Features
Consider the Hot Dog: Ivy Haldeman on an American Icon
Haldeman’s paintings capture the way quotidian images inform how we fashion ourselves, how we move about the world. They ask, “How do we wear ourselves into becoming ourselves? And what do things, such as inanimate objects and advertisements, demand from us?
Against Confinement—On Mohamed Bourouissa’s Frames of Relation
In this expansive appraisal of the artist’s work, Bailey makes a case for the emancipatory power of images.
Berenice Olmedo—Radical Alterity and the Crip/Disabled Subject
Utilizing sculptural, performance, and social practice modes, Olmedo’s work circumvents the representational trap that is part and parcel of a reduced, oppositional framing of normative and non-normative, or able and disabled.
An Eye for An Eye — Bambitchell’s Bugs and Beasts Before the Law
Bugs and Beasts works to remind viewers that such stories aren’t simply dusty curiosities from the footnotes of history books, but practices that fundamentally shaped how we came to understand the intersections between performance, punishment, and the social and legal limits of personhood.
I Will Not Be Purified
Anyone who has ever been life-threateningly ill will know the desperation it breeds. You’ll try anything. You’ll do anything. And when treatments fail, and doctors—shockingly unskilled in empathy—shrug and suggest this means you will die, you start looking anywhere for help.
A Training in Suspense—Stacey Abrams’ While Justice Sleeps
In “Training in Suspense,” Courtney McClellan questions the implication of veracity in the recent spate of politician-penned political thrillers by way of Stacey Abrams’ new novel, While Justice Sleeps.
Bleeding Out: On the Use of Blood in Contemporary Art
Blood corrupts conventions of purity and privacy to suggest all elements of the body can be used for expression.
Against Closure: John Akomfrah and the Monumental
John Akomfrah’s practice can be considered in relation to the problematics of monuments, and it is apt to do so at a time of widespread decommissioning of statues depicting individuals long celebrated for their roles in dominant narratives of human progress.
Blue Cripistemologies: In and Around Derek Jarman
This critique calls for the development of transgressive strategies that allow us to retrieve, revive, and ultimately reassess work that has become mired in art myth and fraudulent provenance.