Poetry
Nary a Soul

Contributor
Macgregor CardMacgregor Card is a poet, translator, and editor living in Brooklyn.
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Alyson Shotz: Alloys of Moonlight
By David EbonyMARCH 2023 | ArtSeen
Encountering the eight recent abstract, painted folded-metal wall reliefs in Alyson Shotzs luminous show, Alloys of Moonlight, I thought of Gilles Deleuzes book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside, Deleuze remarks in his study of folds as an infinite weaving of time and space in Baroque art. Because it is a virtuality that never stops dividing itself, the line of inflection is actualized in the soul but realized in matter, each one on its own side. With the nuanced spatial play in these worksof a façade and an enclosure, outside and insideShotz seems to aim for a transcendent quality like the one Deleuze describes.

Spencer Sweeney with Andrew Woolbright
JUL-AUG 2022 | Art
In early May, Spencer Sweeneys exhibition Perfect opened at the Brant Foundation. The drawings and paintings that spanned across the two floors of the foundation represented fifteen years of work and achieved the depth and dimension of both a retrospective and a concert . When the energy finally settled from the opening, we talked in his studio, where I found myself surrounded by the same palpable excitement and energy captured at the Brant. Next to his drums and guitars, and flanked by a ring of booming paintings still in progress, we discussed the shared spaces of music and painting, how painting can be used to anticipate and store the energy of an announcement, and how self-portraits can hold the tension of contradictions to emanate and reflect the soul.
Charles Baxter’s Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature
By Joseph PeschelSEPT 2022 | Books
The hardest part of being a writer is learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul, Charles Baxter writes about halfway through his new book, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature. This isnt Baxters first book about writing and the life of the writer as an artist.
Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili
By Dina A. RamadanJUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen
Much of Lydia Ourahmane’s work has been an exploration of the multiple connotations of barzakh, the barrier or threshold that separates two things that must be kept distinct. In Islamic philosophy, this is the liminal place which the soul inhabits after death, while awaiting the Day of Judgment. For the multi-disciplinary artist based between Algiers and Barcelona, this space of limbo between life and death has generative potential.