Joanna Seifter

Exhibition Reviews

The Brooklyn Rail •

Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always | The Brooklyn Rail

In his 1946 speech The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that subjective perception is “paradoxical”: the object of perception unequivocally exists, he explains, but “only insofar as someone can perceive it. I cannot even for an instant imagine an object in itself.”1 When artist Lorenzo Clayton first encountered this phrase, he interpreted it through a Cartesian lens and took umbrage...
The Brooklyn Rail •

Jesse Krimes: Corrections | The Brooklyn Rail

From a distance, the series of uniform eraser-sized white slabs lined up on a blue velvet-lined shelf appear to be stone sculptures stripped of their pigment and linear detail, bearing only traces of patina. Upon closer inspection, eyes, hair, and mouths emerge to form somber facial expressions. They etch themselves deeper into the viewer’s vision with each passing moment, revealing their true nature: the faintly rendered images are photographs of prison inmates.
TUSSLE •

Artemis Kotioni | TUSSLE

Artemis Kotioni’s Volume Study II (2024) features monochromatic gridded patterns occupying the center of an otherwise empty page. The painting’s hash marks contort into a twisted cone, assuming form without a visible contour. While the drawing’s ambiguous title, antiseptic surface, and scratched linework intentionally obscure the object and geographical representation, we can infer both from the shape’s occasionally overlapped gridding narrowing towards its edges coupled with an oblong base...
The Brooklyn Rail •

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory

Contemporary artist and cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains’s retrospective at El Museo del Barrio, aptly titled Archaeology of Memory and on view through August 11, documents Chicana histories, whether anecdotal, geographic, political, or cultural. The exhibition encompasses over thirty years of the artist’s manuscripts, photomontages, sculptures, installations, and research. It is large in scale and yet deeply intimate.
TUSSLE •

Art House | TUSSLE

When introducing his friend and colleague Mickalene Thomas to audiences at Art House 2024, fashion designer and philanthropist Robert Verdi described her artistic vision as “immersed in Black beauty, driven by feminine power, and overflowing with seduction.” Almost as if to prove his point, propped next to Verdi was Thomas’ Afro Muse #4 in Black and White (2014), a photograph of a young woman baring her chest and psyche, staring deeply at the unseen viewer...
Art Spiel •

Ophelia Arc: we’re just so glad you’re home at 81 Leonard Gallery – Art Spiel

In her 2014 essay Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, Leslie Jamison examines the literary phenomenon of women’s suffering being depicted in almost luxuriating detail, as much an object of fetishization by men as it is a subject of shame by women. Jamison recalls a boyfriend accusing her of being a “wound-dweller,” or fixating on her own afflictions to an unhealthy, self-centered degree, to which she initially reacts with umbrage. Ultimately, she reworks this pejorative into an argument...
TUSSLE •

Accommodating the Object: Bosiljka Raditsa and Elizabeth Yamin

While the title of Bosiljka Raditsa’s The Knots (2023) sounds fairly straightforward on its own, the painting suggests knots as a slouched stack of coils, conspicuously overlapped but never intertwined, while eliminating its essential characteristics like textured string and loose ends. Fellow abstract painter Elizabeth Yamin’s Entrance (noun), Entrance (verb) (2018) features a similar interplay of language and form, assuming the structure of an archway framing an unfamiliar room while embodying the inhabitant’s overpowering presence.
TUSSLE •

A Dark, A Light, A Bright: Dorothy Liebes at Cooper Hewitt

In her essay for "House and Garden", fiber artist Dorothy Liebes touted the 1940s as “the age of good color,” referring to how “today, as never before, science has given people on all economic levels an endless palette.” According to Liebes, the potential wielded by artificial dyes and synthetic fabrics meant that artists were no longer limited to using earthen hues made with affordable natural materials, potentially introducing greater stylistic diversity while minimizing barriers to accessibil
TUSSLE •

A Glorious Bewilderment: Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi

Martha Graham’s visionary choreography was distinguished by brusque, repetitive movements designated as “contraction and release,” involving dancers physically withdrawing and expanding their bodies, imparting a breadth of somatic and emotional expression. Graham’s collaborations with Isamu Noguchi, as thoroughly boundless as her choreography, appropriated Noguchi’s biomorphic sculptures as sets, costumes, and even dance partners.
The Brooklyn Rail •

Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design

Museum Of Modern Art

Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design

September 2, 2023–July 7, 2024

New York

The Museum of Modern Art’s Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design exhibition is the latest in a series that champions technological and conceptual innovations in twenty-first-century interior, product, and fashion design, particularly those at the forefront of education and scientific discovery. Previous entries have included Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Con
The Brooklyn Rail •

Jane Wilson: Atmospheres

In his 1891 dialogue-essay hybrid, The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde prioritizes romanticism above rote verisimilitude, positing that nature is a paltry imitation of art. Wilde argues that great artists embellish (or outright fabricate) their surroundings rather than depicting nature in a way that is factually accurate, using art as a veil to be cast over the natural world rather than as a mirror to directly reflect it. Wilde’s essay dismisses the practice of gazing at sunsets and cloudscapes as ov
The Brooklyn Rail •

Stephen Deffet: Shadow Heir

At Below Grand Gallery, nestled in a restaurant supply store on Orchard Street, Stephen Deffet’s triptych of narrow vertical paintings, Eternally Off Course (2023), hang on the convex wall of a window display. Each panel, evenly spaced from the next, features an interconnected segment of an unoccupied, sun-drenched bedroom. While the painting’s softened brushstrokes obscure its details, its objects and environment remain recognizable.
The Brooklyn Rail •

Aura Rosenberg: What is Psychedelic

In Cabinets, a chapter of theorist Walter Benjamin’s stylized autobiography Berlin Childhood Around 1900, the author recounts his parents’ practice of sequestering new toys, books, and even laundry from their children in the name of preservation. Contemporary artist Aura Rosenberg’s untitled photograph of the Palais-Ephraim’s exhibition From a Good Home: The World of Children Around 1900 (1998) features perfectly preserved dolls and toys, imbued with what Rosenberg designates as “traces of living history.”
TUSSLE •

Yvonne Pickering Carter

In Emma Allen’s New Yorker profile of Yvonne Pickering Carter’s life and works, the contemporary artist fondly recalls her husband allowing her the time and space to contemplate and create, subverting the longstanding narrative that women artists prioritize their husbands’ livelihoods without reciprocal support. Carter’s artwork, encompassing painting, sculpture, costume design and performance art, explores this dichotomy of domesticity and isolation, of inertia’s comfort and existential dread.