From the Air by Yvonne Jacquette

 Yvonne Jacquette's exhibition "From the Air" at Karma brings together her paintings and works on paper created between 1971 and 2016. After a cross-country flight in 1969, Jacquette began to explore aerial perspectives. Later, she observed urban and natural landscapes from airplanes, helicopters, and high-rise buildings. She did not aim to replicate these scenes exactly like maps or photographs. Instead, she combined direct observation, memory, and imagination. During this process, distance became both the subject of her work and a way for her to understand the world below.

"Airplane Window, Clouds and Hills" is a watercolor on paper created around 1976. The rounded rectangular format resembles an airplane window. The image is filled with clouds, sky, and distant mountains. The landscape extends to the edges of the painted area, and there is almost no visible unpainted space within the image, so the viewer does not feel a boundary between themselves and the scene. This composition creates a first-person point of view. The viewer seems to be sitting by the airplane window, looking out during the flight. This work shows how Jacquette connects physical distance with personal experience through the shape of the picture.

"N.Y. Aerial View from Helicopter (Looking East from Hudson Yards Area) II" depicts Manhattan during the day. Jacquette compresses many buildings into a wide canvas composed of brown, blue, orange, and yellow brushstrokes. She changes the perspective and scale, and did not depict the city as an accurate map. The city can still be recognized, but the repeated shapes also form an abstract pattern. As an international student, I recognized a tension between distance and belonging in these works. This exhibition shows that although an aerial perspective may seem detached, it can still contain the traces of daily life.

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.

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.

 

When walking through the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kainoa Gruspe’s Welcome to here—doorstops immediately attracted my attention. This piece incorporates many found objects, including salvaged stone; kiawe wood, haole koa wood, and Douglas fir; coconut fiber, plastic, and cement. The installation is composed of many small pieces, usually combining two or three materials together. For example, one piece consists of a stone enclosed within a woven rope structure, while another features a found glass bottle tied onto a brick with rope. These pieces are scattered casually across the floor, giving the installation an unfinished and organic feeling, as if the objects naturally accumulated within the gallery space rather than being carefully arranged.

The diversity of materials and the contrast between different ways of treating them add a strong sense of civilization and history to the work. It gives the impression that these objects had been used for a long time before being collected and displayed. The rough surfaces, weathered textures, and handmade qualities create a feeling that the materials carry traces of everyday life and labor. For instance, the way plant fibers are woven around the stones constantly reminds me of traditional fish traps. Another piece, in which burlap is wrapped around a stone and secured with plastic zip ties, makes me think of bundled pork sold in markets or prepared for cooking. These uses of materials evoke memories of past ways of living experiences. Although the objects themselves are simple, the combinations of natural fibers, industrial materials, and salvaged fragments create layers of cultural associations.

Considering that Gruspe collected many of these objects from golf courses, hotels, and military bases in Hawaii, the work inevitably reflects his thoughts on extractive relationships between colonialism, industrialization and the environment. Through creating these doorstops, Gruspe hopes to keep the door open for more possibilities in the future. The title itself suggests resistance against closure, as if memory, history, and cultural identity can still remain active in spite of environmental and social transformation.

The other piece that echoes this work from a distance is heʻe and leho forever / cones. It is composed of hanging translucent fabrics, shells, fishing materials, wood, and found objects. The translucent fabric is supported by a wooden frame and a piece of cement, standing upright on the floor like a fishing net. Gruspe embroiders onto this surface and attaches fossilized squid to it.

The title uses Hawaiian words: “heʻe” means octopus and “leho” refers to a seashell. These references connect the artwork closely to the ocean and to Hawaiian culture. The cement comes from Kālia, a site that was later developed into the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort, suggesting Hawaii’s colonial history and the impact of industrialization on the ocean and the land. Gruspe transforms these remnants of developed land into parts of his artwork, encouraging viewers to reconsider the relationship between land, memory, and nature. His works carry both a sense of mourning for what has been lost and a quiet hope for future possibilities.

MoMA PS1: Red Canary Song's "Touch the Heart"

 

by Alicia Li

A stand out piece from MoMA PS1's Greater New York 2026 exhibition, is Red Canary Song's Homeroom project: Touch the Heart. Touch the Heart, the english translation to the Cantonese phrase "dim sum", is an installation dedicated to illustrating the intimate relationships and stories about migration, autonomy, grief, and sex work. 

Touch the Heart uses the word play from its translation of dim sum in the installation. Dim sum for many migrants of the Asian diaspora, was a place of communion and cultural saftey, similar to Red Canary Song's mission. Behind the pink curtains lies four dim sum banquet tables, each dedicated towards different aspects in the worker's stories. Table I is dedicated towards grief and longing. Table II is dedicated towards migration and sanctuary. Table III towards the fine line intimacy of body care, labor, and desire. Table IV is dedicated towards providing more resources in forms of books and magazines to continue the education on the politics of sex work.

Through the haze of the sheer soft pink curtains, I was deeply moved by the attention to detail in the installation. Specifically in Table III: Body Care, Desire, & Labor, the lingering scent of tiger balm and acupunctured breast implants describe the often fetishized fine line between intimate body care and erotic power. While Red Canary Song describes some of their work to be tongue-in-cheek, I was thoroughly reminded of the many realities of asian massage and sex workers, where their likeness, lively hood, and agency have been taken advantage of. Table II also had an auditory experience, helping the installation be a fully sensory induced experience. This immersion had driven in how much the collective cares for their cause and respects their fellow community members. 

MOMA PS1 James Turrell "Meeting"

  

MOMA PS1 JAMES TURRELL "Meeting"

By Evan Wu

James Turrell’s Meeting at MoMA PS1 feels less like entering an artwork and more like stepping into a pause. The space is almost empty, but the emptiness becomes the main material. Sitting inside the room, the opening in the ceiling frames the sky so precisely that it starts to look artificial, almost flat, like a projection instead of something real. What interested m
e most was how Turrell manipulates perception without physically doing much. The work depends on time, weather, and the viewer’s patience. As the light slowly shifts, the sky changes color and depth, making you question if what you are seeing has always been there or if the space itself is producing it.

What I appreciate about Meeting is how it heightens awareness toward something people usually ignore. Looking at the sky is such an everyday act, but Turrell stages it in a way that feels theatrical and uncanny at the same time. The room frames a familiar experience until it becomes strangely unfamiliar. It reminded me that perception can be choreographed through subtle interventions rather than dramatic gestures. The work does not force an interaction, but instead creates conditions for observation and sensitivity. I left thinking more about slowness, stillness, and how architecture can alter the way we experience ordinary moments.