Visual Arts
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The Silent Types
Graphite on Paper, the two-person show at James Kelly Contemporary, delivers on its promise, though the ratio of paper-to-graphite is strikingly disproportionate. The artists, Susan York and Wes Mills, each employ a restrained approach to mark making, but the similarities end there.
Ecotistical
Mapping a Green Future presents issues that are universal—such as carbon emissions, pollution and depletion of resources—but it does a good job of examining them in a way that feels specific to the viewer, either by assessing the impact at the local level or by narrowing the focus of the data to the individual level.
Old Skool
How is it some people, operating under much more oppressive regimes than, say, an ad agency, can transcend mediocrity to design something original and beautiful?The Polish Poster: Paradox, Metaphor and Symbolism doesn’t answer this question. It simply demonstrates that good design can last well beyond its intended commercial purpose.
This Land Is Your Land
There are two kinds of landscapes to photograph: the ones we’ve messed up by living all over them, and the ones we’re destroying in absentia. Manmade: Notions of Landscape from the Lannan Collection focuses primarily on the former, while Selections from True: Photographs by Thomas Joshua Cooper presents the latter, with images from the Earth’s shrinking poles.
Come Again?
Of all art media, video is probably the most difficult with which to engage viewers. This seems preposterous when one considers the amount of time we spend in front of screens, but maybe that’s the problem. Video art is composed in the language of entertainment, yet so little of it is entertaining.
Georgian Devotion
The photographs in New Mexico and New York: Photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are hardly transcendent. Except for a few formal portraits and some on-location shots that serve as illustrations of the landscapes she painted, the work is closer to a family photo album than an art exhibition.
Represent, Y’all
UN's premise is audacious and funny, but curator David Solomon’s approach to unrepresented artists also is a missed opportunity. It is a gesture steeped in benevolence, but the subtext of inferiority (or is it superiority?) to the local market interferes with an otherwise strong assembly of work.
Hit the Road
It is on the vast voids of the American West and the aesthetics and implications of distance and long-haul shipping that artists Shelby Shadwell and David Jones have set their sights.
In Good Company
David Kapp may hope to be called the new Diebenkorn, but that would imply that Diebenkorn had been replaced, and the long memory of art history doesn’t always work that way.
Playing House
A few months ago, I was working with a woman who was employed by a hotel chain. Her job title was ‘interior designer,’ which meant she was responsible for picking and purchasing everything from lamps and bedspreads to the “art” that I was screwing to the walls.
