Author: Bea Huff Hunter
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“Becky Suss/Wharton Esherick,” Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia (Artforum)
In recent years, Becky Suss has painted the domestic spaces and personal effects of her late relatives from memory, guesswork, and fantasy, meditating on the mind’s revisionist tendencies while crafting pictorial elegies to familial and cultural histories. For her new series of interiors and object studies, Suss turned her psychological gaze to the material legacy…
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Rina Banerjee, “Make me a summary of the world,” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelpha (Frieze)
In an interview with Allie Biswas, Rina Banerjee described early influences, artists Santa Barazza and David C. Driskell, as ‘people who were trying to re-route art history,’ to include ‘the kind of art you were making.’ This process drives Banerjee’s first US survey exhibition, ‘Make Me a Summary of the World’ at the Pennsylvania Academy…
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“A gathering, a sensuous meeting of thinking bodies,” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (Exhibition Essay)
Sitting at my parents’ dining table over the holiday and reading Gaston Bachelard’s essay “Intimate Immensity” (in The Poetics of Space, 1958) on my laptop. I know that B.’s text is your inspiration, Alexis. There are some beautiful passages: “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life…
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“Lip Sync Parade,” Fjord, Philadelphia (Artforum)
In this multigenerational exhibition curated by Doah Lee, five interdisciplinary artists uncover, celebrate, and question LGBTQ histories and aesthetics while wrestling with their own connections to and alienation from queer history. Gabriel Martinez’s Perpetual Care, 2016, displays heart-wrenching, humorous, and sometimes racially discriminatory personal advertisements—notably, I DON’T WANT TO GROW OLD ALONE, DO YOU? and HOT WHITE…
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Suzanne Bocanegra, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (Artforum)
Suzanne Bocanegra confronts the cultural cliché of women’s vulnerability and distress—unresolved and raw, brought to light again by the #MeToo movement—which is still central to entertainment and artistic production. The exhibition’s title, “Poorly Watched Girls,” and the title of La Fille (all works cited, 2018), an installation of handmade costumes and scenography, were drawn from the eighteenth-century classical…
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Kate Bright, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia (Artforum)
The title of Kate Bright’s exhibition, “Soft Estate,” referred to the fertile swaths of land that run parallel to railroads and highways in the UK, where Bright photographed the flourishing nonnative flora that are, in her words, “escapees from the domesticated environment.” Painted from composites of these photographs, Bright’s sensuous—and deeply ethical—canvases extend her two-decade…
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Leroy Johnson, Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia (Artforum)
Dogs have played a supporting role in human culture since prehistory, serving as partners and protectors at home, work, and war; the unwitting subjects of medical and psychological abuse; and proxies onto whom we project human emotion and behavior. Explicitly drawing on a range of sources—Greek mythology, pop lyrics, biblical descriptions of Armageddon—eighty-one-year-old artist and…
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Suki Seokyeong Kang, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (Artforum)
For her first solo exhibition in a US museum, Seoul-based artist Suki Seokyeong Kang debuted a project centered on historical Korean conceptions of the grid as a spatial and social structuring device. In the traditional Chunaengjeon (Dance of the Spring Oriole) choreography, for example, the borders of the hwamunseok reed mat, with its crosshatched warp…
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Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck, Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan (Artforum)
Philadelphia-based artists Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck have been collaborating for thirty-five years alongside their work as museum preparators and as a painter and a sculptor, respectively. Titled after the mysterious lights and colors we see when we close our eyes—and inspired by a dream of Feasley’s—the exhibition “Out, Out, Phosphene Candle” continues their sustained…
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vis-à-vis Summer Reading Group (Kelly Writers House and Institute of Contemporary Art)
1 : in relation to2 : as compared with3 : face-to-face with A DISCURSIVE OFFSHOOT OF MY RESEARCH ON MOYRA DAVEY’S WRITING STRATEGIES A free, eight-session summer reading group that explored some of the ways that visual art and writing come face to face. We read texts by artists and scholars, reflected on interdisciplinary relationships,…