Author Archives: Justin Matlick

Gary Hill once said, “Although my art is based on images, I am very much involved in the undermining of those images through language.” And that’s what he does in the video installation Twofold (Goats and Sheep), in which we see someone using sign language to communicate a text Hill wrote while Hill’s recorded voice […]

When I first went to see Timothy Blum’s re-creations of familiar objects and icons I expected an overt critique of our material surroundings. Instead his meanings were opaque–but that allowed me to feel a sense of wonder. Eye of the Needle is a life-size rendition of R.J. Reynolds’s cigarette-box camel, with a skin made of […]

Torkel Korling was one of America’s most important industrial photographers, but his first love was botany, which helps explain his work’s precise beauty. Among the 26 Korling photos in Stephen Daiter Gallery’s “Big Shoulders” exhibit are four untitled cityscapes that showcase his eye for geometry. My favorite is a 1930s image of two streetcars on […]

The 23 paintings in M. Ivan Cherry’s new show at Gescheidle form a meditation on sleeping children that’s more proof of the relevance of figurative painting. Quick and Nimble is an overhead view of a shirtless boy lost in sleep. Like all of Cherry’s figures he’s isolated on a canvas painted a solid color, which […]

Charles LaBelle has always had an uncanny ability to see beauty in the urban morass. His show at Bodybuilder and Sportsman starts with five photographic images called “White Nights,” translucent prints mounted on light boxes that look like glowing black-and-white negatives. The three standouts capture the unseen essence of cheap motels. In Ambassador Hotel the […]

One of Louis Faurer’s stated goals was to “transform adversity into victories of love and hope.” His photographs of New York street scenes, most shot between 1946 and ’54, document the alienating effects of city life. Champion, New York, N.Y. is a lonely image of a well-dressed man standing in the middle of traffic, his […]

The linchpins in Peter Wegner’s current exhibition are conceptual riffs on the relationship between color and name. 42 Unnamed Blues is exactly that–a large sheet of identical rectangles, each painted a different shade of blue. The rich hues stir the emotions, which tempts you to try to label the colors, to translate their mysterious power […]

Debra Tolchinsky’s show at Artemisia, “Case Studies,” uses photography, computer animation, and text to create portraits of eight fictional characters who, in an attempt to find happiness, modify their bodies in ways that range from familiar to haunting to hilarious. Most striking are six digitally altered Polaroids pasted on graph paper and accompanied by typewritten […]