For the sake of the season and keeping in line with the ongoing thematization of horror common in the art shown in the city, this week’s exhibitions pivot around the haunted in direct but different ways. It is stark stuff. Some of it is lush and stark, some muffled to the point that it seems shuffled together. Both exhibitions are playing on the spectre of the archive, that canonical trope constantly trotted out as the operating room for the birth of Contemporary Art. Here it takes two forms that echo one another in their insistence on the archive as a repository of mementos (often of a “visitation”) or of captured decay. Ashy residues figure in both, in one case as a burned remnant of art careers and absent subjects. In both cases, images are juxtaposed with what suggests archaeological display cases containing monochromized bones or black and white. Both stress an inarticulate distance between “ruins” or “fragments” and some ostensible reality that only seems to exist as an aphori...
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.