Lauren Anderson: Setup

Curatorial project with River Valley Arts Collective
Al Held Foundation (Boiceville, NY)
May 18–October 10, 2025

River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to present Setup, new commissioned works by Lauren Anderson installed within the landscape that surrounds the Al Held Foundation studio complex. The project is curated by Marisa Espe and organized as part of RVAC’s annual On the Grounds series.

Anderson’s work investigates the formal properties of vernacular images, objects, and methods of presentation. With Setup, she extends her material experimentations in wood and clay into the outdoors. Drawing from the visual vocabulary of roadside structures encountered while driving throughout the Hudson Valley, Anderson constructs forms that echo makeshift farm stands, produce containers, abandoned palettes, and free piles. She considers the sites and circumstances these everyday objects occupy, examining their logics of display and the ways they integrate or contrast with the natural landscape. Anderson engages techniques of casting, projecting, deconstructing, and reconstructing to create new associations between the utilitarian, the provisional, and the handmade.

Setup is comprised of three sculptural works that are installed in three distinctive locations, activating throughways and tucked-away corners of the Foundation’s property. Further drawing on the design of the outdoor site—the discreet paths between buildings, the gently winding switchbacks up the slope, the calm of a level grade—the artist invites visitors to reorient with the space and scale of the grounds. Like the roadside farmstand, Anderson’s works punctuate enough to catch the eye yet remain approachable and human scaled.

Structures of weather treated wood function as the base and support for ceramic compositions, including casts of waxed cardboard boxes and novelty baskets, clay slabs, and ceramic offshoots and tests. Anderson’s process-driven recipes for firing and glazing yield visual delights that either augment the trompe l’oeil effect or strike dissonance between form, surface, and palette. The constituent parts can be understood as representatives—elements that stand in for something, but are not the things themselves, elements that sometimes just surpass the threshold of abstraction to perplex viewers in their uncanniness. As the exhibition title suggests, setup connotes both an arrangement and a scheme, both the way something is organized and how it has been designed to deceive. Anderson’s work revels in the space between recognition in the referent and the defamiliarization through process.

LAUREN ANDERSON (b. 1983 Portsmouth, VA) works in expanded notions of painting and sculpture. She is observant in how perspectives are established, how objects, ideas, and images get from Point A to Point B, and the scope of forms, substrates, and portals that get them there. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include The Middle Ages, Roundabouts Now, Kingston NY (2025); 48 Hour Biography, Paradise Projects, Philadelphia, PA (2024); Talk Shop, VERSE Workshop, Red Hook, NY (2023); The First Show, CooCoo Barn, Hudson, NY (2020); Lax Attitude, AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles, CA (2018); among others. She has been awarded fellowships at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson) and Ox-Bow (MI). Anderson graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in Printmaking and received an MFA in Painting from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently an Artist-In-Residence at Bard College and lives and works in Kingston, NY. 

Susan Wides: Voice of Silence

Exhibition writing for Private Public Gallery (Hudson, NY)
September 28–November 10, 2024

Before he turned to the camera, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a prolific poet. He maintained his writing practice his entire life. In 1975, the same year as his untimely assassination, Pasolini published the short essay “Disappearance of the Fireflies”:

“In the early sixties, because of air pollution, and specially water pollution in the countryside (our blue rivers and limpid irrigation ditches), fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was swift and dazzling. After a few years the fireflies were no longer there. They are now a heartbreaking memory of the past: and an elderly man with yet such a memory can no longer see himself in the face of today's youngsters as he once was, and hence he can no longer hold to those beautiful feelings of before.”

Here, Pasolini laments the extinguishing of the firefly as a consequence of ecological destruction as well as the loss of a particular collective experience of communing with nature. Future generations will not have those wondrous twinkling encounters, nor will they have the memories to share with others. In Pasolini’s telling, he cautions against the danger that we only register the absence of the fireflies when it is too late. He implores us to observe, to notice.

The work of Susan Wides is an invitation to, and a product of, close observation. These images require the artist’s deep immersion in nature, seeking the synergy between water, light, trees, and rocks. Wides engages her immediate surroundings in the woodlands of Catskill, New York. Through her daily practice of walking, she has come to know the landscape intimately, attuned to its shifts and seasonality, to the protean patterns of light changing throughout the day. Wides’ work is the result of being in nature, of total presence. There is a directness and proximity expressed in the forms and forces the artist composes.

Wides’ process unfolds through these rhythms of time, light, and space in a technique that negotiates the artist’s deft manipulation of the camera lens’ focal properties in single exposures with improvisation and experimentation. These images also express a quiet patience, as if the artist waits then welcomes, with gratitude, that special light and color of a sublime combination of molecules never to be repeated the same way again. This silent magic relies on a medium to constitute its form and expression. Transcending and exceeding words, Wides’ images are the medium through which the silent forces of nature may be given voice.

And yet despite the technical rigor, her images expand beyond the conventional concerns of photography. Wides instead pushes the qualities of the lens into orbit with painting and music. These works resonate as gestural, as abstraction, as evocative and emotive. They enable perhaps one of the most profound experiences: that is, to see something new, something never seen before. Such perception stretches our minds to accommodate a whole new set of forms, which begs long, slow looking characterized by the pleasures of defamiliarization and mystery.

