Outside the Palace of Me (Art Canada Institute, 2021) by artist Shary Boyle is an exhibition catalog for a stunning eponymous body of her multimedia and ceramic works that debuted at the Gardiner Museum in February 2022. While this catalog is a highly conceptual and well-executed offering from an artist […]
“Photographs act as vehicles of litigation against the slippage of the tightly bound spool of memory,” writes Garry Reece, in an essay that concludes Beautiful, Still. (2022, Mack Books), a monograph by photographer Colby Deal documenting the Third Ward neighborhood of Houston, where Deal grew up, and where his grandmother […]
“What do we expect or want from books about ancient archaeological sites?” asks Margaret Randall in chapter six of Artists in My Life (New Village Press, 2022). She goes on to muse about publications that are variously “of an elegance that far outweighs content” and others that are “superficial tourist […]
In Brink (Punctum Press, 2022), photojournalist David Butow captures many critical tableaux in a visual dissection of the US political system between 2015 and 2021. There are flags and red MAGA hats, of course, and blue buttons with Hillary Clinton’s “H” logo. There are political rallies and candid portraits of […]
You don’t have to be a mycologist to enjoy Brian Blomerth’s new art book, Mycelium Wassonii — you could also be a fan of amazing graphic storytelling, interested in the cultural roots of mushroom as ritual and medicine, or eager to learn about some of the unsung heroines that helped […]
As early as the introduction of railroads and the telegraph system, the Western landscape has struggled with the aesthetics of convenience. From commercial interests like strip malls and billboards, to national systems like highways and telephone wires, to individual interventions like graffiti and public sculpture, the definition of “eyesore” is […]
50 years is an aeon in the art world, and a powerful increment of time by which to mark change in contemporary ideas. The book Objects: USA 2020 (The Monacelli Press, 2020) seeks just such a reckoning, by first revisiting and recapping the influential exhibition, Objects: USA, presented in 1969 at […]
The perception of photography as a documental form is based on a simple premise: you cannot photograph something that isn’t there. In his latest project, photographer Stephen Berkman turns this idea on its head by claiming to document what is no longer there … and maybe what never was. On […]
In its broadest sense, a temple is a place devoted to a specific and elevated purpose, one not necessarily limited to the spiritual. Maybe it’s fair to say that what I’ve needed lately are secular temples, houses where I can refocus my capacity for reflection, which has been eroded by […]
Nobody is looking at Niko J. Kallianiotis. Even when people are pictured in his book of color photographs, America in a Trance (Damiani, 2018), they are not the kinds of staged portraits that indicate a relationship between artist and model. Kallianiotis captures Americans going about their lives: walking through the […]