Will Rockel: Bourgeois Angst
Will Rockel’s work asks if postproduction can escape the Marxist vortex. Commodities are passé. Can one fetishize a joke, a glance, an aesthetic trope-roll it over the tongue until melted and pliant, but still very much a Heideggerian Thing? We rephotograph, can we refetishize? Can I fetishize a fetish? These photographs borrow the language of...
Interview: George Sanchez Calderon
George Sanchez Calderon’s studio is beneath 395 in the historic Overtown area of Miami. When I stopped by on November 27th, he was busy shuffling things around in preparation for a series of studio visits. How long have you been in Miami? Oh, since I was a kid. I moved here from New York when...
Faith Ringgold: American People, Black Light
If you haven’t been, it’s worth a trip over to MAM to see their show of Faith Ringgold’s paintings from the 1960s. Ringgold is most famous in this country for her narrative quilts, which are a staple of grade school art appreciation courses, and for the Reading Rainbow standby Tar Beach. As these early paintings...
Natalia Molina: Becoming
Natalia Molina’s new photographs attempt to transcend contemporary life vis-à-vis our image culture. All of these photographs feature characters on a threshold-running towards the light, towards the shadows, submerged in water, or drifting out of sleep. Transcendence, it seems, is equated with freeing the self from its surroundings. If this is the case, it is...
aaajiao: Turritopsis Nutricula and Cloud.data
Aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) is one of China’s most popular digital artists. Rather than attending art school, the 27 year old studied engineering before going into a career of software development. This unlikely progression and his use of digital media makes aaajiao an unlikely heir to the long history of traditional Chinese art. However, his work...
Reality Television Conference
University of Wynwood presents REALITY CONFERENCE December 10, 2011 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. Lester’s Bar (link) 2519 NW 2nd Ave. Miami, FL 33127 The Problem Why is “reality television” so awesome? Discuss. Call for Abstracts Please send a brief description, no more than 300 words, outlining a presentation, paper, panel, or performance on any...
Interview: Ruben Ochoa
There’s a pretty nice line in Trinie Dalton’s essay for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. “Increasingly Ochoa studies areas where nature buttress itself against annihilation, a cultural metaphor lending hope and vivacity to his work.” I’m specifically drawn to how you make concrete and steel look so fragile. Trinie wrote a really great piece. My work...
South Beach Semiotic Breakdown
Seems like somebody took umbrage with Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club. According to gallery proprietor Clayton Deutsch, “There were three homeless people getting arrested down the street this morning. They looked like they had been causing trouble.” However, the foul play might be more institutionally based. Deutsch’s reluctance to show local figurative painters could have provoked...
Artist Unknown – The Free World
Oliver Wasow and John D. Monteith, the artists and curators behind the Artist Unknown – The Free World project, have been so kind as to share a collection of images. Read my related essay here. Buy their book here. Justify a trip up to Hollywood here.
Candid Camera
I found this photograph stuffed into a fuel pump outside of Daytona Beach in August 2011.-Hunter Somewhere along the line, photographs of others moved from empathetic to pathetic. [Name] Publication’s fascinating new archive of found images, Artist Unknown – The Free World, illustrates the shift from analog to digital photography, and with that, a sneaking...
Taurin Barrera: Imagining the Future / Synthesizing the Past
Ryugyong Hotel was supposed to be finished in 1989. Construction began on the 330 meter high building in 1987, yet it still is unfinished. At 105 stories, it is the highest building in both Pyongyang and North Korea. Over the past several decades, it has come to represent all that can go wrong in architecture...
Sewon Chung: Floating Island
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. - Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa (1952) I didn’t know much about the emotional impact of building a home in a city undergoing rapid urbanization. I simply thought I wanted to live in a seaside metropolis with an infamous...
