EUTOPIA

Calum Craik

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Calum Craik "Leisure"

Calum Craik “Leisure”

Calum Craik
Leisure [2013]
Space Blanket, bowling ball, image of Californian swimming pool, steel
Sextant, curated by Marco Antonini
Nurture Art, Brooklyn [link]

A cartography of sociologic desire, Craik’s ludicrous simulacra 1earth floats in orbit around a radiant golden mountain2: mythic wealth manifested as hollow skin3 4 5. The heavy hobbyist planet eclipses an idealized cliché of personal oceans, darkening the American dream6. The game sphere condescending to a postcard attenuates an episteme of juvenile vapidity, shallowness a parody of nihilism.7.

Leisure indeed: the surreal map8, a nouveau fabled teleology9  10, amplifies labor for the consumer: discernment is a cultural effort11 12. The key/legend is a vague context pointing at content,13 inferring vast social aptitude only attainable through swaths of leisure labor14.

~Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Nurture Art

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Ryder Richards

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RRichards_final hoodie

Ryder Richards “Shield:Defense” kevlar hoodie [2015]

Ryder Richards
a thing of this world
Public Address, Brooklyn [link]

The striking aspect given the relational nature of power is the implicit presence of a subject through its absence; we see the instruments that compel obedience, the police, the guns, the blunt matter of fact-ness of a neatly folded Kelvar® hoodie, the field of conflict, but we don’t see the other side of it anymore than we can see ourselves. This intricate collection of works, as in the system of vowels and consonants in language, are joined in the likeness of “a thing of this world,” drawing on a priori aesthetics of partitions established between the law and its subject.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of Public Address and the artist

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Zanele Muholi

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Zanele Muholi (South African, born 1972). Ayanda Mqakayi, Nyanga East, Cape Town, 2011, 2011. Gelatin silver photograph, 34 x 24 in. (86.5 x 60.5 cm).

Zanele Muholi (South African, born 1972). Ayanda Mqakayi, Nyanga East, Cape Town, 2011, 2011. Gelatin silver photograph, 34 x 24 in. (86.5 x 60.5 cm).

Zanele Muholi
Isibonelo/Evidence
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum [link]
May 1 – November 1, 2015

The power of Zanele Muholi’s portraits is in the gaze of the South African lesbians and transgender men commanding the viewer’s attention from the frame. Installed in a grid, the wall of images gives a triumphant voice to people who face social stigma and vehement, homophobic backlash. Isibonelo also includes intimate images of weddings and funerals and Being Scene, a blurred, prosaic video of lesbian couples making love that does not pack the demonstrative, thought provoking punch of the photographs. That said, Muholi’s commitment to her craft and her community, anticipate this “Call me Caitlyn” transgender time with moving authenticity.

~ Janeil Engelstad
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