October 19, 2016 Look No Circus By Randi Malkin Steinberger & D. J. Waldie Randi Malkin Steinberger, Pier Ave. Randi Malkin Steinberger’s book No Circus collects photographs of buildings tented for termite fumigation around Los Angeles. It includes an essay by D. J. Waldie, excerpted in part below. If you live in Chicago or Cleveland, you may never have seen a house tented for termite fumigation. Dry-wood-termite infestation—the usual reason for tent fumigation in the southern and western parts of the United States—may become more common as the global climate warms. Termites don’t take cold well. Neither do cockroaches. In an evolutionary sense, termites are the cousins of cockroaches that picked up other habits, including a knack for colony formation. Like ants, a termite colony has a queen, but unlike ants, the colony also has a king. Once mated, the termite queen and king are monogamous and life-long partners. The queen may live as long as fifty years in some termite species. There is a court of princesses around the queen, waiting, infertile, until the queen dies. Left undiscovered long enough, the termite colony will prosper until the apparently intact timbers of the house are a paper-thin skin over the hollowness inside. Read More
October 18, 2016 Look West Ridge By Dan Piepenbring Claire Sherman’s exhibition, “West Ridge,” is at DC Moore Gallery in New York through November 5. Sherman’s latest paintings focus on what she calls “unraveling environments,” depicting archetypes of forests and islands in varying states of agitation. She paints quickly, refusing to spend more than a day in the studio working on a single piece. “The physical quality of paint is something I find very seductive,” she told Hyperallergic in 2014. “Paint has the ability to describe, fall apart, be chaotic, rigid, uncontrollable, fluid, and surprising all at once.” Claire Sherman, Sea Cave, 2016, oil on canvas, 78″ x 96″. Read More
October 10, 2016 Look In the Pines By Dan Piepenbring “In the Pines,” an exhibition of paintings, ceramics, and works on paper by Rebecca Morgan, is at Asya Geisberg Gallery through October 29. Morgan grew up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania; her work plays with stereotypes and caricatures of hillbillies and country people. The woods suggest a coarse and hedonistic culture: it is the scene of bonfires, hunting, sex, drunken revelry, camaraderie, fights, and perversion. Morgan said in an interview with TOH Magazine. “I navigate my reverence and aversion to the place that has rejected yet charmed me. I operate in modes of frustration, cynicism, and reclamation.” Rebecca Morgan, Family Reunion, 2016, oil and graphite on panel, 24″ x 30″. Read More
October 6, 2016 Look Circumstantial Pleasures By Dan Piepenbring Since the late seventies, Lewis Klahr has garnered praise for his collage films, whose use of midcentury imagery inspires what the historian Tom Gunning has called “an interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting.” A new exhibition at Zurich’s Grieder Contemporary, in association with London’s Anthony Reynolds Gallery, finds Klahr pursuing collage outside of film for the first time; in addition to a new movie, he’s debuting a set of standalone works. “When I first started doing this, in my late twenties, I was really trying to bring my childhood back,” he told Blouin ArtInfo in 2013. “I wanted the world to look like that again. As I aged, and as I grew as an artist, that became not the concern anymore in the same way. Then it was more about memory. Now it’s just a language; it’s a place I like hanging out. It’s this idea of looking at the world with the openness and wonder of a child, so you’re seeing things fresh.” Lewis Klahr, At Night, 2015, collage on cardboard, 20 1/2″ x 8 7/8″. Read More
October 3, 2016 Look Woman Power By Dan Piepenbring The Austrian painter Maria Lassnig moved to New York in 1968, leaving behind a thriving career to explore what she called “the land of strong women.” She lived in the city virtually unknown for twelve years, keeping a low profile and producing a protean body of paintings, drawings, watercolors, silkscreens, and animations. “Woman Power: Maria Lassnig in New York 1968–1980,” at Petzel Gallery through October 29, exhibits her work from this period. Lassnig, who died in 2014, is remembered for her self-portraiture and “body-awareness paintings”: her effort to translate physical sensations to the canvas. “The only true reality is my feelings,” she said, “played out within the confines of my body.” Maria Lassnig, Woman Power, 1979, oil on canvas, 71.65″ x 49.61″. © Maria Lassnig Foundation / The Essl Collection, Klosterneuburg / Vienna. Read More
September 27, 2016 Look Bare Shouldered Beauty By Dan Piepenbring Suellen Rocca’s “Bare Shouldered Beauty: Works from 1965 to 1969” is showing at Matthew Marks Gallery through October 22. In the late sixties, Rocca was part of the Hairy Who, a group of six imagist artists from Chicago; their exhibitions gained renown for their magpie approach, drawing influences from pop culture, magazines, comic books, and “trash treasures,” as Rocca’s collaborator Ray Yoshida called them. Rocca has referred to her work from this period as her “autobiography.” “I was this young mother making these paintings,” she told Hyperallergic last year. “It was a wonderful period. My son would take a nap and I’d rush to my knotty pine studio and work on a painting. Having a toddler and a baby and all these exciting shows, it was wonderful. It was a happy time.” Suellen Rocca, Palm Finger, 1968, oil on canvas, 20 1/2″ x 16 1/2″. Read More