Memorial Ruin: On Lida Abdul’s Once Upon Awakening
A rope bisects the opening shot of Lida Abdul’s film Once Upon Awakening. The rope, itself bisected by a hand grasping its fraying coils, is taut against an unseen weight…
contemptorary and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, May 2018
Fold, Staple, Embrace: The Body Alive in the Archive
Photographic objects and the subjects within them degrade over time, particularly when discarded through the sieve of archival practices. Do possibilities exist for the body to further live through the photograph? Can photographic objects invoke life over death?
Art Practical, October 2018
Slow Burn: Young Suh’s Wildfires
Cloaked in smoky haze, the surreal Californian landscapes of Young Suh's Wildfires are unsettling reminders of the urgency and proximity of climate change.
Art Practical, January 2019
Light, Paper, Process: Alternative Process and Experimental Photography at the Mills Building
Works by Meghann Riepenhoff, Brianna Tadeo, and Binh Danh refuse a basic photographic premise: to document and preserve a fixed temporal state. In challenging the perception that a photograph necessarily signifies pause, the artists reveal that photographic processes can evoke duration and the inability to stop time.
Art Practical, March 2019
The Matter of Photography in the Americas at Cantor Arts Center
Instead of heavily leaning toward documentary or portraiture, as is often done in shows of Latin American photography, this exhibition presented expansive conceptual and material inquiry into the photographic medium. In the exhibition’s nine categories, bounds of representation are tested and pushed—not only by what is shown within the frame, but also in how the frame itself is made.
Art Practical, May 2018
(re)Arranging Pictures and (re)Reading Histories
(re)Arranging Pictures and (re)Reading Histories examines Leslie Hewitt’s Still Life series, a photographic series of sculptural assemblages that considers collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Hewitt arranges a library of archival materials in the studio which manifest as large-scale photographs. The gesture of arrangement is a process of remembering: a way to read histories, evolve them, and keep them alive.
Sightlines, California College of the Arts, May 2018
This Land Is Not Neutral: Georgina Reskala and Dionne Lee
Georgina Reskala and Dionne Lee photograph landscapes of what lies beyond the visible, considering how bodies affectively orient themselves when confronted with spatially-embedded histories and memories.
Art Practical, April 2019
Daria Martin: Tonight the World
Tonight the World begets the unfulfilled desire to know each other and ourselves, if only we could read someone’s mind, see into their dreams, have a peek at the unmediated inner-workings of a person: a desire always just out of reach.
The Brooklyn Rail, September 2019
Review: Bri Williams’ Playbill at Et al
Bri Williams’ exhibition “Playbill” explores threads of their family history through a series of sound works and sculptures using collected objects encased in soap, wax, and resin.
48 Hills, August 2021
Review: Nasim Moghadam’s I Sprout on my Wound at Aggregate Space Gallery
Nasim Moghadam’s exhibition is a haunting, immersive experience that brings together the interdisciplinary artist’s sculptural, photographic, sound, and video practices in a single installation of new work.
48 HIlls, September 2021
Review: Susan Nakata’s Notions
On view for just two days on November 6 and 7 in the artist’s former home, the exhibition shared a range of Nakata’s work across ceramics, painting, drawing, and photography from the 1970s through today.
48 Hills, November 2021
Review: Sydney Cain’s Dust to Dust at Rena Bransten Gallery
Figures emerge like apparitions in Sydney Cain’s drawings, forms that flow in and out of focus. Cain presents a series of works on paper and wood that explore memory and ancestry, in a fluid bridge between temporal worlds.
48 Hills, February 2022
Review: Christine Elfman’s All solid shapes dissolve in light at EUQINOM Gallery
There’s a hush to Christine Elfman’s photographs, a soft silence that resembles a single beam of light shining into a cave. It is the kind of quiet that slows time, where seconds feel like centuries in the most beguiling way.
48 Hills, April 2022
Colliding: Jennifer Brandon and Andréanne Michon at SF Camerawork
Jennifer Brandon and Andréanne Michon’s exhibition, Colliding, suggests resonant metaphors about the impact of mark-making, interconnectedness, and flows of change.
