Tom Greenwood's practices as a musician and visual artist are so assiduously entwined that drawing any clearly defined boundary between the two is impossible. Scanning the walls and shelves of his stuffed apartment in Southwest Portland, Oregon, one can see how, for Greenwood, sound and image share a symbiotic relationship. There are paintings made for the albums he issues with his band, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and then there are paintings made directly on the surfaces of used LPs. There are posters promoting gigs for the band; tambourines screen-printed with overlaid pinwheels and starbursts; and yellowing pages from ancient issues of Rolling Stone, which Greenwood has singed into lacy, latticed patterns with burning incense sticks.
Read More
"Raul Guerrero's 'Oaxaca Series'" by Lesley Ma
On the southbound Interstate 5 past Downtown San Diego en route to Raul Guerrero's studio in National City, signs start to count down the mileage in the twenty-mile stretch to the United States-Mexico border. National City, one of the oldest cities in San Diego County and primarily an immigrant community, hosts the largest naval base on the West Coast, along with the Mile of Cars, one of the first auto malls in the world. After being greeted by the row of shiny car dealerships right off the highway exit, one arrives at a plain, adobe-colored industrial and warehouse complex, where the artist's studio is located.
Read More"Carrie Olson: Fear as Commodity" by Christopher A. Yates
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.
Read More"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