The Gelatinous Abjection of Mire Lee's Black Sun @ New Museum in New York Invariably Turns Us On

“Mire Lee: Black Sun,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum.
Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hannah Sage Kay


Entering Mire Lee’s installation at the New Museum—passing through plastic strip curtains into a moist, greenhouse-like environment—seems, I can only imagine, like a trip up a vaginal canal. It recalls one time that, in warm, sud-less water, I looked down to see a brownish-red gelatinous mass emerge between my legs. With an ovular center and porous, mane-like tentacles, it moved, not in a bloody mess, but as a neatly self-contained collection of blood clots and uterine lining. The wet porous fabric that lines the plastic walls of Lee’s installation recalls this same murky, brown fluid that accompanies the expulsion of an egg and, not at all coincidentally, overlarge egg sacks dangle from the ceiling, entwined with rope, metal chains, and what looks like a prematurely formed exoskeleton.

Strange whirring, rotating devices—simultaneously technological and organic—churn in mud-filled recesses of the grated metal floor below. One such contraption wound with sodden, fleshy cables rotates over a pool of dense brown liquid: a loose member makes a distinctly phallic flop; an art handler man-handles the entrails; a viewer becomes a casualty of the splash impact—its localization on the front of his pants unveiling the very male shame at the heart of all female subjugation. A cum shot to the patriarchy? A territorial spraying? A cyborgian golden shower? However you spin it, I like to think the installation staked its claim, via a forced confrontation with those bodily functions and oft-taboo fluids that make up the stuff of all life and sex, feces and death.

This pseudo-maturation chamber, in all its arousing repulsiveness, posits the female body as the original site of body-horror as a genre and sexual stimulant—not because any real violence has occurred, but rather because violence is inextricably associated with the female experience: vaginas tear in childbirth, babies emerge as purple as eggplants, walking down the street is a physical liability. And yet, the genius of Lee’s installation is its unabashed admission that depravity is sexy. It recalls those paraphiliac misadventures recounted in Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, where omorashi fetishism and corporeal mutilation are the result of adolescent musings; it simultaneously transports you inside an episode from Star Trek: Enterprise, wherein Captain Archer develops an obsessive interest in the unhatched Xindi-Insectoid eggs hanging from the ceiling of an abandoned ship after one sprays him with a neurotoxin. What is, there, a simple illustration of the chemically-induced power of maternal instincts and the resulting shame when those same instincts are displayed by a man, here manifests as a voracious unease: the uncanny pleasure and discomfort of an unfulfilled orgasm.

Titled after Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, Lee’s installation extends Kristeva’s characterization of melancholia to the asshole and all its attendant forms as another forbidden, shameful, non-speakable void in which language and symbology no longer function, but that same characterization can, it seems, engulf our prescribed and highly shielded perspectives of the female body. So, while many may simply be disgusted by Lee’s exhibition and what it stands for, I instead see a feminist refusal to quiet those life-giving functions that in the secret recesses of the mind invariably turn us on.

 
 

"Resounding, Variegated, Leaves" Foregrounds the Primacy of a Multisensorial Encounter @ Mrs. Gallery in New York

Resounding, Variegated, Leaves, an exhibition featuring works by Fabienne Lasserre, Annie Pendergrast, and Lily Ramírez, brings together three artists who work along distinctly different wavelengths, yet come together as they embrace the natural phenomena of listening, touching, breathing, and looking as it occurs through an exchange between artist and art object. A primordial hum, the aural topography of a cave, a protrusion juts out from the painted surface, an atmospheric aura emanates from a flower.

The multiple postures of Lasserre’s hanging, standing, and leaning ear-like forms project an ongoing moment of repose, surreptitiously confronting the architecture or spectator as they quietly teeter along the tightly wound wire between invitation and revolt. A subtle dissonance pervades from the interaction between the knobby, hand-wrought linen membranes covered in thick paint and the industrial sheen of the vinyl lens at the center of each object.

Annie Pendergrast’s paintings channel the deep-rooted, unrelenting frequencies of natural organisms thriving in the face of air pollutants, radioactive soil, and bioengineering. A palpable heat emanates from the electric hues of flashe, as the paint bubbles up slightly to the surface. Striated bands of color insistently reverberate across each arrangement, buzzing with energy and the possibility for plant systems to reclaim control of the earth through their healing properties and the potential for bioremediation.

