Jake Romm
Jake Romm is a writer and human rights lawyer based in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Strange Matters, Photograph Magazine, Protean Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He can be found on twitter at @jake_romm.
Peter van Agtmael: Look at the USA
By Jake RommLook at the USA. It’s the title of photographer Peter van Agtmael’s exhibition, but it’s an instruction too. Look at it, do not turn away, do not obfuscate, do not insist on nuance, do not flinch: look at the USA.
Sayre Gomez: Renaissance Collection
By Jake RommLos Angeles based painter Sayre Gomez’s exhibition of new work, Renaissance Collection, currently on view at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy consists of five paintings focused on the eponymous collection of apartment buildings by developer Geoff Palmer. Palmer is notorious for being both a sleazy and rapacious figure in the LA real estate scene, and also, something of an idiot, having once claimed that “The Italians actually settled LA before the Spanish and Chinese.
Lee Lozano: All Verbs
By Jake RommWhat does it mean to show Lee Lozano’s work in a commercial gallery? And not just any commercial gallery, but Hauser & Wirth, one of the biggest and most profitable? It’s not a question actively posed by All Verbs, but after leaving the building it’s this problem, more than anything else, that remained on my mind.
Mona Hatoum: all of a quiver
By Jake RommIn Mona Hatoum’s visual world, the grid is often also a cage, and in this sense all of a quiver references not just collapsing structures, but also the cages used to hold the refugees such collapses create.
Dziga Vertov and the Kino-Eye
By Jake RommIn Kino Eye (1924), the first of his two masterpieces, Dziga Vertov staged a resurrection, turning a bull carcass hooked in a city slaughter house into a living bull, happily grazing in a field. “Kino Eye moves time backwards,” the title card reads just before the miracle.
