By Éva Forgács
Hungarian artist Miklós Erdély (1928–1986) would not have thought twice about boarding a spaceship, sweeping aside physical fitness and other pedestrian worries. Space seemed to promise first-hand answers to urgent and intriguing questions… Thinking more like an artist than a scientist, Erdély was taken by the dilemma of black holes, which could signify the same kind of discontinuity in time and space that he thought artwork signified in culture.
By Bansie Vasvani
Built, World investigates architecture and structural forms as articulations of injustice and longing. For some artists, freedom from oppression is expressed through their constructed worlds, while the impact of loss and displacement reverberate through some of the strongest works in the show.
In the spring of 2015 The Nomadic Journal encountered the eclectic collage works, painting and poetry of Guy R. Beining. Since the 1960s, Beining has published thousands poems, as well as dozens of collections of poem-novellas and chapbooks, and has had his artwork gracing the covers of zines and literary magazines.
By Seph Rodney
Around each bend in the Guggenheim rotunda, Alberto Burri’s works give off the scent of free-form experimentation, worked by both the elements and the will. He applied heat, flame, pressure to disparate mediums; he ripped and tore fabrics, allowed substances to dry, crack and fissure, all the time attentive to the process as well as to what could happen if something in the formula were changed. It seems counterintuitive that being so careful and particular, so watchful, would be tantamount to liberty for Burri. But his independence conspicuously reveals itself here.
By Andrew Patrizio
Artist Rona Lee has realized a remarkable series of works through constructions of her extended engagement with oceanographic research. In addition, Lee takes on the mantle of the ocean as a metaphor for the female body that can point us in new directions, above and beyond, or perhaps through, the notion of an art/science encounter and into a subtly feminist art discourse.
Just weeks after his historic zero gravity flight out of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Nomadic Journal editor Carrie Paterson had the pleasure of interviewing Nahum, the Project Director for the massive art exhibition La Gravedad de los Asuntos (Matters of Gravity).
By Krystina Mierins
In March 2015, the Carnegie Museum of Art announced that Ingrid Schaffner will curate the next Carnegie International (CI), the second oldest survey of contemporary art in the world. Over the next three years, Schaffner will attempt the Herculean task of assessing and distilling contemporary art from around the globe. Of particular interest is the Hall of Sculpture, a room that has proven to be highly appealing to artists and curators, but is riddled with challenges.
By Glenn Harcourt
It is easy to imagine both the increasing complexity of the task and the frisson of guilty (or not so guilty) pleasure that must have marked the slow unfolding of this project: the construction of a historical alter-ego through the elaboration of a virtual archive, and the creation of an alternate life, and an alternate world, within the actual world of interwar Eastern Europe. But to what end?
By Bansie Vasvani
Architectural construction, assemblage, and symmetry play a vital role in Róza El-Hassan’s sculpture. Deeply inspired by unnamed Syrian artists whose work she describes in an essay as avant-garde for its spontaneous expressiveness, El-Hassan’s own art comes close to capturing the ethos and pathos of these displaced people.
By Carrie Paterson
Among the many references loaded like cargo into Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza’s subtle and humorous sculptures are Southern California’s pattern of Filipino immigration, ecosystems, local bungalow architecture, shipping containers, chemistry and space travel. Yes, space travel, but we’ll get to that.
