Formal Wear by Diane Simpson

Walking into Diane Simpson’s exhibition, viewers encounter a series of sculptures that blur the boundaries between the two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional space. Constructed from corrugated board, fiberboard, aluminum, brass, linoleum, and galvanized steel, these forms shift under changing viewpoints, generating a sense of disorientation. The material qualities recall everyday life and domestic contexts, yet the geometric abstraction disrupts direct recognition— a chair’s slats spiral like a vanishing staircase, a column stands wide yet impossibly thin. This tension between familiarity and estrangement highlights Simpson’s interest in how utilitarian materials can be reorganized into new architectural forms.

The exhibition continues on the lower level, where Simpson reveals her meticulous process. Axonometric drawings, garment sketches, and archival photographs reveal how each piece originates from historical women’s formal wear. Corsets, bonnets, collars, and hoop skirts become the basis for sculptural frameworks, allowing viewers to see the structural logic shared by clothing and architecture. For example, a bonnet rendered in brass tubing becomes an arched, open form whose negative spaces imply the absent head.

Moving between floors, viewers trace the transformation of pattern into geometry, and garment into architecture. The human body itself is absent, but its implied presence emerges through the negative space of sculptures. Simpson presents an original and inspiring reimagining of how the overlooked structures of daily life and wears shape identity.

"Formal Wear Diane Simpson," at The American Academy of Arts and Letters

Underskirt, 1986 

Oil stain and paint on MDF, cotton mesh 

Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

    Diane Simpson’s Formal Wear, spread across two floors at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, felt like walking through a spatial sketchbook, each work translated from drawing into geometry. The show traces Simpson’s decades-long dialogue between clothing and architecture, showcasing how the nature of fabric can serve as both a support system for the body and an expression of form.

    I was especially drawn to the play of distortion in her pieces, the way geometries become fluid and,-softened, while maintaining their complexities. Underskirt (1986), with its green lattice and gauzy cotton scrim, looked like scaffolding and fabric that was beautifully suspended. Amish Bonnet (1992), is perched on a shelf, with brass tubing bending into an almost breathing curve. Lastly, Window Dressing (2007–08) composed of hard industrial materials like - aluminium, wood, and industrial fiber - somehow evokes the softness of cloth, creating tension between rigidity and drape. Her works reminded me of industrial design prototypes, objects whose precision carry quiet emotion. 

    

    Simpson’s mastery of materials is evident in her work, which is controlled yet deeply human. Her sculptures don’t imitate garments but reimagine how structure might inhabit space as if it were built to stand on its own, inviting interpretation rather than delivering a fixed message. In Formal Wear, Simpson transforms geometry into something that evokes warmth, proving that discipline and distortion can coexist beautifully.

Window Dressing, Window 6: Collar & Bib-Deco (2007/2008)
Linoleum, paint on aluminum and wood, industrial fiber
Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Rodrigo Hernández: A Personal Constellation of Images

 Chrystal Gayle

October 17, 2025

Blog Post Entry Assignment

Rodrigo Hernández’s first exhibition at ChertLüdde Gallery offers a focused, poetic journey through material, myth, and memory. Known for working across painting, relief, sculpture, and installation, Hernández builds what he calls a “personal constellation of images,” a title borrowed from a poem by Bernadette Mayer. It captures the show’s drifting, dreamlike rhythm, where meanings shift and overlap.

Walking through the exhibition felt like entering a space where restraint and imagination meet. Many works shimmered with subtle gold tones that gave them an ancient yet refreshing presence. In one piece, a small brass figure emerges from a hammered surface. Its tiny scale and smooth, continuous curves create a feeling of vulnerability and quiet reflection, as if the form is caught in a moment of inner stillness.

Another relief, also in gold tones, leans toward an architectural composition. Layered planes create rhythm through repetition, while tight spacing introduces a sense of containment. At the bottom, a lone human figure walks beneath the towering shapes. The contrast in scale makes the work read like a meditation on how individuals move through memory or history, navigating structures far larger than themselves.

Hernández’s careful layering gives the exhibition a cinematic quality, as if time unfolds through overlapping images rather than a straight line.

Weather Report by Shara Hughes

    

    Shara Hughes' exhibition at the David Kordansky Gallery features nine paintings of imaginary landscapes representing Hughes’ internal psychology of being human. Each landscape is created instinctively and allowing for mistakes to create works that come purely from her inner world. The vertical orientation of the paintings is meant to be immersive for the viewer, to fully experience Hughes’ true emotions.

