Forms of Regulation and Control, El-Sherbini’s current exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, hones in on the notion of control in a time in which the world feels uncontrollable. Focusing on social conditions most acutely felt in the age of COVID-19, like increased surveillance and police presence on the streets, El-Sherbini also asks us to examine other modes of surveillance and control that go largely unnoticed.
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"Power/Play" by Re'al Christian
Myeongsoo Kim’s collection of Olympic-themed stamps are equal parts works of art and utilitarian objects. There is a particular timelessness to the stamps that could be described as retro-futuristic. Such an aesthetic reminds the artist of the sports movies he grew up on as a child in Seoul. While he may have been too young to understand the symbolic implications of movies like Miracle on Ice (1981) and Rocky IV (1985) in the context of Cold War–era politics, he recalls how these films and others like them fetishized the West. Kim thinks of his collection of Olympic stamps and memorabilia as an extension of this fetishization. Keeping hundreds of them in a box—some laminated, some grouped together thematically—they have become uniquely personal fetish objects.
Read More“Sickly Sweet and Dirty Dazzle: Terri Friedman’s Textiles” by Alexis Wilkinson
Terri Friedman’s textile panels buzz with urgency. She employs clamorous color palettes and assembles her works out of loose gestures, uneven textures, and yarn that spills out from both planes. Rogue cords dangle, droop, and gather. Often hiding in these compositions are words like “AW/FUL,” “WAKE UP,” and “ENOUGH,” signaling the personal and national anxiety that has engendered these frenetic forms. At the same time, Friedman’s work is buoyed by an ethos of optimism; her intention is to rewire and redirect the mind, and to weave pathways to pleasure and joy in tumultuous times. Gaps widen in her dense fibers, sometimes containing colored plexiglass or stained-glass pieces, letting in the light from the other side.
Read More"Uniform, Free-form" by Gaby Collins-Fernandez
Yang Mai’s work asks us to submit to the terms of apparel. Nowhere is this clearer than in his studio, which I visited twice as he prepared for this exhibition. The space bursts with clothing in varying stages of conversion from raw material to finished sculpture. In the middle of the room were groups of business suits, sportswear, and school clothes, stiffened, painted, filled with spray foam, and arranged in constantly fluctuating configurations. Between these were sculptures comprising neatly stacked polo shirts, purposefully drab columns interrupted by off-kilter plastic spheres and fluorescent tube lights.
Read More"Steve Parker: Call and Respond" by Lilia Rocio Taboada
With a practice combining sculptural and auditory elements, Steve Parker’s exhibition Futurist Listening reimagines the role of sensory audience participation as a social interruption, blending the sculptural and the sonic in an environment that offers respite from the chaos beyond the exhibition’s walls. Parker’s use of repurposed instruments and early sonic technology links the loud, tumultuous history of the early 20th century, as expressed in the music of brass bands, to the noise of everyday life.
Read More"Tracing Intuitions" by Sumru Tekin
The invented landscapes of Sarah Amos’s large-scale collagraph constructions on felt and canvas recall archaeological sites where the uncanny presence of disparate objects evokes the co-existence of multiple histories and activities. Amos describes the material and compositional makeup of the work as “layers [that] jostle over the surface, to find each other,” a palimpsest, irreducible to a single image, surface, or history.
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