EASYREEDER

Artforum

Francis Palazzolo

(04/01/2005)

When the gods—or media corporations—are angry, you’re probably doing something right. Francis Palazzolo’s current exhibition at The Proposition publicized itself through an image appropriated from the New Line holiday film Elf. Palazzolo had chosen the image to exemplify the quandary of what is and isn’t apparently true, titling the photo, I Believe It’s Snowing When It’s Not, 2005…

Josh Dorman

(11/12/2004)

That there is often an essential sentimentality to creative endeavors—a reconnecting with memories, with the past—is a fact long made manifest by Josh Dorman’s paintings. In recent years, however, Dorman’s precise landscapes have recontextualized their relationship to history, moving from the personal toward something broader. In this show, curated by Paul Auster, the pictures on view are representative of a new body of work…

Jimmy Raskin

(11/05/2004)

In the early ’90s, Jimmy Raskin exploded onto the New York scene, drawing a crowd of 350 art world insiders to his inaugural performance at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Raskin, a star of his class at Cal Arts, had renounced his art—an amalgam of photography, computer-generated images, and objects made of tissue-paper confetti—in favor of a poetic philosophical treatise on the Prologue of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and, of course, Pinocchio…

Lydia Dona

(10/21/2004)

In ten medium and large-scale works in acrylic, oil, and sign paint, Lydia Dona bares the inner machinations of her own paintings. Transparent elaborations of convoluted mechanical structures are illuminated among opaque clusters of acidic colors. The under-diagrams, which are based on images from car-repair manuals, make for an association not only with the human body, but with the wreckage of war, history, and art…

Orly Genger

(10/05/2004)

In recent years, the distinction between figuration and abstraction has yielded. In the years before that, the divisions between Pop and everything else saw near-total erosion. And yet the notion of art-versus-craft continues to provoke assumptions about what constitutes “high art.”…

Dirk Westphal

(07/30/2004)

Dirk Westphal’s C-print panels of tropical fish are sheathed in acrylic, as if to suggest the tanks in which his subjects were photographed. But Westphal takes pains to create a photographic environment in which the viewer can experience the fish directly, without the distorting lens of the aquarium, or even water. In hyperclear detail, his “Piscoli Fabulosi” are shown adrift in pure whiteness…

“Band of Abstraction”

(07/21/2004)

The cramped character of the New York City apartment, in addition to that of contemporary world politics, brings an acuity to the reduced scale of the nearly fifty works presented in Joe Fyfe’s summer curatorial project. With seventeen contributing artists, mostly emerging or not recently shown in New York, Fyfe does well to establish the existence of not so much a national as an international identity in abstraction…

Jon Kessler

(05/13/2004)

A surveillance camera zooms in on a Cabbage Patch Kid. Another camera swings over modernist office decor; a third enters a latex vagina; a fourth surveys a ghostly New York City. On a screen embedded in a cardboard box, we watch it all. Titled Heaven’s Gate, 2004, the work provides entry to Jon Kessler’s “Global Village Idiot”—a group of kinetic assemblages that surveille themselves with the aid of video cameras and monitors….

Alfred DeCredico

(/4/13/2004)

No, it’s not just another moil of paint, condoms, fishing lures, and animal carcasses. Alfred DeCredico, who has been showing since 1967, has long been incorporating objects into his paintings, where they serve as iconographic or biomorphic sculptural forms. Yet viewers are never burdened by the impression that his paint is little more than an adhesive for stuff. Rather, the enticement of Decredico’s work is that, despite the bedlam of his surface, the forms and colors remain unmuddied and acute…

Nicole Eisenman

(03/19/2004)

Four sullen teens, hoodlum wannabes, traipse through the woods of their glum, if bucolic, country town. Perhaps they live in the shadow of a big city, perhaps New York City. In her first show with Leo Koenig, Nicole Eisenman, after a move to Hudson Valley, New York, has directed her encompassing vision at the murderous ski slopes and Bunyonesque mud trompers of her new district…

Yoshihiro Suda

(03/02/2004)

