Short Form Review- Gillespie

 Short Form Review

Sasha Gillespie

Justine Kurland: A Retrospective — OSMOS Gallery

Justine Kurland’s retrospective at OSMOS on the Lower East Side was a joy to experience. Having followed her work for years, I was excited to encounter her photographs in person.

Spanning three decades, the exhibition includes intimate portraits of women and girls, photographs from her travels,  images of intricate gears and motors inside auto shops, and collages from her project SCUMB. Though unfamiliar with these mechanical photographs, I found their pairing with her portraiture intriguing. Like machines, human relationships depend on interconnected parts, requiring maintenance and care to function. Whether intentional or not, this pairing heightened my appreciation of Kurland’s constant attention to connection.

Throughout, Kurland approaches her subjects with tenderness. Even in photographs involving nudity, her subjects appear comfortable and cared for. As a woman viewing her work, I feel as though Kurland is holding her subjects’ hands rather than simply observing them.

However, I was surprised by the exhibition’s lack of contextual information. I found myself wanting to understand the origins of these unfamiliar photographs and their relationship to her broader practice.

Yet the gallery itself offered something unexpected. Tucked behind a rusted red sliding door, OSMOS is small and unassuming. Some might consider its modest appearance unworthy of such a celebrated photographer, but I found it suited to Kurland’s values of intimacy and accessibility. In close quarters, the enthusiastic gallery staff eagerly shared their knowledge with our class.

While the exhibition could benefit from greater contextual guidance, its humble setting encourages tpersonal exchange Kurland’s photographs advocate.

Leidy Churchman, Space Remembers

Center of the Universe (Ratna)

 Leidy Churchman's "Space Remembers" transforms the concept of "home" into an unstable, vast and wonderfully vibrant existence. In her paintings that blend domestic imagery, animals, celestial forms, shells, and fragmented bodies, Churchman refuses to view space as a neutral background. Instead, space seems to carry memories, beliefs, and physical experiences. This reminds one of Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space," where home is understood not just as architecture, but as a psychological and imaginative structure. Churchman further advances this idea: home becomes cells and the universe, and porous.

When the human body is placed beside non-human life. In Center of the Universe (Ratna), the disintegrating body and references to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of chöd suggest that the self is not fixed or separate. Churchman's world places animals, humans, plants, and matter within a shared relational system, rather than a hierarchical structure, much like "pantheism."

Center of the Universe (Buddha)

Moreover, Churchman's enlarged shells, changing scales, and surreal space transformations make the viewing experience physical rather than detached. Therefore, Space Remembers is not so much about representing a stable world, but rather exploring: how perception and memory are constantly reorganized through the spaces we inhabit. The exhibition places the audience within a network of relationships, and consciousness seems to be distributed among different bodies and environments.

-Anan Zou, Group B

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body: Grandmamauntsistercat

Grandmamauntsistercat (2024) 

Directed by Zuzanna Banasinska

Grandmamauntsistercat, is a short 23 minute film which was constructed with found footage originally produced from Poland's Educational Film Studio during its communist era. The film repurposes educational and propagandistic materials to speak on family, identity, and collective trauma as a woman during this era.  The film additionally introduces and reimagines the Slavic folklore figure Baba Yaga, who historically was a goddess associated with matriarchal power, and now traditionally is demonized in folklore as a witch who eats children. 

    With a young girl narrating, the film begins with her story of how her mother accidentally became pregnant with her, and was forced to conceive by the matriarch of their family (her grandmother), as the same had happened to her. This immediately sets the theme of generational trauma throughout the film, and how women help to reinforce patriarchal standards. Within this, there was a strong theme of comparing the female condition within patriarchy to machines, animals, and other smaller organisms, most notably the comparison of a parasitic organism to childbirth. 

    Using real medical found footage, and videos of examinations or animal experimentation, with sound effects alongside the child’s narration, the film creates an uncomfortable atmosphere. Many of the animals shown are in medical contexts, being experimented on alongside footage of women in medical contexts.

In this comparison of women to animals or machines, Grandmamauntsistercat makes a point to show how a woman's identity within the patriarchy is erased. Women as a class become one monotonous thing; hence the name, Grandmamauntsistercat, which is combining all levels of the family into one taxonomical name.

  -Yves Kroner

Exhibition Review - Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony

William Henningsson

Group B

Arthur Jafa’s I Am Tony is an exhibition currently on view at the New Museum which shows his video and photographic work confronting black life in the contemporary United States. While the amount of work shown in this collection is overwhelmingly large, its standout pieces mirror the complexity and friction of American life.