   “MaMa” (2025) is one piece representing a forest with many emotions within it. There’s intensity and beauty in the vivid, warm colors and quick brushstrokes in the center of the piece, but also a quieter and sadder feeling in the dull, cool colors and slow brushstrokes on the outsides of the painting. The inclusion of various flowers and trees represents the constant evolution of nature and its reflection of emotions like beauty, pain, peace, and sadness, which reflects the unchanging nature of humans and the emotions we feel.

  The exhibition space is organized to allow viewers to move from one painting to the next to explore Hughes’ representation of the complexity of the internal human experience. The gallery's open space is split by a wall in the middle, making the spaces feel smaller and adding to the intimate experience. Shara Hughes’ exhibition is very well executed in the presentation of her expressive paintings that pull viewers into the imaginary landscapes and help give us a deeper understanding into her inner world of human psychology.

FINAL VERSION

Sasha Gordon; Haze (revised edition)

Sasha Gordon’s new exhibition, Haze, currently on view at David Zwirner, is a collection of oil paintings with interrelated narratives that unravel through each painting. The themes draw from myths, Asian cinema, and Gordon’s psychological experiences and struggles with her Asian identity. Ambiguity is a key theme, and the works are purposely not shown in narrative order. 

It Was Still Far Away, inspired by Bong Joon Ho’s The Host, depicts an explosion that lights up the background. Oblivious of her surroundings, the figure clips her toenails with her headphones on. This figure reappears with different roles, either becoming the victim or doing the action. In some, she eats her nail clippings, is forced underwater, and is fed by another seemingly identical figure. 

Immense detail is shown in Flame Like Blush, where the figure is bathed in a blazing orange, casting a vivid glow on the face. The reflection of clouds in her eyes hints at the continued narrative through her work, resembling the explosion from It Was Still Far Away and provides a reason for the radiant illumination and sweat. The size of both works is massive, each being over 60 inches tall. 

Overall, Gordon’s works are realistic yet uncanny. The continued narrative of the figure put in bizarre scenes, combined with her own life, evokes a psychological and dream-like experience where continuing themes are threaded throughout the works. 

The Drawing Center, In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney exhibits nearly 100 works that serve as benchmarks of the different stages of Delaney’s career. Moving the focus away from some of his more famous on-canvas works, the exhibition chronicles Delaney’s life, and in turn, the way his experiences influenced the development of his artistic style and greater presence in the world of art. Including supporting materials such as the published writings of his close friend James Baldwin, and newspaper clippings documenting the societal reaction to the success of black artists, the gallery halls narrate the eras of Delaney.

While both the exaggerated portraiture and naturalistic landscapes of Delaney’s works from the 1930s through the early 1950s do feature two of the primary colors, yellow and red, the majority of his works lack a primary blue. Layers of teal, aqua, and turquoise can be found in his watercolor paintings, inks drawings, and oil prints, but in very few did he dare use an out-of-the-tube ultramarine. It is my belief that this decision is what keeps his pieces from reading as somber as they could, considering the lack of smiling and overall signs of life, that being either flora or fauna. By leaving out primary blue, his work is able to exist in the space between melancholic and chipper.

Hayden Holmes

Detritus: Tom Friedman at Lehmann Maupin

 

Detritus: Tom Friedman at Lehmann Maupin

Tom Friedman’s solo show commands the viewer to look at the ordinary objects that fill our lives.

The exhibition explores both solitary subjects and elaborate compositions that create webs of focus

rather than a singular point of interest. 

His cluttered compositions begin as photographs which the artist then works to replicate as paintings. Reflections and individual contours abstract during this process. In Detritus, the abstract stands next to the fully rendered, exemplified in spirals morphing out of other objects. The bird’s eye view gives a warped sense of scale and grandeur abstracting the painting further. 

The paintings that illustrate singular objects also act as collections. Their details become pieces of a complicated group. Wise Old Sage depicts a crumpled up water bottle, unrecognizable at first due to its large scale and magnification. The over 50” x 40” painting requires the viewer to stand back for a full view, a clear demand of attention. Parallel white lines running down the work and light brushstrokes contour the form, seemingly abstract until a recognizable image forms. 

The strength of this show is found in the detail of a singular subject and in the cluttered compositions painted at a grand scale. The ordinary is elevated by being placed at our feet, the only perspective in which collections can be fully seen and recognized as a sight to behold. 

- Lucia Bautista  HAD 472-02

*Revision*