What Lives in the Work

By Colin Edgington

JUNE 2020 | Critics Page

Making came first and then writing. It began with images and is how I learned to see, not just the external world but the clouded interiority of my self. What drew me into the world of images was an initial experience in the darkroom.

Dara Birnbaum’s Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On/Deal With)

By Jennie Waldow

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Art Books

Materially detached from Birnbaum’s finished products, her working documents chart the theoretical motivations behind each piece, along with the novel technical solutions she devised to translate thorny concepts into external space. While this is not a publication for the casual reader, its complexity and resolute physical presence dovetail with the concerns of Birnbaum’s body of work, linking means and ends.

What Sound Does The Blk Atlantic Make?—on translation in the work of artist Alberta Whittle

By Mother Tongue

MAY 2020 | Critics Page

Whittle’s filmwork was filmed in part within the North British Rubber Company archives, surrounded by documents and objects relating to their former Edinburgh factory site, singing the mournful lyrics of African-American blues, jazz, and folk singer Odetta Holmes’s song “Deep Blue Sea.”

79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)

NOV 2021 | The Miraculous

An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.