Fear is contagious and seductive. Every day the news and entertainment media bombard us with disasters both real and imagined. TV shows like Law and Order and CSI present a new horror every week. Our politicians pander with promises to get tough on crime or to protect our borders. Author and medical doctor Marc Siegel explains in False Alarm: the Truth about the Epidemic of Fear, "Statistically, the industrialized world has never been safer. Nevertheless, we live in fear of worst-case scenarios."[1] As a biological function, fear protects us from danger, yet in today's political and cultural climate it can lead to debilitating anxiety and hysteria, opening the door for individuals, companies, organizations and governments to step in with ill-conceived solutions or coercive measures of all sorts. We consistently act in response to fear. It is a potent drug.
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"Mores McWreath: 'Maybe If I Keep Talking...'" by Cameron Shaw
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.
Read More"Inside the Moon Hotel: The Art of David Dunlap" by Melissa Tuckman
David Dunlap does not compartmentalize. Everything he feels, sees and experiences, every newspaper story he reads and every person he meets, alters him, and makes its way into his art. He does not strategize, and seems to be incapable of deceit. In everything he does, he integrates joy and labor, instinct and consciousness, art and life
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"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.
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