MUSÉE 29 – EVOLUTION
Evolution explores the concepts of progress, transformation, growth, and advancement in an age when images are taking a dramatic shift in the role they play in our lives.
Ball culture, the house system, the ballroom community, and similar terms describe an underground LGBTQ subculture in the United States in which people "walk" (i.e., compete) for trophies and prizes at events known as balls. Some who walk also dance; others compete in drag categories, designed to emulate other genders and social classes. Most participants in ball culture belong to groups known as “houses”
For the past four decades, photographers Angela Beckwith and Carol Fisher have spent their working lives in Africa documenting the lives and communities of several cultures throughout the continent. In their newest book, African Twilight, Beckwith and Fisher have compiled over 15 years of work in order to capture some of the oldest and most varied cultures in human history before they disappear forever.
“YA’LL SHOT HIM!” Manny Ortega yells outside a bodega in Brooklyn, as he uses his cell phone to film an arrest by the New York Police Department (NYPD). Tension quickly escalated between officers and an African-American man as Manny captures the death of the community’s beloved Darius Larson, or “Big D.”
“I would like to bring attention to a new feminism, where artists like me decide to bring light and hope to this conversation. Women’s bodies and natural beauty is what makes us powerful. We will only be cherished and respected when we respect ourselves.”
“It’s a film about isolation, it’s a film about struggling to find comfort in solitude. Which is a very real dilemma for people in their 20s because being alone can be very exciting but also, predictably, very scary.” - Avery Duncan.
The film’s appeal for human decency will no doubt fall on deaf ears in many quarters, no more so than that of the current U.S. administration, whose umber grotesque of a leader has done the utmost to play on his electorate’s tendency towards xenophobia and isolationism.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty has exhibited widely since 2001, including solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College, Massachusetts; Fine Arts Center Gallery at University of Arkansas; and a commissioned sculpture for the Public Art Fund. Gloves Off, the first traveling survey of her work with accompanying fully illustrated catalogue published by SUNY Press, completed a three-venue tour last year
We are living in a time of fear that is substantial, consistent, and bipartisan. Today, as people began congregating at the pools before sunrise, the general consensus was that of a universal anxiety, but this is not a new feeling. Fear has long been manufactured and promoted advantageously in the political sphere, with visual media serving at the forefront of our contemporary political dialogue.
Eclectic Polling stations like the ones in the images of Ryan Donnell tell the story of access, diversity and civic duty in the American electoral system.
My imagery is concurrently precious/impaired, plausible/ridiculous and intermittently political. I like to manage or miss-manage what is absurd, humorous, and irresolvable and revitalize events from the past. Formalism and pictorial space are the structure for narratives to unfold.
A rectangular box fitted with red framing and a rotatable wheel sits holding an array of note cards in Chelsea’s Cristin Tierney Gallery. The note cards started out as a way for Neil Goldberg to keep track of his thoughts and plans, some twenty years ago, before they turned into an immersive exhibit. In the artist’s self-described “suicide-note” style font, he has turned his handwritten note cards into a political statement under the title VOTE IN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS.
A dark room with ambient sounds and stunning visuals was packed with an overflowing audience (including two dogs) for the final day of Jeff Whetstone’s Batture Ritual at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea. Consisting of six photographs and a 24-minute film, the exhibit focuses on the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana. Whetstone spoke on the exhibit’s closing day about his inspiration and the work’s larger significance given the pivotal role the river plays in the global economy.
The stench of cheap brandished Trump steaks can be likened to the new Republican party and the men hiding behind red — not for country, but for power.
Georgia’s race for governor is drawing national attention and for good reason. The voter suppression tactics are an act of cowardice by Secretary of State Jeff Kemp who is desperate to win the election.
Discourse surrounding spirit photography has long been concerned with the veracity of the genre. The ability to capture human spirits on film seems like a stretch for the reaches of both art and science, but this practice has persisted for nearly two centuries, speaking to the age-old desire of humans to figure out what comes after death.
Released in 2009, Coraline isn’t often considered a horror movie because of its PG rating and because horror movies aren’t usually made for children. It’s a shame that there aren’t many horror movies made for kids when one considers how easy it is to terrify them; at least half of the original Brothers’ Grimm fairy tales read more like nightmares than whimsical bedtime stories.
If all Shivers amounted to was a savaging of the bourgeoisie it would hardly qualify as a horror movie, at least not in the tradition sense. Where the movie unsettles and disturbs is in its - and by extension, Cronenberg’s - capacity to tap into our deep-seated fear of our own vile bodies and their capacity to betray us.
