In Mexico City, everybody knows that if you have an emergency there is no point in dialing 060. Everyone knows that help, if it ever arrives, will come late. Laboratorio 060 emerges from this state of national emergency, being aware that there is no way to produce any final resolution, because time and space are out of joint, and that state, more than being an irreversible moment of chaos, allows the very possibility for something to happen - without notice, or invitation.
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"On Tom Secrest" by Michael Patrick Welch
To speak with 65-year-old Tom Secrest about his art, you must hunt him down on the marshy edge of America in Lafayette, Louisiana. There, Secrest lives and worksin a tiny, dark student apartment, its every wall, countertop and floorboard layered in thousands of his etchings, drawings, paintings and various amalgams in between, each and every one framed.
Read More"Not Too Real: Karen Tam and the New Chinoiserie" by French Clements
Although Karen Tam says her work draws upon an imaginary China, she's practically lived there too, growing up above her parents' Chinese restaurant in Montreal. She completed schoolwork in the restaurant's back room as her father prepared a variety of food-chicken balls, egg rolls, chop suey-rarely eaten in the family's apartment. Generations of previous Chinese immigrants to the West had fine-tuned these hybrid recipes, guaranteed to be more popular than the original. Tam recalls a friend in Canada who opened a pure Szechuan restaurant, only to fold soon after for lack of business. She jokes, "It was too real!"
Read MoreCatherine Taft on Linden
Ron Linden's
Shem the Penman(2007) is a modest painting with an innate but peculiar logic of its own. On a worked wooden panel, geometric forms in graphite and acrylic drift like half-shucked oysters, broken glass, or unstrung black pearls stuck in some muddy nook. Rendered in sooty earth tones, this layered abstraction shifts between slack brushstrokes and hard edges in a movement at once organic and mechanical. As its title suggests, this painting seems to exist only to spite its creator; a playful aphorism in disguise, "Shem the Penman" - a central figure in James Joyce's protean novel
Finnegans Wake- should also be read as "shame on the author," or "the maker is a sham."
Read More"The Importance of Being Phranc" by Julia Schlosser
"The World as Still Life by Mark Turgeon" by Carolyn Funk
One can be a traveler at home as well as abroad. In a wildly colorful language evocative of the Fauves, the painter Mark Turgeon
depicts domestic artifacts and easily forgotten souvenirs that are excavations of the ordinary: vases of flowers, an airport security sticker, barcodes, DVDs, textiles, paperback books, street posters, statuettes, Nike swooshes, the Fair Trade emblem. The pictorial elements record the precious alongside the utterly disposable, compiling a visual archaeology of the detritus of everyday.
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