Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest

By Simon Wu

SEPT 2020 | ArtSeen

The musculature of Jiménez’s figures is exaggerated but also flattened, and their genders are ambiguous. Most of them are closely-cropped figure studies, but a portion of them appear to be drawn from memory-scenes or TV broadcasts.

Kate Shepherd: Surveillance

By Susan Harris

MAY 2020 | ArtSeen

Surveillance marks a vast leap in a new direction. Working on, experimenting with, and percolating this new body of work for years, Shepherd dug deep into her self and her process to figure out how to make paintings that would essentially make themselves instead of her superimposing images on them.

I am Prehistory

By Rémi Labrusse

JUL-AUG 2020 | Critics Page

You’re standing in front of a prehistoric work of art: or at least, you’re being told that it’s a “work of art,” and you’re also being told that it’s “prehistoric”—let’s say roughly 25 or 35 thousand years old. It’s a group of animals drawn in charcoal across a cave wall, for instance, or perhaps it’s a small faceless female figure with visible genitalia that’s engraved onto a fragment of a mammoth’s ivory tusk. All these facts were provided by experts to you in just a few minutes.

OXANA CHI and LAYLA ZAMI
with Gillian Jakab

By Gillian Jakab

APRIL 2020 | Dance

Dance as a form of perseverance and resistance is not just the stuff of movies. Tatjana Barbakoff, a now much-forgotten historical figure, did just that, at great personal risk. Like Rosie, Barbakoff danced as long as she could in the face of hate during the Holocaust. A dancer from Russia (now Latvia) of Jewish and Chinese descent, Barbakoff moved to Germany and had a successful career performing throughout literary cabarets and theaters in the 1920s and early ’30s.