Page 10 - Rt Critic News Today

Soraya Palmer published her debut novel, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, a week before her former professor, Matthew Vollmer, published his sixth book, and first book-length essay: All of Us Together in the End. Both books, as the above title asserts, are about ghosts. To be more specific, they are also about mothers. Even more specifically: mothers who die before their time. And what happens next to everyone they love. 

I DANCE ALL THE TIME is a piece that never loses sight of its audience—performers deliver well-timed glances, make jokes about creating, and ask for audience participation. The relationship between spectator and performer is clear and defined.

Orlando (2003) is its own meditation on metamorphosis, and it’s Ruhl’s most direct engagement with gender fluidity. Featuring one performer as Orlando and an ensemble of discernible size to play every other part, Ruhl’s script suggests “as few as three gifted transformational virtuosic actors or as many as you can fit on a stage and pay.”

Like a soldier trained to watch Bikini Atoll through Rembrandt’s eyes, Roy Lichtenstein, arguably art’s greatest humorist, takes us from the ridiculous to the sublime. As an artist who repeatedly swore that his works were purely abstract, devoid of message, Lichtenstein’s work may have been full of mantic allusions and meditations over our civilization’s fragile future.

The twentieth iteration of the international photography biennial contends with our relationship to land. A symbiotic cycle of molding and destruction is present in many of the works. It might be an expectation that this exhibition presents a cry against intensifying climate change, its impacts, and our culpabilities as a human race.

At Teruko Yokoi’s retrospective at Marlborough Gallery, which includes fifty works spanning from 1957 to 2012, I had the feeling that the paintings were somehow twinkling or gleaming as I walked through the galleries.

Anna Ting Möller’s transdisciplinary practice is propelled by an overpowering story of origin. In 2015, she traveled to Yueyang, a humid and warm port city in southwestern China, in search of her birth mother, to no avail. Instead, a woman whom she stayed with gifted her a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY), or what is colloquially referred to as a “mother.”

Science fiction is largely a projection of our own fears about ourselves, and in these two exhibitions of graphic works and several choice sculptures, Bhabha plays with the struggle to enter into the minds of our ancestors, as well as the unpleasant acknowledgement of a creepy pseudo-fascism or impulse to domination that seems to inhere in a great deal of archaic art.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.