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, currently on view at the New Museum, presents his video and photographic work that confronts black life in the contemporary United States. The exhibition's standout pieces subvert online behavior and filmmaking tools to expose the complexity and friction of American life.

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, 2021

The animated video AGHDRA (2021), depicting an undulating sea of unidentifiable material, scored to abstractions of R&B music is one of the highlights in the exhibition. This piece doesn't depict Jafa's aforementioned theme as literally as the broader exhibit, but it does communicate the same attitude of much of the other work. The animations of black waves screened at such an enormous scale that they threaten to swallow viewers, in combination with the heavy bass that vibrates through the body, transform the gallery into a quasi-religious space. While viewing there is a heightened tension between dread and survival, which becomes a thematic through-line of the show.

Arthur Jafa, The White Album (2018)

Building on that theme, Jafa’s compilation of viral video clips The White Album (2018) reframes surreal internet moments into a performance of race and power dynamics. The assemblage of footage ranges between white supremacist manifestos, street fights, and a horse bucking because of its annoying rider. While each of these videos can be interpreted as funny moments on their own, as a collection, the absurd behavior shows how much of culture on the internet is built on the clash between black and white American life.

Jafa exposes contemporary life in modern America in an expert way throughout this exhibition. Visiting this show is an excellent way to reflect on lived experience and 21st century race relations.

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 at 125 Newbury

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

Asher Liftin’s Recent Work turns familiar scenes into paintings that shift between photographic clarity and visible construction. Working from his own photographs, Liftin uses acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen to depict flowers, windows, parking lots, and city architecture. From across the gallery, the images appear sharp and almost printed. As viewers move closer, that clarity begins to break apart into grids, dots, drips, and overlapping layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The paintings make distance an active part of looking.

Liftin’s method also connects his work to the history of Neo-Impressionism. Like Georges Seurat, who built images through separate marks of color, Liftin lets small units of color combine in the viewer’s eye. At the same time, his use of CMYK brings this older painting method into the language of modern printing. The repeated lines and dots create a woven surface. In the work Lilies, soft petals are built from dense colored marks. In the work New York Window, the window frame, reflections, interior space, and street outside overlap so closely that a familiar city scene becomes visually unstable.

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

The exhibition is strongest when this tension between image and structure becomes visible. A viewer may first recognize a flower or a window, then step closer and begin to notice how the image is made. The works move back and forth between representation and abstraction. This repeated shift makes ordinary subjects feel unfamiliar again and turns the act of looking into part of the work itself.

---Rita Chen (revised)

Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued

- Personal take

The exhibition Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued, featuring the objects from the workshop of Italian artist Gaetano Pesce, is on view at Salon 94 in New York. These works move away from the standardized appearance of industrially-produced furniture. Using materials such as resin and pigments, the studio creates furniture that appears transparent, using fluidi, irregular forms.

- Personal take

While maintaining their practical functions, the furniture contrasts 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, a long, narrow curved groove evokes a nose or a mouth. Each chair is colored with different pigments. Such as orange, red and black. These anthropomorphic forms and vivid colors seem to give each chair a distinct personality, allowing every piece to express an identity that is not perfect but unique. 

As sunlight enters the gallery and meets the translucent, colorful works, the light not only makes the pieces appear more transparent and delicate but also gives the relatively heavy furniture a lighter, more playful feeling. This effect transforms the chairs’ imperfect forms into a lively kind of beauty, making each chair’s unique personality seem more vivid and expressive. The visitors’ experience of viewing the works is shaped by the interaction between the anthropomorphic forms, materials, and sunlight.

HAD-472-02 - Group B - Jiaru Jin