In 2003, after graduating from Cooper Union in New York City, Mores McWreath had the letters WW tattooed onto his bicep. His inverted initials and the monogram of his alter ego Will Westlake, the tattoo now resembles a pale stencil. His body literally rejected the ink. The incident makes a striking metaphor for the relationship between McWreath, the artist, and Westlake, a recurrent character in his art. Ironically, it has also come to symbolize a sense of failure for McWreath that he embraces and actively cultivates in his practice-failure to be unique, failure to communicate, failure to make the "right" choice.
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Filtering by Category: Essays
"Adiwit Ansathammarat: A Diary of Small Traumas" by Tim Ridlen
With a transcultural background of increasing familiarity, Adiwit Ansathammarat was born in Thailand, where he began his education in the visual arts; he left his home in Bangkok as a teenager to study in Edinburgh, then for graduate studies went on to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He arrived in Chicago in 2004, and it was there that I first came to know his work.
Read More"Of Dissonant Notes and Artistic Practices: The Art of Naeem Mohaiemen" by Haig Aivazian
I first met Naeem Mohaiemen at The Third Line gallery in Dubai in January 2009, while setting up an exhibition curated by London's Green Cardamom. The show was called "Lines of Control" and it consisted mainly of South Asian artists exploring the historical, social and cultural repercussions of the partitioning of India (in 1947) and Pakistan (in 1971), the latter resulting in the establishment of Bangladesh. Mohaiemen was presenting Kazi in Nomansland, a series of monochromatic, bitmap digital prints of the eyes of Kazi Nazrul Islam that the artist had shot from photographs on display at the Nazrul Institute Museum in Dhaka. A defiantly seditious, anti-colonial Bengali poet and a revolutionary thinker, Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was struck by a rare disease that impaired his speech and left him mentally disabled in the last thirty years of his life.
Read More"Just Beyond Reality's Edge: Kira Lynn Harris" by Nicole J. Caruth
Kira Lynn Harris's attention to light and space dates back to her childhood. Raised in the sun-drenched landscape of Southern California, she recalls a poem that she penned at the age of twelve: "Sunlight shining through the tree leaves like stars twinkling in a green leafy night." The artist says, in a very matter-of-fact way, "Light has always been present for me."
Read More"Chance Encounters: Following the Thread Through Art Green's Recent Works" by Meghan Bissonnette
Art Green first gained artistic recognition through his involvement with the Hairy Who, a Chicago-based group that formed in 1966 when several recent graduates from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago came together to exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center.
Read More"Earnest Irony: The Deadpan Passions of Clark V. Fox" by Emily Warner
Clark Fox's paintings, silkscreens and wooden sculptures are at once deadpan and heartfelt. In their pop culture references and their grid-like multiplicity, they have a cool '60s aesthetic. Their painterly and textural qualities, though, are anything but cool: sensual brushwork and color areas reveal an artist deeply involved with his materials and invested in the subtleties and hidden histories of his subjects.
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