Reviewed

Nikolas de Masi

The Australian bush is known for things like dingoes, walk-abouts and a rich native history

Vivien Kabar

Vivien Kabar’s work highlights elemental images, using dramatic ploys such as contrasts in scale, shifts in focus, mirrored reflections

Hu Zhiying

Illustrating what he calls the “cultural contrast,” Hu Zhiying brings together traditional Chinese art

Nihat Kemankasli

Nihat Kemankasli's visual interpretations are deceptively child-like, humorous and captivating works, which he creates through detailed ink, acrylic and oil paint, and also in his use of bold, vibrant, colors.

Jenik Cook

Known for her technical brilliant and startling use of light and color, Jenik Cook incorporates a plethora of references

Barbara Palka-Winek

The sumptuous paintings of Barbara Palka-Winek represent a crossroads of East and West. Drawing upon sources as varied as Orientalism, Byzantine art, and Mycenaean metalwork, the artist also exhibits more contemporary references including Art Nouveau symbolism, and modernist Abstraction.

Aase-Hilde Brekke

Oslo based artist and teacher, Aase-Hilde Brekke breaths a deep spirituality into the art world. Working toward being an “impulse to change, creative energy, inspiration, and the flow good ideas” she brings her knowledge of Tibetan yoga into her photos and performance pieces.

Carry Van Delft

>Carry van Delft works emphasize the aesthetic of a spiritual journey that is at once historically embedded and intensely intimate and personal.

Amir H. Fallah

In Amir H. Fallah’s latest body of work, he continues his prior explorations into boyhood memory, the intensity of relationships, both past and present, and the thin line between the real and the imagined.

Michael Lineares

Michael Linares’ recent exhibition Found & Lost at Museum of Contemporary Art Puerto Rico highlights the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and flamboyant methods by which life is experienced and observed. The exhibition employs Linares’ own fluency in multifarious forms of discourse—from sculpture, to photography and video.

Miranda July

Some of the things I make are obviously built for audience interaction—Eleven Heavy Things, the sculptures for the Venice Biennale, are objects that literally have holes for people to fit their bodies into and pose with. Similarly, my Web site Learning To Love You More (with Harrell Fletcher) gives assignments to the public.

Patricia Cazorla

Venezuelan artist Patricia Cazorla creates “diaries” or personal collections of portraits of women who have a significance to her, whether because of their bold characters or because of their simple beauty.Cazorla depicts the emotions, sensibilities, and personalities of her subjects through vivid colors, strong brush strokes, and collages of images taken from the media, although her favorite media is oil paint.

Pilita Garcia E.

I have been making pretty straight city scenes from my head for the past couple of years. I like to believe they are similar to what the Internet looks like, with all the individualistic people existing invisibly, unable to observe each other over at the colliding room town, with no walls, piled in more than one direction, compartmentalized.

As any cynic will tell you, a utopia is not only a perfect world, but it is also a purely imaginary one. And looking to the word’s etymology, there’s some truth to this contention: “Utopia” comes from the Greek ou, “not” and topos, “place,” and so beneath the term’s idealism, there is an underlying pathos—the perfect world is ultimately a place that does not, and cannot, exist except in dreams.

Fiercely Fragile

I first came across Nava Lubelski’s work in 2007, during open studios at CUE Art Foundation while she was a resident artist there. Her delicate and sinuous abstractions beckoned me from across the room. It was only up close that I realized they were not just made of paint, nor were they merely drawn. The intricate networking line-work that is her signature was, in fact, achieved through thread embroidery. This technique proves especially compelling in the service of the themes of her most recent solo show at LMAKprojects.

The Endurance of Language

An abundance of conceptually informed exhibitions opened in New York in the space of three days at the end of October 2008, buoying the spirits in the wake of collapsing world economies. Consider that art is a language, intentions and materials, techniques, historical referents, among its parameters. The relational aesthetics, demonstrated by a core group of the 90s at the Guggenheim, are not a new concept but an agreeable show of younger artists’ work. Recall Beuys’ Free International University, the Green Party, and Social Sculpture, an assertion of the individual’s social existence as a malleable form of potentially creative political structuring.