With their deft placement high above eye level, Yoshihiro Suda’s diminutive wooden flowers (one to each room) engender a surprisingly broad range of reaction. The front gallery, painted classic white, greets viewers with a beatific rose; the dusky green inner room, with a lush, languishing tulip…

Joseph Nechvatal

(03/02/2004)

The process of decay is also the process of life: Dust we are, unto dust we return, and so on. Here, Joseph Nechvatal’s eight paintings—“computer robotic–assisted acrylic on canvas”—overwhelm the main gallery with their luxuriant sense of theoretical and psychological decomposition. “Ignudio”—as per the ignudo (singular) or ignudi (plural) of classical Italian painting—is Nechvatal’s term for the nude form that’s neither singular nor plural, masculine nor feminine…

Marlene McCarty

(02/11/2004)

John Keats composed the gnomic, oft-cited phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty;” in her first show with Brent Sikkema, Marlene McCarty sustains her attack on presumptions about these famous twin poles, particularly as they apply to the American teenage girl. McCarty has been making composite portraits of young female murderers for a decade; the new works, six mural-size drawings in graphite and ballpoint on paper, are based on media images of Marlene Olive…

“Urban Baroque”

(11/25/2003)

Guest curator Lisa Ivorian Gray has brought together installation, photographs, sculpture, and paintings in this group show exploring the intersection of nature and the urban environment. Anya Gallaccio sets row upon row of red gerbera flowers behind a pane of glass whose proportions echo those of the gallery’s doors, which are practically the only architectural elements that haven’t changed since the building’s days as a fire station. The flowers, fresh at the opening, will be left to decay over the course of the exhibition…

Miranda Lichtenstein

(10/29/2003)

Everyone is familiar with Monet’s garden in Giverny, having seen the artist’s depictions of it or even visited the site itself, which has been meticulously maintained. Less well-known is the replica of the garden in Kitagawa Village, Japan, a down-at-the-heels tourist attraction where French flowers struggle to survive in the alien climate. In her current show at Elizabeth Dee, Miranda Lichtenstein presents photographs of both places…

Hiroshi Sugimoto

(10/17/2003)

In this exhibition of black-and-white photographs, Hiroshi Sugimoto defamiliarizes canonical works of modern architecture. Using extended exposures and odd camera angles, he transforms icons like the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Brooklyn Bridge into visual enigmas, shadowy and suggestively blurred…

Ingrid Calame

(10/17/2003)

LIngrid Calame’s abstractions derive from her tracings of stains on the pavements of Los Angeles and New York. This isn’t just an aleatory compositional strategy—it’s a political gesture as well. Art with a progressive agenda has often sought to illuminate the socially invisible; Calame’s sidewalk revolts might be read as sly, oblique continuations of this tradition…

Jason Rhoades

(09/13/2003)

In the beginning was the word. Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World depicts a woman’s vagina as the source of all things, but for Jason Rhoades, the origin of the world is not the vagina but the many words that name it. In his current solo exhibition “Meccatuna,” hundreds of neon signs reading POONTANG, BEARDED CLAM, etc., spangle the gallery walls and pile up on pallets in every available space, as Rhoades’s battle, seemingly partly for and partly against the massive influx of industrial flotsam into our lives, takes on biblical proportions…

“Women on Painting”

(08/01/2003)

Encompassing six decades and a divergent group of eight painters, “Women On Painting”—with surprisingly few artworks and a small amount of space—demonstrates not only the flexibility of painting but an increasing flexibility in the ways one can look at a painting. The show presents a condensed narrative of the discipline, from the reductivism of Abstract Expressionism (represented by a very fresh and unreductive Yvonne Thomas) to the resurrection of the modernist female form…

Rachel Harrison, Hirsch Perlman, Dieter Roth, Jack Smith, Rebecca Warren

(08/01/2003)

This untitled group show falls into step with a summertime trend, shunning conventional art-historical chronologies by grouping works that span generations. Curated by gallery director Jeffrey Peabody, the exhibition focuses on materials of summer-camp simplicity. The faded fabulosity of Jack Smith’s “Brassieres,” c. 1967–75 (sculpted in fabric and rendered on paper), point up, with uncanny accuracy, this moment’s riches-to-rags mentality…