In our current moment of relentless digital feeds, images that once shocked and provoked action—extreme weather events, displaced climate refugees, animal habitats disrupted, untold acres of forests leveled—now circulate so ubiquitously that they lose their bite. Alarming documentation of the world in crisis, routed through mediums whose viewership is predisposed to seek small hits off the next reel and the next and the next, is a crisis unto itself. It’s not just the issue of attention or the problem of digital versus physical. It’s also the miraculous faculty of observation itself at stake.

Almost as an antithesis to the kind of looking social media demands, Wides’ work offers a poetic and subtle meditation on the urgency of ecological preservation. For the artist, the regenerative potential of the natural environment, our inseparable relationship with it, and the necessity for repair in a period of profound loss on the planet fuel the work. Before her images, we are called upon to look in a different way—to pause, to notice the quiet transformations happening around us: changing patterns of the stream splashing against the river rocks, shifting hues of the forest in the midday sunlight. These images appeal to a level of attunement necessary to detect the slightest of warnings emitted by the earth, to hear its voice of silence. It is expressed when a certain shade of brilliant orange arrives too early in autumn, when the light saturates the tree canopy with a different density, when there are fewer fireflies than last summer. The visions Wides’ creates rouse viewers to regard our earth with care and attention and to be sensitive to its acute indices of change. At the same time, the work moves us to be with nature, allows our eyes to open, to let the unfocused periphery flood our vision in full phenomenon.

Image: Susan Wides, 9961, 2023. UV print on dibond.

Brigitta Váradi: A cloak of red, slow as a Carpathian rock

Curatorial project with River Valley Arts Collective
Al Held Foundation (Boiceville, NY)
April 13–June 9, 2024

River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to announce A cloak of red, slow as a Carpathian rock, an exhibition of commissioned felted wool works by Brigitta Váradi. The title references the Polish playwright Józef Korzeniowski’s dramatic work Carpathian Highlanders (1843) that depicts lives of resourcefulness and survival in a remote mountain region. A song in the play describes the traditional dress of a young Carpathian shepherd and celebrates the natural beauty and wildness of the landscape throughout the changing seasons.

Váradi’s practice pays homage to the labor of sheep farming communities, past and present, including her family whose origins are rooted in the Carpathian Mountains. For these remote residents, a subsistence-level lifestyle to maintain food and shelter and survive extreme mountain conditions preoccupies daily existence, yielding traditions of labor the artist aims to preserve and honor. Memories from visiting her great-grandparents–cold quiet walks in the mountains, scents of wool and lard, and folk textiles in vivid colors–are animated and imbued in the new works.

The exhibition is anchored by two wall installations that showcase the artist’s unique felting technique–a physically demanding and time-intensive process. A large-scale felted work of natural, undyed wool spans the length of one wall in Al Held's former drawing studio. Part textile and part painting, Váradi composed it by placing individual tufts of the raw wool arranged according to color, texture, and length. Part cloak, the work recalls a hunia, a traditional Carpathian wool garment worn as protection against the severe mountain climate but also as ceremonial dress, incorporated into baptisms and weddings. Part animal, the work’s materiality is foregrounded, while it also assumes a life-like presence within the space.

In contrast, a mosaic of colorful dyed wool and silk hangs on the opposite wall. The palette of magenta, cobalt blue, lemon yellow, orange and green references the colors of cross stitch textiles the artist recalls from her childhood. Subtle variations of pattern and color in this traditional craft are highly localized, dependent on inherited practices and availability of material. For instance, artist Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit (1927-1998) traveled to isolated Carpathian Mountain villages sharing the technology of synthetic dyes with local women who enthusiastically adopted the new palette. (Horytsvit, also a photographer, documented Carpatho-Rusyn life and her photos constitute what little record exists of this largely unknown ethnic minority). Presented anew through Váradi’s deconstructed material collage, the riot of color is juxtaposed against the natural grays, browns, and blacks on the facing wall.

In keeping with the artist’s long standing engagement with sheep farmers and their distinctive practices, Váradi sourced the wool for this exhibition from Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY, who generously donated the material. Turkana Farms raises American Karakul sheep, descendents from one of the oldest sheep breeds in the world and believed to be the breed with which the art of felt making originated. Historically, Karakul and Carpathian Mountain sheep share their valuable role within their communities as providers of clothing, shelter, and sustenance. Like Carpathian wool, Karakul wool is coarse, suited for rugged climates, and constitutes the rich shades of black and brown in Váradi’s new work.

In addition, and in the spirit of generosity, the artist hand rendered and produced a cream, individually jarred for visitors to take. The cream is a traditional folk remedy one would apply to the chest for colds or a part of the body in pain. Váradi’s grandmother adapted a recipe inherited from her godmother, who was the village medicine woman and midwife. Made of pig lard and both wild and cultivated calendula from her grandmother’s garden, it is lovingly referred to as “Mama Cream.” The artist intends for a piece of her family’s heritage–which Váradi has only recently begun to activate as a catalyst for her work–to be shared, drawing resonances between traditions, memory, and the present.

Brigitta Váradi is a Hungarian-born self-taught artist who lives and works in Pine Plains, NY. Her recent solo exhibitions include Civitella Ranieri, Umbria, Italy; Burlington City Arts Center, Burlington, VT; Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY; Budapest Gallery, Budapest, Hungary; and Leitrim Sculpture Center, Leitrim, Ireland. Váradi’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Katonah Museum, Katonah, NY; Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, SC; Equity Gallery, New York, NY; Marfa Open, Marfa, TX; Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland; National Design and Craft Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland; and Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, among others. Váradi has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Peterborough, NH; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbria, Italy; Saltonstall, Ithaca, NY; TransBorder Art, Governors Island, NY; NARS Foundation, New York, NY; The Marble House Project, Dorset, VT; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; LOCIS-European Cultural Program, Sweden, Poland, Ireland; and Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Leitrim, Ireland; among others. Váradi is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work.

