The 83rd, Figure of Noise

By S. David

OCT 2020 | Music

While perhaps telling, The 83rd's coded use of “culture” is just as instructive as his near-militant posture of independence. As the founder of the multi-pronged media organization Sermon 3 Recordings, through which he self-releases his music via Bandcamp, The 83rd’s sui generis trajectory seeks the kind of valanced heat that the real and art worlds seem to so rarely offer to self-styled enfants terrible.

Samara Golden: Upstairs at Steve’s

By Elizabeth Buhe

FEB 2021 | ArtSeen

Unlike those in which we find the Rückenfigur, that singular figure of the romantic sublime, Golden’s vast landscape is not a verdant expanse unperturbed by human hands but something like its opposite: the apparent site of both personal and natural disaster. Yet evacuated of human presence, the narratives suggested here remain open to our imagination.

Trans-Gendered, or How to Disappear

By Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard

MAY 2021 | Critics Page

When I transitioned, I was no longer seen as somewhat-Asian-looking. I was whitened. The features that highlighted racial difference for others—my short black hair erect, frontward, like a ball cap’s bill; bushy brows; a rounded face with apple cheeks—were resignified when my hair grew into long tresses, my brows were tweezed, and the curvature of my face became a laudable feminine quality. The racist image of the Asian-American man helps me pass as a white woman. 

Haim Steinbach: 1991 – 1993

By Katherine Siboni

FEB 2021 | ArtSeen

Steinbach’s objects, in their adjacencies and juxtapositions, behave like linguistic signs. Their meanings are both inherent and contingent, organized along the structural grammar of figure and ground constituted by his shelf supports. Presented in succession, each item yields new axes for comparison.