Kristin Baker at Deitch Projects

NY Arts, March/April 2004

The crowd at Deitch Projects, one of the few vital galleries in SoHo to have resisted the exodus to Chelsea, had already spilled out onto Grand Street by the time I arrived.  This was the first Friday of the 2003 art season and a grand tour of openings had lead me through scores of packed art houses further West.  Deitch openings, of course, attract a different sort of crowd, one that has more to do with the pinnacle of youth style than contemporary art, and tonight was typical; hipsters with trucker caps and the electroclash kids were out in force.  I wondered if they were here because they are fans of Kristin Baker, a recent Yale MFA grad whose New York City debut solo exhibition glistened on the walls inside, or if some mutant sense of high style had attracted them like moths to this most fashionable of parties. Read the rest of this entry »

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Canadian Art, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2005

In her second solo exhibition, Kristine Moran sharpens the focus in her sci-fi paintings, zeroing in on the ideas of utopian theorists from the 20th century—Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Buckminster Fuller—to present inner-city landscapes from an imagined alternative present. While still sprinkled with her signature airborne vehicles and extravagant explosions, these works ponder idealistic urban environments and the social interactions of their inhabitants. Like all science-fiction tales about supposedly perfect societies (think of Spielberg’s blindingly bright future in Minority Report), Moran’s narratives inevitably present harsh dystopias. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Art, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 2004

‘Street Art’ exists in heavily urbanized environments from Tokyo to Toronto. Much of it is ‘graffiti’, that pestilence of territorial pissing by visually impaired half-wits who have little creative output beyond barely-literate scratches of their own names. However, an informed eye notices that the seas of scribbled spray paint, stickers and wheat-pasted billboards polluting the sides of buildings are sometimes topped by a foamy sprinkling of intelligent work that competes in the same public urban space. Barry McGee, a.k.a. Twist, whose wall paintings, drawings and mixed media installations were among the first to migrate from the streets into galleries such as Deitch Projects in New York and museums like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, is one of the best-known practicioners.

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NY Arts, July/August 2001

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I found myself standing in front of a series of framed photographs by Richard Kern, writing in my journal notes that seemed more like Penthouse letters than art criticism. “Staring wantonly into the camera lens, Lucy slides her delicate hand into her bikini bottom, daring the viewer to come to her with a glance impregnated with innocence and desire… Now taking a soothing post-coital haul from her Marlboro, the buxom blonde opens her legs to reveal the used condom still protruding from her vagina and the mess her unseen lover has left inside her legs.” “Oh my God,” I hear gasped behind me.

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Canadian Art, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2003

A spontaneous chain of personalities and events lead to Czech-born sculptor Richard Stipl’s debut solo show in New York. It started in 2001, at Art Forum Berlin, where the artist’s Toronto dealer, Christopher Cutts, was encouraged by the American collector Steve Shane to take part in the first Scope Art Fair, slated for spring 2002 in New York City. Only hours after selling out his entire installation at Scope, Stipl met David Hunt in the halls of the hotel where the fair was staged. A bombastic and prolific curator and critic, Hunt was looking for artists to flesh out a summer group show at the Daniel Silverstein Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Art, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2003

“I would like some bad-acting and wrong-thinking. I would like to see some art that is courageously silly and frivolous, that cannot be construed as anything else.” So wrote the art and culture critic Dave Hickey in an essay that appeared in Art issues during the summer of 1996. Though it is unlikely they were aware of this request, the young members of the Winnipeg-based drawing collective known as The Royal Art Lodge first formed in the same year and have worked collaboratively to unwittingly realize Mr. Hickey’s desire. Their group show at the prestigious Drawing Center in Manhattan, with nearly 500 works on display, proposes a reinvention of drawing itself by raising a simpleton’s understanding of the world above all other markers of value. “Ask the Dust,” curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Joseph R. Wolin, travelled to Toronto’s Power Plant and De Vleeshal in the Dutch city of Middelburg. Read the rest of this entry »