the viewer in come-hither sharp angles with a celerity that implies confidence and a bit of coquettish teasing rather than desperation—note that this brazen display of usually subdued dimensions will not be readily apparent if one comes up off the stairs into Corbett vs Dempsey running along the wall whisker-bound like a house mouse; abstract art favors the brave—and invites the viewer up its ascending staircase—a second set of stairs!—into an exhibition comprised of familiar motifs and vibes and colors and sensations predominantly sans any mimetic analog, which, yes, abstract art is meant to do, albeit not always so adroitly. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor


Rebecca Shore | 20, 2014, acrylic on linen on panel, 14 x 16 inches. Photo by Tom Van Eynde, courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey

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February 19, 2015, 9:10am

Frozen Time: Rebecca Bird’s “Niagara Falls” at Kopeikin Gallery

Rebecca Bird’s painting show “Niagara Falls” at Kopeikin Gallery is compelling and beautiful. The show features a mix of delicate watercolors on paper and equally fragile acrylics and oils on wood. Something about the balance between the very subtle nature of her works combined with the hard, angular movements within her details compelled me to contemplate and wonder. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor


Rebecca Bird | Double Niagara, 2014, Watercolor on paper, 12 x 16. Photo Courtesy of artist and Kopeikin Gallery.

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February 16, 2015, 9:22am

Better than the Beyond: Bed Bath & Between at SOIL Gallery

When I think of a Bed Bath & Beyond store, all I can see are things: things lining the walls, filling the floor space, packed onto shelves, coating the store in all forms of home goods. The section filled with informercial gadgets is my favorite, for the way it makes real the items that seem particularly made up, giving the store a mildly utopic element: here, you can buy bizarre, useless things that are supposed to only live on TV. When Seattle artists Julie Alexander, Nicholas Nyland and Matthew Offenbacher announced they were curating a group show, called Bed Bath & Between, at Seattle’s SOIL Gallery, it was hard to know what to expect, given the store reference. And, what would be the outcome of changing the “beyond” into the “between?” - Erin Langner, Seattle contributor


Installation view, including work by Julie Alexander, Maria Britton, and Nicholas Nyland. Wallpapers by Julie Alexander, Nicholas Nyland and Matthew Offenbacher. Photo by Julie Alexander.

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February 04, 2015, 11:09am

Insert Here

Ugh, fuck, can you … can you feel that? That!, right there, that sensation in the auditory canal, the Eustachian tube, curving down along the jaw line, there is something in there … psychosomatic, right? A slight pressure, a loss of hearing—like water in your ear, or an underground platform right before the train arrives—which compresses and builds, and something is most definitely working its way inside, inside where it does not belong. The moth. Ugh, the moth! Wings folded flat, branched rachni of the antenna slicked back, its whole furry body, so stupidly erratic in flight, now looking determined, sinister, a penetrative medical instrument leaving scale-flecked cerumen in its wake … it could unfurl that proboscis and touch tympanic membrane, could keep forever crawling forward and assault the fleshy nautilus of the cochlea, could cause such unthinkable damage, right?, this harmless little moth, by virtue of its position, by its complete and utter disregard for our great corporeal agreement with the world, namely that we—our precious selves, our physical selves, our prosopopoeia with which we acquire tactile knowledge of existence and so satisfyingly, concretely exert ourselves upon it—is entered into only through our consent. To find one's self—literally, one's very self—entered in any other way, to be invaded, is just … wrong. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor


Vesna Jovanovic | Moth, 2013, ink and graphite on polypropylene, 80 x 60 inches. 
Photo courtesy of the artist and Packer Schopf Gallery.

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