A. L. Steiner + robbinschilds

The project called “C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience),” installed in the museum’s Shaft Project Space, comprises the following: a series of looped videos on monitors in the closet-size gallery, with a driving instrumental sound track playing softly and piles of rainbow-dyed clothing stashed here and there; a projection, on a wall outside the museum, of a related video accompanied by similar music on headphones, beginning daily at dusk and visible through a window in the stairwell beside the gallery; and intermittent performances by the choreographic duo in the videos. The dancers are robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs).

Guido van der Werve's videos, currently on show at the Hayward Gallery, are the kind of thing art writers describe as 'hilarious', although they're only hilarious in an art way, meaning that any laughs that do come are snorty expulsions easy to mistake for symptoms of the cold that everyone seems to have at the moment. I think van der Werve knows his work is only funny in a limited way, the sort of intentionally weak gags coming soon to a Christmas cracker near you.

José Parlá’s first New York solo exhibition is on the fourth floor of an old Soho loft building; a manually operated freight elevator takes you up to a space that has been cleared of its usual offering of furniture to make room for his paintings, works on paper and ceramics. Parlá began his career writing on the streets of Miami, with the occasional jaunt up to New York City to join in what was going on in the boroughs at the height of the graffiti movement. “Soho, Manhattan, Circa 1981,” a four-by-six-foot canvas painted in 2008, acknowledges the “old school” writers Parlá was too young to truly be part of, yet from whom he nevertheless learned volumes as he watched their forays into the commercial art world of the 80s.

It’s become a cliché to describe statement-making jewelry as “wearable art,” but no other term quite captures the personal adornments made by Alexander Calder. His earrings, necklaces and bracelets were mini-mobiles that dangled from the wrists, necks and earlobes of sophisticates like Peggy Guggenheim and Jeanne Moreau. The Whitney Museum’s current Calder show features room after room of his playful wire sculptures but none of the 1,800 pieces of jewelry he made over the course of his career. Fortunately about 90 of these pieces are being given their own exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the first museum show to focus on Calder’s jewelry. (The New York Times, December, 11, 2008.)

Women Making Movies

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art feels like walking into a labyrinthine David Lynch film. Like Inland Empire or Lost Highway, womblike rooms and shadowed hallways open like Chinese boxes to reveal hidden secrets. Spelman's imaginative installation employs darkness, deep blue walls and a string of small viewing rooms, which provide a refreshing break from the usual white walls and antiseptic spaces where video work often appears. Those choices show the rewards of striving for an ambiance in some ways more "cinematic" than "art world."

Picture This

In one of her many meditations on the taking of pictures, Susan Sontag wrote that “all photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable — that is, unforgettable.” Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s lover before her death in 2004, says she doesn’t really “have a single favorite photograph” among those she’s taken; it’s her body of work, its “accumulation,” that gives her the most satisfaction. And yet “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” the latest of her books, makes a viewer realize how many of Leibovitz’s pictures have managed, individually, to fulfill the egoistic aspiration Sontag ascribed to all photographs. (The New York Times, December 12, 2008.)

The Ties That Bond Us

Together Forever, a group show of four female artists on view at Broadway Gallery this past September, should be lauded for its unique approach to representations of identity and the relationship between the self and the other, as well as for its compelling presentation of four diverse and distinctive female voices that in concert harmonized in exciting ways. Curated by Christine Kennedy, the exhibition featured the works of Alice Lang, Gertrud Alfredsson, Leah Beabout, and Marjorie van Cura.

Quids In!

Arhan Virdi finds out what the deal is at the autumn 2008 Affordable Art Fair in London. We are used to hearing about the Damien Hirsts of this world whose works sell for millions to a very exclusive club, but what we don’t hear about is our flourishing end of the art market which is supporting thousands of British artists, sustaining many young galleries and providing the opportunity for tens of thousands of people to have original art in their homes. --Will Ramsay, founder of the Affordable Art Fair.

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