Spot 1: Interviews
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya: Devastated and Hopeful
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya is an art- and myth-maker whose work distorts the imaginary lines that exist on land between states. His chimeric “lil beings,” as he calls them, are reconfigurations of found, personal, and organic materials, which he animates with allegories of displacement, inspired by ancient Mesoamerican myth and folklore.
Operating Along Desire: Derrick Woods-Morrow
Tyra A. Seals speaks with Derrick Woods-Morrow about deconstructing masculinity, moving through feeling, and interventions on the sartorial codes of male-identified bodies.
Karen Holmberg: Archaeology in an Emergency
In Part Two of this two-part conversation, Karen Holmberg discusses the seemingly intractable problem of convincing people that they are in danger, or helping them to see that the world is changing around them and encouraging them to mitigate, or prepare for, those changes.
Kenneth Tam: The Silence We Hold Between Our Bodies
Re’al Christian speaks with Kenneth Tam about his recent work Silent Spikes; the entwined mythologies of American Cowboys with Chinese laborers on the Transcontinental Railroad; and the intimacy—and intensity—of male coming-of-age rituals.
Spot 2: Speculative Masculinities
Boy With Luv
BTS’ offers a new incarnation of the boy band, one that refuses the limitations of Western, propagandized stereotypes and White supremacist ideals, intent instead on promoting self-acceptance.
daddy
Every week, after the Friday prayer, my dad would drag me along with him to the main fish market in Kuwait—where I lived until I was seventeen—to buy our seafood, raw and wriggling.
Jared Buckhiester: Male Trouble
Jared Buckhiester and Logan Lockner discuss the thrill and humiliation of attraction, the influences of Billy Budd and Querelle on Buckhiester’s current exhibition, and the question of how much of a person’s “arousal template”—the fantasies, thoughts, images, sights, and smells that turn you on—is given, rather than chosen.
Spot 3: Climate Crisis
Tropical Hangover
Between reality and escapism, magic and engineering, there is Florida, where the swamp is an unlikely breeding ground for global cultural capital and investment.
A Brief History of Power
Contributing editor Stephanie Bailey traces the lines of electrification to political power via Chilean artist Iván Navarro and the 38th EVA International in Ireland.
Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement
French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy writes: “If we destroy nature is it because we hate nature? Of course not—we merely hate one another.”
He may well be right.
Spot 4: Labor
Chang Yuchen: Language, Use, Value
Traveling from China to the US in early 2020, the strangely fragmented temporality of solitude, and feeling useless.
The Museum Union Wave
No one could remember a time when wages for work in the arts met the cost of living in an American city.
Patty Chang: Milk Debt
Spot 5: Late Summer Blues
Poolside Chat
An LA architect and a Palm Springs architectural curator discuss liberated design and pastel color palettes in the American West.
Rallou Panagiotou
A Greek artist’s practice treats liquids as solids, and materials as ideas.
Spot 6: Mimicry, Camouflage, Transformation
Resisting the Spectacle
Sasha Cordingley explores the shift in representations of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, from the international news media’s spectacle to the intimate banalities of continual struggle, in Resisting the Spectacle—Tiffany Sia’s Never Rest/Unrest.
Architectural Camouflage and the Class Dynamics of Housing
Gabriel Cira reveals how confounding façades can also reinforce the dominant narrative by masking economic differences to favor a mirage of homogeneity. Photos by Pat Falco.
Inaudibility: Krista Belle Stewart’s Sonic Repatriation of Knowledge
Krista Belle Stewart mines the power of strategic incomprehensibility to reclaim ownership through the mediation of access and refusal.
Spot 7: Still Not Working
Bodies / Antibodies
Miriam Simun’s text-and-image artist project meanders through the first month or so of quarantine, exploring the porousness of the body—the touching/not touching—and offers a kind of choreography of permeability.
Achieving Blankness
Notes from the edge of the Atlanta Airport
with photography by Johnathon Kelso
Cyclical Time: the Trap
Gridthiya Gaweewong explores the Buddhist notion of cyclical time in the framework of diverging artistic practices in Thailand.