A dense cacophony of accumulated marks maps the terrain of Lily Ramírez’s heavily impastoed paintings—acting simultaneously as a direct trace of the artist’s presence and also an aggregate record of her lived experience and memory. On a cellular level, Ramírez’s gestures evoke chromosomal strands vying to shape the proverbial DNA of each painting; while on a macro level, they convey pathways of movement woven across the artist's native city of Los Angeles or other expansive swaths of land.

To privilege tactility and aurality is to thwart the relentless stream of images flooding visual culture. In this way, the works in this exhibition foreground the primacy of a multisensorial encounter that demands the physical presence of a spectator. While the artworks themselves don’t explicitly make sound or ask to be touched, the artists have imbued their work with a methodology that filters the act of seeing through a form of deep listening and touching, as much as looking, at the natural world.

Resounding, Variegated, Leaves is on view through August 11th at Mrs. 60 - 40 56th Drive Maspeth, NY

Martyna Szczęsna Addresses the Challenge of Creating Art in An Ever-Gentrifying Urban Landscape @ Open Source Gallery in New York

In Martyna Szczęsna’s Spectre at Open Source Gallery, the artist has manipulated over 500 feet of nylon construction netting into an oversized ruched curtain, winding it through the KoKo NYC lot space. A playful embodiment of drama, opera and the challenges of securing hospitable space for art and creative expression in the ever-gentrifying urban landscape of this city. The blazing orange work will be on view all summer.

Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography and sculpture. She is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed her MFA studies at UCLA. Szczesna lives and works in Brooklyn. Select exhibitions include: ARRAY at Penumbra Foundation, If Rittenhouse– at Callicoon Fine Arts, Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, BsAs, and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Szczesna’s work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations, and The Watermill Center.

Spectre is on view through August 31st at Open Source KoKo NYC Lot at 440 19th Street, Brooklyn NY 11215.

Haim Steinbach: 1991 – 1993 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of collecting and arranging found objects. In selecting items that range from the obscure to the ordinary, the private to the ethnographic, Steinbach emphasizes notions of circulation and human connection.

The exhibition highlights a concentrated three-year period in the artist’s career and draws upon memory, offering a recontextualization of his own historic practice and an occasion for reflection. Comprising a seminal large-scale “display” and objects from the same time period, the exhibition is populated by individuals who are both named and unnamed, touching upon family gatherings and traditions, intimacy, and the personifying power objects can hold.

Haim Steinbach: 1991-1993 is on view through February 27 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 W 21st St, New York

Universal Fatigue: A Solo Exhibition By Mircea Suciu @ Blain | Southern in New York

Part of the Cluj School, Mircea Suciu (b. 1978) is regarded as one of Romania’s leading artists. During his formative years he witnessed the country’s tumultuous transition after the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the 1989 revolutions. Describing himself as an image creator rather than a traditional painter, Suciu mines and references art history and contemporary imagery, reducing down the elements and adding color-coded symbolism. He has ‘his own complex way of making things in which painting, photography, drawing and print all cooperate while playing their individual parts.’

Inspired by his former studies on the restoration of Baroque paintings, Suciu has developed a process he calls ‘monoprinting’. A photographic image is split into a grid of A4 surfaces, each one printed on an acetate sheet, onto which a layer of acrylic paint is applied. The paint acts as a ‘glue’ that adheres directly to the canvas and once dry, the acetate sheet is peeled off. The result is a transference of the printed image with associated faults and imperfections, which Suciu then 'restores' by re-painting with oil and acrylic paint. Sometimes, as with works in the Disintegration series, he overlays the image multiple times using various colors until he creates a surface that is barely recognizable from the original. As a final stage the whole image is repainted. This multi-layered process creates compositions of reinvented images which allude to history, memory and the eventual dissolution of all things.

