Radio is, famously, a location-less medium. It exists in the "ether," neither here nor there. Often it meets listeners in transit: on the road one catches broadcasts from the local station, or tunes in to more remote content from satellite transmissions. Depending on where the dial (or on-screen arrow) lands, one hears either corporate content assembled by automatic playlists or carefully selected regional voices; however uncommon the latter, radio remains a rare haven for independent production. With Free Radio, Brian Gillis and Robin Lambert aim to expand the social space opened by community radio, helping underserved community groups to develop and transmit their "voices" through a DIY radio station that could be heard across the New York metropolitan area from CUE's gallery.
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Filtering by Category: Essays
"Michael Minelli: Both/And" by Megan Hoetger
A pair of men's briefs that fit on a pinky finger; that quintessential comedic prop, the banana peel; a little bust of the cartoon character Olive Oyl mounted on a spindly wire; the still-shocking hooded figures from the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal; a miniature car battery rigged for electrocutions; the small frame of eleven year old Kim Phuc burned by napalm; naked devil men; a minute vignette of two men in a life raft; a mini Michael Jackson striking his well-known moonwalk pose.
Read More"Greg Wilken's Terra Incognita" by Tucker Neel
Greg Wilken arrives at his final images through a process akin to a fact-finding mission. On these expeditions the artist is motivated by the discovery of a significant historical event or condition which results in research, field explorations, documentation gathering, and the presentation of evidence, usually in the form of framed photographs, films, and custom-made artist books. Taken at face value, it's a fairly simple set of procedures, a way of getting from A to Z, but the resulting works are anything but easy, demanding a cognitive shift from viewers.
Read More"Intimacy Composed: The Paintings of Sarah Canright" by Bethany Johnson
In this expansive exhibition, Sarah Canright presents paintings from her ongoing exploration of—almost exclusively—the greyhound as compositional form and psychological subject. Canright constructs her compositions with the dogs' twisting bodies and limbs, producing works that are as visually eloquent as they are psychologically stirring. These paintings embrace the visual subtlety and emotional depth of oil on canvas, while also embodying the intimacy and immediacy of drawing.
Read More"Harvesting Narratives: Tales of Rural America and Race in the Work of Mitchell Squire" by Elly Fishman
In the studio, the tile is spattered with old coffee stains and the persistent remains of misdirected meals, while the walls are marked with remnants of cigarette and stovetop smoke. The three small rooms harbor an atmosphere of feral domesticity and are saturated with history and the evidence of past lives. It makes perfect sense then that Squire would choose this space to make his artwork, concerned as it is with the poetic interaction of loaded objects and materials, echoing across open or abandoned space.
Read More"The Way We See It: The New Drawings of Ryan and Trevor Oakes" by Deenah Vollmer
"It's easy to think that the world is out there, but in fact we're in the pitch darkness," said Ryan Oakes to me last June, gesturing toward our immediate surroundings. "The whole world exists right here," he said, pointing to his head.
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