Not Your Average Selfie / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — What is a selfie but a momentary image of oneself captured in social-network time? The selfie can be shot anytime, anywhere, and uploaded instants later. Take Ashley Keast, a burglar in the UK who, after robbing a home, placed his SIM card inside a...
Living in a Post-Private World / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — In the wake of Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency (NSA) leaks, which continue to reveal more about the American government’s epic surveillance program, it seems pretty meta to make art about being spied on. Yet what we read and understand about...
Kara Walker Lands in Oregon / Hyperallergic
EUGENE, Oregon — The Black Portlanders, a blog initiated by Intisar Abioto that focuses on the black experience in Portland, recently posted a letter seeking to raise money for their project. In this appeal, Abioto discusses the bizarrely racist history of an...
Printing the Performative Object / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — I got lost on the freeways and streets en route to Brian Getnick’s Highland Park studio space, which is also the home of the blue theater and artist residency PAM. When I arrived, exhausted from the many wrong turns, Brian and I ascended the stairs to...
Selfie Justification / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — I hit the brakes at a stoplight and turn my head to the left. I spot a young woman waiting for the bus. In golden capital letters on her t-shirt, the words WHY NOT shine boldly. I thought of taking a photo of her, but the the light turned green and I...
Old and New Takes on the Female Nude / Hyperallergic
PORTLAND — Way back in 1989, the Guerrilla Girls called attention to the fact that less than 5% of the artists in Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Modern Art sections were female, but 85% of the nude works on display featured women. Twenty-five years later, it should be...
Empty Photographs / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Lynn Saville‘s photography series Vacancy captures storefronts, malls, parks, highways, and billboards across America. Existing now in states of transition, they largely appear deserted, and lifeless. Saville gives no explanation as to why these spaces are...
A Mormon Teen Girl’s Fantasy Land / Hyperallergic
Teen girls’ Tumblr blogs are like the wallpaper of their minds gone public, while photographer Rania Matar captures teen girls in their bedrooms as an outsider. These two reflections of adolescence consider contemporary realities. In her installation “Return to...
Laboring Over Walead Beshty’s Bodies / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Walead Beshty’s solo exhibition at Regen Projects, Selected Bodies of Work, claims to “address bodies and labor as they are rendered visible in or on the art object.” Where and what are these bodies and labor? Similar questions come to mind when...
Documenting Indigenous Americans / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Between the years 1907 and 1930, Edward Sheriff Curtis published The North American Indian, a record of traditional Indian cultures in the United States and Canada. Curtis’ book, a landmark historical document with a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt, has...
The Academy Award Goes to the Corporate Selfie / Hyperallergic
PORTLAND, Oregon — The 2014 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres knows a selfie moment when she sees it. In her second year orchestrating celebrity moments — she first hosted the Oscars in 2007 — the selfie makes its move into Hollywood in a way that’s far more serious than...
Live Girls Looking for Fun / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Shopping is a mundane, ecstatic experience. Enter any mall that’s filled with sparkly goods and products and suddenly we feel like ourselves but amplified. This environment only exists to reinforce consumerism and our opportunity to make surface-level...
Culture By Way of Los Angeles / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — It must have been kismet that I ended up sitting next to Julie Niemi at the ridiculous Dave Hickey lecture a few weeks ago. As I searched for an outlet to use to charge my iPhone — which had died approximately three times that day, its life force being...
I Dream of Selfies / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Selfie culture is everywhere, and writers besides us here on Hyperallergic are actually beginning to take them seriously. Nimrod Kamer of The Daily Dot decided that rather than try to take a selfie with a celebrity, he’d wander Highgate Cemetery in...
A Bookmobile Becomes a Book / Hyperallergic
Remember the thrill of finding the library bookmobile as a kid? I do. I rode my pink Schwinn bike through a suburban wonderland, dodging cars and small children to meet the mobile. Nowadays I associate those types of trucks with tacos, but the memory of wandering into...
President Obama Pens Personal Apology to an Art Historian / Hyperallergic + NYTimes
Professor Ann Collins Johns at the University of Texas at Austin was just as peeved as many people were about President Barack Obama’s knock on art history majors. So she did what any self-assured art historian would do and wrote a letter to Obama on January 31,...
What’s Your Selfie Pleasure? / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — This week, a new selfie trend pissed people off. Jason Feiffer, the same guy who dug around on Instagram and discovered funeral selfies, discovered the creepy “selfies with homeless people” trend. These “selfies with homeless people” are more like...
Man Meets Nature Once More / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Kevin Cooley and Philip Andrew Lewis’s exhibition Unexplored Territoryat Kopeikin Gallery made me wish the artists had taken a hint from Joseph Kosuth and the spirit of 1960s Conceptual art rather than just creating photographs and videos of the age-old...
A Well-Oiled Machine Project / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Machine Project is housed in a formerly unremarkable convenience store nestled in between a coffee shop and the Echo Park Film Center on Alvarado Street. On Saturday evening, I went there to experience a performance called “The Ship’s Recorder.” When...
There’s No Need to Buy a Camera / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — What are people really saying when they express a desire for a new camera? Do they want a camera that will take better pictures, allowing them to see the world more clearly, or do they want a new smartphone with a better camera in it, in order to snap...