Reviews

Daniel Larkin reflects on Brent Owens’s solo show Gnastic Pursuits, which took place earlier this fall at the English Kills Art Gallery in Brooklyn. Describing his work, Larkin writes, “Owens likewise takes the rich tradition of wood carving and melds it with that millennial taste for biting wit and quirks of fate.”

Artist Kevin Regan grew up in a family of Reagan Democrats. Today, he continues to be plagued by Reagan, and he uses the image of our 40th President in his own personal art. To amplify the trauma, we asked Kevin to visit a recent exhibition titled Reaganography and report on what he saw.

Two weeks ago, I found myself in Los Angeles with an afternoon to kill. I ventured to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and stumbled across a small exhibition by 18th C. Spanish still life painter Luis Meléndez. The exhibition, titled “Master of the Spanish Still Life,” was a quaint two-room show decked out with bizarre gray stucco walls treated with a ragging technique that made it look like a display at a suburban home furnishings shop. Faux finishes aside, what immediately struck me as I perused the canvases were two works in particular that I would characterize as Rococo food porn — they were pretty hot.

This movement of art in- and outside has been of interest to me since I regularly began following street art about a year ago. The contexts in which the work can be seen often varies dramatically, and these environmental shifts raise a number of questions: does the work itself change as it traverses public and private domains? If so, how? And what does this translation mean for our understanding of the work? A few months ago, I crisscrossed Brooklyn and Manhattan to investigate street art’s translation from the street to a gallery setting.

Depending on how a street artist uses the street they may have something to lose by moving into a gallery space. Peru Ana Ana Peru, which is composed of two artists, use the street primarily as a way of making their striking and fantastical images even more so. We are struck by a colorful image or by a traditional picture frame on a signpost. We wonder what they’re doing there, so we investigate. But a closer inspection is unhelpful: An old portrait with the face scratched out? What does “Peru Ana Ana Peru” even mean?

Much has been written about the traveling exhibition The Americans, but here’s a recap: Swiss photographer Robert Frank won a Guggenheim fellowship and drove around the United States in 1955-56 taking pictures. His book The Americans, with a forward by Jack Kerouac, was published in 1959, and met with acclaim and controversy. Some people didn’t like the America that Frank saw. On the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, the entire series has been shown at several U.S. venues, and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From images of a funeral in South Carolina to a wedding chapel in Reno, Frank revealed a nation that looked burdened, anxious, and lost.