Image courtesy of Jordi Anguera
Renowned architect Kengo Kuma (previously) amplifies the already magical nature of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona with layers of shimmering curtains. Lining a staircase that stretches from the coal bunkers in the basement up eight flights, the immersive installation suspends 164,000 meters of Kriskadecor’s aluminum chain, positioning the lighter shades on the upper floors and black on the lowest level to emulate the gradient in the Casa Batlló courtyard.
Image © Steeven Salvat
History, science, and nature converge in the watercolor and ink drawings of French artist Steeven Salvat (previously). Whether encasing beetles in ornate armor, rotational gears, and antique dials or rendering vast entanglements of flora and fauna, Salvat’s works exquisitely apply a fanciful veil to wildlife and insects. Each piece, which is the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking linework, stems from biological studies and 18th-century engravings, two themes the artist returns to as a way to allude to the precious qualities of the natural world.
Monica Ong, “Purple Forbidden Enclosure” (2019), gold and silver foil stamping, custom letterpress on Colorplan imperial blue cover, 12 x 18 inches; 16 x 22 inches framed. Produced in collaboration with Boxcar Press
NEW HAVEN, CT — Monica Ong is a 21st-century visual poet who extends the reader’s sense of what is possible. She is the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2014), in which renowned poet Joy Harjo was selected for a First Book award in poetry. This book meshes together images, such as family photos, sonograms, and anatomical diagrams, with dictionary entries, texts and phrases she has altered, and her own writing. It begins with the author discovering that she had a “Mystery Uncle,” but, as with all family stories, larger forces are at play, and this is what Ong pursues.
One page pictures a bottle labeled “Fortune Babies.” The label includes a photograph of a man, woman, and child, and directions: “If you have difficulty conceiving, adopt a child […].” Another bottle is labeled “Chinaman” and has a family photo placed above dictionary definitions. By superimposing language and image on a bottle, Ong underscores how beliefs and ways of thinking and seeing become embedded in one’s culture, shaping the way we communicate.
Siopis says the Truth and Reconciliation Commission raised questions about individual complicity in apartheid, which she wanted to explore in the series. Mario Todeschini
Growing up in South Africa in the 1950s and ’60s, it was inevitable that Penny Siopis’ work would be political.
The multimedia artist was born during apartheid, South Africa’s period of legislated segregation, and began her career in the 1980s when anti-apartheid activist (and later president) Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. The “momentous changes of the country” fundamentally shaped her art, said Siopis.”
You’re not just painting or making work about the empirical changes that you witness, but actually the psychological changes,” she said.
Siopis expressed some of those psychological changes in her series “Shame.” Comprising 165 paintings created over three years between 2002 and 2005, Siopis said the series was a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a government body established to investigate human rights violations that took place during apartheid — that explored the “questions around culpability, vulnerability, and shame that the Commission raised.”
Joseph E. Yoakum, Mt Colbart of Nome Alaska, n.d., ballpoint pen, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 12 by 19 in.PHOTO: ROBERT GERHARDT. COLLECTION OF CHERYL CIPRIANI
Joseph E. Yoakum’s origin story has long been inseparable from the reception of his artwork. In 1962, when he was a 71-year-old retiree living in a storefront apartment on Chicago’s South Side, Yoakum had a dream in which he was urged to make art. He drew nearly every day for the remaining ten years of his life, using inexpensive paper, ballpoint pens, pastels, colored pencils, and sometimes watercolors to create more than two thousand pieces that constitute an atlas of his psychic geography. Among his best-known works are undulant landscapes that are almost psychedelic in their vertiginous perspectives. “What I Saw,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, gathers nearly one hundred of these works, plus portraits, sketchbooks, and ephemera—a small but revelatory fraction of Yoakum’s singular output.
Jim Nutt, a fellow Chicago artist, and one of many influenced by his predecessor’s enigmatic oeuvre, once categorized Yoakum’s work as “exciting to ponder [but] difficult to describe.” That difficulty is two-pronged. The first issue is Yoakum’s disorienting style. His landscapes (named after real places, sometimes misspelled) typically occupy one visual plane, in which mountains, a ribbon of empty highway, and stands of conifers might coexist in woozy harmony.
Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” (1904) is just as excited about the moon landing as the artist himself. (edit by Valentina Di Liscia for Hyperallergic)
Over 52 years ago, on July 20, 1969, the world came to a standstill as humans landed on the moon for the very first time. Hundreds of millions sat glued to their television sets, watching in awe as iconic images of Neil A. Armstrong descending Apollo 11 and stepping foot on the rocky lunar surface beamed back to Earth in one of the most widely viewed broadcasts in TV history. For many, it was a deeply poignant, indelible moment, the kind that happens only once or twice in one’s lifetime.
But others were unmoved by the spectacle, perhaps most famously artist Pablo Picasso, whose quote in a New York Times roundup of reactions to the landing the following day remains an impressive display of apathy even in today’s notoriously cynical, meh-centric culture: “It means nothing to me.
Installation view, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, MCA Chicago, 2021. (© MCA Chicago; photo by Nathan Keay)
CHICAGO — When people think of comics, they typically think of New York, the historic home of the US comics industry. They might think of comic book legends like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby or the ubiquity of New York in superhero comics and movies. Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, makes a case for including Chicago in discussions of how the comics industry, massive and varied, has developed to this day. The show includes the work of major creators who were born, lived, and/or worked in the city such as Daniel Clowes of Ghost World, Nick Drnaso of Sabrina, and cartoonist Lynda Barry.
Integral to the show is its highlighting of the contributions of Black cartoonists who published their work in the Chicago Defender, Jet, and other Black Media outlets, and whose work has not received the same amount of attention as their white counterparts.
Replicating ancient light sources can help archeologists determine ho how prehistoric artists and artists would have seen ancient cave paintings. Photo by the Before Art Project, courtesy Iñaki Intxaurbe.
Cave art researchers have a tantalizing new theory to explain prehistoric paintings: that the images came to life in the flickering flames of candlelight as an early form of cinema.
“The flickering light, the dancing shadows, the warm glow from the fire, many people have argued that this creates a sense of theater, that you’re looking at an ancient version of cinema,” University of Victoria archaeologist April Nowell told Atlas Obscura.
To see ancient artworks the way they would have appeared to their pre-historic creators, Nowell and her colleagues designed flickering electric lamps that matched the color and intensity of their prehistoric predecessors.
Paul Rousteau, “Lincoln Sea,” from Seascapes
In the spring of 2019, the French Embassy in Australia invited the French photographer Paul Rousteau to spend 12 days living and making artwork on a sailing boat in the Coral Sea. This atypical artist residency turned Rousteau into an active crew member of the boat, working to keep it on course, and sometimes maneuvering it through the night. In a recent email to Hyperallergic, Rousteau reflected that “Living at sea, surrounded by the elements, without internet, without material comfort, night and day, was a strong and unforgettable experience.”
At first, Rousteau took daily photographs of the sea with his camera. But he quickly found that the process fell short in capturing the vividness of the light, water, and air that surrounded him. “The camera breaks up and locks up reality,” Rousteau said. “So I started to modify my camera.
Alec Soth, Ed Panar, Pittsburgh (2019) from Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph(Aperture, 2021). © Alec Soth/Magnum Photo
“Death.” “Dogs.” “Sunsets.” “The Hidden Faces of The Moon.” “The Distorting Lens of the Colonial Machine.”
These are some of the entries you’ll find in Photo No-Nos, a sort of encyclopedia of all the subjects deemed off-limits by more than 200 contemporary photographers, writers, and curators. Among the experts offering their personal “no-nos” are well-known contemporary artists such as Sara Cwynar, Roe Ethridge, and Taryn Simon.
Arranged alphabetically, from “Abandoned Buildings” to “Zoom Screenshots,” the book’s list of subjects are broken up by longer passages from contributors elaborating on a particular subject or theme. For Alec Soth, “Cemeteries” tops the list of banned subjects; for Lyle Ashton Harris, it’s “Landscapes.” Eva O’Leary avoids photographing people from above, especially other women. “This way of seeing caters to the male gaze,” she writes.