Brigitta Váradi: A cloak of red, slow as a Carpathian rock is curated by Marisa Espe. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, NY.

This project was supported, in part, by Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. The artist gratefully acknowledges the MacDowell residency program where she developed this project; and is thankful for generous donations of wool from Turkana Farms and leaf lard from Fat Apple Farm.

Image © Alon Koppel

Cudelice Brazelton IV

Exhibition writing for Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, Germany)
December 2, 2023–February 25, 2024

I.

Blue Collar (1978) follows three autoworkers in Detroit. Desperate, financially struggling, and feeling trapped in their demanding and dangerous jobs, the men rob their office’s safe. Instead of money, they find evidence of corruption within their union’s leadership. Thwarted in their attempt to use the evidence as blackmail, they face a series of threats that ultimately lead to one man’s death. He is given orders to work on a car in the factory paint booth, and once inside, another worker parks a forklift outside barring the only exit. The ceiling nozzles suddenly turn on, emitting a mist of dark blue paint. Unable to shut them off, unable to escape, he claws at the walls leaving violent streaks of cobalt. Blue splatters soil his white painter’s suit. His cries for help are inaudible against the incessant hum and din of the factory. The blue-collar worker suffocates in a chamber of blue noxious fumes.

In the ruling of his death as an accident by the factory leadership, it becomes apparent the auto company, the union, and the police are all in collusion and will go to any length to conceal corruption and maintain power. Instead of avenging the murder of their friend, the two men are systematically turned against each other. All fraternal bonds crumble under paranoia and fear. No man nor allegiances among men can withstand the power of the institution according to Blue Collar. Their bodies and spirits are broken down on the line. Their cunning and creativity eventually extinguished. Their pleasures and aspirations bent and buckled to American corporate and consumerist conformity.

“Got a house. Fridge. Dishwasher. Washer. Dryer. TV. Stereo. Motorcycle. Car. Buy this shit. Buy that shit. All you got’s a bunch of shit.”[1]

While scouting locations for the film, director Paul Schrader sought real working auto factories for the set. Every place turned him down except for Checker Motors Corporation in Kalamazoo, Michigan about 150 miles west of Detroit. The reason Checker accepted was due to tension and unrest among their workers, and the managers hoped that movie production might distract and settle them. Life imitates art.

“If the company can’t crush a noisome fly, it can do something far worse. You’ll see. Keep those cabs rolling out. Never stop the anvil chorus. Grease the gears. Those Checker Cabs. Was that a conscious choice on Schrader’s part? The fact that these cabs, the same model Travis Bickel piloted in Taxi Driver, came from a hot, hopeless hell like the factory in Blue Collar? Where every rivet was fastened by someone with murder on their minds? Every windshield tamped into place by someone who wanted to blow up the world? Every steering column and gas pedal affixed by the damned? It’s as if the metal, rubber and fuel themselves were infused with rage. Bickel never stood a chance.”[2]

 

II.

Artist Cudelice Brazelton IV’s practice blends material experimentation and conceptual investigations with work that spans sculpture, installation, painting, and sound. His work gathers resonances across aesthetic and spatial modalities by putting text, image, material, sound, and space into generative confrontations within the works themselves and with the viewer.

The work, like the artist, moves between worlds, airing both the friction between and the complementary qualities shared among the hair salon, the barbershop, the factory, the tailor, the club, the white cube, the street, the studio, the home. Each world nurtures languages, styles, behaviors, attitudes, and gestures of its own from which residual iconography flows and percolates with those of other commingling worlds. Never fully under the gravitational pull of one more than another, the artist wields collage to describe intersections, overlaps, and influences. Brazelton reconciles divergent methods. On the one hand, the specificity of a faux leather’s color and grain has the ability to instantly transport viewers via haptic memory. On the other hand, abstraction abounds, and some references don’t readily reveal themselves—they’re not for everyone anyway.

Brazelton has consistently explored techniques of assemblage. Here, the found object is not fetishized as an exhibit of authenticity purely extracted from the so-called real world. Nor is the found object romanticized like ruin porn, a stand-in for abject detritus. It is rather material and psychic texture, sometimes in harmony, sometimes dissonant among other textures. In a single composition, some things are cut and fall satisfactorily, others bend against the grain in edgy tension. Some things are singed, some things shine, some things would cut to the touch. A texture, or word, or image is like a clue, a cue, a knowing nod to the environs in which it orbits.

At the same time, Brazelton’s works remain deeply responsive to the spaces they inhabit. Burned contours round a corner. Steel rods with modeling clay and graphite scale a wall or suspend from the ceiling. Unspooled wire scrambles across the floor. Lines of thread trace baseboard molding. Getting through the door is complicated. To occupy Brazelton’s installations is like an exercise in potential energy, as if the room could come alive, the temporarily dormant components in each work animated, setting off a Rube Goldberg-like machine of steel, plastic, paint, wire, magnets, fake leather, cardboard, wood, and paper. Measured and diagrammatic in the way the works relate to each other, to the space, and to the viewer, the overall gestalt impresses as a total system according to Brazelton’s unique lexicon.

