Reviews
It Shall Not Be Named – Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols
Tamia Alston-Ward’s
Le Déracinement (The Uprooting)
Cornell Labs Panama Fruit Feeder Cam at Canopy Lodge
The Fruit Feeder can be viewed as a kind of durational performance art. Its participants may be unaware of their roles, but they perform their daily dramas nevertheless. Fights between peckish birds over the best bit of mango or the prime perch on a branch often rattle the otherwise tranquil setting. The overwhelming growth and decay of the surrounding forest and the exhausting, relentless tussle between life and death infuse the scene with a kind of madness
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic: PRAY
Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere
Each collaborative entity mobilizes its own kind of micro-performance, but together they maintain a coherence through the way we simultaneously apprehend them in the sensorium. As such, the materials feel less instrumentalized by aesthetics and more mysterious.
Monira Al Qadiri: Refined Vision
Whereas fossil fuel exploration happens on a global scale, Al Qadiri zeroes in on extraction and refinement, which are much more visible at ground level in certain regions of the world. This exhibition drew a nuanced connection between the Persian Gulf region and the Texas Gulf Coast (although not noted in the exhibition information, the processing infrastructure of the latter region certainly extends into southern Louisiana).
Leah Clements—INSOMNIA
Providing access to the exhibition for blind and partially sighted people, this audio description acts as a way in for all audiences. Excitingly, here, through this interpretive sonic contribution, the visual aid becomes an affective feature rather than simply a functional element. It affects pace, the order of encounter, and the awareness of oneself in the environment, embedding us within it. It asks us to pay attention, to be indulgent with our time, and in so doing, to allow details and sensations to emerge.
Krista Clark — After Barkley
Even Clark’s techniques appear to be sly allusions that further enmesh her suite of references. In many of her works on paper, such as Play 1, Verse 1, the artist has created a subtle layering of paper through cutting and ripping—terms also used to label maneuvers in basketball.
Fuego Nuevo —Sergio Suárez
Through a combination of printmaking, ceramics, and installation, Sergio Suárez uses distinct traditional techniques to assemble a visual language, one that examines the fusion, impermanence, and consistency of objects, images, and structures. The exhibition is framed by the Meso-American, post-classical-period ceremony Fuego Nuevo (New Fire)—a ritual enacted every 52 years to ensure that the sun would return, thus staving off the end of the world.