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, 2021

The animated video scored to abstractions of R&B music, AGHDRA (2021), is one of the highlights in this exhibition. While this piece is more abstract compared to the broader theme of the show, the sensations felt in viewing this work communicates the attitude of the whole exhibit. The animation of black waves threatening to swallow you, and the heavy bass that vibrates directly into the chest, transforms the gallery into an almost religious space. In combination with the enormous scale of the piece, you feel the heightened tension between dread and survival which become a thematic through line.

Arthur Jafa, The White Album (2018)

In contrast to AGHDRA (2021), Jafa’s compilation of viral video clips named The White Album (2018), reframes surreal internet moments into a mix of statements. From race to power dynamics, the absurdity of these clips is hard to look past when compiled as a collection, but it really shows how much of culture on the internet is built on black and white American life clashing. 

Throughout this exhibition, Jafa flexes his ability to punch through the gloss of contemporary life in modern America, and show us the reality in its rawest form.

Let's Take Back Our Space: Marianne Wex's Study of the Gendered Body Language

Who gets to take up space? Marianne Wex’s documentation featured in MoMA’s exhibition Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives, questions the body language and gestures that we often overlook.

Starting her journey in 1972, Wex photographed people in Hamburg and gathered images from advertisements, newspapers, magazines, television, film, and art catalogues. She organized them into photographic panels under categories including “standing arms,” “sitting legs,” and “possessive holds.” These arrangements transform familiar poses into a visual argument about gender and power.

The comparison between the postures of different gestures in such a way showed how vastly different the male and female were. The masculine expansiveness versus the confinement of the feminine language was obvious in the way Wex's collection was organized. Spread legs, extended arms, and relaxed stances suggest permission to occupy space, while tightly positioned limbs suggest expectations of restraint. Wex presents these patterns as products of social conditioning, challenging the assumption that gendered body language is simply natural.

What I find compelling is how the panels make these differences repeatedly visible in many scenarios. One person’s posture could appear as if it was just an incident but similar gestures placed together encourage us to recognize a larger social pattern. Pairing everyday photographs with media imagery also raises questions about how representations reinforce the behaviors we learn.

The work truly questions the way we think about public seating, classroom participation, and even how we position ourselves around others. How much of our bodily expression feels chosen?

Wex’s documentation brings attention to these habits and imagine occupying space with freedom, confidence, and awareness of those around us.

Asher Liftin’s Recent Work

Asher Liftin: Recent Work, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026, 125 Newbury, New York

Asher Liftin’s Recent Work turns ordinary scenes from daily life into images that ask viewers to slow down and look more carefully. The subjects in the exhibition are very familiar, including flowers, windows, parking lots, and city buildings. After Liftin’s process, these images begin to feel like a mix of photography and painting. From a distance, many of the works look like enlarged photographs or printed images. They appear complete and very precise. When viewers move closer, the images slowly break apart into dense lines, grids, and small areas of color.

He works from his own photographs and builds each image with layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. His process feels similar to weaving, because different colored lines and dots cross over each other and slowly form a complete image. In Lilies, the flower petals look soft and realistic from far away, but up close, many small layers of color become visible. In New York Window, the window frame, glass, interior space, and street reflections are also broken into small lines and colors, making an ordinary city window feel much more complex.

Asher Liftin: Recent Work, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026, 125 Newbury, New York

One of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the way it changes how viewers look at painting. At first, viewers see a complete image that feels close to photography or print. Then they naturally move closer to understand how the image is built. As the viewing distance changes, the image shifts between a complete scene and scattered areas of color.

---Rita Chen

Exhibition review on Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued

- Personal take

The exhibition Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued, featuring the workshop of Italian artist Gaetano Pesce, is on view at Salon 94 Design in New York. The exhibition mainly presents furniture created by Gaetano Pesce’s studio. These works move away from the standardized appearance of industrially produced furniture. Using materials such as resin and pigments, the studio creates furniture with transparency, fluidity, and irregular forms.

- Personal take

While maintaining their practical functions, the furniture pieces are full of creativity and artistic ideas, particularly the contrast between standardization and individuality. One example is the Nobody’s Perfect Chair S94D series. From a distance, these chairs look like individual characters, each with its own personality. Two irregular circular holes on the backrest are outlined in black, creating the impression of eyes. Between these two holes, there is a long, narrow curved groove that reminds me of a character’s nose or mouth. Each chair is colored with different pigments. These anthropomorphic forms and vivid colors seem to give each chair a distinct personality, allowing every piece to express its own identity.

The exhibition is held in a space filled with natural sunlight. As the sunlight meets the translucent and colorful works, it creates a wonderful and joyful visual experience. The light not only makes the pieces appear more transparent and delicate, but also

gives the relatively heavy furniture a lighter and more playful feeling. Here, the visitors’ experience of viewing the works is shaped by the artist’s creativity, the materials, and the sunlight working together.

HAD-472-02 - Group B - Jiaru Jin