EUTOPIA

Buster Graybill

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buster graybill "informalism"

Buster Graybill
Informalism
Street Gallery, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art [link]
May 25 – September 8, 2018

Informalism presents an informed aesthetic of a rural American vernacular embracing high-brow aesthetics through populist materials and actions. Grounded by the Lawn Chair Strapping paintings, a further look reveals requisite playfulness of a sculpture created from brightly colored arrows buried deep into a dense foam mass. Calmly posed clay trap thrower becomes a mischievous drawing implement leaving random marks on a canvas and broken pigeons across the floor. An exhaust system becomes an abstracted form referencing truck culture. With this contextualization, Graybill transcends sentimentality, proffering honest visual references to working-class objects mediated through theories of Minimalism and Pop Art.

~ Jake Weigel
images courtesy of Teri Mumm at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

 

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Chim↑Pom

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photo courtesy of Dallas Contemporary, by Kevin Todora

Chim↑Pom
Non-Burnable
as part of INVISIBLE CITIES: Moving Images from Asia
Dallas Contemporary, Dallas [link]
Sept. 29 – Dec. 17, 2017

The prayers of well-wishing citizens are sent to Hiroshima in the form of thousands of pounds of colorful origami cranes. In a transmutation from cultural meme to sacred rubbish the totems are classified as “non-burnable” trash. This semantic redefinition of folded paper formalizes a social contract wherein sympathetic gestures eclipse the value of environmental or infrastructure concerns, converting social consideration into a societal burden: an ever-expanding archive of care. Maintained by the state, the trash-chive converts morally beneficent acts into sanctioned eco-terrorism, conflating objecthood with fulfillment of a sympathetic ritual.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Dallas Contemporary, by Kevin Todorra and the author  

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Iva Kinnaird

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Iva Kinnaird

Iva Kinnaird “Broke, Please Advise” 2018 _ Walmart shopping cart, bricks

 

Iva Kinnaird
A Two Page Paper on Impasse
The Reading Room, Dallas [link]
February 17 – March 24, 2018

Employing absurdist humor, Kinnaird’s exhibition riffs on Camus’ Sisyphus myth. Although many artists experience existential crises in the search for validation and meaning in their work, the timeliness of Kinnaird’s exhibit in context with the past 1year46days0hours44minutes36seconds resonates with a strong Barthesian punctum. The collapsed shopping cart of bricks and the grad-school dartboard reference the despair facing artists mired in mountains of art-school debt combined with the current bleak political culture. Using the metaphor of play, Kinnaird’s “games” provide diversion, while simultaneously pinpointing the futility of said gestures. Yet Camus’ ultimate message is about revolt. And we only have 1049days8hours26minutes24seconds left.

~ Colette Copeland
photos courtesy of the Reading Room, by Kevin Todora

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Numen/For Use

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Numen/For Use "Tape Tokyo 02" @ 2121 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use “Tape Tokyo 02” @ 21_21 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use
Tape Tokyo 02
Grand Projects—How Far Will You Go?
21_21 Design Sight,
→
GRAND PROJECTS: HOW FAR WILL YOU GO?
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
by Exhibition Director, Naoko Aono
Tokyo, Japan [link]

Tethered and taught, 21,120 meters of tape stretch into a translucent organ, squeaking and groaning as squirming, curious museum goers crawl through its aortal expanses. Choosing populist excess –cheap tape and labor instead of high-end fabrication— allows patrons near familiarity, prompting magical wonder at the common’s transformative ability. Inside the womb, externalities of sight and sound muted, the individual is left to entertain the alien familiarity of an organic space, or retreat from such existentialism to our digital umbilicus as experiential intermediary. Externally, the blurred shadow’s peristaltic migration is regarded, jealously, as the latest morsel consuming a novelty.

~ Ryder Richards
all images by the author

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Paper into Sculpture

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Paper into Sculpture
curated by Catherine Craft
The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

The digital has emerged as the primary material for communication, replacing paper. Works featured in this exhibition engage paper’s historical links to systems of knowledge and its material (im)possibilities in intimate and epic works that render the invisible: time, space, and cycles of decay. The sacro-profane nature of paper is conceptualized from maps and scrolls to shredded, torn, and crumpled refuse. Franz West’s Sisyphos IX, 2002 confounds, as paper’s fragility is recast as an enduring mass. In Noriko Ambe’s Inner Water, an intricately cut wave unfurls, like pages, in a glacier-slow persistence of vision. In Marco Maggi’s Global Myopia, an encrypted topography of tiny, cut particulates is a metaphor for more is less in the information age.

~ Sara Cardona
images by Ryder Richards

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Annie Vought

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Annie Vought
a sketchy outline
Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, California [link]
August 12 – September 30, 2017

Annie Vought offers a fresh approach to papercutting traditions without compromising personal sensibilities. Further achieved through repurposed paper from her father’s sketchbooks and written letters, Vought generates a new vernacular and stream-of-conscious poetics decipherable for only brief moments in time. Intimacy exists in scale and clandestine conversations started by the artist, as whispers of thoughts and barely existing with more negative space than physical paper. Lacking words altogether in several pieces, these contain non-verbal communication as dynamic rhythms attempting to convey messages where Vought reveals the futility of complete comprehension in language through playful gesture and serious investigation.

– Jake Weigel
images courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery 

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