Art Practical, April 2019
Review: Austin Thomas’ Metropolis at Municipal Bonds
Austin Thomas’ exhibition Metropolis is a clamor of geometries. Walking into the gallery, there is an ambience of clarity and stillness amid flurries of movement that is synonymous with a metropolis like New York City, the artist’s hometown and foundation for the show.
48 Hills, August 2021
Review: Natani Notah’s Normal Force at Rebecca Camacho Presents
Natani Notah’s sculptures, collected and secondhand garments reworked with belts, faux fur, and intricate beading, have an uncanny relationship to the body; they simultaneously appear like distinct organisms and disembodied human limbs.
48 Hills, August 2021
Review: Andrew Chapman’s The Strange Case of Theodule Otis at Et al
Andrew Chapman’s exhibition is a dense puzzle. It is one of those exhibitions that lingers in your mind long after you have left the show. Questions beget more questions in an infinite cycle of wondering.
48 Hills, October 2021
Review: Under the Waqwaq Tree at / (slash)
Like an invitation into a dream, this otherworldly exhibition curated by Naz Cuguoğlu draws its title and concept from the waqwaq tree, which bears fruit in the form of female figures, who cry “waq waq!” upon ripening and falling.
48 Hills, December 2021
Review: Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s Here Be Dragons at Friends Indeed Gallery
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s exhibition explores histories of colonial economies, mythologies, and systems of power, visualized through symbolic objects. Bermúdez-Silverman’s sculptures reveal slippages in surface perception.
48 Hills, March 2022
Odette England: The Outskirts, Exposed, and Punched
Odette England puts photographic peripheries at the center of her work, whether the edges of images or the residual marks left behind by photographic process.
The Brooklyn Rail, May 2019
Review: Ajit Chauhan’s hapless, helpless, hell heaven, health, hello, hi, ho, home at Anglim/Trimble
Ajit Chauhan uses collected print ephemera for source material: vintage postcards and secondhand records. Postcards bear carved drawings and geometric cutouts made by removing surface imagery. Record covers are erased into abstractions and kaleidoscopic tableaux.
48 Hills, August 2021
Review: Reclaimed: The Art Of Recology at Bedford Gallery
What art might be made at the dump? Vases made from ethernet cables. Knoll chairs from aluminum pipes and duct tape. Quilts from awnings and IKEA bags. Moving boxes from scrap paper and office supplies.
48 Hills, September 2021
Review: Lindsey White’s How to Get on Cable Television at Casemore Kirkeby
Can art be funny? Is it OK if you laugh really hard inside a museum or gallery? Encounters with Lindsey White’s work enliven an intellectual spectrum that, in a pleasant surprise, allows whimsy to co-exist with criticality.
48 Hills, October 2021
Review: THE WEATHER IS NOWADAYS CRAZY at Cushion Works
As if windows, Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby’s drawings invite viewers to peer into their abstract worlds. Theirs is a language that only close companions can know.
48 Hills, January 2022
Review: Greta Snider’s Pictures You Can Hold at Roxie Theater presented by Canyon Cinema
Greta Snider’s expansive practice embraces an almost boundary-less approach to filmmaking, redefining the scope and potential of experimental nonfiction film.
48 Hills, March 2022
Notes on Grain in Running, Falling, Flying, Floating, Crawling
“From a distance, a photograph of grain. A boundless field of speckled grey, made of tones mostly oscillating between the eighth and ninth zones, surrounds a circular formation of darker values, registering at the almost immeasurable depths of zone one…”
Published by Saint Lucy Books, 2020
of castles in Spain in Why are they so afraid of the lotus?
“A crumbling edifice appears, made of stones or now perhaps seashells, cast within the magenta-yellow fading of time. I hear the crash of waves and yet do not see water. Sound is out of sync with speakers and space.…”
Published by Sternberg Press, 2021
Guest Editor of Volume 7: Nature of Feral Fabric
“This volume of Feral Fabric makes visible some of the intersections between textiles and the natural world: wefts of home and diaspora, of liberatory labor, of queer possibility, of global capitalism and industry, of new lives from old things, of resilience amidst disaster..…”
Published by Feral Fabric, 2023