Julia Bland: The Half That Ties, the Half that Breaks

By Claire Voon

NOV 2019 | ArtSeen

An unshakable sense of magic pervades almost all of Julia Bland’s laboriously fabricated fiber works in her first solo show at Andrew Rafacz gallery. Cut, stitched, painted, and burned canvases joined with hand-woven textiles hang like tapestries that thrum with entrancing geometric configurations. Even the exhibition’s measured title, The Half That Ties, the Half that Breaks, evokes an incantation—a sort of ritual poem seeking to resolve seemingly contrary forces.

Keith Tyson: Life Still

By Daniel Pateman

SEPT 2019 | ArtSeen

The still life painting—that most quotidian of art genres—is given a modern makeover in Hauser & Wirth’s latest exhibition

Life as a Cabaret

Walter Corwin with Dan Kelley

OCT 2019 | Theater

Walter Corwin has been hanging out and having his plays performed at Theater for the New City going on 40 years. A protégé of Ed Bullins in the ’60s at the Public Theater and a veteran of the Actor’s Studio and The Herbert Berghof Studio, he’s never been afraid of weaving politics into his writing. The last decade of his practice has been an investigation of short form theater seemingly tailored to life in New York.

Gina Beavers: The Life I Deserve

By Charlotte Kent

JUL-AUG 2019 | ArtSeen

The lighting for Gina Beavers’s exhibit The Life I Deserve is Instagram perfect. That seems only fitting for paintings based on social media posts and aware that they will return there as #art #museum #artselfie or even, in a potential throwback to 2015, #museumselfie. The artist’s #Foodporn series from 2014 gets particular attention, though the newer series based on makeup tutorials had some snapping pics as well. All this begs the question, what are we looking at?