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As a sub-genre of action movies and literature, apocalypse porn has made a name for itself in recent years. Discounting what we typically look for in movies, story becomes secondary and characters’ interaction is merely filler for the money shots of Tokyo being trampled by a giant monster or Los Angeles falling into a great...
The Atomic Explosion
Is there any greater visual icon of the mid-twentieth century than the mushroom cloud? The atomic bomb’s destructive force and the following radiation and disease render its sight unmistakable. The Atomic Explosion collects a series of 66 vintage photographs taken in the 1940s and ’50s depicting nuclear tests performed by the United States at Bikini...
Matt Keegan: I Apple NY
A collection of photographs, sculptures and printed texts, Matt Keegan’s composite vision of New York City captures the gaudy and the gritty, the mundane and the maniacal, and the everyday moments that inundate us. Like everything else in the city, Keegan builds on what came before, inviting collaboration and openly riffing on influences. A fawning...
Sweet Toof: Dark Horse
Why so long in the tooth? After losing 10 friends “in a series of freak accidents,” a Danse Macabre sensibility has gripped London-based, veteran graffiti writer Sweet Toof. In Dark Horse, his first solo show in the U.S., Sweet Toof invades Bushwick’s Factory Fresh Gallery with his iconic swollen gums and pearly whites.
Tuca Vieira: Berlinscapes
Berlin, above all cities of the world, is a place of memories. From the outside, it seems built layer by layer from the successive waves of kingdoms and ideologies that have swept across the North German Plain. Just the city’s name itself connotes a bear-like strength; a stone facade that perseveres and insists on its...
Neil Farber: Slugging
The paintings in Neil Farber’s Slugging can be divided into a few camps. There are those featuring a multitude of indistinguishable individuals, those in which heavy black outlines and block shapes add up to childlike depictions of animals, and still others built from delicate ink lines and shapes repeated again and again into nine-legged alligators...
Emily Roysdon: Positions
Visual threads of minimalist geometry and ambiguously improvised movement permeate Emily Roysdon’s new exhibition at Art in General. Incorporating work made during a stint at Berkeley, Positions is a continuation of her many multidisciplinary projects, which include the feminist queer arts collective LTTR, numerous film and photo projects and collaboration with the band MEN.
Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On
When Mark Morrisroe died in 1989, a vast collection of photographs, artist zines, Polaroids and photograms were found among his belongings. Pat Hearn, the late art dealer, preserved the collection until her death in 2000. Now, a career retrospective organized by Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur has brought his work back to New York, and is currently...
Jordan Eagles
My first encounter with Jordan Eagles’ work came a year and a half ago in his multimedia installation “Projection.” The rooms were bathed in undulating red light from overhead slides depicting blood in various formations. A less immersive experience of his work is on display now in his first solo show with Krause Gallery. The...
Paul Gabrielli: Generally
At first glance, the sculptures in Paul Gabrielli’s Generally appear as readymades, grouped together by functionality and a common theme. On closer inspection, however, deconstructed ideas of ideal objects appear. In his second show at Invisible-Exports, pedestrian objets trouvés are paired in three-dimensional investigations of functionality and perception.
Meg Hitchcock: Obsession: The Book of Revelation from the Koran
“And thank you to God, for making me an atheist!” I got a lot of satisfaction out of Ricky Gervais’ closing statement at the Golden Globes: something about the ambiguity of inheriting a tradition in which one is clearly an outsider, epitomizing itself in a statement of humor. I got a similar charge out of...
Butt Johnson: The Name of the Rose
The rose has been so overused as an allegorical symbol that the flower is devoid of power and importance. Or so argues Butt Johnson in his first solo show at CRG Gallery, The Name of the Rose. It’s an interesting argument, but little of the work follows through on the promise of reconceputalizing a symbology...
Seth Price: Non Speech, Fire & Smoke
The videos in Seth Price’s Non Speech, Fire & Smoke were uploaded to YouTube last year and, with this show, Friedrich Petzel Gallery maintains the isolating nature of the Internet. Each video is individually packaged in its own mini cubicle with a single set of headphones. The viewer must press play on the DVD player,...
Condo Moves In
George Condo and his Artificial Realism land at The New Museum It’s hard to talk about George Condo these days without mentioning Kanye West. Luckily, it’s The New Museum to the rescue. Mental States, a monumental collection of Condo’s work to date, opens Jan. 26 on the Bowery. The exhibition ranges from classically inspired landscapes...
