Sunday Without Love, Ragnar Kjartansson

Sunday Without Love

Ragnar Kjartansson

 

Sunday Without Love is a single channel video showing a scene of people in folk costumes performing a slow song about living without love. The inspiration behind this piece was an old postcard that Kjartansson had portraying a similar scene. The song was inspired by a comedic German song called “Ohne Libe Leben Lernen.”

 

When I walked into the Luhring Augustine Gallery, the first thing that caught my attention was how the only piece of work was a projection on the wall. The atmosphere felt intimate with soft conversations in the background, in a way contributing to the artwork. There was no pressure to focus entirely on the art, as the environment allowed for viewers to experience the work at their own pace. Sitting down to watch the video, I found myself enjoying this a lot more than other works of art I have seen. The song that was being played by the people in the video created a sense of stillness that was calming and entrancing. This piece of work also had a humorous quality, with people in folk costumes, in a grass field, performing a song about how you must learn to live without love. We arrived just in time to see the ending, when the performers finished performing and paused, making the scene looked like a painting. I left the gallery wondering whether this piece was a painting, a video, a song, or an installation, or something in between.

                

(Draft 2)

Sunday Without Love is a single channel video showing a scene of people in folk costumes performing a slow song about living without love. The inspiration behind this piece was an old postcard that Kjartansson had portraying a similar scene. The song was inspired by a comedic German song called “Ohne Libe Leben Lernen.”

 

When I walked into the Luhring Augustine Gallery, the first thing that caught my attention was how the only piece of work was a projection on the wall. The atmosphere felt intimate with soft conversations in the background, in a way contributing to the artwork. There was no pressure to focus entirely on the art, as the environment allowed for viewers to experience the work at their own pace. Sitting down to watch the video, I found myself enjoying this a lot more than other works of art I have seen. This piece was influenced by an old postcard the artist had on his fridge, it is random, and a little silly, with people in folk costumes, in a grass field, performing a song about how you must learn to live without love. We arrived just in time to see the ending, when the performers finished performing and paused, making the scene looked like a painting. I left the gallery wondering whether this piece was a painting, a video, a song, or an installation, or something in between.

Untitled III from The Figures Portfolio, 1982

Jean-Michael Basquiat

    Coming straight from Basquiat’s early-mid period, this awesome piece stood out to me as soon as I walked into the room. Considering the use of paper as opposed to the work he did on canvas, one could entertain the idea of this being a study Basquiat did, especially since it’s from his early career when his artistic style was still in development. Then again, maybe Basquiat wasn’t thinking of this piece as a preliminary piece at all. In almost every piece of artwork of his that I’ve seen, it’s almost impossible not to pick up some sort of theme, message, or representation of some type within the work. Either in text, gesture, or rendering of an object, Basquiat always finds a way to tell a story with his work, but only ever enough to allow some sort of interpretation from the viewer which I find to be a delightful characteristic. Even when his pieces do get filled with meaning, it’s never forced upon the viewer which offers a welcoming “vibe” to appreciate his artwork for the silliness that has whilst also directing the viewer to consider it just a bit further, invoking curiosity as well as an appreciation of what his work really stands for. In the past, I’ve seen many of what I consider to be better pieces of his, usually because of artistic appreciation for their gleeful and funny visual appeal. But this one I really liked because of the white canvas (a rarity of his) and the simplistic colors and shapes!

Homage: Queer Lineages on Video

Dineo Seshee Bopape’s a love supreme (2005-6)

    Homage is a video based show displaying a total of eight works through seven artists. The show highlights avant garde work that represent different aspects of the queer community. The galley had a very dim moody lighting, obviously this was to see the works clearly, but I also think the way the darkness was lit was intentional in creating a unique atmosphere. Two works played as the center pieces of the room. 

    Dineo Seshee Bopape’s a love supreme (2005-6) is the first work seen as you enter space. At first glance it is seen a streak of vertical abstract lines slowly being added through subtraction. You may leave this work to look at the rest of the gallery but the images are very striking and also confusing, leaving the work to wander in the back of your head as you continue to experience the rest of the show. As you leave the  galley you will come across this work again, curious to discover what it really is.

Kang Seung Lee’s The Heart of A Hand (2022)

    The second central work is Kang Seung Lee’s The Heart of A Hand (2022). This work is a lengthy interrupted dance on a large screen. This piece is very grounding as you consistently interact with it visually and auditorily as you move through the space. It is quite a long video making it feel natural to experience it in small increments between other works. It was not until I had seen everything else that I actually sat down with the work, acting as a wonderful closing moment. These two works structure the whole show working as a base for six other works to play off of and it was this central flow that really made this show stick with me.

