Emily Chun
Emily Chun is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Stanford University.
One of the rayographs currently on display at the massive exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art captures fern leaves, interspersed with what look like fluffy dandelions. It is one of the exhibition’s sixty-one rayographs, displayed with around a hundred other works, including some of his most iconic films, paintings, and sculptures.
A veteran Korean artist who has been assiduously experimenting with light, textiles, and sound in various mediums over the past four decades, Kimsooja (b. 1957) brings these long-standing interests to bear in her new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar.
Rendered with a layered technique of tapping the paint onto the surface to produce roughly hewn, almost scabrous surfaces, these works lovingly transform creases in clothing into topographic landscapes, as in Untitled (undated): “I always compare the wrinkles in clothes to the ridges of mountains,” the artist said.
The sinister, tenebrific aura of Nguyen’s earlier works, like the macabre scene in Mary, Anne, Christ, and John (2018), is tempered in this recent show. It’s true that his works still resist easy projection, but therein lies Nguyen’s main aesthetic claim: like good theology, his works make the familiar strange again.
TR Ericsson’s solo exhibition at TOTAH constructs a tender portrait of his mother who died by suicide in 2003 at the age of 57.
