SELECTED TEXTS
Body Objects tend to be laboriously made things that register a separateness from their makers. They are witty, chilly, lecherous, warm, inviting, grotesque, and distant. The contrary values they present neutralize each other, clearing space for an emergent autonomy–they haven’t yet decided what they are. Click here for the full text, created for “Body Objects” at Room57 Gallery in spring of 2024. Curated by myself.
[…] “Miklos has sent me an assortment of reference materials, image-rich PDFs populated by cloudbursts of language. I call him up for clarification. “Carrots? What’s going on with the carrots?” I ask. “That I’m still not so sure about,” he replies. “They’re in your main promotional photo!” “Yes, well, the photo with the carrots–in a sense that is me being overwhelmed by my own working method... Also, it comes from this childhood memory of all these piles of carrots lying around, but I’m not sure if they will be in the show.” I jot on my notepad: “Carrots uncertain.” See the full catalog essay here.
[…] “To better define Ionescu’s work, I find myself searching for a neologism, like Robert Morris’s “object-type sculptures.” Conveniently the artist has coined one: “roomscrapers,” which captures at least three signature characteristics—scalelessness, hybridity, and humor. Just as Ionescu builds in the mud where the holy water of art meets the pedestrian land of everything else, he also displays a fluency with scale which is so effortless it undoes the sense of meaningful difference.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “Some of the most famous of Cragg’s head sculptures spiral upwards like expressionist pillars, their facial features resolving and then blurring into abstraction. In interpreting these works, one could begin thinking about the disorienting flexibility of identity – “Man is broad, too broad indeed. I would have him narrower,” Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) – and how our selves get warped over time, so that no single self can be claimed durationally. But this seems a reach: the work is visual, spatial, and exciting to move around; just what is being stretched hardly seems important.” CLICK HERE for the full article (Issue #74, 2023)
[…] “On the left side of the room, suspended from a gantry, is a plaster sculpture that seems to be either explosively ascending or meteorically diminishing in descent. A protoplasmic flux of bone-white force and movement congeals into a terminus where two feet are flexed, the toes just touching the ground. Read bottom up, the form becomes a volcanic plume of potentiality, a quantum wave bursting out from specificity.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “Behind any given city wall is a gnashing knot of intestinal pipes, fetid growths, and mutant poison-resistant insects. Vents, grilles, tubs, taps, and sockets open portals to a hidden substructure of polychrome mucus pulsing through arterial networks hundreds of metres overhead and in giant subterranean throughways below. A matrix of urine and gore: that’s what the urban shell conceals and that’s what Hsu’s art is bent on uncovering, with rigorously smooth intensity.” CLICK HERE for the full article from 2021.
“[…] The smallest work in the show is a tightly contained statement. Engine no. 11 (2024) sits on the ground, looking like half a polished engine casing. On its surface, scattered matchsticks lie on their sides. The ‘engine’ issues a bassy thump; a force is engaged; and the matches wriggle and squirm upright, their phosphorus ends pointed aloft. They do a brief, shimmying dance and then fall flat once again. Erie and wondrous, Engine no. 11 dramatizes a world where improbabilities simmer at the edges of one’s vision, where static expectations are unbalanced by flickers of unexplainable strangeness.” CLICK HERE for the full review, published in Frieze #246
“Its enveloping scale, as well as its decorative whorls and arabesques of stitchwork along the quilted tail and dorsal fins, evoke a grandmotherly warmth. Lightly frayed fringes of fibers, running along the denim ribs, suggest a stringy, meaty residue. The whale is suspended with a system of ropes that is one part shibari bondage and one part fishing netting. Though it appears to be preparing to dive, its heart and viscera hang outside its body, linked by ropes — a sculptural agglomeration that effectively delivers a sense of precarity and expansive breadth at once.“ Read the full article HERE.
“This graphic austerity directs attention toward his lavish vocabulary of material effects. It’s not that his paintings acknowledge their surfaces; it’s that they are surfaces congealed into paintings. Celestial orbs, ethereal expanses, machined interfaces: one senses the sacred geometries of Hilma af Klint converging with the hardware of Tishan Hsu. Brock draws into tension organic loveliness and systematic labor.” Read the full article HERE.
“These scenes – like those showing serious-faced referees nodding to each other and communicating in a lexicon composed entirely of the word ‘hut’, ‘hut hut’ and, for variety, ‘hut hut hut’– underscore the bathos of a game that is theoretically played for fun but in which the stakes can be millions of dollars, lifelong paralysis or irrevocable CTE. Battles are fought for territory and gain, but American football is played merely for glory; depending on your sensibility, this is either dumb, beautiful or beautifully dumb.“ Read the full article HERE.
[…] “This is not so much coded art as it is art as code—ciphers that succeed in proportion to their inscrutability. The more mysterious, the less legible their referents, the more they resonate with unnerving eeriness.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
“There is a sense that his lamps have arrived at their forms through a process of calculated reasoning. This impression rubs against the precarity of many of his structural choices — in which ad hoc solutions just short of bubble gum hold things together. See, for instance, Love Light #2 (2022), in which the transition between the joined wooden rod and the lightbulb fixture appears to be a wadded smush of epoxy clay.” Read the full article HERE.
“When Libby Rothfeld was a child, she believed that God published TV Guide. Who else could know the future? Her parents were unusually indifferent to their material surroundings. “We lived with these bizarre curtains that the people before us already had. And at one point we ran out of water glasses, and we didn’t buy more; we drank out of mugs. There was just no aesthetic decision-making.” Does any of this help to explain what I see as I enter her storefront studio in Ridgewood, Queens?” Read the full article HERE.
"Turandot, set in China, was written by an Italian who never visited Asia. Then it was adopted by the Chinese. The translation of a fantasy of the East into an Eastern rendition of the West’s fantasy of itself is a conceptual hall of echoes. Where Covey’s language begins, where his source material ends, what relation one bears on the other cannot necessarily be rationalized." Read the rest of the article HERE.