Universal Fatigue is on view throughout February 22 at Blain | Southern 547 W 25th St, New York, NY. Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern.  Photo by Cooper Dodd:

SISSÒN: COTTON [Phase 1] @ Wilhardt & Naud

Sisson exhibits their sixth body of work, COTTON, divided into two parts, Phase 1 is the first in this series.

Beginning in 2018 with a bag of gossypium (cotton) seeds delivered by mail from their uncle, these seeds sparked a dialogue between the artist and their partner. Those conversations were the catalyst to COTTON.

The body of work in this installment includes paintings, a tapestry, and quilts that the artist learned to make in Mississippi under the mentorship of the Gees Bend masters.

The artist explores the changing shape of slavery’s influence through a plant, tended to by enslaved millions who built America’s superpower economy and shaped its cultural, systemic, and social landscapes.

The plant provided an entry point, through which the artist could develop and explore a personal and direct relationship. Over a year and a half, they grew more than 600 cotton plants on the roof of their home and studio. The remainder of the recently devastated crop are now presented as living sculptures.

SISSÒN: COTTON [Phase 1] is on view throughout February 16, 2020 at Wilhardt & Naud 1667 North Main Street. Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Lani Trock

Melanie Baker's The Optimates @ Cristin Tierney in New York

The Optimates presents three distinct scenes: a person stands at a podium; a man, seen from behind, speaks to someone unknown; and a group of men huddle in conversation at a window. The works are large in scale; some exceed life-size. All are made with charcoal, graphite and pigment on paper. Two are mounted on panels, and the other is presented loose, pinned to the wall.

Baker crops her images to draw attention to specific details. It isn’t immediately apparent in every work who the subject is, but signifiers indicate the immense power the subject wields. They wear dark suits and crisp white shirts, and several are pictured in richly adorned rooms. These are the people, we are meant to intuit, who possess wealth, class, and authority. They are also, clearly, all middle-aged or older white men, and Baker provides just enough context clues to suggest that they are either the focus of attention, or the ones cutting the back room deal. The exhibition title is a further nod to their status; the Optimates in ancient Rome were conservatives who favored rule by oligarchy and opposed immigration and assistance for the urban poor.

The Optimates will be on view throughout February 22 at Cristin Tierney 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Arcadia Missa Presents Hamishi Farah, And Lomex (New York) Presents Danica Barboza & Justin Caguiat @ Condo London 2020

Hamishi Farah is an artist, writer, and musician living in Australia while retired from Australian art. Drawing upon afropessimist theory their painting practice skims through possibilities for non-human representation tiptoeing around the white disembodiment of a colonial libido.

Caguiat produces large oil based paintings often on unstretched canvas that shift stylistically between abstraction and figuration. Done in almost a pointillist style, the works appear as landscapes or murals out of a different era; anachronistic images with a register always in flux. Drawing stylistically from sources as varied as symbolist and post-impressionist painting, Viennese history painting, and certain stylistic movements in Japanese painting, they present otherworldy vistas perhaps at home in science fiction or in the realm of fantasy.

Danica Barboza produces suites of sculptures that populate a mythological universe entirely of her own devising; suites of works throughout which the same figures recur in various states of physical development that experiment with notions of celebrity and icon. Her works elaborate a mythic autobiography rooted in a romance between her and a mare figure named in her work as “Draco Adollphus B”; a figure often presented in various states of construction and de-construction, iomages of whom she has produced since as early as 2000 as part of a long term robotics project that informs much of her larger sculptural practice. She has produced a concurrent gothic novel ‘spondere’ which is available in various stages of construction on the occasion of her solo exhibitions.

The works of Hamishi Farah, Danica Barboza, and Justin Caguiat will be on view through February 8, 2020 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor, Soho, London. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series @ Muddguts in New York

 
 

Judith Supine’s latest solo show at Muddguts called, Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series features all new works by the artist. Throughout the Cowboy series, Supine uses iconic Marlboro Man advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that symbolize a heroic desire for adventures of the unknown, valor, and daring independence. Supine breaks the barrier of gender norms and social constructs by twisting the archetypal narrative and cultural context of the cowboy figure, and interjects his own personal associations with gender and sexuality. Re-writing the age-old narrative to include one where balance, nurture, environment and intimacy are at the forefront of inclusivity, the Cowboy series is a continuation of the artists pursuit of placing art between the worlds of abstraction and representation.