The artist often installs his work in ways that interrupt views or frame perspectives, calling attention to the negative space. The work charges everything around it, like microclimates simultaneously supplying and extracting from the sculptures, paintings, and installations. It’s an atmosphere thick with history, sociality, and in a sense the artist’s sympathy. Without wading too deep into the waters of autobiography, Brazelton’s upbringing in the rust belt of the United States, his mother’s expertise as a cosmetologist, his time spent working in a steel factory and running a DIY space, his expat status as a Black American in Germany yield certain techniques instead of topics, sensibilities instead of subject matter.

Much in the same way, Schrader’s Blue Collar generally avoids straightforward or trite depictions of identity. Layered dynamics complicate the essentialized portrayal of a worker in America, of a Black man in America, of a white man in America. These portraits include race, class, labor and struggle, family and brotherly bonds, leisure, booze and drugs, lies, schemes, creativity and invention, betrayal, ego, dreams, death. What’s particularly painful about the film is how these nuances are ultimately flattened under the boot of power. The closing scene is a voice-over by the man who was murdered declaring that “They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.”

Today, the expression of power as seen in Schrader’s late 1970s Detroit has itself become a thing of the past. If only “the man” was still the individual boss, union rep, or cop. With capitalist, corporate, state power consolidated and depersonalized, its force is more like gravity than a boot. Brazelton observes these current conditions and contradictions of the “post-industrial,” “post-globalized,” “post-Black,” “late-capitalist,” uniquely American consumerist malaise, angst, betrayal, pain. He doesn’t look away. Synthesizing from these sources, the work is precise in its references and execution yet abstract, even playful, in its presentation. In a balance of vitality, restraint, strength, spontaneity, and grace, the artist manages to make something beautiful out of what he sees. He summons a sense of lively expression hidden in there, a dark humor that merges with the abstraction.

[1] Jerry Bartowski played by Harvey Keitel, Blue Collar, 1978. Directed by Paul Schraeder.

[2] Patton Oswalt, introduction to Blue Collar Criterion release.

Image: Cudelice Brazelton IV. Installation view: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship. The Exhibition 2023, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2023. Photo: Katja Illner

The Marieluise Hessel Collection

Essay for the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
Edited by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion

Published by the Center for Curatorial Studies on the occasion of its 30th anniversary season, The Marieluise Hessel Collection: Volumes I & II tells the complex story of the development of this wide-ranging collection, built by Marieluise Hessel over more than 50 years of contemporaneous collecting from artists and galleries. Marking the first comprehensive catalogue to document the collection in its entirety, the two-volume publication considers impact of Hessel’s original decision to dedicate these holdings to Bard in the early 1990s to create a new type of graduate arts program focused exclusively on curatorial studies. Through contributions by more than 50 leading curators, critics, and CCS Bard alum, the catalogue explores the collection’s reverberating impact on the curatorial field.

Comprising nearly 2,000 paintings, photographs, works on paper, sculptures, single-channel video, and multi-media installations from the 1960s to the present day, the Hessel Collection is considered among the leading contemporary art holdings on a university campus. International in scope, the collection is distinguished by its dedication to artists who explore conditions of race, gender, class, culture, and society in their practice. It has consistently pursued strong representation of works by women artists and, over the past decade, has focused on increasing representation of African American artists, African artists, and artists of the African Diaspora. The growing collection features notable representations from the foremost movements in contemporary art, such as Minimalism, Arte Povera, Transavantgarde, Neo-expressionism, Pattern and Decoration, The Hairy Who and Chicago Imagists, Post-minimalists, and New Media.

Catalina Ouyang: White Male Ally

Exhibition writing for Lyles and King (New York, NY)
September 1-October 16, 2021

A 1958 magazine cover commemorates Fido, a dog who famously waited for fourteen years at his deceased owner’s bus stop. The cover depicts Fido on his dying day: lying on a dirt road, summoning just enough strength to prop himself up and look back toward the departing bus. What of such cultural lionization—entreating precious sentiment somewhere between admiration and pity, toward a creature rendered so wretched? What of fame for such fateful fidelity—memorialized in magazines, petrified on a pedestal for his obedience, waiting for a dead man to disembark?

White Male Ally portends waiting forever for master’s bus, a vehicle already spun out and flipped. This post-disaster space agitates compass and coordinates, continually reorienting the voyaging body. In Recourse (2021), a bus ceiling escape hatch is suspended on its side, restored to a vertical axis. A collapsed centaur traverses the emergency portal, its liminal body a fulcrum around which multiple dimensions pivot. The creature’s frosted skin glows baby blue-violet, and its posture suggests either repose or death. Behind it, one thousand arrows pierce the courtyard fence, alluding to Sagittarius the archer—the sun sign of the artist’s mother—in the entropic aftermath of aggression.

Here, there is architecture. The installation Ego Death (2021) spans the entire length of the gallery: a ceramic-tiled, three-foot-high platform punctuated by open toilet stalls built over a single trench. The trench toilet, common in 1980-90s China, lacks doors and precludes its users’ privacy. Inciting notions of shame and cultural metrics surrounding shame, the open-ended boxes mutate between stall and stage. The winding trench ends in a trapping pit: originally a tool for hunting animals, later a weapon in border conflicts and colonial invasion. This architectural fission insists that the logic of walls has never been neutral.

Here, there is reflection. Sculptures of suspended puppies with their backs turned to the viewer confront their likeness in a sequence of mirrors and inky resin casts. Below them, engraved plaques borrow an Englishman’s internal tirade from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, in which he denounces his Creole wife as a witch and a slut: a microcosm of colonial discourse ascribed to annexed land and body. The passages crystallize the acute moment of falling irrevocably out of love. Other contorted forms populate the space, internalizing to the point of implosion. Recalling the mysterious beauty of a mobius strip, the form(less) autophagy entices more than it disgusts.

