Peter Brock, Part II

by Sandra Orellana Sears, April 2012. In Part II, we continue our conversation with Peter Brock, in which the artist describes his unique relationship to materials, the architectural influences on his practice and the splendor of a Brooklyn sunset. Audio + transcript below. Artwrit: It sounds kind of like you weren’t interested in writing, or creating…

Alex Prager at Yancey Richardson, New York

by Danny Kopel, April 2012 What impresses about Alex Prager’s work is the breadth of influences she has seamlessly honored and incorporated without sacrificing a distinct authorial voice of her own. In Compulsion, the artist’s most recent turn at Yancey Richardson Gallery in Chelsea, Prager reasserts her taste for staged and highly-stylized photographs. Here, images of…

Interview: Debra Van Tuinen at Butters Gallery, Portland

by Sarah Vaeth, April 2012 A week before the opening of her April show Candescent at Butters Gallery, I sat down with Debra Van Tuinen in her studio at Everett Station Lofts. An established encaustic painter with an international reputation, Van Tuinen has lived in Portland, Oregon since late 2010. In preparation for this show she immediately…

Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim, New York

by Natalie Donghia, April 2012 Let go of everything you already know about the life and art of Francesca Woodman. Her photographs, now on display at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, shape a mythos that exists voluptuously outside the parameters of biography, a mythos perpetuated in the realm of photography. The ongoing allure and cult…

“The Head Must be Proud” Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum, New York

by Sarah Hassan, April 2012 In the darkened, vast space of the Jewish Museum’s second floor galleries, Alios Itzhak stands, in jeans and a t-shirt, at an imposing degree from his large-scale portrait. With a curled fist resting on his hip, his head tilted slightly to the side to reveal the radiance of his face—the…

The Marfa Diaries

by Sandra Orellana Sears, April 2012 The pilgrimage to Marfa, Texas is not a journey for the faint of heart. Three hours from El Paso, it is dry and dusty, bizarre and expansive, showered with sweeping light that changes with the temperamental weather patterns of the Southwest (searing sunshine, thunderclouds, lightning rays and hail all…

Mark Boulos at MoMA, New York

by Zoe Larkins, April 2012 The rippled surface of water flows out of sight. A freeway comes into view. Then office buildings appear—the Chicago skyline. Opposite: The water is a river, bordered by bright green mangrove plants. An oilrig looms above the water. The rig passes out of sight as the view turns to a…