EUTOPIA

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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Zaria Forman

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Zaria Forman, Greenland no.50, 40″x60″ pastel on paper [2012]

Zaria Forman
Antarctica and Greenland
pastel on paper drawings

Forman uses beauty as a means of attracting attention to global climate change, exemplifying the idea that one’s sense of emotion –rather than logical prowess— functions to acknowledge and promote empathy of injustices. Thus beauty is the most effective tool of manipulation when mobilizing support and action from the community. The spectacle of Forman’s drawings not only provide awareness about climate change but create the capacity in viewers to delight in, learn about, and deeply care for Earth and its multitude of beautiful places and peoples.

~ Harold Adams

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Linnea Glatt

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Linnea Glatt "Overlap" 2016, Fabric on paper, 44 x 150 inches

Linnea Glatt “Overlap” 2016, Fabric on paper, 44 x 150 inches

Linnea Glatt
Continuum
Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas [link]

Overlap broadens and narrows, rises and falls, like a wave, like breathing. The fragility of the fabric’s weave is countermanded by the stature and consistency of a classical organization. Like stoic Roman pilasters, the thread-drawn rectangles cling close to the ground plane of the paper.

In Verse #1 is drawn with precisely cut sheer-cloth circles that float above one another, both in their alignment and actual surface application, resulting in delicate chiffon-glazed tonal layers.

Linnea Glatt’s latest drawings provide stunning testament to her continued fascination with intricate, illusive materials cast in timeless configurations.

~ Thomas Motley
photographs by Kevin Todora, courtesy of Barry Whistler Gallery

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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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Eric Zimmerman

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Installation view, elegy for left hand alone (2015)

Installation view, elegy for left hand alone (2015)

Eric Zimmerman
Elegy for Left Hand Alone
Art Palace, Houston, TX [link]

Unequal partners despite symmetry, Zimmerman offers the neglected left hand as a sympathetic narrator. Speaking in rare fragmented imagery –an ancient hand tool, Houdini magic tricks, plunder mined from the Voyager Golden Record, or a Werner Herzog screenshot– the selection is an eclectic imbalance, muted icons with remote poetic value. However, the deftness of the paintings belies a dexterity bordering on photographic, the hand over-compensating to remove touch from sight: a hand in absentia. Though manifest in sculpture, an impotent amputated clasping, more compelling are the Beuys basalt replicas*: a paper-thin pretense of heft, an embodied grasp at gravitas.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Art Palace and the artist.

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James Drake

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Chapter4_detail-1k

James Drake
Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)
The Blanton Museum of Art [link]

Making and consuming large-scale work takes place in small increments, a time based unfolding of viewing. Focus leads from here and now to then and there, occupying an intimate field as understanding and connections develop slowly. Step back and new meanings emerge, stay close to be consumed.

Drake’s installation-drawings force the viewer to remember. Indulge on eclectic details of a highly skilled draftsman: a diagram, tornado, or flock of words drowning in a sea of paper, charcoal, collage, and crayon. Attempt to remove the distance, to breathe and avoid the undertow, and one risks forgetting the specifics.

~ RJHarrington
images courtesy The Blanton Museum of Art and James Drake

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