The lockdown was like an eternal Sunday evening. Streets were suddenly street-sized maps with no one on them, like a surreal Jorge Luis Borges story. Clocks stopped ticking, or we stopped listening. Isolation meant safety, uncertainty, comfort, and loneliness as new universes were formed inside small one-bedroom apartments and basement floors, mansions and hotel rooms.
Category: Writing
The Sight of Death, Over and Over
There were days of doing nothing. Days of naps and existential crises, and other blissful days of reading and watching movies. Seasons changed as we stood still, the dark days of winter spent under blankets turned into the clear morning air of spring, and then afternoons of basking under the hot June sun.
Grayson Cox and Joan Waltemath: Apparatus
A large-scale, wooden sculpture stands in the spotlight between the dim gray walls of FiveMyles in Brooklyn. New York City-based artist Grayson Cox’s Market Graph II (2020) is in the middle of the exhibition Apparatus, an installation curated by the artist and writer A.V. Ryan gathers together Cox and Joan Waltemath’s work in a contemporary yet timeless setting, as it takes its main inspiration from the current global crisis surrounding COVID-19 and a Giorgio Agamben essay, “What Is an Apparatus?”.
The Artist’s Choice
The Wanderer looks ahead. The tails of his dusky green frock coat ruffle in the wind as he summits a hilltop, his left leg forward and his knee slightly bent, casually holding a walking stick in his right hand. The sharp, craggy edges of the cliff are wet and lustrous under his feet. One can only imagine the expression on the Wanderer’s face––his back is turned and so it is hidden from the viewer’s eye.
Anne Truitt
Truitt’s works skillfully combine color and form in their truest essence, examining their connections and spatial characteristics in relation to one another. Her paintings and drawings also draw from this relationship to achieve the highest simplicity with the most meaning, this time on two-dimensional surface of paper and canvas.
After Manet: The Wife, the Fish, and the Philosopher
She had fair and healthy skin, slightly red on the cheeks, and flawlessly taut around the eyes. Her aquiline nose was the most prominent feature of her face, protruding over shapely lips. Brown eyes, light like unripened almonds, were half-covered by sleepy eyelids, and framed subtly by modest brows.
A Bridge Between You and Everything: An Exhibition of Iranian Women Artists
In the group exhibition A Bridge Between You and Everything many artworks are slightly concealed. Sometimes the veil is a thin coat of blue paint, or a glaze of dirty water blurring the black ink, or fully opaque, jet-black brush strokes over pictures of famous landmarks.
A Space of Pure Imagination: Swoon’s CICADA at Jeffrey Deitch
A cardboard dollhouse cracks open in the middle, revealing a nude, pregnant woman also of cardboard. Her legs are spread and vulva dilated and, surrounded by flowers, bushes, and other flora, she clutches her rounded belly.
Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory at The Met Breuer
To artist Vija Celmins, everything in the world is of equal importance: a heater, a fan, an old letter addressed to Miss Vija Celmins, a burning plane from WWII, Saturn, the sea, the stars. Celmins fixes her objects of inspiration in time, as perfectly as can be.
Writing-by-Proxy: A Conversation with Lucy Ives
“My interest is less in making a fake protagonist who might stand in for me,” says Lucy Ives over iced coffee one hot Sunday afternoon, “than in having independent characters who produce writing.”