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ROUND-UP April 15-19, 2019

New round-up! Two art shows, a movie, and a piece of music IN a movie!
"In Williams’ work, the question is: what objects are the cockroaches of human civilization, destined to last long after their meanings have been divorced from their forms? The answer is aluminum-made objects, shining in their quotidian uses. In “Welded Bundt,” a melted Bundt cake pan fused to a dish hangs on a wall in the gallery space, looking oddly like part of a suit of armor. In “Pins,” a pile of sleek, shiny rolling pins rests on the ground, fused together to the point of uselessness. In “Dig Up the Earth (decorate its surface),” what appears to have been a section of a fence is removed from its context, instead left to hang askew, attached to a tall, thin slab of concrete and adorned by partially-melted aluminum mugs and measuring scoops. “Dig Up the Earth” comes across as deeply ironic, because what is the purpose of a fence when everyone is gone? Williams’s work suggests that the evidence that people lived and worked here remains embedded in the histories of these objects, even if these objects cannot tell us much about what these people were like."
"People who know me know that I will take any opportunity to discuss my favorite movie of 2015, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Whether it’s Armie Hammer’s warbling Russian accent, Henry Cavill in a three-piece suit, delicious polyamorous shipping fodder, “It. Doesn’t. Have. To Match.,” or the scene where Cavill and Alicia Vikander zipline over the Berlin Wall, there’s nothing I don’t love about this slick, fashionable, trope-tastic miracle of a movie. But for “Hey Rewind That,” I specifically want to talk about the music. Or, rather one tiny musical moment that’s so brief that you might have missed it the first time you saw it in theaters."
"Wink: Self, Memorial Hall, Philadelphia, a 1974 self-portrait using this same technique, functions as a coming-out statement, according to the wall text: Lebe depicts himself with a bronze statue of two muscular nude men engaging in Greek wrestling, winking at us to make it clear that it’s no accident. The 1985-6 work Seth incorporates this same hand-coloring technique into a more traditionally-produced photograph, posing the nude figure like Poussin’s Narcissus against a flat, floral ground and a pale blue sky, the colors almost veering towards lush Pre-Raphaelite hues. The real highlights of Long Light are the photograms and light drawings, which rightfully take up the most space in the show. Again, the process seems as fascinating as the works themselves, but is hard to understand solely from the written description in the wall text. The photograms are created with light-sensitive paper, and are more easily understood; many of the works using this medium are of botanical arrangements, titled Garden Series, and you can readily picture the artist laying out these plants on the light-sensitive paper, placing them under light, and simply coming back to them when he likes what he sees. The results are moody and dramatic, the darker images like Garden Series #1 almost reminiscent of the Victorian macabre."

"“My name is Aubrey Parker. I broke into my dead friend’s apartment. Who the fuck are you?” Aubrey (Virginia Gardner) says combatively to a walkie-talkie she found by her friend’s bed in a wood-paneled, cabin-like dream of a bedroom. It’s New Year’s Eve and Aubrey’s best friend Grace is dead, leaving behind a group of mourners, a tombstone with the epitaph “Always Right,” and a secret task that she expected Aubrey to be able find out about and carry out. In response, Aubrey has barricaded herself in Grace’s apartment, cocooning herself in how Grace has scrapbooked their memories on her walls, written it into the fabric of the home, so that it’s everywhere she looks."
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