US artists
QUEER COMMUNION: RON ATHEY
As one of the most generative and important performance artists to emerge in the twentieth century, Athey challenges traditional limits of artistic practice—activating the body as a site of trauma, resistance, sexuality, and religious ecstacy. The artist, who has been HIV positive since the mid-1980s, explores pain, fetishism, power, and queer politics, commenting on the intersections and synergies among Christian fundamentalist religious traditions and ritual, through highly visceral performances and interventions
TISHAN HSU: LIQUID CIRCUIT
In the mid-1980s Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) began a series of works that considered the implications of the accelerated use of technology and artificial intelligence and their impact on the body and human condition. His prescient artistic practice has been probing the cognitive as well as physical effects of transformative technological advances on our lives. An artist-intellectual ahead of his time, Hsu worked quietly for many years, largely overlooked or forgotten by the art world –until now.
EDDIE RODOLFO APARICIO: ESPINAS AMOROSAS
For Aparicio, rubber itself exudes the symmetry between the commodification of indigenous material culture and the exploitation of Latin American countries for labor and resources. Restored to its natural function, it also suggests a salve: dressing the wound, repairing the broken, displaced, and dispossessed. Throughout «Espinas Amorosas/Loving Thorns», entwined threads lead back and forth between El Salvador and Los Angeles, relays along which Aparicio is a spore.
GINA BEAVERS: WORLD WAR ME
Drawing on images taken from Instagram, YouTube, image databases, and other online sources, Gina Beavers creates thick, tactile paintings that capture, in deeply visceral ways, the curated and often superficial nature of our digital lives. Her recent series of sculptural paintings are based on body painting, social media snapshots of food, make-up tutorials, memes, and bodybuilder selfies.
WEIGHTLESS FURNISHING: ABOUT AN EXHIBITION BY RYAN BROWN
In Ryan Brown’s allegorical proceedings, the void and not the profusion of elements; the realism and not the collection of symbols, are the ones that, through estrangement tactics, produce weightlessness and at the same time, distancing, in the face of a constellation of aesthetics that modernism, at the time, treasured, as a flight into the future.
LAIA ABRIL: ON ABORTION
The Museum of Sex in New York presents «On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access», Laia Abril’s first-ever solo show in the US, displaying her career-long research exploring the debate over abortion restriction worldwide. In Abril’s words, abortion has become “a political matter, rather than a question of rights.”
LOIE HOLLOWELL: GOING SOFT
Loie Hollowell’s pastel drawings for «Going Soft» explore the physical and psychological experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. Serving as abstracted self-portraits, each drawing reveals the artist’s interior psyche at the time of the work’s creation. Her online exhibition is at Pace Gallery (New York).