Here, there is devotion. In reliquary corpus (lash of hope) (2021), small gestural objects nest within the incised cavity of their wood-carved reliquary device. Relics spliced from their source contain no less magic than the whole body. font VIII (2021) continues a series in which the artist uses stone and organic materials to revise the form of the holy water vessel, this time transmuting a 17th-century marble font collected from a demolished church. Stolen marble from a different colonialist source—the Skull and Bones Society at Yale University—is hand-carved into a listening device in The Passion (2021), which frames this haunted material in relation to Clarice Lispector’s account of a mystical existential crisis.

Finally, the installation Devotion (2016-2021)—not quite shrine, not quite tableau—weighs down the room with the face of an abusive lover, painfully and faithfully rendered in graphite. A scratched-up school desk situates a bruise-skinned girl in an educational setting, where lessons on loyalty come from an ambiguous mix of instruction and institutionalization, discipline and indoctrination.

Seeking the phrase “white male ally” in this work typifies the non sequitur, the literary device of disruption or unrelatedness: it does not follow. But the phrase also operates as a non sequitur in the philosophical sense. “White male ally” is a logical fallacy—its truth relies upon the assumption of its own truth. While the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise, logical turns and sleights of hand obfuscate this paradox and prop up its claim to truth without assumption. “White male ally” betrays cognitive dissonance and deceit at a structural level, whose invalidity is only inconsistently made apparent.

The world of White Male Ally resists the certainty of permanence: its edges are never made apparent, and the gestalt slips in and out like a tide. The exhibition is a continuation of the worldbuilding that propels Ouyang’s practice, in its endeavor to indicate counter narratives around representation and selfdefinition. Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects to examine themes of desire, subjugation, and dissidence. The artist’s intuitive use of organic, inorganic, and conceptual material is simultaneously poetic, apocalyptic, primordial, and abject. Using form, movement, and relational engagement either to expand or fragment subjectivity, the works propose the body as a politicized landscape subject to partition.

The address of Ouyang’s work can be described by means of triangulation: its origins begin at a known point, one potentially far away and long ago, from which measurements and approximations unfold outward to reach a desired unknown. The contours of labored estimations between distant origin and the object at hand form a sinuous network enveloping the work like microclimates, simultaneously the most ancient and the most subject to change. At times, the work thrives feeding off its local smog and becomes more difficult to elucidate. Sometimes, however, those same contours shimmer, like spiderwebs in the sun, casting the work in a subtly different light. For they have been a tragic love letter all along, with words that speak to those who have already inhabited the world after the crash and found meaning there.

Image: Catalina Ouyang, Recourse (detail), 2021, fiberglass, steel, school bus emergency hatch, arrows. Photo courtesy the artist.

Charlie Smith: Cinema

Exhibition writing for Baba Yaga (Hudson, NY)
July 31–August 21, 2021

The last movie I saw in theaters was Uncut Gems. One version of the plot is that there’s a man who miscalculates the value of an object due to his obsession with it.

Arguably, the main protagonist of the film is the object itself, the precious black opal. The opening scene introduces its origins from Ethiopian mines, establishing its primacy in the narrative. In one of the most provocative transitions the film features, the perspective tunnels into the opal, through its polychromatic fractal interior, and then morphs into a bodily interior from the POV of a colonoscope camera. The man’s fixation with the object resides so deep, the gems are inside him, made of similar stuff as him.

Things in films are props: traditionally, short for ‘property’ of the stage, but also prop in the sense of ancillary support. Props are handled by actors differently than objects in the non-cinematic world—touched subtly more gingerly or held up in a slightly exaggerated manner. However, in Uncut Gems the black opal transcends the status of prop, here the object is real. I watch Adam Sandler’s character attentively transfer it between his hands, and I can approximate its mass. He studies it through his loupe, draws others in to look, and I imagine its gems sparkling against the matte speckled matrix. He carries it around on the streets, and his stride responds to the extra weight, both in carats and affect. I left the movie wondering if the directors had any background as sculptors.

Cinema is an exhibition of sculptures by Charlie Smith. The show title’s reference to moving images affirms a certain quality of Smith’s works that I’ve perceived without a precise term to describe it. ‘Cinema’ is not that precise term, but perhaps more apt in its proximity and simultaneous maintenance of an ambiguity. There is motion in the sculptures. There is implied motion in their tessellated structures—they could turn and comfortably reorient on a new axis, they could cascade and tumble from and into one another. But there is also actual motion derived from the mirrored surfaces of several works. Walking around Tortoise, reflections kaleidoscope around it. I catch parts of my reflection in at least a dozen little frames, like a short sequence of film strip cut into individual cells and scattered.

Many aspects of Smith’s process are precise and exacting. There is an apparent rigor to his craft, but also to the systems from which the iterative forms are produced. In complementary contrast, mysterious things still happen. The unexpected still eludes calculation, and I think in some ways Smith chases that phenomenon, as if doubling down on the technique yields more, new surprises, movie magic.

Image: Charlie Smith, Cross (detail), 2021. Acrylic paint, acrylic mirror, MDF. Photo courtesy the artist.

