Olga Balema: brain damage

By Amelia Farley

JUL-AUG 2019 | ArtSeen

Like the condition to which it refers, the exhibition brain damage does not just invoke a locus of injury, but also the diffusion of its effects.

The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

By Taney Roniger

MAR 2018 | ArtSeen

When it comes to that distinctly human sensation we call awe, little can rival the complexity of our own brains to elicit it. Indeed, so staggering are the numbers— current estimates have it that each contains 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections between them—that the organ seems to founder before its own immensity. No less astonishing, though fortunately more comprehensible, are its structures—the cells’ elaborate shapes and the byzantine networks by which they communicate— and this is exactly what we get to see in the exquisite drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Pat Passlof: The Brush is the Finger of the Brain

By Eleanor Heartney

NOV 2019 | ArtSeen

What comes through in these paintings is a radiant pictorial intelligence, a questing curiosity about what paint can do and a willingness to take formal risks.

Chronology

By Erica N. Cardwell

NOV 2019 | Books

Chronology, the winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, is a nonfiction collage of emails, journal entries, press releases, theory, and short bits of theatrical dialogue, producing an appropriate pastiche for the contemporary multimedia-trained brain. It is a hybrid text formulated from one’s personal archive, which is notable for the photographs and other ephemera tucked into the pages.