Laura Lamiel has been making work now for five decades. So in ways, the recent presence of her work in international contexts, or at least the inclusion of her work in biennials and her representation by young galleries with broad exposure, amounts to a rediscovery. That a private foundation in France has joined with the French Ministry of Culture in commissioning a text on Lamiel’s work – this fact alone gives some indication of what’s changed; if not in Lamiel’s work, then around it. It also suggests that Lamiel’s work has been underserved by writing in particular. So one of ...

Scaling is to move across different dimensions: a firm might be scaling down, nearing bankruptcy—its new dimension is to reach rock bottom; a doll house might be a scale model, where dimensions are kept proportional but decreased compared to a real house; a hand touching a map is, to paraphrase Tom Holert, a scaling device, where the graspable dimension of the map makes available the experience of exploring, traveling and possessing lands. For this publication of Taming the Horror Vacui, which includes content from three different sessions in the program, we put the wind and its manifestations through a process of ...

I am wearing these words. I wish they were bespoke, well-cut, stylish. I wish I wore them with carefree ease, the grace that comes with joyful confidence, sprightly health, and an unburdened conscious. But these words are second-hand, I found most of them in the scrap heap, stole others from my betters, and none of them are rightly mine. They are worn and stained, clunky and awkward, a poor fit for what I really mean to say. Woven into stories, I pretend they are a person. They fail as soon as I slip them on. They are not even made of ...

The work cannot be grasped in one glance, it escapes the gaze and looks like the result of an explosion that has left the space, walls, floor and ceiling covered in fragments and motifs. Florentine Lamarche and Alexandre Ovize’s creations are totally heterogeneous. Rarely have so many materials and gestures been used to confront oppositions of textures, forms and colours. Their works cannot be read. They are visual shocks that create irrational, madcap territories in the actual space of the exhibition. They borrow from painting and sculpture, yet foil the aesthetic codes of their representation to engage them more in ...

This next-to-last issue of Taming the Horror Vacui, titled Air Aggregation, brings together artworks and air. Haseeb Ahmed’s art installation at Rib and the wind tunnel at its center have been used for experiments and workshops throughout the entire long-term artist’s program. Expanding on this approach, this publication collects annotated images of artworks brought to Rib by Piero Bisello to be tested in Ahmed’s wind tunnel in June 2021. If wind and air are the mediums of choice in Ahmed’s art, the aggregation of different practices can be seen as his modus operandi. The outlook of Rib as an institution hosting ...

I perceive Jagna Ciuchta’s work as a dynamic system full of instabilities: she is an artist – painter, photographer, installation artist – but also a curator, sometimes a choreographer, at other times a watchful host. Her individual artworks – whether classic large-scale paintings, or more or less experimental photographs, or even the dense installations she arranges – individually fail to capture the nature of her work. Ciuchta seems to be looking for flows and resonances between them, and her strategy seems to be not to settle into any medium, language, or artistic identity: a constant self-occlusion. However, this is not ...

The Renaissance Society presents a new, site-specific installation by Gabriel Sierra, the Bogotá-based artist’s first solo show in the United States. Sierra is intrigued by the language of man-made objects and the dimensions of the spaces in which we live, work, and think. His practice employs a variety of techniques – from sculpture and spatial interventions to performance and texts – to examine how the human body functions in relation to its environment. Originally trained in architecture and design, Sierra’s work draws on the history of Latin American Modernism. His project at the Renaissance Society consists of a group of constructions to ...

I’m one of those ADD people. I’ve never touched art in a gallery, but that’s because it’s in a gallery, not because “it’s art.” Really good art is best appreciated by rubbing yourself all over it. So, this I Failed as a Visitor thing is a wee bit offensive. Modern art should be inviting visitor participation, not building up that wall of separation. posted by shii at 6:07 AM on December 9, 2009

Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan’s environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination. Amelia Groom illuminates Buchanan’s vision of sculptural ruination, and probes her remarkable work in terms of ideas of witnessing, documentation, landscape, and cultural ...

The smell of bleach figures prominently in my first encounter with Chloé Quenum’s production. During her brief stay and exhibition at Mercer Union in Toronto in 2012, I witnessed the artist excavate an abstract image out of a black cloth by a process of chlorine reduction performed en plein air on the side patio of the gallery. She stressed the textile, washing and manipulating the weave until a new visual field was pulled into existence. The result resembled a rusty sun-print, fleshy yet serene, a skin stretched over a fourfold frame that stood upright by its own counterforces. It held in tension ...