Author Archives: jolanta

Unsettling and beautiful, Diamanda Galás’ work takes an assassin’s aim at ignorance. In pieces such as Saint of the Pit, Plague Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Wild Women with Steak Knives, or  Defixiones: Orders from the Dead and Litanies of Satan, her performances, like her life, are never the same. Born […]

“Me, my sadface, my twoface, my youface, my frontside, backside, rightbrain, leftbrain, leftbehind brain, heartacheface…” This is Dynasty Handbag, Jibz Cameron’s one-woman performance. Resembling a Prozac-filled musical comedy gone awry, Dynasty Handbag’s acts consist of a series of prerecorded monologues set to accompany improvised bodily narratives and sad electro-ballads sung against a backdrop of disorienting […]

On a jam-packed subway ride one morning, a Muslim woman in head-scarf-to-covered-toe black sat pressed against a blonde babe in seersucker and Sperry Top-siders. Simultaneously, writers at USA Today churned out a story on Taco Bell’s new launch in downtown Shanghai. Japan Society says…they don’t know, either, but what an interesting question. The nonprofit’s upcoming […]

One of the oldest exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Moscow, L-gallery, presents the project of New York avangardist Barbara Rosenthal, " Existential Cartoons".  The theme of an individual’s reflection and self-identification within larger society has consumed artist Barbara Rosenthal for many years.  Her use of performance/installation for creative expression began in 1968, before that […]

Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh on Morton Bartlett Wrapped in newspapers  from 1963, 15 plaster figures of boys and girls had been waiting quietly in Morton Bartlett’s house for nearly three decades. Art dealer Marion Harris discovered them, and black-and-white photographs of them, in 1993, a year after Bartlett’s death at 83. Critics have suspected Bartlett was […]

Jesse Burke, who received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, confronts the ways in which we establish modes of gender identification and how these seemingly direct processes can be blurred. Reaching beyond the socially constructed idea of gender, Burke is interested in sexual relativity and a regression towards sexual confusion. […]

Nicholas Weist on Christopher Ho + Troy Richards Christopher Ho and Troy Richards’ project &Leisure, which exists in object form as an artist book, is a series of proposals to contemporary artists that suggest vacation packages related to their work. The travel plans range from serious to snarky—everything from an all-American tour through Maine for […]