By Randy Gladman We interact with technology hundreds of times a day. We dial telephone numbers, scan our food through supermarket check-out lasers, change the television channel and move our mouse to surf to another web page. We click, slide, dial, push, swipe, turn and type on our machines to communicate our contextual commands, and we take for granted that the device will understand our desires and provide an expected result. The point of interface, where our bodies meet our machines, is at the heart of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s art. His works create new interfaces and interfere with communications in order to propose new, unexpected,...
Kristine Moran: Diss...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman 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...
Ryan McGinness; Art ...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman A small TV in a corner of the gallery projects a video of your worst nightmare. Office hell: A shallow space with white walls and whiter lighting, a nondescript table, and a generic clock, hung low on the wall so it appears in the tight camera angle view. The time is...
Nicholas di Genova at Le. Gallery
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman ‘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...
David Altmejd: 21st ...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in C International Contemporary Art, Issue 84, Summer 2004 21st Century Werewolf Aesthetics: An interview with David Altmejd Interview conducted in Istanbul, September 2003 Montreal born sculptor David Altmejd was the only Canadian artist at the 8th...
Kristin Baker at Dei...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman 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...
Richard Stipl at Daniel Silverstein Gallery
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman 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....
Royal Art Lodge at T...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman “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...
Tom Sachs – A Visit to Nutsy’s
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman It’s a Tuesday night in Lower Manhattan. Race night. I’m at Tom Sachs’ production facility on Hester Street, three blocks from his studio, two blocks from his home. Chinatown. This giant factory is on the third floor of an ancient building that once housed the New York City Police Department’s mounted division. There’s even a horse elevator, which will soon be used to transport the components of Nutsy’s, Sachs’s newest installation and most ambitious project to date, to the new Bohen Foundation gallery in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district for the Winter 2002 exhibition. Commensurate with the physical scale of Tim Hawkinson’s...
Alexis Rockman: Fres...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman Alexis Rockman sauntered up to our meeting spot on Canal Street, the sanguine spring in his step belying the bizarre state of Broadway, deserted except for about twenty police officers wearing flak jackets and carrying machine guns. The natural history painter’s studio is...
Ryan Humphrey’...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman Walking into Ryan Humphrey’s solo show at Caren Golden Fine Art was like walking into Valhalla; a place where the holy relics of my childhood heroes retired for eternity. I’ve searched and searched for this place — this garden of delights where my boyhood toys relocated...
Rafael Lozanon-Hemme...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman Body Movies: A Linz Ars Electronica Festival award winner on the State of Interactive Art Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Installing large scale interactive artworks in heavily trafficked and populated zones of cities around the world, Canadian/Mexican artist Rafael...
Richard Kern at Feat...
posted by Randy Gladman
By Randy Gladman 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...