100 words – Katie Murken: Continua

When a system constantly replicates even a simple set of variables, the result quickly becomes organic, seemingly uncontained. By rolling dice to move around the color wheel using mathematical probabilities, Murken dissolves the familiar spectrum into variegated columns of haphazard hues. Towering chroma without regard to art-school theory nonetheless impose beauty on the gallery-white walls. There are the beginnings of excess, of sheer visceral reaction to brilliant abstraction. Phonebooks as the medium could add extra layers to themes of extreme systemization and the disruption of order, but instead are almost ignored, used as a meaningless ground to inexpensively house so much color.

("Continua" at Gallery 2J, 319 N. 11th Street, September 2-October 7, 2011)

100 words - Sheila Hicks: May I Have this Dance?

While containing all of the gentle tactility and delicate detail you might expect from a textile-work, Sheila Hicks’s two-story cascade blows the whole definition apart. Monumental, visceral – you feel the tangled coils twine through your own gut. It dwarfs you, shrinks you to the size of a pin head next to a spool of thread. You have no chance to passively observe, but must conquer the simultaneous desire to dive in and to run away screaming. Like standing at the base of a thousand-year-old tree, you feel the looming presence of time and the constant but unpredictable workings of nature itself.

 ("50 Years" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, March 24-August 7, 2011)

100 words - Bohyun Yoon: Embody

Bohyun Yoon: Embody
Yoon's "Structure of Shadow" suggests that our material bodies are so familiar, so universal, as to be intangible – a mob of mixed-up races and genders with indistinguishable limbs and torsos. The substance, then, is in the shadows, in the way a focused light condenses us each into a specific person with personality and proclivity, movement and meaning. We march together in haphazard rhythms as our passing bodies and tenuous identities shape into societies that shift and jumble as the light changes. What is our collective purpose, the focal light that directs our course? How do we structure the world when everything around us is shadow?

(At the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, April 4-May 6, 2011)

100 words - Anais Mitchell: Hadestown

Anaïs Mitchell: Hadestown
Think film noir – dusky rendezvous in dark alleys, the sound of passing trains, a red-lipsticked lounge singer with sloshing drink, the fat man upstairs obscured by billowing cigar smoke. Then add a hobo with banjo in hand, a delicate maiden in a field of yellow flowers and a raucous Greek chorus dancing the jitterbug. Wrap them together in lush arrangements of instruments, with poetry poignant enough to make you hold your breath. Give them the names of gods and mortals; let them sing an ancient but timely tale of love and loss, of power and pain. What more could you want?

http://www.anaismitchell.com/

100 words - Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms

Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project
In the span of human history, an individual life blazes up and quickly extinguishes. A life of renown perhaps shines more brightly, leaving behind spots in the eyes, a billow of smoke, but is still transient, immaterial. By igniting a lotus blossom, symbol of spiritual awakening, pure beauty rising above murky waters, Guo-Qiang pays tribute to a fleeting life of artistic leadership and vision. Covering the museum’s facade for a single afternoon, the memorial both illuminates and violates the temple behind, highlighting its grandeur and invoking its vulnerability. Uncollectable, unrepeatable, the artwork sharply contrasts the assumption of institutional permanence embodied in the museum.

(At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 11, 2009.)

100 words - Bruce Nauman: Days

Bruce Nauman: Days
Who hasn’t felt the distortions of time? The way a single afternoon drags on, one painful minute after the next, while a whole month flies by in a blinding flash. “Days” captures both monotony and unpredictability, repetition and endless flow. A diverse array of disembodied voices melds into moments of communal synchronicity, into a mindless, meditative chant. Time. Time. Time. Ticking by, measured and chaotic, specific and generalized. The doubling of each voice across the aisle builds layers, alternate dimensions, by which the world is randomly deconstructed and reordered and then finds clarity in a rare moment of near unison.

(At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 21, 2009, to April 4, 2010.)