Bari Ziperstein's installation "Domestic Choices" at The Wende Museum Guardhouse Project opens November 13 and runs through March 2023.

Conceived specifically for Wende Museum’s original East German Guardhouse, Bari Ziperstein’s Domestic Choices (2022) is a set of painted and embroidered curtains encircling the interior of the guardhouse, which is lit from within to generate a warm glow. Rather than face inward, the curtains in Domestic Choices face outward, confusing not only the orientation of inside and outside but also the very purpose of curtains in general and the guardhouse itself, a tiny piece of architecture intended for privacy’s opposite: surveillance.

The curtains in Domestic Choices are inspired by the hundreds of textile patterns Ziperstein has encountered through her extensive research in the Wende Museum archives. Though this research has informed her work in ceramics for many years, this is the first time she has worked in textiles herself. Made in collaboration with artist Jill Spector, the curtains were first block printed with celery hearts and sponges to suggest a petaled flower pattern. Then, using hand cut stencils and spray paint to achieve a misty effect, Ziperstein added abstract shapes. Next, she painted leaf and dot patterns in free hand. The final layer is embroidery depicting Soviet war planes, done by Spector. The pattern synthesizes themes Ziperstein has noticed over and over in her research: benign imagery such as florals and repeated abstract patterns combined with symbols of military might.

True Believers: Benny Andrews & Deborah Roberts provides a historic and contemporary view of the Black experience in America through the work of two artists from different generations. This exhibition explores the deep connections between the work of these two artists in relation to formal similarities, specifically the utilization of collage, as well as their shared interest in themes of activism, racial injustice, family, and religion.

"Stand in the Stream" captures the rise of the internet and social media as tools for political organizing while simultaneously exposing their evolution into powerful sources of surveillance and marketing. Edited with precision and intensity, the film’s footage (all shot by Kahn or screen-recorded by Kahn in real time) moves globally and locally through the wild, the streets, the home, and online, in a visceral, phenomenological reflection of life, power and uprising in late capitalism. 

Articulating a powerful personal dynamic to political movements, the narrative arc of the film is shaped by the decline of Kahn’s mother to dementia, and the birth and growth of her son amid the shift of political and digital landscapes over time. An activist and former shipyard worker, Kahn's mother speaks candidly about unions, NAFTA, the dangers of politicians in the pockets of lobbyists, how she wouldn’t want to get dementia like her mother before, even as she deteriorates. Her illness and death are woven with lo-fi clips of Kahn’s home life raising her son, caretaking, repairing, working, always from the POV of a camera. Interspersed and ongoing, is Kahn’s persistent screen recording of live streams on the internet. 

"Stand in the Stream" mimics our screen-saturated perspectives, hinting at questions of accountability, acknowledging our participation in a sometimes voyeuristic and alienated consumption of the world through images. In Kahn’s massive collection of footage—edited with an operatic sense of sound’s power to draw the epic from the mundane—we experience capitalism’s acculturation of our very personhood and the blooms of resistance and resilience.
 
Kahn’s sound design includes original compositions by Kahn and the musician/composer Alexia Riner.

On view September 16 - December 4, 2022

Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works on paper and on canvas combine found images, sourced from the Internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons.

VIEWING PLEASURE: PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA by Michael Anthony Hall, Photography by Courtney Coles

As the sun rose, revealing a white light that illuminated everything it could touch, 19th-century European and North American photographers captured their subjects in Daylight Studios—what many consider to be the inception of portraiture. Subverting these beginnings with diverse, nude subjects and revealing the frame in full—including the camera and photographer—Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio is artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s series that pays homage to the original Daylight Studios while examining the qualities that compose each image. [...]