Amanda Turner Pohan: Alexa Echoes

Curatorial project at EMPAC (Troy, NY)
February 4, 2021

Film by Amanda Turner Pohan, co-curated by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, Rachel Vera Steinberg, with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa.

In this film, EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer) is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

Alexa Echoes + conversation with the artist

Image: Amanda Turner Pohan, Alexa Echoes, 2021 (still). Photo courtesy the artist.

Taryn Simon: Assembled Audience

Curatorial project for MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA)
Exhibition writing for the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH)

In 2017, I worked on a team of audio producers for a new work by Taryn Simon, for what would become the installation Assembled Audience (2018). For several months, I frequented the three largest event spaces in Columbus, Ohio: the Greater Columbus Convention Center, Nationwide Arena, and Ohio State’s Schottenstein Center. Outside of each venue, I drifted throughout the hordes of attendees on their way to concerts, conferences, basketball and hockey games, trade shows, cheerleading competitions, and more. Approaching, or sometimes sidling up to, individuals whom I randomly selected from the crowd, I ultimately asked hundreds of strangers if they would let me record them clapping their hands for one minute. The listings above, seen as one walks inside the installation at the Wex, share details about the date and place of each recording and the subjects who participated.

The ask itself was deceptively simple, as it was always countered with questions: Clapping? One minute? What is this for? Why? Are you serious? For every willing participant, there were typically a dozen rejections. Understandably so, as I was another obstacle like the salespeople pushing new credit card sign-ups and other indiscernible marketing reps who preyed on these large events, vying for “just a minute of your time.” And truth be told, I never quite perfected my pitch. Sometimes I told people that it was for an art piece, but I learned that was not as persuasive as telling them I was a student working on a project. Whether they were moved to say yes by curiosity, indifference, pity, or perhaps genuine support, I did not leave the venue until I recorded at least three consenting participants.

Upon agreement, I raised the recorder in my outstretched hand and signaled to the participant to begin clapping. The seconds would slowly pass: five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. It was usually around the thirty-second mark when participants shot impatient glances at me or at the recorder. For some it was sooner, and I palpably felt their regret for agreeing. A few people even stopped and walked away before the minute elapsed. In the late fall and winter when temperatures dropped, reluctant consenters apprehensively pulled off their gloves to clap for what felt like forever as we huddled close around the recorder.

As I recollect my experiences in the making of this project, now three years later, I cannot help but refract these memories through the lens of current events, especially the social reconfigurations as a consequence of COVID-19. Convention centers and stadium-sized venues have been shuttered for over half a year. Conferences and expos have either postponed or moved exclusively online. The prospect of live, in-person performing arts events becomes increasingly inconceivable. Following a tour to see one’s favorite band perform once signaled commitment as a fan, but now any non-essential travel is considered foolish and irresponsible. Sporting events precariously carry on—notably, the Big Ten Conference plans to recommence later this month—but in bubbles and empty arenas and with increasingly sophisticated audio tracks piped in to reproduce the sounds of crowds, not unlike Simon’s eerily prescient work.

Producing Assembled Audience would be impossible today, but not just because of cancelled events and closed venues. It would be impossible because the piece depended on the proximity between the person clapping and the person recording—between two strangers agreeing to stand mere inches apart from each other for over a minute. This goes against social distancing measures, against the new ways of moving and behaving in public that we’ve rehearsed over eight months. Reflecting on the necessary conditions that made this project possible, I have to pause and ask myself: When was the last time I was in a crowd? The last time I welcomed the approach of a stranger? The last time I stood close to others without any apprehension?

At some point while quarantining and curious, I looked into this now ubiquitous phrase social distance. While its recent application concerns disease transmission, in 1963 cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall developed a theory of proxemics, studying the extent to which human social relations are spatialized. Hall described four zones, which he categorized by their distances away from an individual: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. To illustrate his ideas, Hall produced diagrams of concentric circles radiating from an individual, each zone a bigger bubble of personal space. Intimate and personal distances, ranging from less than one inch to four feet, is typically reserved for friends and family, whereas social distance is between four to seven feet apart and generally the zone of acquaintances. Beyond approximately seven feet is the zone of strangers, the distance we must now maintain from everyone, including those closest to us.

Throughout the ongoing pandemic we’ve witnessed many different attempts to bridge distances, one being the routine clapping for essential workers organized worldwide. As seen in the viral videos, participants came out and clapped from balconies and open windows and on the street. The ritual has received criticism, namely that this kind of recognition is an inappropriate response when considering essential workers’ pleas for safe working environments and adequate compensation. Still, some have described how joining in on the clapping helps to pacify loneliness and fill a lack of physical, in-person connection.

Being alone within the darkened enclosure that is Assembled Audience, as I did back in 2018 at MASS MoCA, one becomes totally immersed in the rolling waves of applause. For me, the installation incited this strange and unexpected feeling of being put on the spot, singled out, and surrounded by a wall of sound. I can only imagine how differently the work might be experienced today. It could conjure a sense of nostalgia for the so-called before-times. It could act as a melancholic reminder of the extent to which various strategies we’ve tested over the past months are merely simulations of togetherness, not substitutions. Nevertheless, I’d urge visitors to spend real time with the work, especially the list of names. It shows the hundreds of people who said yes to a random ask from a stranger. Though it’s impossible to aurally isolate an individual clap track within the installation, the list makes explicit that every single sound was collected from an actual person. And while I know that fact intimately and it was critical to Simon’s process, Assembled Audience performs this remarkable transformation where every single individual clapping coalesces into a crowd, more than the sum of its audible parts.

