EUTOPIA

Anders Ruhwald

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Jerry Birchfield; Anders Ruhwald; art; photography; sculpture

Anders Ruhwald, Unit 1: 3583 Dubois, 2016. Site specific installation. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Volume Gallery. Image: Jerry Birchfield

Anders Ruhwald
Unit 1: 3583 Dubois (2016)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland [link]

In lieu of any impulse to glorify the beauty of dilapidated buildings, a persistent cliché running rampant in rust belt communities, this exhibition instead gives rise to an immersive experience of dereliction and renewal. Soot cover walls, dimly lit rooms, and claustrophobic spaces are derived from the artist’s experience of a rundown Detroit building. The front door was excavated from the actual site and re-­‐installed in the gallery as the physical entrance for the installation. Charred interiors surround sculptural forms radiation with heat, presenting a metaphorical paradox of entropy, where destruction and decay are congruent with growth and transformation.

~ Joseph Karlovec
Photos: courtesy of MOCA Cleveland, the artist, and Volume Gallery;
Image: Jerry Birchfield

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Joseph Flynn

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Joseph Flynn-Fountain of Time-bJoseph Flynn
Display Method: Remixed Archælogies
Beefhaus, Dallas [link]

Something stinks. Crushed energy drink cans are strewn across the floor, their noxious contents fill Fountain of Time with invigorating formaldehyde green and the air with rude awakening. A digital bust scan of Nefertiti (Sanctioned? Illicit?) spins in Remixed Archælogy, lit by USB-powered plastic crystal. What is real? Does it matter? Donald Trump hangs out in Strange Days Indeed alongside sophistic calligraphy and cheery archival studio portraiture—distorted, meme-ready, anonymous. Flynn warps the foundation of our institutional trust, subverting the authenticity of leadership figures and their capacity for preservation among the digital swarm. The Internet swallows all.

~ Caleb Mathern

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Mauro Martinez

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In The Event of A Water Landing. Oil on canvas. 66"x66"

Mauro Martinez “In The Event of A Water Landing” Oil on canvas. 66″x66″

 

Mauro Martinez
In The Event of A Water Landing
Oil on canvas [2016]

Anchored by a fractured protagonist lost in a Bacon-esque pretense of depth, Martinez establishes a familiarity of painting as angst reflector. The ruptured figure in this delicatessen of discontent dissolves amidst a riot of graphic and painterly styles generating a necessary confusion: a frenetic saccadic movement. Familiar fragments of cautionary travel symbols quasi-pleading for pseudo-safety amplify this visual unsettling, generating a malcontent nausea. Declaring the distress of the physical flâneur (damn the static Internet voyeur) recalls the painful physicality required for painting and cultural absorption, a discomfiting reminder of our existential anxiety mirrored by corporeal un-belonging.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the artist

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Amarit Chusuwan

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Amarit Chusuwan

Amarit Chusuwan
The More I Get to Know Men, The More I Love My Dog
Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand [link]

In a museum heavy with Thai surrealism and religious allegory, this work stood out for its contemporary humor and media, albeit low tech video. What prevents this from remaining a didactic one-liner is the ever-shifting political context: history has no shortage of misuse of patriarchal power. The emasculated figures raptly watch TV monitors, yet instead of news feeds we see endlessly looped panting dogs—a self-portrait perhaps, pointing to mind-numbing obedience training. After a week’s news filled with Trump’s views on abortion, the Stanford rape trial and the Orlando shootings, I tend to agree with the artist’s viewpoint.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Adam Shirley

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a_shirley_untitled(folding thoughts)-web

Adam Shirley
Ordinary Objects
Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit, MI [link]
March 5 – April 10, 2016

A lot of artwork needs an audience and rests on fragile social or circumstantial conditions to build meaning. Ordinary Objects does not. Shirley’s installation is rigid, square, plumb, and absolute. The exhibition renders a contemplative spatial deconstruction, a remembered space rebuilt to destroy the vagueness of memory and description.
Perhaps the greatest potential for sculpture lies in the notion that sculpture is made of matter. Materials do not have opinions; instead they retain actual, undeniable physical properties. In Shirley’s work, these material truths both resist and resonate with more illusive social or personal ideas of truth.

~ Trevor King
images courtesy of the author and gallery

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Daniel García Andújar

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Daniel Garcia Andujar 2

Daniel García Andújar
The Butterfly Funnel
Artpace, San Antonio, Texas [link]
March 17 – May 15, 2016

Andujar’s archive is, like all archives, compromised. What he offers is, not unlike history, neither accurate nor false. Whereby our reliance on interest as a qualifying aesthetic feature blinds us to the subtle truth in details. The exhibition, as a formality, threatens to become a monument to the personal disillusions of its subject. Then why concede to this threat? How much louder must we exclaim into the void of the exhibitionary space? A flag, a sign, a literal symbol modifies its environment without even touching it. Ultimately, this fleeting gesture compromises the exaggerated destinations of display.

~ Chad Dawkins
Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio.
Photo credit Adam Schreiber

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