V MAGAZINE, November 25, 2022

Questionnaire — In Pursuit of the Masquerade My Barbarian in Conversation with Jazmina Figueroa
“We were born Generation X, officially, which is embarrassing to admit but true,” says interdisciplinary artist and member of My Barbarian Alexandro Segade, speaking about the collective similitude within the group, which includes performer and writer Malik Gaines and actress and artist Jade Gordon. Some of the defining characteristics of those born in Generation X have to do with burgeoning youth cultures amid the AIDS epidemic and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc — those who were strongly affiliated with underground, outlier, and/or queer scenes alongside major cinematic and music franchises. [...]

FLASH ART #341 WINTER 2022-23

Andrea Bowers — An Ethos of Resistance by Jessica Simmons-Reid
[...] Andrea Bowers, whose work has long plumbed the methodologies of social justice movements, culls from this archive for a series of works entitled Letters to an Army of Three (2005) (works that, crucially, predate both the Trump era and the cataclysmic collapse of Roe). She displays the gathered correspondence, which she learned of during a visit with Maginnis, at the meeting point of two walls, with the printed letters emanating outward from the crux like an open book. A single-channel video of various people carefully reciting the contents of specific letters plays on a monitor suspended from the ceiling above; underneath, a large-scale book of additional correspondence sits splayed open on a plinth. [...] (November 2022)

Opacity and the Spill — The Photographs of Clifford Prince King, Shikeith, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya by Allison Noelle Conner
[...] Like King and Shikeith, Sepuya turns away from the photographic impulse to dissect and profit. Born and raised in Southern California, Sepuya pulls apart the mechanics of photography and the artist studio— composing his frames with smudged mirrors, velvet drapes, tripods, lighting equipment, intertwined figures, test prints, and hands pressing camera shutters. [...] (November 2022)

"The section exhibited at Vielmetter is titled “Corpus” and includes images of fetish objects — boots, a purse, a nightgown — staged like advertisements. The piece is multilayered in a way that’s typical of Kelly’s work, with photographs and texts that are personal but different in tone from her writing in “Post-Partum,” less like diaries and more like fables. The stories are displayed at the scale of bus stop advertisements, in Kelly’s handwriting. There are first-person scenes set in a nightclub and in a sauna with other women, and one featuring a dying mother. Some words are highlighted in lipstick red. (“That was really sexy for me,” Kelly said.) And despite the title, one never sees an actual female body; instead, it’s conjured constantly through signs and signifiers."

By Sophie Haigney - 11 November 2022

"I have this theory that the absence of a modifier in and of itself is a kind of signifier of privilege. Only straight white men get to be artists. Everyone else is a gay artist or a woman artist or an artist of color or a gay woman artist of color, etc., not that it is anything to deny, but for straight white men, that signifier is absent. So it’s like that absence is in itself a kind of signifier. That’s something that plays into my work, absence as signifier." -Nash Glynn

By Ann C. Collins - October 2022

"Shooting nudes against a black-velvet backdrop with salon-style furniture, Paul Mpagi Sepuya explores the traditions of 19th-century European and North American photography through a queer, playful lens. In the artist’s latest photographic series, “darkroom” functions as a double entendre, where his subjects are bathed in the red light of processing film while evoking clandestine encounters. He also captures them the bright light of day, producing two opposing moods in the exhibition."

"I love the ambiguity. I love that people recognize themselves. Since 2015 I haven’t named any works after the subjects in them, but rather by the body of work or kind of work they relate to in my overall practice. So they’ll be A Portrait, Model Study, Darkroom Mirror Portrait, Dark Room Studio Portrait, and so forth. The thing about the newer Dark Room Studio, Dark Room Mirror, Dark Room Portrait and Dark Room Model Study works is that the obscuring like you mentioned is an effect of how much time it takes to take the picture. The extended exposure of the night-time works, 1 – 3 seconds necessarily blurs movement as things unfold in front of the camera. There are also works where I’ve formally set up a picture where the subject is looking at or interacting with their reflection in a mobile mirror that, because of the angle at which it’s turned to the camera, renders its surface invisible as well as blocks a view of the subject’s face."

By Adam Smith Perez - 2022 September