Nobody can convince me that ASMA’s dolls don’t come alive and skitter all over SculptureCenter at night. That these little featureless skeletal femme creatures don’t pop up when the doors lock to tinker with the accessories placed around them—playing cards while lounging in the nude, tinkling the keys of their piano used as a momentary … Continue reading
At some point in college—or maybe grad school, I sought out Peter Hujar’s only published photobook Portraits in Life and Death at New York University’s Bobst Library. I wanted to pour over black and white photographs of filth elders like a pensive portrait of Divine, sans wig and forehead-reaching liquid eyeliner, curled up in a … Continue reading
“Florida is beyond the earthly; it’s spiritual,” comedian Tim Dillon reflected in a recent Patreon episode. “You cannot get rid of the idea of Florida.” He’s right. Florida is a place, sure, but even more so, it’s an idea. Many ideas, really: alligators lounging on golf courses; palm trees swaying in the beach breezes; Tennessee … Continue reading
Fluffy white clouds slowly roll by as a yellow balloon floats up to the heavens, cutting off two giant (by comparison) butterflies that zip around the golden-hour skies. Below, a flower-filled field, barricaded by a wholesome white picket fence, sits abandoned, seemingly post-picnic with a gingham blanket and a garden hose trickling into the whirlpool … Continue reading
On a warm Thursday evening, I entered a darkened bathroom stall, got on my knees, and licked. An ice cream cone, you sicko! What did you think I was eagerly lapping up?! Genuflecting devotionally in front of an oversized duct tape-encircled hole like I was praying to the spirits of toilet love past, I finally … Continue reading
Most of the insults you might hurl at Jutta Koether’s paintings — sloppy, crude, unresolved — also constitute flattery. Her rough-hewn energy is never more apparent than in her early creations, often featuring garish figures rendered in smeared and crusty oils. In her current summer show at Galerie Buchholz, imaginatively titled 1982, 1983, 1984, we … Continue reading
A mother who carefully renders her grade school-aged son in detailed gouache, focusing on his tousled brown hair, red shirt, and pointy vampire teeth as if he’s sucking the life out of her. An adult son who makes multiple paintings of a stick figure-like shadow outlined in sickening yellows, coagulated blood reds, and burnt oranges, … Continue reading
The well-established field of postcolonial critique and its art-world iterations have prepared and conditioned us to be conscientiously pleased with the 60th International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia titled Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. The recent #MeToo and #BLM movements, Indigenous and descendant movements, the expanding LGBTQIA+ or LGBTQI2S movement, and consequent installations … Continue reading
If Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s current exhibition Survey at David Peter Francis had a smell, other than that of East Broadway’s markets wafting through the third-floor windows, it would be that sweetly sour stench of unwashed, slept-in sheets and stale dry-mouthed morning breath. A man dozes, his face pushed hard into the white-sheeted bed while his … Continue reading
A minuscule flushed hand with five chubby fingers sticks out of a slick reddened birth canal as if waving from a seeping open wound. A rubber-gloved palm grabs the neck of a splotchy greenish-purple head, its rubbery face smushed and eyes slammed shut with yellow viscous fluid running from its nose. Another grumpy face, this … Continue reading