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series is on view through August 25 at Muddguts 247 Graham Avenue Brooklyn, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Muddguts

Margot Bergman: Family Album @ Anton Kern Gallery in New York

For the artist’s second solo exhibition with Anton Kern Gallery, Margot Bergman presents Family Album, which includes her most recent paintings and photographs. Bergman has sustained an active painting practice in Chicago since the 1950s and honed a peerless style of figuration. For the last 15 years her subject matter has focused on individual faces of imagined people, predominantly women. Her style is characterized by active expressionistic brush work, unconcerned with symmetry, realistic proportions, and traditional notions of femininity. The artist can adeptly shift styles within a single composition, juxtaposing photorealistic eyes and lips, with a scribbly green hair-do, and a thin wash of color for the complexion. Accompanying Bergman’s paintings are theatrical and lively photographs that bear an uncanny resemblance to her painted works. Together Bergman’s paintings and photographs create a manufactured family album that memorializes the environment in which they were created and their palpable relationship with the artist.

Family Album is on view through August 16 at Anton Kern Gallery 16 East 55th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery

André Butzer @ Metro Pictures in New York

A exhibition of nine large, vibrant new paintings by artist André Butzer is now on view at Metro Pictures. Butzer’s latest paintings employ vivid color and his signature figures bringing to mind motifs and approaches that predate the stark abstraction and distinctive brushwork of his N-Bilder, begun in 2010. However, Butzer asserts that everything he does is unified by an exploration of color and that this new series is a natural continuation of his work. This exhibition continues Butzer’s longstanding investigation into the medium of painting, while pushing the limits of his oeuvre, and furthers the ideas explored throughout his career from art history to consumer culture.

André Butzer is on view through August 9 at Metro Pictures 519 West 24th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Diedrick Brackens Presents "Darling Divined" @ New Museum In New York

Diedrick Brackens constructs intricately woven textiles that speak to the complexities of black and queer identity in the United States. Interlacing diverse traditions, including West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American south, Brackens creates cosmographic abstractions and figurative narratives that lyrically merge lived experience, commemoration, and allegory. He uses both commercial dyes and unconventional colorants such as wine, tea, and bleach, and foregrounds the loaded symbolism of materials like cotton, with its links to the transatlantic slave trade.

Darling Divined is on view through September 15 at the New Museum 235 Bowery, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath @ The New Museum in New York

Turner Prize–winning British artist Lubaina Himid is debuting an entirely new body of work for her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Himid has long championed marginalized histories as a pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and ’90s. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and textile works critique the consequences of colonialism and question the invisibility of people of color in art and the media. While larger historical narratives are often the driving force behind her images and installations, the artist’s works beckon viewers to pay attention to the unmonumental details of daily life. Bright, graphic, and rich in color and symbolic referents, Himid’s images recall history paintings and eighteenth-century British satirical cartoons.

“Work from Underneath” is on view through October 6 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, NY. photographs courtesy of The New Museum

Oliver Beer: Vessel Orchestra @ The Met in New York

“Vessel Orchestra” is the first sound-based installation commissioned by The Met. The exhibition includes a musical instrument, a series of live performances, and an installation composed of thirty-two sculptures, utilitarian vessels, and decorative objects selected by Beer from the museum’s collection. Chosen for their natural pitches, which range from low C to high G on the chromatic musical scale, the vessels form an arresting and unexpectedly versatile instrument, comparable to an organ with multiple pipes. During museum hours, a pre-programmed audio interface will play a new composition written by Beer, activating the vessels to play in real time. On Friday evenings, the exhibition features a diverse group of guest artists who perform new compositions and improvisations on this radical musical instrument.

“Vessel Orchestra” is on view through August 11 at The Met Breuer 945 Madison Ave, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat @ the Guggenheim in New York

Over the course of her career, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago) has continuously and insistently centered the black female experience. In Loophole of Retreat, an exhibition presented on the occasion of Leigh winning the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, she layers form, sound, and text to fashion narratives of resilience and resistance. The project’s title is drawn from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved abolitionist who in 1861 published an account of her struggle to achieve freedom, including the seven years she spent hiding from her master in a tiny crawl space beneath the rafters of her grandmother’s home. This act of defiant fortitude, which forged a “loophole of retreat” from an unjust reality, serves as a touchstone for Leigh’s long-standing commitment to honoring the agency of black women and their power to inhabit worlds of their own creation.

