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Moving between Dawoud Bey’s Harlem, USA, and Shawn Theodore’s The Church of Broken Pieces, both currently on view at the African American Museum of Philadelphia, is like shifting between worlds. Bey’s photos depict the streets and people of Harlem in the 1970s, a place that to us in 2017 seems like a lost world, his use of traditional documentary black-and-white photography enhancing that sense of distance. Theodore’s larger-than-life, staged street portraits are less documentary than metaphysical or theatrical, evoking a mysterious future through the drama of the set-piece in the street.
Read MoreThese tessellated paintings are naturalistic by an abstractly-expressive-mimetic process, a reconciliation of the human creative impulse with the superior natural forces of creation that encompass it. In other words, Whitten’s work seems to be at an ethereal place, where art production rhymes with the ebb of creation at its highest state.
Read MoreSpain is not a country that I immediately associate with either historical or avant-garde animation, so I was curious–what is Spanish animation, and what makes it distinctly Spanish? Will these films be interesting for normal people who aren’t obsessed with Spain like I am, or will my boyfriend resent me for dragging him out to see obscure Spanish short animations on a Friday night?
Read MoreFjord’s gallery is brimming with Freedman’s assorted colorful papier mâché and found object sculptures that exist in constant dialogue with his ideas, stories, and sketches; they are the physical manifestations of his ceaseless cerebral exercises.
Read MoreDescendants of trash pickers and connoisseurs of the found object, wearing overalls and hard hats, and “interrupting the waste stream,” the RAIR artists turn trash into artwork of one sort or another, and challenge our perceptions of the discarded.
Read MoreThe five nominees for short live action films showing at the Ritz at the Bourse don’t waste much time getting down to business, starting with the French entry, “Ennemis Interieurs,” directed by Selim Azzazi. The fictional story is set during the Algerian civil war (1991-2002) and at a time when French citizens on French soil were being targeted by terrorists. The two main characters of the film, known simply as the Applicant and the Interrogator (both from Algeria), enact an interview for French citizenship. If you ever have been through an interview for citizenship in the west–and I am speaking from experience–there aren’t too many pleasant moments in which you feel like you are welcome during the interrogation about your background, name, or religion.
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