Author Archives: jolanta

Justin Samson’s sculptures are eerily familiar—they remind me of the strange Native American sculptures I stumbled upon as a child, bewildered, in my aunt’s backyard. Detailed and colorful, his sculptures take the form of totems, or mysterious, boxy beings covered with tassels, strung with beads, and patterned with fur and textiles. The landscape that these […]

We can catalogue the backlist titles of James Everett Stanley’s solo exhibitions: There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days, Salt of the Earth, and The Garden. Or consider even the titles, forgetting the paintings themselves: You And I Are Brothers, Be My Eyes and Ears, or My Only Brother, One of His Many […]

David Shapiro paints monochromatic watercolors from photographs culled from fashion publications and art historical plates of classical sculpture. They are delicately and meticulously rendered (to the point of disguising even the fact of brushstrokes) wash drawings of immediately recognizable and readily categorizable single figure subjects. The externals of Shapiro’s work go down so smoothly one […]

The room is dark and crowded. Nearly two hundred partygoers are divided in half by parallel rows of prayer candles on the floor, creating a dimly lit path to an unaccompanied drum set and guitar. The drunken commotion is interrupted with drearily elegiac Appalachian music, and the spectral emergence of a Reaper-like figure carrying a […]

Zombies were trying to get into the building. It’s the Guggenheim and we’re all there and everything has been bombed out. Post-apocalypse. Broken Brancusis and Mondrians boarding up the windows and there are all these people we know. The Bruce High Quality Foundation, the official arbiter of the estate of Bruce High Quality, There’s this […]

Nicholas Weist: Simon, many of your works on paper use the rhetoric of scrapbooks, but the final works do not actually contain collaged material. What prompted this disassociation? Simon English: I like the rhetoric of the scrapbook and you are right, in many ways the work does simulate collage. For me, the most important thing […]

The appeal of “virtual reality” was supposedly the “virtual” part—after all, the unfathomable obstacles of everyday reality aren’t too hard to come by. But we are born into the idea of an immersive, alternate universe, fecund with bliss-yielding possibilities, free of commonplace consequence. Paradoxically, this border between imaginary and symbolic space, the foundation of childhood […]