Mixed Media

Complicated History: Interview with Olaf Brzeski

Screen Shot 2012-02-08 at 7.34.12 AM

Olaf Brzeski’s work spans many different media, but his practice is unified by a central sense of iconic situations having gone awry. For Brzeski, the hunter becomes the hunted, the superhero-savior is hideously deformed, the stately bust is bloated and misshapen. Brzeski’s work has been included in solo and group shows throughout Poland and in Prague, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Lille. We met up in Tarnow,[.....]

Memoria (Memory): Bibiana Suárez at Hyde Park Art Center

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not[.....]

One man’s rabbit is another man’s…

On my first interview for graduate school, I unerringly identified each slide shown to me: Warhol, Matisse, Pollock, Smithson. I left confident for my next interview the following day. I waltzed into the building and calmly road up to the eighth floor.  There, I was completely caught off guard. Instead of Rauschenberg, Duchamp or Hirst, I was presented with a photograph of a man clad[.....]

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence. Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises[.....]

Perpetuum Mobile

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral. Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová[.....]

Otto Piene and Hans Haacke at MIT

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room[.....]

Geraldine Javier: Museum of Many Things

Geraldine Javier’s show Museum of Many Things at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery presents an amalgamation of vintage mementos, framed animal skeletons, stuffed birds and elaborate needlework in a contemporary take of a Victorian-styled cabinet of curiosities. While Javier’s assembly of curios appears to be a whimsical indulgence of the macabre, it is as much a nostalgic take on death’s inevitability as it is[.....]