We know immediately upon encountering the work of Canadian artist and poet Carmen Papalia that he can’t see very well. Signifiers of the artist’s visual impairment are at the center of Papalia’s multimedia installations, whether in the form of altered white canes, or in still- and moving-image documentation of projects in which Papalia re-imagines the meaning of “access,” particularly in museums that purport to care about outreach, education, and diversity, but accomplish little more than marketing campaigns. Papalia wants to change this. First and foremost he wants to change this for himself, but we get to come along too, buoyed by the enormous generosity, wit, and mischievousness that flows through the artist and his work. Papalia even invites us to engage him directly, installing his contact information on the walls of his exhibitions.
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"Specific Site: The Art of Tyree Guyton" by Justine Lai
We must be careful about romanticizing the fire.
Here are the facts: on May 3, 2013, an act of arson nearly destroyed one of the iconic components of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, an outdoor installation spanning multiple blocks on Detroit’s east side. Located on Heidelberg Street and vicinity, the installation consists of houses (some occupied, others abandoned), vacant lots, trees, sidewalks, and streets transformed with layers of bright paint and assemblages of salvaged objects.
Read More"Hip Hop Others" by Cat Kron
The album cover for 2 Live Crew's rap LP, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, shows four black women on the beach. Their backs to the camera, their profiles obscured by loose hair, the women's most noticeable features are their asses, revealed by thong bathing-bottoms. Under the triangles of the women's legs the members of 2 Live Crew sprout fully formed. They beam at the viewer from the hillside below, their black shirts offsetting multiple gold chains. The composition strikes one as though the women's asses are their faces, as if, in a curious perspectival reverse they are holding up the back row in a class picture shot from behind, with 2 Live Crew sitting up front.
Read More"Decorative Contemporary" by Emily Warner
Pattern and Decoration has been called the last modernist movement and the first postmodern, a final hurrah in the chapters of avant-garde rebellion and a new front in the pluralist free-for-all of the 1970s. Certainly the movement was multiple, divergent, even contradictory in its manifestations: under its umbrella it gathered abstraction, figurative flourishes, gridded designs, riotous arabesques.
Read MoreJennifer Coates on Dennis Congdon
Decaying remnants of Roman civilization appear in imaginary, quasi post-apocalyptic landscapes in Dennis Congdon's recent large-scale paintings. Recalling the Surrealist works of de Chirico or the Neoclassical period of Picasso, columns, capitals and busts abound in simplified settings where the history of art survives but humans don't appear to.
Read More"Home/Alone: Photographs by Soi Park" by Kelly Cannon
It is hard to imagine the Yale-trained photographer Soi Park sharing tequila with strangers at a day labor pick-up location in Connecticut. Yet that is how she became acquainted with the workers, and subsequently their families, who figure throughout her latest body of work. While she was riding on the Metro North commuter line in August of 2010, the train stopped briefly outside Stamford, giving Park a view of men loitering in a nearby lot. As the train started up again, she watched them run toward an arriving van. The anomaly of the men's urgency within the nondescript setting led her to return to the site with a camera.
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