The playful, painterly gestures of Sarah Bright's small movable frescoes... at first belie the artist’s rigorous, post-Minimalist attention to form.

The question of why we think about plants the way we do and the problem of how little scholarly attention has been paid to plant intelligence have both practical and theoretical significance. Two books already canonical in human-plant studies are specifically concerned with the treatment of plants in the history of philosophy.

 Wallace’s homage consists of several series of photographs, all grounded in cinematography and thematically related to fractures in gaze, gesture, and relationship

...the show is especially charged where the concept of an art space itself is challenged or negotiated... These tensions are intensified by the glaring presence of the 2015 South of Market neighborhood—ground zero for San Francisco startups—just outside the walls...

“Future anterior,” in this case, presumes that the places from which people have sent things will disappear, and that there won't be political change to overcome predicted events, yet the institutional framework to present the archive will still exist, along with an audience able to view it. The pathos assumes that politics as usual will prevail..."

... the formal aesthetics of disorientation, dependence and informational stonewalling that is experienced in contemporary American life.

The resulting photographs hover between abstract and realistic, with edges and textures that betray the physical presence of the shapes. Digital reproductions don’t do justice to the way that the cfaal photographs challenge perception itself, challenging the eye to make sense of depth while seeming to vibrate in a half-real space. 

Fowler uses the vocabulary of variable and repetition, choosing from ready-made elements to explore the uncanny effects of creating through permutation, playback, and machinated glitch.

...The show also includes a series of three new sculptures, the first she has ever exhibited, translating her concerns with perceptual space into three dimensions

...But the sweetly mournful, teen-girl-Tumblr aesthetic of the show offers only a thin candy coating over vigorous, challenging feminist messages that have a kinship with the diaristic work of Tracey Emin. 

The direct subject of the new Polyscroll video series is specifically painting and the achievement of illusion in two dimensions across media. Using the same digital rendering software that he uses for the video sculpture, Boyce superimposes 3D models onto large digital screens, where they slowly turn to show all sides (jarring any sense of a constant subject position) and appear to melt into and out of the picture frame. 

The curators shrewdly present works that, rather than serving as evidence of this changed world, treat the Anthropocene as a hypothesis meant to engender exploratory thinking.

...what makes “Secondhand” remarkable is the range of vernacular photographs from numerous other collections and archives: shrewd counterpoints to the more manifest practices on display.

We talked about scales of time in her work, lichens in outer space, and what happens when a sleeper-bestseller photography book is translated into an exhibition.

Misako Inaoka’s menagerie of upholstered animal sculptures, exquisite quasi-taxidermy, and delicate collage works is immediately alluring. It only becomes clear after spending time with the objects that their beguiling quality critiques our own desires for a benign version of nature, made safe and decorative for our aesthetic consumption.

Lisa Ross’s large-scale photographs of found shrines nestled among the sand dunes of the Taklamakan Desert in the Chinese region of Xinjiang waver between landscapes and portraits of their absent creators. 

The story of the Hyde brothers offers up two archetypes of gift economies. One stresses the individual gift of the artist, which may or may not be valued by the market (and so, by extension, requires patrons of various forms—or grant funding offered by organizations like Creative Time—to survive). The other offers a collaborative model of making in which gift giving and capitalistic production are so fluid and interwoven as to be at times indistinguishable.

The humor darkens when it dawns on us that while the film is set at an unknown future time, what we now think of as new technology hasn’t survived at all. A young woman reads a worn book on birds that was first checked out in 1961 (and in 2070); we later see her wandering through a display of taxidermic animals.The great irony of the film is that it attains its dreamy futuristic quality by dealing with old-fashioned artifacts in an atmosphere of loss.

I spoke with Marder and Norton for BOMB about, among other things, the so-called turn to the question of the animal (and how it doesn't go far enough); what could potentially constitute a plant ethics; and what the etymological differences between nature and ecology tell us about our mythologies of origin and decay in the natural world.