Sascha Braunig: Lay Figure

By Osman Can Yerebakan

APRIL 2022 | ArtSeen

In the combat between weightlessness and force, the winner is left ambiguous: are the hands guardians of affably soft columns or do they clutch the helpless anchors to destroy? Searching for an answer is futile, and settling for humor is suggested.

from Aesthetica

By Allie Rowbottom

DEC 22–JAN 23 | Fiction

Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel, Aesthetica, alternates between the world of nineteen-year-old nascent influencer @annawrey and that of the thirty-five-year-old Anna Wrey who wears the scars of countless elective surgeries that, when seen in the full context of industrial beauty, don’t seem particularly elective at all. More than anything else, Aesthetica investigates the fallacy of reversibility. When young, don’t we all imagine that life is a series of attempts that can more or less be undone without permanent consequence? Once we step into the light of reality, we realize that there is no fairy godmother waving a magic tv remote with a giant double arrow button reading REWIND. The particularly graceful move in Aesthetica is to advance beyond the commonplace observation that plastic surgery is a futile attempt to flip the hourglass; instead, Rowbottom asks us to imagine a cosmetic procedure that would undo the undoing, reverse the decisions a public figure might make to look like the fantasy version of their true self.

Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art

By Charlotte Kent

DEC 21-JAN 22 | ArtSeen

The curators, Tina Rivers Ryan and Paul Vanouse, focus their broad agenda through four themes: the use of digital technologies for passive (but not always effective) surveillance, how identities are shaped by technology, the erasure of marginalized communities, and the active reassertion of control.

Tony Cragg: Incidents

By Jonathan Goodman

DEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen

Tony Cragg, who has been working since the 1970s, makes sculpture characterized by an effective diversity. In his show Incidents, currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery, Cragg’s sculptures occupy a middle space between the abstract and the figurative; the extreme plasticity of his work results in forms that move back and forth between suggestions of a recognizable figure and sensuous abstraction.