writing

Memorial Ruin: On Lida Abdul’s Once Upon Awakening

A rope bisects the opening shot of Lida Abdul’s film Once Upon Awakening. The rope, itself bisected by a hand grasping its fraying coils, is taut against an unseen weight…
contemptorary and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, May 2018

Fold, Staple, Embrace: The Body Alive in the Archive

Photographic objects and the subjects within them degrade over time, particularly when discarded through the sieve of archival practices. Do possibilities exist for the body to further live through the photograph? Can photographic objects invoke life over death?
Art Practical, October 2018

Slow Burn: Young Suh’s Wildfires

Cloaked in smoky haze, the surreal Californian landscapes of Young Suh's Wildfires are unsettling reminders of the urgency and proximity of climate change.
Art Practical, January 2019

Light, Paper, Process: Alternative Process and Experimental Photography at the Mills Building

Works by Meghann Riepenhoff, Brianna Tadeo, and Binh Danh refuse a basic photographic premise: to document and preserve a fixed temporal state. In challenging the perception that a photograph necessarily signifies pause, the artists reveal that photographic processes can evoke duration and the inability to stop time.
Art Practical, March 2019

The Matter of Photography in the Americas at Cantor Arts Center

Instead of heavily leaning toward documentary or portraiture, as is often done in shows of Latin American photography, this exhibition presented expansive conceptual and material inquiry into the photographic medium. In the exhibition’s nine categories, bounds of representation are tested and pushed—not only by what is shown within the frame, but also in how the frame itself is made.
Art Practical, May 2018

(re)Arranging Pictures and (re)Reading Histories

(re)Arranging Pictures and (re)Reading Histories examines Leslie Hewitt’s Still Life series, a photographic series of sculptural assemblages that considers collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Hewitt arranges a library of archival materials in the studio which manifest as large-scale photographs. The gesture of arrangement is a process of remembering: a way to read histories, evolve them, and keep them alive.
Sightlines, California College of the Arts, May 2018

Odette England: The Outskirts, Exposed, and Punched

Odette England puts photographic peripheries at the center of her work, whether the edges of images or the residual marks left behind by photographic process.
The Brooklyn Rail, May 2019