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.
Black-and-white photographs of nude male figures posing in construction sites around urban Los Angeles. The book drips with death. The nude simultaneously exudes a sense of vitality and also finality: the cadaver is nude as well.
This book traces the development of Crewdson’s work from the mid-eighties until now, observing how he has refined and purified his images according to an increasingly planned and precise vision.
This photobook presents a series of screenshots taken between 2015 and 2017 of frozen WhatsApp video calls with his family members at home in Gaza. The images approach a manner of depicting hell.
In 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.
In 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.
Los 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.
What 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.
Look 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.
