Eric Yahnker’s current solo show VIRGIN BIRTH N’ TURF, at The Hole through October 6, is a meticulous chronicle of canonical American cultural mediocrity. Walking into the vaulted white squareness of The Hole, I’m slammed from all sides by Yahnker’s enormous images — meticulously hand-drawn, magnified portraits of kitsch. Yahnker takes aesthetically unexalted elements of popular media, elevating the mediocre cultural staple and outfitting it[.....]

“The temporary” might seem like a neutral concept, but in reality it is ideologically loaded. Depending on the context (and on the social class of the speaker), temporary work and temporary dwelling might mean either insecurity and precarity–or flexibility and dynamism. How are some of San Francisco’s city officials planning to lure young innovators and entrepreneurs, for instance? By allowing developers to build 220-square foot[.....]

Back in early March 2012, I reviewed Mark Bradford’s solo show at SFMOMA and learned shortly thereafter that the oft-repeated narrative about the circumstances of his early work—that he grew up in poverty in a depressed African-American neighborhood of Los Angeles—was simply not true (he was raised in Santa Monica, an affluent suburb). Given that I’ve heard this myth repeated even by knowledgeable curators, I[.....]

Things are not quite what they seem in ‘Double Take’ at the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The exhibition presents some new works and others which have been seen before but deserve re-examination. A heap of porcelain sunflower seeds, a shiny Harley Davidson which turns out, on closer inspection, to be a bicycle, and the doorway of a Beijing apartment which reveals itself to be[.....]

On a visit to the Nevada Museum of Art this summer, I first encountered the work of Kansas City based Anne Lindberg. Tucked in a small, irregularly shaped gallery, Lindberg’s luminous installation immediately caught the eye, where individual threads created volume and marked space in a way that belied its virtually imperceptible constituent parts. Her large-scale graphite drawings also on view in the gallery invited[.....]

At the end of William Kentridge’s miniature theatre piece Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) a rhinoceros gets shot. The shooting, taken from old black and white film footage and projected onto the theatre’s back screen is clumsily executed by a clearly inexperienced rhinoceros hunter. After the deed is done, said hunter runs back and forth between the animal and his original position to check the status[.....]

Even fanatic football fans would be hard-pressed to remember a Glaswegian football team called Partick Thistle, a perpetual underdog in First Division Scottish Football League that’s oft-joked about because of their non-winning ways. Getting behind a team that tries every week but gets nowhere requires no small measure of faith, an action probably synonymous with holding out hope in the long term for that which[.....]