-
Nov 22, 2024 | 
chicagoreader.com | Jennifer Smart
“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,” which opens November 9 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as with so much of our lives, begins with the Internet. Specifically, with MCA Manilow senior curator Jamillah James, who observed the Internet’s effects on artistic practices in the early 2000s, and who organized the show with assistant curator Jack Schneider.
-
Oct 10, 2024 | 
art.newcity.com | Jennifer Smart
Tali Halpern, “making as being/hands praying,” 2024, handwoven fabrics on a TC2, cotton, wool, thread, paint, rhinestones and beads. Based on collaboration with Jane Serenska and Stephanie Jensen. Assist from Kate Hassett, 24” x 20”/Photo: Twelve Ten GalleryThe six textiles comprising this show are patchworks of various fibers (hope, wool, thread), beads and rhinestones.
-
Sep 23, 2024 | 
art.newcity.com | Jennifer Smart
The title of Neïl Beloufa’s exhibition currently on view at the Renaissance Society is “Humanities.” The study of what makes us human. The academic disciplines that study human culture and tradition. As a staunch humanist, and importantly someone not previously familiar with Beloufa’s work, I was excited about the show. I should have known it wasn’t going to be a show about the humanities. Not exactly.
-
Aug 7, 2024 | 
art.newcity.com | Jennifer Smart
Luftwerk’s installation “A Summer Journey” does so through fragments of plant material and a recovery of the spectrum of color that exists in nature, one which we can’t always see. The installation is comprised of three pieces, all of which are installed in a luminously lit gallery in the Garden’s Regenstein Center. A series of water-filled test tubes, each containing a small piece of plant material, is installed along one wall.
-
Jul 9, 2024 | 
chicagoreader.com | Jennifer Smart
When the Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and AntennaeProject take over Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion this summer, audiences will hear lots of familiar sounds: the beeping of CTA trains, summer cicadas, the bucket boys of Michigan Avenue, and waves from Lake Michigan crashing on the beach.
-
Jun 24, 2024 | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Jennifer Smart
A diary of the Dan Davin Literary Foundation Poetry Festival that took place Invercargill over the first weekend of June. From north to south, Aotearoa is loaded with literary festivals, each with a unique way of inviting bookish people to come out and play. Over the last month we’ve seen our shiniest literary event, the Auckland Writers Festival, and our friendliest, the hyper-local Dan Davin Poetry Festival in Waihōpai-Invercargill. I was fortunate enough to attend both.
-
May 31, 2024 | 
art.newcity.com | Jennifer Smart
Although the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago has collected the work of artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa in depth (it is home to one of the largest concentrations of his work in the world), only one of the works in the upcoming exhibition “Arthur Jafa: Works From the MCA Collection” has been shown at the museum before.
-
May 15, 2024 | 
art.newcity.com | Jennifer Smart
In a recently rediscovered film, Amos Poe’s camera follows the artist Sandra Binion as she does exactly what the film’s title, “Ascending Descending” (1978), suggests, ascending then descending, then ascending and descending again, the steps of a fire escape in downtown New York City. The film’s editing is chaotic but hypnotic. We identify intimately with the camera, seemingly unable to tear ourselves away from Binion’s assured movements and commanding gaze.
-
May 6, 2024 | 
art.newcity.com | Jennifer Smart
A couple of weeks ago, as part of a panel discussion on women’s video cultures and the history of the Guerrilla Television movement hosted by the Chicago-based Media Burn Archive, Tracy Fitz and Barbara Jabaily, two of the founding members of the LoveTapesCollective (L.O.V.E. in the name standing for Lesbians Organized for Video Experience) reflected on their activities in the 1970s.
-
Apr 16, 2024 | 
chicagoreader.com | Jennifer Smart
In an age in which distinctions between broadcast and streaming or video and digital are increasingly meaningless, it can be easy to forget just how revolutionary the technology of video was when it was introduced. Prior to the availability of cameras like the Sony Portapak in the late 1960s, capturing moving images was the province of well-funded filmmakers and studios.
