Matthew Biro
Guest Critic
Art and Protest
By Matthew BiroCan art today be a form of protest? And, if so, what subjects, what issues, what transgressions or injustices, does it most vitally and persuasively critique? In many ways, the obvious answer to this question is yes.
BRUCE CONNER Its All True
By Matthew BiroIt’s taken a long time for Bruce Conner (1933 2008), the polymath San Francisco artist who was a major force in the development of both found-object sculpture and experimental film in the United States, to be given a major retrospective.
ALEX WEBB La Calle, Photographs from Mexico
By Matthew BiroComprising a total of forty-five medium-sized photographs, La Calle (The Street), presents highlights culled from more than forty trips that Alex Webb took through Mexico between 1975 and 2007.
Carrie Mae Weems
By Matthew BiroSince the late 1970s, Carrie Mae Weems has pursued a socially engaged form of creative practice, examining how identity is constructed through concepts of race, gender, and class, while interrogating the processes by which we produce a sense of self in relation to both private memory and public history.
SHEIDA SOLEIMANI:
Medium of Exchange
By Matthew Biro
For Rosalind Krauss, the pivotal difference between Dada photomontage and Surrealist photography had to do with the relative presence of either the photographer or the world in the image itself. Surrealist photographs are not interpretations of reality, decoding it, as in Heartfields photomontages. They are presentations of that very reality as configured, or coded, or written.