Page 36 - Rt Critic News Today

Jessica Segall, a self-described “artist that needs discipline,” infuses the darkened space of Smack Mellon with sexual tension and suggestions of menace. With transgressive defiance, her multichannel video installation Human Energy confronts the spectacle of petroleum extraction, appropriating and subverting its masculine iconography.

How can a dance wrap its arms around a geopolitical crisis in which over five thousand people have died just this year? Dust unfolds in a style close to Tanztheater, but with live music and vocals instead of words and narrative, creating clear segmentation, emotional specificity, and striking frameworks for each danced vignette.

When an artistic tradition moves from one culture to another, it inevitably changes. And if that other culture is very different, it changes greatly. When El Greco moved from being an icon painter in Greece to Italy, and then on to Spain, inevitably his pictures changed.

No one really wants to paint like an athlete, unless by painting Katy Moran means something like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. Lots of people would like to paint like Moran, but precious few have the wherewithal. The seventeen works here, mostly—following her signature modus operandi—acrylics on found painting, constitute an affirmation of abstract painting, a genre many consider outmoded. How utterly wrong she proves them!

On October 11, 1948, the weather was fair in New York City. Low sixties, a moderate breeze, a waxing gibbous moon. A crowd entered the New York City Center of Music and Drama and found their seats. The 8:45pm debut performance of a brand-spanking-new company—the New York City Ballet Company—was about to begin.

It’s an admonition we must respect when dealing with this terrific show because the wall and the work hanging on it have a consubstantial relationship. The paintings will eventually hang on other walls, but it is the wall as an infinite, inhuman plane Novros demands we take into account to understand them. Portable murals, as Novros calls them, wall paintings meant to be seen against that blank, meaningless void on which they confer structure, human order. So not sculpture, but perhaps arch...

For a while, I have avoided the word crisis as it refers to our ecological condition because it seemed to provoke an intellectual standstill, the kind of dismay that concludes effort or even further consideration. Recent chatter about the AI crisis appeared similar. The crisis in arts funding did the same. There are even claims of a crisis in any social imaginary. Recently, however, I have begun to wonder if the permanent crisis of the humanities might not provide a different attitude towards cr...

Photographs today are simulations, amalgams of effects and filters, whereas in the mechanical age (1840s–1960s) people tended to believe photographs were trace records, evidence—an indexical copy of something that was once in front of the camera. In other words, photographs were a disembodied specter. When looking at Charles Traubs photographs, we come to recognize the subject’s direct and causal connection is not to the camera but to the photographer’s eye.

Entering the theater, audiences pass through a pink, uterine canal. What beaded curtains did for sixties parties, this passageway accomplishes for Soho Rep. visitors. Thrill—jumpy and irresistable—awaits on the other side.

Allison Miller digs deep into the world around her, scattering peripheral elements like the tiny rocks and dirt one kicks up in an abandoned city lot or scanning for misplaced artifacts. Some elements in Miller’s paintings reappear, as they sit atop slightly modulating, near-monochromatic fields, spaces that encompass both the innermost and the universal.