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Peeping out of rounded rectangular boxes, rapidly shuttering cameras capture gallery goers at numerous angles, emphasizing those viewers who foray into the inverted panopticon’s proscenium to perform for the machine. The photos are then projected onto the wall in rapid succession, the gestalt being a structural film befitting a mass surveillance age.
It’s not hard, gazing at the photographs James Welling has assembled in Thought Objects, to picture their creator holding a paintbrush rather than a camera. The show’s standout work is a striking combination of seascape, screenprint overlay, and abstract coloration whose stippled, almost woody texture defies formal categorization.
On the occasion of the awarding of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Rail Books section co-editors Elizabeth Lothian and Joseph Salvatore interviewed 2023 recipient Tyriek White about his debut novel We Are a Haunting. In their conversation, White discusses troubling the boundaries between Western ideas of life and death, writing a story about growing up in a predominantly Black and brown, blue-collar neighborhood, and how Brooklyn to him represents an attitude, a demeanor, and a set of principles.
If you can’t feel the joy in Tamara Gonzales’s paintings, call an ambulance. Her newest body of work (twenty-one paintings made in 2023) spreads across four walls, two of which are hung salon style. The effect of being surrounded by Gonzales’s colorful paintings is overwhelming. To feel the buoyant and rejuvenating energy of spring on a gray day in mid-winter is a profound gift.
I must admit, I didn’t do what I had proposed in my application, and it was the best decision I made. I had written that I would work on some of my video projects, which the residency time away from New York could have provided. But even before I left for Venice, I realized I needed to do some things that situated me specifically in the place—the uniqueness of Venice—rather than working on video footage that has nothing particular to do with this magical place that I could easily work on back in NYC. And so I began to envision how better to take advantage of being in Venice duri...