A Space Where Identity Politics Give Way to Queer Minimalism / Hyperallergic
What happened to the glitter, the queer ideals, the mirror that looks back at the viewer? In Aay Preston-Myint’s artwork, politically charged objects are emptied of their significance. In his solo exhibition (At Night, I Think of You), now on view at Threewalls...
Why a Queer Photographer Is Going South / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Budding young Cincinnati-based gay documentary photographer Christian Hendriks has an agenda. It involves travel, pictures and maybe even you. His ambitious project South of the Ohio: A Queer Photo Documentary, will take the great American roadtrip south...
A Green Screen Mirrors the Impossibilities of Arrival / Hyperallergic
Somewhere in Los Angeles, a movie is being filmed, an actor is speaking words from memory, and a person is hunched over a screen carefully editing moving images using the green screen, a post-production special effects technique that layers on a background that...
On Being an Artist and a Mother / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — What does it mean, bodily, physically, emotionally, mentally, and perhaps spiritually, to be what Simone de Beauvoir deemed “the second sex,” to be a woman and, moreover, to be a mother? These are questions that Chelsea Knight explores in her latest video...
Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City Art World Stronghold, To Close / Hyperallergic
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For more than 20 years, John O’Brien’s Dolphin Gallery has been a cultural and community epicenter for Kansas City artists. Located in a huge white wall space in the West Bottoms, a historical area in downtown Kansas City, the Dolphin is the size of...
The Aesthetics of Gendered Dumbness / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — What happens when blogs GURLDONTBEDUMB and WEIRD DUDE ENERGY face off in the reblogosphere, dueling it out in a viral battle-of-the-sexes? This post compares these two Tumblrs, both of which index hyper-gendered pop culture tropes, readily spinning off memes...
The Awkward Laughing Moment of Charles Ramsey’s Hero Tale / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — The internet is amazing, the internet is awful. It amplifies the general public’s internal thoughts, projecting them out into the cybersphere. This is how and where internet memes are born. The latest internet fodder for comment threads and message boards is...
Body Modifications of the Woman Born from the Young-Girl #NSFW / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Move over, John Currin. Your paintings of disproportionate, not symmetrical picture-perfect bodies pale in comparison to the photographs of Philip Toledano, whose images portray women, transgender women and men with extreme cosmetic surgery. As a matter of...
Viral Image to Real Rubbers: Pop Pope
MILWAUKEE — When a story, an image of a work of art, or an essay goes viral, it has struck a cultural nerve, somewhere, and people can’t stop passing it on. The work itself becomes freed of the space where it was first realized; it is taken over by global internet...
Messing with Google Maps in the Suburbs / Hyperallergic & Salon.com
OAK PARK, Illinois — You’re driving to a suburb that you don’t know well, and you whip out your iPhone to quickly punch an address into Google Maps. In this case, that address is 704 Highland Avenue, home of Sabina Ott and John Paulett, who run Terrain Exhibitions, a...
Tavi Gevinson’s Exquisite Cadaver / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Tavi Gevinson took the ACT exam the same day she took the stage at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Edlis Neeson Theater, joining old family friend and LA-based filmmaker Jonah Ansell to discuss their latest collaboration, “Cadaver.” In this animated...
David in Decay, or Making the Digital Landscape an Analog Dreamscape / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece “David” presents the idealized masculine body. Chiseled and exacted over a period of three years, this perfect man stands on his pedestal, head cocked to one side, proportionate and gorgeous in his porcelain pose....
twohundredfiftysixcolors Flashes One GIF Too Many / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — In the GIF world of twohundredfiftysixcolors, there is no time to process visual imagery; viewers are left with reaction options to each short GIF much like those found on a Buzzfeed post. It’s all <3, LOL, WIN, OMG, CUTE, WTF, UNBELIEVABLE, SCARY, FAIL...
A Family Lives Out the Drama of the World / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Typical American movie moments of heightened tension use signal sounds in tandem with the emotions portrayed by the actors on screen. The family dog knocks over a precious antique plate, and an ominous tune rolls in to signify that the pup is about to get in...
Carrying on a Political Absurdist Legacy / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883–1970) was best known for his depictions of complicated contraptions with far too many moving parts built to solve the simplest of problems. These “Rube Goldberg machines” appeared in his work, and were used as devices to poke...
Latham Zearfoss Knits Together Materiality, Domestic Politics, and Queer Identity / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — The absence of the body (politic), the presence of a re-negotiated domesticity, and a necessary embracing of the fine line between romance and criticality play forward roles in artist Latham Zearfoss’s work, which embodies radical feminism of days past while...
Moments of Female Adolescence, Illuminated Online and in Print / Hyperallergic
In a culture that discounts the contributions of teenage girls yet rips them at will, co-opting their keen fashion sense into one that is marketable and desirable, Illuminati Girl Gang (IGG), a print and online journal of girl culture featuring work by kids who are...
Derelicts, Drunks, Hippies, and Queers: Fred Burkhart’s Life in Photographs / Hyperallergic
I first spotted artist Fred Burkhart’s advertisements for nude female models plastered around local Chicago hippie, vegetarian, artist hangouts. I was 16 years old. The ads said something like: “Nude models needed for figure drawing class at Burkhart Studios. We pay...
Interview: Where Are The Girls, Online? Part Two of an Interview with Kate Durbin / Hyperallergic
Artist and writer Kate Durbin is both an internet scavenger and connoisseur. Like a cultural anthropologist, she prowls the immaterial space of Tumblr, discovering user-generated content that describes the semi-anonymous emotional outpourings of masses of women, girls...
Interview: Kate Durbin Finds Virtual Moments of Adolescent Vulnerability in “Girls, Online” / Hyperallergic
Artist and writer Kate Durbin is both a scavenger and connoisseur of the internet. She prowls the immaterial space, searching for images that express the emotional lives of adolescent girls. It was on Facebook that I first noticed a link to Durbin’s project “Girls,...