Profiles

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DUOX Will "Customize Your Strife"
01/25 | Alexandra Kleiman

Few artists use obscure materials such as Zebra Cakes, fish tanks, and keychains with such lyrical efficacy as the Baltimore-based duo DUOX, a collaboration between Malcolm Lomax and Daniel Wickerham. Their installations often aim to implicate viewers through their movement or interaction and focus on a queer sensibility and a digital context.

Five Artists from Another Planet
11/03 | Amanda Ryan

In May 2012, Tom Sachs will take over the Park Avenue Armory's 55,000 square foot drill hall to simulate a month-long expedition to Mars. The installation, titled <i>Astronaut's Training Manual: Space Program 2.0: Mars</i>, features a Martian landscape, mission control, spacecraft, exploratory vehicles, and a launch pad, all constructed from a variety of common materials. In anticipation of the unveiling of this massive undertaking, here's a look at current shows that are out of this world, including Tom Sach's <i>Work</i> at Sperone Westwater.

Four Artists to Know: Meet the Johnsons
10/07

You’re going to be seeing a lot more from these four artists named Johnson. They have studied at Yale, trekked through Northern Canada, been collected by Steve Martin, shown at the Hammer Museum and Blum & Poe, and been selected for an upcoming solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

CHERYL: Try Everything
09/19 | Matt Fisher

CHERYL, the artist collective made up of Destiny Pierce, Stina Puotinen, Nick Shiarizzi, and Sarah Van Buren, sits somewhere on an axis that joins Mike Kelly and David Byrne, a mix of earnest absurdism and a regard for abjection that seems squarely a product of early-80s investigations into participatory dynamics and DIY spectacles. Lately, the crux of CHERYL’s production are obsessively orchestrated video works loosely composed around a theme that involve lots of fake blood, cat masks, choreographed dances, glitter, and gloopy food. As one part of the overall work, the videos are completed by chaotic dance parties held in a nightclub, gallery or museum. The entire affair comes off rather like the up-cycle of a bipolar swing, a manic rush to the top of the roller coaster hill fully aware of the drop to come.

Requiem for the Super Ball
08/22 | Mayukh Sen

Henry Simonds has devised a taxonomical system for every strain of the Super Ball®. Those crafted to look like pool balls are called Hypersphaerae billiardus; ones made with marble compositions and primary colors are dubbed Hypersphaera primomarmoreus. They’re all arranged in tidy, neat frames like butterflies in museums. It’s an absurd methodology, and the underlying meaninglessness of the practice is precisely what Simonds explores. The Pittsburgh-based filmmaker’s Requiem for the Super Ball®, a mixed-media exhibition, runs at Charles Bank Gallery through September 11.

Images That Understand Us
07/14 | Mayukh Sen

Lisa Rovner is young and idealistic. She idolizes Godard. She has a fetish for images. She longs for the sixties, a time she’s only heard stories of, when revolution and political commitment were common. She thinks our world has dissolved into a muddy pool of consumerism. Rovner, a French-American artist and writer, seeks to utilize mass media and turn it into its own politicized space.

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An Infrared View of the First World
06/22 | Laura Gonzalez

A few days before the opening of his new exhibition, I sat down with Juanli Carrión at a Lower East Side café. After asking the barista to lower the music so I could record him clearly, he launched into a labyrinthine explanation of his elaborate, multimedia project 10.21-23: The Plague of Darkness, which opens on Wednesday, June 22 at Y-Gallery.

Restaging the Past
06/17 | Fionn Meade

In Image of Absalon to be Projected Until it Vanishes, Matthew Buckingham projects a picture of Copenhagen’s once-controversial statue of archbishop Absalon. Over the course of the exhibition, the 35mm slide gradually fades from the heat of the projector lamp. Elsewhere in Time Again, a SculptureCenter exhibition curated by Fionn Meade, Laure Prouvost enjoins us to remember the stream of images in her video montage It, Heat, Hit.

As Popular as Elvis
06/15 | Peter Blake

Each founding figure of Pop Art seems to have their own story about the origins of the term, and Peter Blake's takes place at a dinner party thrown by British art critic Lawrence Alloway. Blake was explaining his desire to create paintings with the same cultural resonance and mass appeal as Elvis. “Ah,” Alloway responded, “a kind of pop art.” Rauschenberg and Johns were inspiring parallel epiphanies in New York and London - Blake's sculptures based on Captain Webb matchboxes actually preceded Warhol's similar work with iconic Campbell's Soup and Brillo boxes.

Building a Rainbow City
06/10 | FriendsWithYou

From their massive installations at Art Basel Miami Beach and their collaborations with galleries like OHWOW and CANADA, the FriendsWithYou aesthetic is now easily recognizable in the art world. But focusing on galleries and installation is too narrow – FriendsWithYou got their start making plush and wood toys and even have big plans for a children’s television show. They see their simple, totemic designs as a utopian and accessible form of storytelling.