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Rachel Remick

Rachel Remick is an art historian and writer based in New York. She holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin where her research focused on modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art.

Alexa West: Triple Expo

You encounter Triple Expo, a new performance choreographed by Alexa West, in a shop window on a nondescript corner of a residential block in South Williamsburg. The performers are behind the glass, you are not.

Sydney Shen: Strange But True

Shen creates a cartography of historical knowledge, seemingly mapping out the documents and images utilized to construct historical or scientific narratives. Her research, put on display for the contemporary viewer, highlights the discrepancies of how knowledge has evolved: what once were facts now register as outdated superstitions while other events, previously understudied or not well known, emerge as stranger than fiction.

Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell

In Sandy’s Room (1989–1990) is one of Laura Aguilar’s (1959–2018) most well-known images—a self-portrait, a monumental nude, a rejection of the fetishization of women’s bodies. It is one of Aguilar’s largest single prints, more than three feet tall and four feet wide. Within her retrospective, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, this immense work is reconfigured as one sentence within the much larger story that Aguilar’s work tells about the complexity and embodied experience of identity.

Diane Severin Nguyen: If Revolution Is a Sickness

We might see Nguyen’s film as an elegy to failed revolutions or the ways in which all revolutions transform themselves and become institutionalized, a memorial to lost histories, or histories that never took root. As the narrator at the beginning of the film asks comrade Weronika, “where is the truth of unremembered things?”

Joiri Minaya: I’m here to entertain you, but only during my shift

“I’m not the motherland. I’m not a landscape. I’m framing this conversation. I’m not a flower. I’m only here to work,” declares a woman whose monologue acts as the soundtrack to video documentation of performances from 2017 by artist Joiri Minaya. The woman’s refusal of identities which connect the feminine to the landscape is emblematic of Minaya’s exploration of the female subject, in particular the construction of the tropical woman.

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The Brooklyn Rail

JUNE 2023

All Issues