Horizons are not infinite

Curatorial project at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
August 20–September 20, 2020

Horizons are not infinite examines the use of axonometric projection by Roger Brown (1941–1997), Agnes Denes (b. 1931), and Fred Sandback (1943–2003) and speculates on the significance of this technique during the 1970s and 1980s. By reflecting on the cultural conditions of these decades and how they resonate with the present, the exhibition gathers paintings and prints whose axonometric visions of the world create ways to imagine the future.

Axonometric projection is a technique for representing three-dimensional space in two dimensions. It is achieved by projecting the coordinates of a three-dimensional object onto a fixed surface, such as the picture plane of a painting, drawing, or print, or what’s referred to as the “projection plane” in the discipline of descriptive geometry. The rays connecting the three-dimensional coordinates to the corresponding points on the projection plane are parallel, resulting in compositions often characterized by a sense of flatness, where the scenes depicted appear to unfold across a work’s surface rather than recede back into it.

This exhibition, which features works made between 1972 and 1981, proposes that axonometric projection was an apt expression of the shifts that occurred during this period. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed increasingly privatized and deregulated economic policies, agitation of Cold War tensions and conflicts, and technological innovations such as live satellite television broadcasting, GPS navigation, mobile phones, and email. These decades were marked by new ways to connect and consume, with media and market more networked than ever before. Paradoxically, as the capacity for worldwide connectivity expanded, so too did the sense of geopolitical instability and economic imbalance. Axonometric projection—and its capacity to show disparate information in an organized manner and to resolve compositional contradictions—visually and conceptually complemented the ideological conditions of this era. Roger Brown, Agnes Denes, and Fred Sandback engaged axonometric projection and its unique qualities to explore fundamental notions of reality, representation, and reception.

In addition to the way that axonometric projection structures the content within a work, this technique also produces a unique phenomenological relation between a work and its viewer. Whereas the idealized viewer of a perspectival composition is stationary and monocular, and maintains a fixed distance from the work, the viewer of an axonometric composition is comparatively more mobile. Untethering viewers from a prescribed vantage point, axonometric projection encourages them to pan, rove, and scan. This sense of flexibility echoes how neoliberalism produces an illusion of flexibility, an ideology that took hold during the same time these works were produced. How one lives, works, and spends are choices ultimately circumscribed within the logic of capitalism, a system in which flexibility does not equate to freedom.

If one accepts that possibilities are not limitless, then such an understanding is perhaps most adequately expressed through a representational technique in which horizons are not rendered as infinite. The works of Horizons are not infinite demonstrate how axonometric projection forecloses illustration of a distant vanishing point, of an infinite horizon. They underscore how attempts to image the world from an optical perspective result only in illusion. But if one can instead accept that horizons have discrete ends, then other, seemingly insurmountable, regimes might similarly come to an end—as distant or oblique as that end may appear. From landscapes to cityscapes, from the corner of a room to the edges of the earth, these works by Brown, Denes, and Sandback present axonometric visions of a possible world, hope in finitude, and ways to imagine the future.

Exhibition gallery guide

Image: installation view. Photo courtesy Olympia Shannon, 2020.

Say Ever Moves

Curatorial project with Bard MFA (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
July 21–28, 2019

Group exhibition of works by Luis Arnias, Georgian Badal, Jobi Bicos, Lauren Burrow, Gwenan Davies, Omari Douglin, Carolina Fandiño Salcedo, Carolyn Ferrucci, Marco Gomez, Colleen Hargaden, Evie K. Horton, Christiane Huber, Rachel James, Jamie Krasner, Nawahineokala'i Lanzilotti, Dani Leder, Isabel Mallet, Carla Jean Mayer, Lee Nachum, Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen, Jaxyn Randall, Miko Revereza, Alicia Salvadeo, Robert Sandler, Josephine Shokrian, Estelle Srivijittakar, Jordan Strafer, Daniel Sullivan, Christopher van Ginhoven Rey, Jessica Wilson, Alex Zandi. The exhibition was co-produced by Paula Stuttman, Josephine Shokrian, and Marisa Espe.

Image: installation view. Photo courtesy Pete Mauney.

Wrack Focus

Curatorial project at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
December 6–14, 2018

Group exhibition of works by Liz Deschenes, Ellie Ga, Janis Kounellis, Do Ho Suh, R. H. Quaytman, and Cosima von Bonin, co-curated by Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, and Elizaveta Shneyderman.

If the focus is shallow, the technique becomes more noticeable. In a single shot, images volley time.

The time it takes to read text against images about the Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria (Ellie Ga). The time it takes for two interlaced images—bound in a lenticular painting—to be revealed, though in a hardly stable manner (R.H. Quaytman). The time it takes to move from a “real” green screen, to its scan, to its surrogate, a photo—a stand-in for a stand-in (Liz Deschenes).

Image deployment is an action that has duration and is unstable. It is clear that the capacity for image deployment is bounded and exhaustible. (There are only 78 slides in each slide projector’s carousel).

Where is a viewer situated within this? What is a viewer to do with the time between iterations of image deployment? Draw the time out, make it longer. Hope for a lingering, a delight, a play within the finitude put forth by images.

