Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world. Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Rain in Los Angeles is apparently bimodal — there are dry years followed by a few wet ones — which means the average precipitation is reached by factoring the wet and dry years together. We must be in a wetter year now, because there have been multiple rainy days just this week.[.....]

Kristi McGuire is an artist, writer, and editor living in Chicago, Illinois. She is coeditor of The Contemporary Visual Studies Reader, forthcoming from Routledge this fall. She can be reached at postmenlikedoctors [at] gmail.com.  Stock image photograph produced by Google image-search for “stock photography.” I once thought that I could summon the ambient act of reading on the Internet as part of a singular project of prognostication:[.....]

Down the Rabbit Hole, the current exhibition in Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, explores familiar themes, such as the disjunction between appearance and reality, or between the real and the fake. Layers of the past and present, preoccupying so many artists, provide insights into the psychological whirlwind resulting from the pace of change in today’s China. Ideas about materialism, globalisation, wealth and power, corruption, and identity[.....]

When I first saw David Shrigley, I was taken aback by his calm aura and semblance of complete normalcy. A man known for his searing dead-pan humour, I half-expected to see a crazed post-punk artist living on the fringes of society. But here was a charming, clean-cut gentleman, tranquilly tattooing ink drawings onto willing participants in the middle of London’s most extravagant art fair. Calm,[.....]

Laura Letinsky is a master at having it both ways. She photographs messes that are exquisitely tidy. She uses white like a color. She presents endings in a moment when they are still new, still vibrating with just spent energy. She captures objects as images and images as objects. She makes decay look gorgeous. Letinsky is known for her artfully arranged still life photographs of[.....]

There is always someone who is offended by every biennial. They are inherently two-headed beasts, with the introspective head judging the strengths and weaknesses of a portion of the art world, while the extroverted head optimistically presents a narrative, declaring why the included artists are notable. For this year’s DeCordova Biennial, curators Dina Deitsch and Abigail Ross Goodman followed tradition by programming a regional Biennial[.....]