Robert Zehnder: Ageless Machine

By Clare Gemima

OCT 2022 | ArtSeen

Robert Zehnder’s new paintings and sculptures all possess a strong visual symbology and psychologic indexicality, evocative of his most recent trip to Europe. Returning with a critical and philosophical attachment to the idea of hidden functions of certain architectures, namely those ecclesiastical in nature, Zehnder’s intrigue into how these ideas can influence one’s own spatiality, both internally and exteriorly, has produced Ageless Machine, the artist’s first solo-exhibition with Mrs.

Dear Friends and Readers

By Phong Bui

OCT 2023 | Publisher's Message

As we think and re-think who we are as individuals, capable of integrating our inner and outer lives, we should question how we are related to the world’s economic machine, especially in relation to our constant consumption of things, and how we as individuals relate to economic forces that we are part of and at the same time try to maintain a certain distance from.

Jane South: Halfway Off

By Andrew Paul Woolbright

OCT 2023 | ArtSeen

For her current exhibition Halfway Off, South continues to produce from the mind of the hand and its partner, the industrial sewing machine. Between foot and plate, South finds the relational and situational dialectics, tensions, and moments between textures and fibers, discovering synthesis through process.

from Take What You Need

By Idra Novey

MARCH 2023 | Fiction

Deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a sixty-six year old woman named Jean welds scrap metal into massive sculptures. These works, which she dubs her “Manglements,” assert themselves into the foreground of the story with the same haunting force of Louise Bourgeois’s works—which makes sense given that Bourgeois is Jean’s greatest influence and the central source of reflection on the artistic impulse in Idra Novey’s superb new novel, Take What You Need. Amid the sawdust and machine oil, there’s a whiff of distrust. The novel deeply examines the intersection of art and trust, which is a central, if quiet, conversation often overlooked in the sensationalist depictions of art monsters in contemporary fiction. Novey relates an outsider artist’s life, and her step-daughter’s reckoning with that life, with resonance and connection to the broader world beyond the workshop.