Thus the organizing question for the roundtable: How did we get to the point that figural sculpture seems viable and significant again?

The photographs, sculptures, and assemblages in Walead Beshty’s “Selected Bodies of Work” derive from three series that span a wide range of approaches to the evidence of labor in artistic production—from the almost purely formal to the explicitly political.

The thrill of looking in “Mystery Hour” at first seems merely cynical and cheaply erotic—a hard-boiled flick done up in a shocking pink palette—especially given the many sex scenes projected in film clips. But in addition to embodying the genres of thriller and horror into make-believe set pieces, Snelling has also captured their gendered underpinnings

...artists are encouraged to frame their work as research at a time when discourses surrounding art are increasingly influenced by science and other academic disciplines. But what practices should "count" as research, and which are just part of the process of art-making?

Regina Mamou’s latest architectural and landscape photographs depict bygone attempts to create utopian communities in America. Each work serves as a reminder that utopia literally means “no place.” Despite the large scale and clarity of the photographs, their evasive titles keep many of the depicted houses, monuments, and terrains teasingly unknown.

Only the second exhibition at the MCA organized by Senior Curator Dieter Roelstraete, The Way of the Shovel, opening tomorrow, takes as its basis Roelstraete’s ongoing observations about the centrality of the language of archaeology, archive, and history to art discourse over recent years.

...despite its more ostensibly environmentalist themes, this is ultimately a show about time: specifically, how to come to terms with the orders of magnitude between human history and the scale of geologic time. The most rewarding pieces here forgo any outwardly ecological argument and focus on modes of anthropocentric thinking and ways of conceptualizing the (for us) nearly infinit

USSA 2012 has taken on vast aesthetic, political, and increasingly personal topics for the artist over the years, and this latest iteration is no exception, with references to different kinds of modernisms within the history of painting, Thomas Mann, and the relationship between wellness and art, within his ever-present wide-ranging institutional and cultural critiques.

Owen Kydd’s durational photographs, as he calls them, take advantage of... the ambiguities of perceiving digital documentation, deftly occupying a third space between the static and the narrative and suggesting new potentials for hybrid documents.

The deep texturing of art as both a commodity and a symbolically transcendent object... oscillates between appeals to price and pricelessness offering half-answers to the serious questions we’re facing about what value itself is now—a telling fable about the ever-loosening relationships between value, price, and meaning.

One major focus of the Cern series, and a longstanding concern of Bolen’s work, is our conviction in the recording apparatus itself,taken to be a transparent vehicle for truth about worlds beyond human perception in scientific research and a technological ob-Operating in the realm of scientific images, with a strong grounding in American survey photography, Bolen’s work oscillates across the boundary between art practice and scientific research, troubling our belief in “the document,” whether photograph or a laboratory measurement, as a transparent and conclusive representation of a reality that we otherwise cannot access.

Sampson arrived on January 11th and has been putting together An Ill Wind Blowing for the two weeks since, using recycled material from previous work and found objects from the back rooms of Intuit. The result is a multimedia interactive installation with an aesthetic of contingency, vulnerability, and stratification that corresponds shrewdly to the thematic content of the show.

...by the time the narrative comes together in a metaphysical police-room confessional scene, Sullivan has explored and shown new light on themes that are often the stuff of cliché: disappointments in love, the endless permutations of ways our families can damage us, and the particularities of the American soul.

How does a fragment speak and tell Baker to use it in one of these configurations, and how? Some fragments don’t catch her eye, and she passes them with quick fingers back into the entropic piles in her studio. But some, like Rigoletto’s assassin, are in the right place at the right time. They fit a logic that creates itself. The logic of each of Baker’s assemblages operates like Rigoletto’s curse: begun purely instinctively, it then follows rules it creates as it goes along, until it culminates in a piece whose connections seem inevitable

His paintings create awkward moments that call attention to the act of judgment. They deflate our understanding of what art is supposed to be and do, often subverting the fetishizing mysticism with which we approach painting. And they often stall or short-circuit our understanding of painting itself. But ultimately Cowan’s work is hopeful rather than nihilistic, gently ironic rather than sarcastic, if we can be patient with its easily misunderstood tests and games.

All tent cities simultaneously exhibit characteristics of permanence and temporariness. Nobody camps out indefinitely except for homeless people, and there’s necessarily an apprehension of the inevitable acquiescence that accompanies the ends of these occupations. Anyone who goes camping knows it’s going to end sometime — whether it’s a back-to-nature family vacation or a civic vacation to get back to participatory democracy. 

Ultimately, Zona is essential both as a close study of one mind processing time-based art and a subtle exposition on the aesthetics of triviality in our attempts to write about art that moves us.