EUTOPIA

Erin M. Riley

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Erin M. Riley

“Show Me More” 2018, Wool and cotton tapestry, 60 x 48 inches_Courtesy the artist and PPOW, New York

Erin M. Riley
Used Tape
P•P•O•W, New York [link]

Used Tape, a metaphor describing women with a sexual history in abstinence-only teachings, uses textiles (a.k.a. women’s work) to address shame surrounding female sexuality. Scale is manipulated to emphasize bodies and shrink pleas, emulating how support for women is literally downplayed while the display of the body is aggrandized. Dissonance occurs between distinctly female actions from masturbation illustrated in the work to the creation of these traditional weavings. Aligning intimate portrayals of the female body with sterile manufactured products, both become items of utility, confounding the difficulties that arise when navigating sex, sexual relationships, assault, and rape.

~ Francesca Aton
images courtesy of the Artist and P•P•O•W, New York

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Angela Heisch 

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Angela Heisch "Back Bone"

Angela Heisch “Back Bone”

Angela Heisch
106 Green [link]
New York City, NY

Angela Heisch’s new paintings pull your attention toward formal activity at the edges of their square substrates, and in effect, showcase a dominant centrality. Complex symmetrical structures echoing ArtDeco or post-war industrial design harbors a prevalent motif: the black circle. Painted with gouache, their matte surface grants these solid shapes the ability to feel vacuous against a pattern-rich field of jewel-toned plumage. The work is wholly ominous –a dark comedy with beauty-mark dots and hair-thin lines as its protagonists.

~ Amie Cunat
photos courtesy of the artist

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The State of the Arts

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Cooper Union, State of the Arts

The State of the Arts
The Annual Exhibition of Students’ Work
Cooper Union New York, NY [link]
May 22-June 10th, 2018

Isolation is decidedly solitary- in social terms: withdrawn, distant, non conformist, resistant, … etc. Qualities that have served the school to set itself apart: on the one hand devising a pedagogical framework unfazed by the proliferation of spectacular images of a pseudo-technological stance;  on the other hand in stark contrast to the increasing venues of garish art fairs and such the show is a hinged décollage of architecture, art, and engineering departments foregrounded as a singular collaborative act that -together with its tentative onlooker- reveals the patent rift between genuine enquiry versus an intrinsically kitsch itinerary of culture industry.

~ Ali Soltani
Photos : Soltani+LeClercq

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Zoe Leonard

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Zoe Leonard: Survey
The Whitney, New York [link]
I want a president, 1992
Typewriting on paper

Although this work is the least assuming object in Leonard’s retrospective, it resonates with omnipotent irony to our current political culture. Originally written for QW, an independent queer magazine that folded before publication, Leonard’s letter was an inciteful/insightful call for a voice for the marginalized in the lead up to the Bush/Clinton/Perot election. Twenty-six years later and we still want. And our wants are blatantly ignored. And we are told that our wants are not important. And we still wonder why “always a john and never a hooker, always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

 

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Henrik Vibskov

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Henrik Vibskov
“Performing Fashion”
fashion after Fashion [link]
Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY [link]

In 2015, fashion forecaster Li Edelkoort pronounced that fashion was dead, “a ridiculous and pathetic parody of what it has been.” Exemplified in Vibskov’s technically wearable apparel, his unwieldy and constrictive cherry-bomb red sculptures resemble sexy alien blobs. The amorphous, testicular sculptures are suspended in cage-like structures: an external frame substituting for the absent, skeletal, human model. A monitor plays a performative video of actors wearing the garments while walking through a nighttime landscape, moving in and out of an illuminated, glowing structure. Seductive and absurdist, the sculptures satirize the heroin-chic body image with bulky, flopping, nodules of excess.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Urs Fischer

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ursfischer-julian1b3

Urs Fischer
Standing Julian (2015)
as part of “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [link]

Ignoring the common candle clichés, the more contentious aspect of “Standing Julian” is premature, celebrated, public death. Schnabel’s art-star career is characterized by egoistic confabulation, often manifest as equally grandiose work. Poignantly, the aggrandized auteur is physicalized as temporary, monumental statuary for self and cultural consumption.

The portrait reflects Schnabel’s objet petit a fixation, theatrically enlivened by art’s necessary auto-cannibalism. As such the living demise of a momentary cultural genius is a sardonic tribute to culture’s accelerating consumptive desire: a forced, spectacular compaction of temporality as a pre-funereal rehearsal, a tragi-comic celebration of sublimated genius.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the author and the Whitney Museum of American Art

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