The plush crab (Cosima von Bonin) begs for it, makes it materially apparent, and holds the viewer in a space of anticipation before the performance. The discrete images of the lenticular print possess a visual tolerance, a threshold under which the constructions intertwine (Quaytman). The green screen’s moire-like pattern index the friction and feedback of several permutations (Deschenes). The lacquer drawing, itself suspended between substrates, illustrates inquiry, wracking the brain (Do Ho Suh).

~~~

Wrack Focus

As in a change of focus across depth and within a single shot, rack focus.
As in a cognitive searching, wrack the mind.
As in a thing ruined or destroyed, from shipwreck, wrack.

Wrack Focus is about submersion, bifurcation, and play-as-practice. With works by Liz Deschenes, Ellie Ga, Janis Kounellis, Do Ho Suh, R. H. Quaytman, and Cosima von Bonin, Wrack Focus proffers a staging in which viewers momentarily suspend an unresolved exchange between two operations: bifurcation, division into two, and stereoscopy, enhancing the illusion of depth.

These operations illuminate the individual works as well as the relationships between works, a condition that implores viewers to tune their focus within and between images. Racking focus requires that works shift in and out of states of obscurity and clarity while maintaining a contiguous proximity enough to occupy the same frame. Movements between obscurity, clarity, and proximity usher the unresolved dialectical between bifurcation and stereoscopy to surface, and this is precisely where the viewer enters the scene.

Image: installation view. Photo courtesy Chris Kendall.

An American City Volume I

Essays for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue
Edited by Michelle Grabner

The first edition of FRONT is an expansive program of eleven interconnected Cultural Exercises that address aesthetics in relation to political change and societal uncertainty. The exhibition interweaves critical approaches to museum exhibitions, public and educational programs, residencies, publications, and research strategies in a multi-venue presentation unfolding across Cleveland and its surroundings.

An American City teases out the ways in which contemporary experiences of an urban location are shaped by historical and current events, and how a city’s collective memory and sociopolitical imperatives can define artistic and curatorial production there.

I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT: Eileen Maxson

Curatorial project at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH)
February 1–28, 2018

Forty-five unsuspecting women are prompted to define irony in mere seconds. The result is equal parts documentary and comedy. In I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT (DEFINE IRONY), Eileen Maxson presents this challenge and captures her participants’ candid search for words and the often hilarious responses they manage to muster, their reactions ranging from placid to embarrassed to irritated and inevitably laden with Alanis Morissette references. Morissette’s 1995 hit single “Ironic,” unintentionally ironic in its misconstruing of the word, feels at home among the throwback aspects of the video itself: the artificial sound effects like the ticking timer, VHSquality footage, and test-pattern color bars sliding across the screen to transition to the next sitter.

With retro influences abounding, the video principally cites the 1994 romantic comedy Reality Bites. In an iconic scene, protagonist Lelaina is rejected from a string of TV and news jobs. But in a last-ditch attempt to salvage one interview, she is asked to define irony while being escorted out of the office—only to exclaim “I know it when I see it!” as the elevator doors close on her.

Lelaina herself is an aspiring filmmaker who records a documentary featuring the everyday lives of her friends. She shares the footage with her boyfriend, a television executive at a fictional equivalent to MTV. He helps Lelaina pitch and sell her footage to the network, but at the debut of Reality Bites, she discovers her work has been compromised for a derivative, unflattering parody of those closest to her. Reeling from this public failure, she laments to her other love interest, Troy, “I was really going to be something by the age of 23.”

In the postmodern sense of the term, irony represents something self-referential. By the end of the 20th century, film, art, and literature seemed at such a loss to find artistic direction that their most meaningful next move was to quote themselves—which is not to be mistaken with nostalgia, since irony is too devoid of sincerity to be as sentimental as nostalgia. Postmodern irony has come to be conflated with aloofness and cynicism, both of which are personified in Troy, the slacker-cum-philosopher who cannot keep a job but who coincidentally provides the textbook definition of irony when Lelaina tells him about the fateful interview.

But there is another type of irony, romantic irony, that is self-conscious insofar as a work points to its own fictionality as a means to reveal some form of truth. While quoting and restaging the scenario from Reality Bites, I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT (DEFINE IRONY) thus reveals the truth of its own making in each awkward silence and incorrect answer from the sitters, all of whom, like Lelaina, are 20- to 30-somethings working in the creative sector. It is in the blurring between Lelaina and Maxson’s contemporaries and the interplay of the retro, the recycled, and the recollected that several truths emerge: the gap between a woman’s intention and how her words are received or (mis)interpreted; the ever-shrinking age by which she should achieve success; and the depiction of creative, aspirational women as perfectionist, careerist caricatures.

While Maxson does not articulate this overtly, she implies these truths through the affinities and figurative exchanges among fictional and real portrayals of women. The bitter reality of these societal pressures can explain a sitter’s hesitant pause, reviewing her response before uttering it so as not to say the wrong thing. Or the look of embarrassment and the self-deprecating laughter. Or the searching in her eyes to quickly conjure the correct answer and prove something about herself. Though the evidence of these effects is subtle and often can only be intuited, you know it when you see it.

Image: Eileen Maxson, I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT (DEFINE IRONY) (still), 34 mins., HD video, 2015. Photo courtesy the artist and Microscope Gallery.

White Wash Show Room

Curatorial project at Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH)
July 29–August 13, 2017

Co-organized with Maritt Vaessin

See and Experience
White Wash: Show Room

Discover the Riches
of
White Wash: Show Room

Where there is
No Shortage of Delectable
World-Class Art
in the
City’s Crowning Jewel

Do It All
and
Change Lives With Change

Picture Yourself Here
at
White Wash: Show Room

Image: installation view. Photo courtesy Tom Hoying, Skylab Gallery.