Greene Naftali: Hanna Hur's Anunciation

     

   To get to Greene Naftali, a hand-operated elevator that almost felt like a relic had to be taken to the eight floor. The current show in the gallery is Hanna Hur's Annunciation, a title that references Antonello da Messina's painting of the same name, the moment Mary learns she will give birth to Jesus.

    Auto Annunciate, an eighty by seventy-six inch acrylic, colored pencil and pigment piece was what caught my eye. Though the title means self announcment, the piece visualizes the opposite, it holds back what it seems to promise. Only after a few minutes of taking in the repeating pattern of squares and dots does the viewer notice the hands followed by an outline of a female figure in the center. Her hands reaching outwards gives this sense of her trying to communicate with the viewer. Small shifts of color keep the pattern from making it feel flat and monotonous.

    Annunciation, a small colored pencil drawing on a piece of paper reminded me of the times I would draw out the squares in my notebook when I went to middle school. Because it was on paper rather than a canvas, the lines felt thinner and more fragile which also created the sense of this piece sitting somewhere between abstract and figurative but not fully being either one. This exhibition asks people to slow down and look for once.

Dunya Oguz

Museum of the Moving Image - Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022)

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

by Cass Brent-Nurse


The Museum of the Moving Image exhibition, Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body, presents the viewer with an almost overwhelming portrait of the human body and the technological ways we can perceive it. When you first enter the exhibition, you are greeted by well-known, even quaint depictions of technology-focused images of the body, like early X-rays and animations.

As you make your way through the exhibition, however, the artists’ featured endeavour to complicate and even reshape your view of the body as it relates to technological advancements, and especially the field of medicine. In De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor present an in-depth and often close-to-obscene hexaptych of the human body through the medical lens, combining images of highly invasive surgical procedures into bloodied body cavities with footage of the medical staff who perform this work, whether commenting flippantly on the severity of their patients’ conditions or attempting to blow off steam at a club after work. Unnervingly, the film emotionally binds us to these enigmatic medical personnel while simultaneously allowing us to distance ourselves from the patients, who are intimately presented to us as bodies split open on an operating table rather than individuals. This dehumanizing perspective places the viewer on the same side as the medical staff, severing the body from the being to view it through the sterile medical lens.

This exhibition forces the viewer to consider their own body and their image of it in this technologically advanced, all-too-often insensitive world.

Hand Written Journal 3- Sasha Gillespie

Reflection 3- Focus: Minjeong An "Self Portrait_Rachaph" in 417 Body Constructs, Moma PS1 

Sasha Gillespie

Hand Written Journal 2- Sasha Gillespie

 Reflection 2: Focus Frank Gillette, Spectra Obscura

Sasha Gillespie

Rebecca Ness: Inheritance

     I found this exhibit to be a refreshing homage to life and art culture. As I passed each work I felt as though I was in on the joke, being invited to the artist's wealth of experience in traditional and modern fine arts. The paintings were a fascinating mix of trompe l'oeil and historical moments, cherry picking pieces of art history and bringing time forward with current sentiments and queer symbols. As a queer show I felt there was a refreshing lack of overtly sexual shock art, instead replaced with an intimate view of queer romance and pride. These works retold the artist story but were right beside city life and modern internet culture. A detail I did not notice until later review was that each painting had a distinct background, that of an art school pin-up wall, each panel bolted in as needed. There is a nice efficiency to the work, even in the midst of all that detail, the painter lets go and lets the viewer imagine. The only piece that broke this recall exercise was the gay bar scene; the painting is inherently photographic. The build of moments in time is abruptly broken and we are now in our time. At first I felt adverse to this break, but then tying into the inheritance theming I think the bar is a culmination of our history thrown back at us, hopefully to show how far we have come in the face of adversity.

The Museum of Moving Image; Overexposed (Art and Technology)

     Stepping into the gallery I first noticed the stark absence of natural light, cuing me in to the artificial nature of the theme. The gallery opened with X-Rays, mainly I think to open up the discussion of what we are generally familiar with seeing and what we as the audience should be fascinated with "revealing". At first the pure fantastical amusement beyond the initial scientific breakthrough was shocking, as I am so familiar with X-Rays as a strictly medical practice that I did not even connect the dots to the "peepshows" on display. I felt a certain willingness to be amazed and join the spectacle of the naked body. Naked Truth, the spectacles on display that were to be used to look up a woman's skirt, was the first clue to me. We as the audience are viewing these X-Rays in a feminist manner, reflecting on the male gaze and that particular view of the nude. This idea began to rapidly tie into every other display, starting with the experimental films. Grandmamauntsistercat, the surreal collaged film featured a hodge-podge of a women's collective life and functions juxtaposed with domestic machinery recreating procreation. The experience of this gallery was entirely strange and at times deeply uncomfortable. I felt the purpose of the pieces were almost to find a mechanical alternative/replacement for women's suffering, searching for a sexuality unexploited by the patriarchy. At the same time I believe there was a small victory of humanity, a celebration of life. Nurses complaining, partying, chattering away to one another, finding comfort together, maybe a silver of hope for our society.

Revised- Vignettes and Mutations by Eric White at GRIMM Gallery

 

Revised Vignettes and Mutations by Eric White at GRIMM Gallery Review

Stella Kowalsky

       Vignettes & Mutations by Eric White at GRIMM Gallery is a deeply introspective exhibition by creating a feeling of partially remembered experiences rather than complete narratives. In one piece, a woman sits at a table with her face cropped and partially hidden. The viewer is placed in an uncertain position, we are close to the subject yet separated from her. Because important visual information is withheld from us the image feels familiar while also distant, like the painting of a car interior facing an unreadable billboard against a sunset which presents a perspective that feel like is uncommon in painting but more in photography. Instead of observing a clear scene, we are put in a position that feels personal, almost as if we are seeing through someone else’s eyes.

       The exhibition drew me in through its realism. They initially resemble photographs because of their precision and attention to visual detail, but after spending more time with them, they feel a lot more strange and constructed. Rather than simply documenting a scene, they create moments that seem suspended between memory and fiction. The work forces us to become aware of our own process of looking. As we search for meaning in the images, we notice details that felt insignificant at first. The paintings feel deeply personal without relying on dramatic events or direct emotional displays, emotion emerges through absence and suggestion. The spacing and arrangement of the paintings creates the feeling of moving through a series of individual moments rather than following one continuous story. Each work acts like a vignette, revealing fragments of people and environments that hint at larger stories. Details like the jewelry, cigarettes, objects on tables, paintings within paintings, and domestic interiors are clues about the lives represented in the work. These objects don’t function as random decorations they show habits, personalities, and histories of the people depicted. White is interested in how people leave traces of themselves through the objects and spaces they occupy.

      White becomes both a collector and participant within these images making a visual archive that reflects not only the people around him but also his own perspective and relationship to memory. These paintings suggest that identity can’t be fully understood through a single image or narrative. It emerges through accumulation, small details, fleeting encounters, and partial views that slowly build a larger understanding of a person and of the artist himself.