Na Kim: Memory Palace January 16 – February 22, 2025 “It is always someone that can at once be recognized and realized to be unrecognizable.” Was the concluding note I wrote about Na Kim’s inclusion in a previous Nicola Vassell exhibition. Each portrait seems to contain some natural antecedent: a
Owen Fu: Own Alone January 31 – March 8, 2025 A two-room exhibition of works by the Chinese, LA-based artist Owen Fu was the perfect way to end January. Each painting coaxes you with its tenderness and impresses you with an unyielding melancholy. Sexual pleasure sparkles with a particular
The ‘culture’ of Black culture is negation; the apotheosis of Culture renders its own nadir: blackness “to the fullest extent.” Eastman’s articulation of the parcelled personae of the nigger is the negation of, not Whiteness, but of the Human. The repetitious, basal unit of (non)Being—that repeating unit
Romantic minimalism—an oxymoronic sensibility that grounds the work of Katie Peterson in her exhibition at James Cohan at 52 Walker St. Dressing the walls are fleeting thoughts that consequently solidify within your skull and leave a heavy weight in the back of your mind. I walked slowly, but I
“...and through that relation of desire or love the other comes to exist for me as a thing or being.” (Salamon 2010, 46). Images of individuals sleeping always inspire inquiry into voyeurism and the voyeuristic tendency inherent to the spectator sport of viewing, analyzing, and critiquing artwork. However, the work
As the sweat from the summer morning dried on my back in a chilled and quieted Nicola Vassell gallery space, I attempted to trace this plural of “The Selves,” to find the parallel(s), the subtension. Yet, there was a strange frustration which ached as I walked through and upon
“Fashion exists in an interaction between forgetting and remembering, in which it still remembers its past by recycling it, but at the same time forgets that the past is exactly that.” —Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy I skipped writing about last year’s Costume Institute exhibition because it was more irritating
“I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks) “From Fanon we learn about the experience of disorientation, as the experience of being an object among other
Flesh—unadorned. Painting, as a gesture, rather than a material, implies and reproduces the grammatically coherent “flesh” of McKinney’s black women. I found myself entranced mostly by the nude works which forced McKinney to trace the contours of the Black female flesh to its end(s), it’s limit(
Historical impression: coffee, ink, and their inscriptive weight are the material foundation of @hallchase Melanoidin. Hortense Spillers on the body and flesh: the hieroglyphics of racialization—those engraved inscriptions that produce comprehension born out of the incomprehensible congealing of flesh. Seeing this exhibition and Chase’s other show The Bathers,
The Blackness of Color; the color(s) of the Color(ed)ful…(I have so much to say about the night itself: Uman weaving through and into the warm embraces of friends and family; the white pantsuit which cling to her body so intimately was gently dyed by the light