Cosima von Bonin

 Von Bonin's textile characters included in the exhibition present a mass of contradictions—approachable creatures that aren’t quite what they seem or don’t behave as we might expect. Weaving together humor with melancholy, softness with hardness, as well as access and exclusion.

These sculptures mix art history, popular culture, music, and craft, while engaging in feminist destabilizations. Appropriately, the deep sea is its own world, little known and remote for us.

Trans Genesis: Evaporations and Mutations

Trans Genesis: Evaporations and Mutations at Vilma Gold, Lynn Hershman Leeson presents a combination of works spanning from 1968.

In her Cyborg series mechanical elements, identity numbers, and technological symbols are superimposed on the faces and body parts of women, making them into half-human and half robotic female forms. These images are manipulated using a wide variety of techniques and effects and represents bodies transformed by computer-based technologies - this seems relevant looking into the present day where we photoshop every girl ever put in a magazine. 

Hanne Lippard at KW ICA in Berlin

Hanne Lippard from Norway just had her first solo show at the KW ICA in Berlin, Germany. The show was made up of one single installation taking up the whole ground floor of the gallery, consisting of a useable spiral bound stair case titled "Flesh". The work is stated to be based off of past works about language. The work attempting to question the confines and physical limits of the institutionalized space it is viewed and leading the viewers to a view of the outside through the window.

Lunchtime dystopia: CON-Figuration at Postmasters

There was a two part installation at Postmasters. The artist of interest is Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung with his large scale digital paintings. He displays them as printed canvas, this particular one being 40 x 72 inches. It depicts Obama as the many armed Goddess Durga with a golden crown, with an 'adoring audience of small foreign leaders". It is completely sourced from the internet and collaged into a vividly colored piece. It also references traditional Mysore paintings from South India, with symbolism and color palette and composition. This was displayed recently, after Trump's inauguration, and the press relief was simple and short, finishing with 'In dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times.' 

Chadwick Rantanen at Team Bungalow

Chadwick at Team Bungalow

In this exhibition by Team Bungalow, the implementation of many common commodities such as kitchen appliances and battery packs are integrated in new and unique ways to remove their original functionality of the work. 

This particular piece is based off of the design structure of a fishing trap, and encourages the viewers of the work to involve themselves within it's structure. Without context, the piece encourages communication between participating audience members as they involve themselves within the details of the work. Related to relational aesthetics in the sense of inducing the openness for discussion, getting involve within this work allows for the people viewing it to leave questions of their own.  

Free speech: White artist paints Emmett Till, black artists protest

This piece falls under public art practice. There is a historical context that roots this piece in both historical and contemporary realms. In 1955, 2 white men lynched Emmett Till, these men were then tried and all charges were acquitted. His mother was outraged and published a photograph of Emmett's beaten face from his open casket in Jet Magazine. This photograph was more recently put on a list of the top 100 influential photographs. A white artist by the name of Dana Shutz used this imagery in a painting that was put up in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Many black artists have protested its existence and how it was allowed in the show. Hannah Black, a black artists from London wrote letters to the curators demanding it be destroyed. Black artist Parker Bright took a different route and stands in front of the painting, trying to obscure the image, but in a peaceful protest, with a t-shirt with "Blalck Death Spectacle" written on the back. He engages in conversations with other gallery goers, and speaks his mind on how Shutz had no right to use such imagery because she is white. I find this fascinating, especially because Bright is doing this as a performative artistic act, using performance art and peaceful protesting to make his voice clear as a Black Artist.

Michel Auder at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

Riappropriazione

In Converso, Milan, Franco Mazzucchelli wrapped the space in sheets of polyurethane to create one of his environmental instillations. His work is very site specific in the way that it takes a common public space and puts it into a new context that forces the public to engage with the space and each other in a new way.

'Crisis Tourism' byTobias Madison

                 While there is no specific statement, placards, or spoken artistic objective to 'Crisis Tourism'  this exhibit speaks out in a similar manner to the organization Act Up during the Aids crisis. Crisis Tourism may not have the blatant objective on what it is trying to inform its audience about a certain cause, but rather it displays a more abstract idealism within its works despite the bold and almost political lettering involved within the exhibition peices.  The words scrawled against photographs in this exhibit show a connection to the stylized fonts and bold interfaces that are used in Act up posters or any pieces involving the aids crisis. Though while both are blatantly different each one grabs the viewers attention and brings them to focus on whatever is metaphorically shouting at them through these art works.

Simon Thompson at dépendance, Brussels

Rising Damp

Simon Thompson's instillation "Rising Damp" at dépendance in Brussels exhibits a small variety of works that seem to surround the topic of low income housing.  The works above include a drawing titled "View of Brussels", done with charcoal on paper, and a series of 6 oil paintings on canvas depicting a form to apply for Housing Benefits in the UK (assistance from the government to pay rent).  The contrasting ideas of a seemingly luxurious house in Brussels and the form for Housing Benefits seem to stand as more of a commentary on the "site" of economic security than a form of institutional critique.  The other works in the show include a video titles "Rising Damp Sitcom" and a series of photographs depicting ground meat.

Violet Dennison at Jan Kap's gallery 

Violet Dennison's current show at Jan Kaps gallery in Cologne Germany, consists of sculpture, video, and photograph.  The work is also accompanied by a very poetic artist statement bringing up themes of post-humanism and the analogy of life towards plumbing. The installation of the sculpture its self effects the environment in which the viewer is in, creating a site specific relationship.

General Idea

Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, the exhibition surveys the artistic trajectory of General Idea (A Latin America Canadian collective), touching upon topics such as archaeology, history, sex, race, illness, self-representation, and the myth of the group itself, a recurring subject of their production. 

General Idea were pioneers in incorporating the issue of AIDS in art. In 1987 they took Robert Indiana’s work LOVE and transformed it into AIDS to create a logo that was used in many of their works.

Installation for the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League or CATPC)

This installation creates a theoretical space for the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League or CATPC), an organization of plantation workers who create sculptures out of the materials they harvest for little pay. This installation creates a board room setting, emulating the business that build their wealth on the materials harvested from Congo.

Amy Sillman At Castillo/Corrales

Amy Sillman's works at the Castillo/Corrales gallery are part of a artistic fashion that involves a poem being played alongside a animated video. This exhibition included the film (which had around 2000 pieces made by Sillman using an iPhone or an iPad) as well as other pieces of artwork, the title of the exhibit is taken from a poem written by Lisa Robertson. Using a variety of methods to create each piece, the point of the exhibit is to show an understanding of feminine modes of subjection and resistance. In tandem with the poem by Lisa Robertson, Amy Sillman has used her abstract artworks to try and show the world about the female life. 

Dena Yago at Bodega

Dena Yago’s exhibition “The Lusting Breed” consists of five tableaus, each taking on a role that has been ascribed to women in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.  These include renditions of Courbet’s Sleeping Spinner and Grain Sifters, as well as images of women as caretakers, designers, listeners, and craftsmen.  The work speaks to the sense that the roles of women throughout history has been and continues to be fetishized and to a point trivialized, yet at the same time the images carved into the tableaus are specific to the exact time they belong to.  Sleeping Spinner is a product of 1853 showing a take on the working woman at the time, and The Influencer is an example of the view on the working woman of 2017.  While representing a long-held struggle, they are separated by their context.