Avram C. Alpert

Avram C. Alpert is a contributor to the Rail.
Lucas Blalock’s second solo show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Florida, 1989, achieves that difficult balance of being an intensely personal show that resonates beyond the private symbols and winks embedded in its photographs and sculptures.
Lucas Blalock, The Floridian (Urodisny), 2017–2020. Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 50 1/4 x 40 inches. © Lucas Blalock. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York.
Even as it feels like a representation for the mass decay we experience, it is also, if only accidentally, a preservation of a time when decay still felt like a metaphor or imaginative exercise.
Installation view: Brandon Ndife: MY ZONE, Bureau, New York, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Bureau, New York. Photo: Charles Benton.
I detect a strong Marxism underlying the work, moving from the struggle of black and white to a resolved dialectic in red. Their work completed, the performers lounge on the sculpture, rather than dragging and assembling it. Such subtle resistance matches again with Noguchi, who, curator Dakin Hart reminds visitors, “was a social activist…most of [whose] efforts to shape society were indirect and abstract.
Brendan Fernandes: Contract and Release. Photo: Nicholas Knight. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY / ARS.
The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel brings together contemporary artists making work about intention, belief, and prayer with historical prayer wheels and related images from the history of Himalayan arts.
Installation view: The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel, The Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2019. Photo: Filip Wolak. Courtesy the Rubin Museum of Art, New York.
In his now mostly forgotten work, The Philosophy of “As If” (1911), Hans Vaihinger argued that much of our mental life is taken up not by provable propositions, but by “as if” stories that we construct to make sense of our experience.
Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2010. Ink on C-print. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York.
Luke Stettner’s current exhibition at Kate Werble Gallery, ri ve rr hy me sw it hb lo od, is a heavy show. I do not use the word heavy lightly.
Installation view: Luke Stettner, ri ve rr hy me sw it hb lo od, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photo: Gregory Carideo.

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