 

Zoe Leonard's "Display" at Maxwell Graham Gallery - revised

"Display" showcases photographic work from Zoe Leonard. Six photos of suits of armor between 30-50 inches tall, originally taken at the Musée de l’Armée and the Worcester Art Museum in the 1990s, attract attention amid the gallery’s largely empty white walls and high ceilings. Attached to the walls with only l-pins and sheets of plexiglass, there is an undeniable sparseness to the show which brings both the content of what is displayed and the act of displaying to the forefront.

While a knight in armor may convey a sense of masculine heroism, empty suits as seen in

Display I (1990/2025) seem more like shells; masculinity becomes a performance.  In the premeditated poses of the armor – hunched forward, embarrassed shoulders, and empty crotches – there is a comedic aspect to these photographs which further undercuts ideas of valor. What remains then, in addition to performance, is the implication of violence.

Leonard has previously used photography to question the act of looking, and how something is made to be seen. She continues to do so here, confronting the seemingly neutral museum vitrine and institutions which house these suits of armor. To display this armor is to uphold the violence it implies, and to place that violence in an untouchable space, in the realm of ‘history.’ 

Leonard’s photographs then shine a light on the ‘normal’, forcing us to question the violence present in all aspects of society.

'Sixties Surreal' at the Whitney

 By Isabella Mendez

The exhibition explores the profound cultural changes of the sixties in America through a surrealist style. The diverse array of artists offers many perspectives on topics like the Civil Rights Movement, space exploration, war, and feminist sexual revolutions. 

Each section of the exhibition echoes the "unreal" feeling that surrealism promotes: first, three large camels greet you at the entrance; then, a dark room filled with psychosexual work that explores the normalization of female and male anatomy; next, more structural work; followed by political and feminist work. The floor plan and layout of the exhibition can feel disorienting, and the deep purple and vibrant orange chosen for some walls add to the "unreal" feeling. However, I did appreciate the exhibition's approach in showing parts of history in a way that shows what has brought artists together as they face different issues.

Works featured by Luchita Hurtado, Martha Rosler, and Barbra Hammer explore the feminist movement through dynamic painting, photography, and even film. Works by Kay Brown, Shawn Walker, and Romare Bearden explore the Civil Rights movement through captivating photography and collage. Sculptures by Robert Arneson explore the psychosexual with a play on words in his sculptures, "Klick" and "Call Me Lover." 

Overall, while there were various takes on surrealism, it was interesting to see artists' voices united through the Whitney's curation, which suggested a new history of the sixties.

Sophie Calle: "On The Hunt" (Revised)

 Sophie Calle’s curiosity about people - specifically ordinary, everyday people - is undeniable. She has an ability to turn her subjects into art without asking much of them at all. She presents to us what is already there, and what has always been there, and allows us to see it with a whole new perspective. 

Calle may appear to be a journalist more than a visual artist, but every written page is strong enough to stand on its own. Seeing her work in a gallery setting was a new experience, and because most of her work takes the form of writing paired with photography, in a volume that can be slightly overwhelming. Select pages of her pieces are framed, some with very small text, the pages filling an entire room. Due to this, her work isn’t received well if the viewer is under a time constraint; there is a lot to take in.

One of her most memorable works was The Address Book (2012). After finding a lost address book on the streets of Paris, Calle set out to create a character profile of the owner. She interviewed each of the contacts and eventually constructed a portrait of him through his associates. The work became a eulogy for a living person; his own words completely absent from his life story.

Calle is an artist through and through. While her pieces can be enjoyed in a gallery, they can also be consumed alone, over time, using the solitude of the reader. 

Alix Cléo Roubaud "Correction of perspective in my bedroom"

Alix Cléo Roubaud

Correction of perspective in my bedroom

Galerie Bucholz

Curated by Hélène Giannecchini

Gigi Moss

            Walking into Galerie Bucholz, a single window filters a small amount of natural light into the room. The photos of Alix Cléo Roubaud are small, even in the delicate glass framing them, they take up little more space than a sheet of copy paper. Laterally displayed at eye level, they invite the viewer to examine up close. In this gallery stark LED lights against  cold white walls and dark grey carpet create a strange liminal space, as though I have stumbled upon an empty or abandoned office space. The environment highlights the haunting quality very present in some of Roubaud’s photos, and juxtaposes the emotion and sentimentality in the others. One of the throughlines of this body of work is that all the images have been shot in the bedroom of her Paris apartment, then developed in the bathroom. Her bedroom, a deeply personal space in contrast to the sterility of the gallery, becomes an embodiment of her consciousness as the room transforms in each image - some very grounded in the physical space and others where the room disappears completely and the subject rests against the white of the paper in no environment at all. In this gallery there are no distractions, the viewer must concentrate on the images and the feelings they stir. The softness and ambiguity in her images evokes feelings of familiarity and memory while staying inventive and curious. In her diaristic work, a documentation of life in this one space, the images act as representations of memory as it transforms with time.