Cora Fisher
Charles Juhasz-Alvarado Complicated Stories
By Cora FisherAt first glance, the main gallery of Exit Art resembles a Wunderkammer of lovingly selected botanical, animal and human artifacts. These objects, made by the artist Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, tell stories that are as culturally specific as they are utopian and borderless.
Jonathan Torgovnik: Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape
By Cora FisherIntended Consequences conveys through its visual parity the burden of long-internalized silence—unbroken until now—over the sexual torture of Rwandan women by militiamen during and after the bloodiest phase of the 1994 genocide.
The 53rd Venice Biennale
By Cora FisherThe Venice Biennale’s title, Fare Mondi/Making Worlds, offers no particular vantage for viewing the eclectic survey encompassing both the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and the Arsenale. Still, the compelling and idiosyncratic visions of Simon Starling and Nathalie Djurberg are sufficiently bound up with the corporeality of process to stand out from the sprawling exhibition.
DENYSE THOMASOS: The Divide: New Paintings
By Cora FisherDenyse Thomasos’s paintings propose hypothetical cities where buildings overtop each other. Ruler-drawn lines scaffold over clouds of color, but never settle into finished form.
JOAN JONAS Mirage
By Cora FisherWhen Jonas performs on video, her force of consciousness bubbles to the surface of the medium. Against the will of the censor, she pries open its logic with her own concatenations.
Found in Translation
By Cora FisherThe Guggenheim’s current survey of film and video-based installation art, Found in Translation, features a series of darkened rooms off the main rotunda. Each room houses the work of one of the 11 artists in the show, some of the very best working in this format.
CLIFFORD OWENS Anthology
By Cora FisherFor Anthology, Clifford Owens asked 26 inter-generational black artists to provide him with scores for performance works which he interpreted in situ during a residency at PS1 last spring.
The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women
By Cora FisherTouting Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” as the curatorial premise of its group show, The Female Gaze: Women on Women, Cheim & Read promises a look into how women see themselves and other women, surveying self-portraits, portraits, and female nudes, all by women artists.
Walking the Edge of a Blade of Grass: Art and Activism of The Canary Project
By Cora FisherLet’s start anecdotally: a pair of high-end white leather boots, a smart piece of luggage, a decadent bijou cradled by a clump of ice, and drifting in a wintry, monochrome sea.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Thousand
By Cora FisherA distinct nostalgia is stirring in Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s recent show, Thousand. A row of a thousand Polaroid prints snake around the pristine white field of gallery walls, each a little window into the artist’s past bodies of work and visual fixations. The linear arrangement, slightly below eye level, asks us to look intently at every frame, and then train our eyes sideways.
EDWARD KRASINSKI AND EUSTACHY KOSSAKOWSKI J’ai Perdu La Fin!!!
By Cora FisherIn one of the photographic collaborations between the late Polish artist, Edward Krasiński, and his friend, the photo-journalist Eustachy Kossakowski, the artist is pictured increasingly entangled in loops of cable, unable to find the end that would enable him to free himself. Performed and photographed in 1969, this absurdist series begins with coils of tubing on the floor and quickly gets out of hand.
Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself
By Cora FisherIt is doubtful that “X,” the aptly named anonymous former lover of the artist Sophie Calle, anticipated that the artist would use his break-up letter, sent to her via email, to open the collective floodgates of feminine response, metabolizing the experience through a public exegesis, or else he might have picked up the phone instead.
Ryan Schneider One Dog Night
By Cora FisherMany artists keep a journal. Their entries can be loose, fertilizing other preoccupations in their lives away from public scrutiny. Yet the scenic tableaus of Ryan Schneider’s six paintings, packed as they are with furniture, domestic effects and other objects, read more as a disingenuous staging of the personal.
The Peripheterists
By Cora FisherThe Peripheterists, a group show curated by Jocko Weyland at Apex Art, is an ode to artists “away from the banal fuss of the validated...low-key and unsung.”
Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Rum: The Art of Appropriation
By Cora FisherIn an interview with Gene Swenson, Andy Warhol articulated his intellectual stance on originality and mechanization, saying: “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me…I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.”
MARISA MERZ
By Cora FisherThe radicalism of the Italian Arte Povera movement is lost in the glare of high-finish concrete floors and glowing white walls.
MORE THAN THAT: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson
By Cora FisherA floor apart from the mid-career retrospective of Glen Ligon at the Whitney Museum, a gallery-turned-sanctum offers its own glimpse into black experience—in a manner apart from the literalism of Ligon’s neon signs flickering “AMERICA.”
Riccardo Vecchio: Recent Paintings
By Cora FisherThe scenes in Riccardo Vecchio’s recent paintings are at first glance ambiguous in their evocation of a postwar cityscape—it’s hard to discern whether these places are in a state of reconstruction or stasis, whether they are tinted with nostalgia or tamed by the discipline of building a picture.
The Makers Market at The Old American Can Factory, Brooklyn
By Cora FisherIf you happen to be walking on Third Street in Brooklyn, the sight of the two industrial garage doors of The Old American Can Factory opening onto a white hangar-like space arrayed with market stands will likely stop you in your tracks. Inside, to the left, you are confronted by a behemoth machine: resurrecting turn-of-the-century manufacturing, the members of Sway Space step on the pedal of their letterpress to crank out customized stationery.
La Carte D’Après Nature
By Cora FisherTen years ago in Belgium I was told that a flock of birds had migrated from Africa and settled in the rainy treetops of Brussels. Bright bits of color could be seen on spindly winter branches, the birds not out of place so much as forging a new outpost. The rumor struck me at the time as a little allegory of postcolonial diaspora in a Western European city.
EVA AND FRANCO MATTES AKA 0100101110101101.ORG Reality is Overrated
By Cora FisherOnce upon a time, when web space was still considered vacuous and alien, avatar meant something very different from the cat-eyed, loping creatures of James Cameron’s imagination. But oh, haven’t we evolved.
CHRIS VERENE Family
By Cora FisherIncreasingly, Chelsea is not an environment where emotional intimacy is the norm. But a curious thing happened to me with Chris Verene’s photograph “MY MOM VISITING DOROTHY” (2005): tears welled up.
PAUL RAMÍREZ JONAS Key to the City
By Cora FisherThe object of Key to the City is to collect experiences. Populist in spirit, this universal key, the brainchild of Paul Ramírez Jonas, provides the holder with access to obscure spaces in public institutions, private establishments, and municipal sites like docks and bridges.
SOTO Paris and Beyond,
1950 – 1970
By Cora Fisher
Above all, an interest in movement cuts across the mid-career abstractions of Venezuelan artist Jésus Soto (1923–2005). During the period of 1950s Paris captured in the show, Soto, one of the pioneers of kinetic art, produced alongside a cabal of artists including Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, and Group Zero.
BABETTE MANGOLTE Presence, Movement and Stills
By Cora FisherBabette Mangolte, filmmaker and photographer, fled to New York from Paris in 1970 to be in a place where film authorship was not a gendered noun, and has been making experimental films and cinematographic collaborations ever since.
Marksmen and the Palimpsests
By Cora FisherAt Centotto, curator Paul D’Agostino provides a conceptual link for each exhibition, inviting artists to respond to it any way they see fit. D’Agostino’s concept for the current show, featuring the painters John Avelluto and Josh Willis, is the palimpsest.
READING DOUBLE: The Book of Ruth
By Cora FisherWhat freedoms can an alter ego afford an artist? What truths? In Book of Ruth, Robert Seydel assumes the identity of his fictitious aunt, Ruth Greisman, a forgotten collagist. Made by Seydel through the foil of “another,” Book of Ruth is a paean to the inner life and how we might express it through poetry, through the subliminal medium of collage, and across gender.
