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

The Poetic Jump at Arts and Letters

Is there a circumstance that allows us to escape death?, is the eternal question of avant-garde artist duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins, surveyed in The Poetic Jump showing at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The exhibit clearly examines the humor and genius central to the question of “reversible destiny” from Arakawa’s early philosophical text-and-diagram works to the interactive spaces he developed alongside his wife and collaborator, Madeline Gins. 

Instead of addressing immortality with reincarnation, Arakawa and Gins create a space that renders us eternal in Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91, 2026). As the central prop of the exhibition, it provides visitors a space of the disorientation and derealization necessary for one to transcend their bodily decay. The curtain of pink robes envelops viewers in disorienting darkness, and the uneven terrain breaks their inherent balance and sense of scale.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Ubiquitous Site X, 1987–91/2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio 

The exhibition also examines the visual philosophy to arrive at an architecture of “reversible destiny.” The early work by Arakawa, NO! Says the Room (1972), examines the conditioning of the body by rigid and conventional spaces. Defined room plans paired with orienting language (“focus here,” “NO!") question how spaces condition us to be complacent in a conventional life, and thus a conventional death.

Arakawa, NO! Says the Room, 1972. Installation view, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio 

 The Poetic Jump addresses our essential fears: what happens after death, and in life,  what changes that death, all without taking itself too seriously. It calls on viewers to break from the limitations of their earthly bodies and enter a reality of endlessness, an increasingly exciting prospect in a world that feels ever more destined for an end. 

- William Spadoni, Group B

 

The New Museum: Arrivederci, Piggies! 

   Diego Marcon’s exhibit, Arrivederci, Piggies!, is announced by the lack of light, the glass doors to this space a disturbing blood-red. The room inside is consumed by maroon, the floors padded by a crushed velvet carpet of the same color. Four large screens stand in the middle of the show while viewers take their seats in the director’s chair. Four films play in a sequence, one active panel while the others remain in a quiescent state, “waiting their turn” so to speak. The show consisted of these four films, which act together as a theatrical fable, utilizing spotlights and decorative entrances reminiscent of a stage set. The films are narratively gruesome, depicting childhood memories of domestic violence in the medium of CGI animation and live-action film. The work retains a refreshing stylization in For The Parent’s Room (2021), depicting extreme flesh disfigurement on the actors’ faces.

The exhibit serenades its audience, suddenly bursting out into musical fits, overwhelming the room chorus and a haunting Americana orchestra. For instance when viewing Fritz (2024), as the hung boy sang I found myself turning my head, being guided by foley; a flicker of a lighter, a bird’s song, and the strain of a fabric noose. I give credit to Marcon for his seamless integration of animation, live action, and sound design for this specific space. The singular failing of this exhibit is the literal lyrics, “I took the life of my little son” feels incredibly on the nose, which ruins the work the enigmatic visuals provide.

Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You

     Tayrn Simon's photo exhibit is an interactive rotunda installation featuring photos, videos, text, and sculpture tracing the life and career of an FBI agent. One of the strongest parts of this exhibit was its location in the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim's ascending rotunda shaped heavily aided the exhibit's storytelling. As you enter up the ramp you turn and are faced with a large print of a babies head crowning during labor. This incredibly intimate moment displayed on such a large impending scale is the perfect introduction for this exhibit. I am saying that because one of the key elements to this exhibit is its intimacy with its subjects and the stories they tell. Many of the photographs are of miscellaneous and commonly found objects that develop a deeper context when you read the accompanying text. A clear example of this was the Hallmark Cards on display. The photographs Simon took were arranged in a heart shape and the accompanying text detailed a secret agent using these cards to send classified communications in order to commit espionage. Paring them next to Hallmark Cards created thoughts of hidden truths or deceptive uses of inanimate objects. This is a central theme in this photography exhibit presenting the view a important questions; how well do we know the people around us? what truths do our personal belongings hide about ourselves? 

Roy Ward Baker’s The Monster Club (1981),

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body shows how X-rays and other medical technologies changed the way we see the human body. One of the best examples is a 33-second clip from Roy Ward Baker’s The Monster Club (1981), shown on a monitor with headphones. The clip connects the science of seeing through the body with pop culture’s love of spectacle, transformation, and surprise.

In the clip, two men in suits watch a dancer in underwear perform under bright pink stage lights. As she takes off her clothes one piece at a time, their curiosity and desire grow, making us think about the act of looking. The X-ray becomes a way to show the urge to uncover what is hidden beneath the body’s surface. But when the lights change, it reveals a dancing skeleton instead of bare skin. The surprise turns the scene into a joke, and one man says, “Beautiful bones, don’t you think?” A glowing skeleton is usually a gag used when a character gets struck by lightning or electricity, so putting it in a striptease feels funny and original. It also turns a familiar movie joke into a comment on desire, visibility, and how much we can really see.

Overall, the exhibition works as the museum calls it: overexposed, because it uses a playful, easy-to-understand example to show the irony of our desire to look beneath the flesh. Instead of treating the subject in a dry or purely historical way, it makes the connection between technology, the body, and spectatorship feel lively and engaging. Its mix of humor, clarity, and thoughtful commentary is what makes it so effective. 

- Seunghwa Woo

 

FRANK GILLETE: SPECTRA OBSCURA AT MICROSCOPE

FRANK GILLETE: SPECTRA OBSCURA AT MICROSCOPE

The Symbiotic Blues (2017-22)

For Gillette, ecology has never limited itself to the natural world, for it also includes media ecology, which is the idea that technological systems give rise to awareness and eventually create new cultures. The title nods to the camera obscura, the first instrument known to render the world as an image. 

The clearest expression of the idea is found in The Symbiotic Blues (2017-22), which consists of nine channels spread over three pieces, each channel being a different length so that the combinations never repeat. Gillette shot all nine channels around the woodlands and beaches of eastern Long Island, and he’s described being immersed in that environment as a kind of data bank for the exchange between nature and culture. Mirrors show up constantly, propped on sand and among trees to throw off your sense of depth. The broken ones read as a direct statement about how fragile the whole system is. 

The work involving still images is more strange: Chthonic Chimera (1987), which was created using one of the very few 20x24 inch Polaroid cameras that was ever made, puts together shells, coral, butterfly wings and insects to form compositions that look like specimen cases constructed by someone who doesn't care about taxonomy.

The oldest work is the quietest one. Rio Grande River Bed (1974) presents 81 Polaroids of a cracked riverbed in a grid format: there is no sound, no movement, and nothing to decode. Fifty years on, it functions less as documentation than as a warning that went unheeded.

-Anshuta Jadhav