The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat is on view through October 27 at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128. photographs courtesy of the artist and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Alicja Kwade: ParaPivot @ The Met in New York

Using a wide range of media, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade creates elegant, experiential sculptures and installations that reflect on time, perception, and scientific inquiry. With equal parts poetry and critical insight, she calls into question the systems designed to make sense of an otherwise unfathomable universe. Kwade has created ParaPivot I and II for The Met’s Roof Garden Commission, an annual site-specific installation by a living artist. These towering sculptures consist of powder-coated steel frames that intersect at oblique angles with massive spheres that float in apparent weightlessness in between. Although static, ParaPivot I and II are charged with the possibility of movement: their steel appendages, which fan outward around multiple axes, seem to trace the orbital pathways of the globes evoking an astrolabe or even a miniature solar system. Confronted with the artist’s abstract cosmos, our experience of scale, both human and galactic, is unsettled. Overall, Kwade seeks to recover the mystery and absurdity of the human condition, heightening our powers of self-awareness.

ParaPivot is on view through October 27 at The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tandem: Alejandro Cesarco and Tamar Guimarães @ Alexander and Bonin in New York

The third iteration of Tandem, a project curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas is on view at Alexander and Bonin. Tandem consists of a series of five exhibitions presented over 2019 that run parallel to the gallery program, each one a dialogue between two distinct artistic practices. In the video gallery are two films by Tamar Guimarães, O Ensaio [The Rehearsal], 2018 and Canoas, 2010. The dialogue between the two works is framed by the changes that Brazil has gone through over the last decade – namely, the rise of new social movements, the reemergence of the political right, and the fragmentation of the left.

O Ensaio is on view from June 27 to July 25 and Canoas is on view at Alexander and Bonin 47 Walker St, New York, NY from July 26 to August 16 as part of Tandem: Alejandro Cesarco and Tamar Guimarães. photographs courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s @ the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. Many artists during this era adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing materiality and visual force of painting. At the same historical moment, an emerging generation of artists of color and women explored color’s capacity to ignite new questions about perception, specifically its relation to race, gender, and the coding of space. Spilling Over looks to the divergent ways color can be equally a formal problem and a political statement.

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s is on view through August 18 at the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

bitforms gallery presents "IDEAL CONTAGION" in New York

IDEAL CONTAGION is curated by David Hunt, and features the work of Barry X Ball, Richard Dupont, Peter Gronquist, Jon Kessler, Ted Lawson, and Lynn Hersman Leeson. As a whole, the exhibition suggests a looming middle future where our current tsunami of data and information—largely blank, implacable and bewildering—is seamlessly internalized by each individual artist as the substrate of their work. Technology is transformed from a passing zeitgeist fetish into something inscribed on, or within, the artist’s own body, etched like algorithmic scrimshaw into the far recesses of his or her own mind. Each artist in the exhibition signifies a modernist categorical academic division, such as landscape, body art, or appropriation—that have yet to percolate and trickle down into traditional digital and techno-art discourse.

IDEAL CONTAGION is on view at bitforms gallery through August 16 at 131 Allen Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of bitforms gallery, New York and Shark Senesak

ASHES/ASHES Presents L’IM_MAGE_N Group Exhibition In New York

L’IM_MAGE_N is a group exhibition curated by Timothy Hull, featuring Graham Anderson, Gina Beavers, Mathew Cerletty, Gregory Edwards, Anya Kielar, and Chason Matthams. The show’s title plays on the word image, folding it into different linguistic aspects yet allowing for the stability of decipherment. One could look at this through the rhetoric of the pop image, denoting a distillation or simplification into something symbolically new. While elements may be re-arranged, the image can still be read and understood—if not intellectually, then psychically. Although the image is passed through a sieve, its meaning contains vestiges of its origin. L’IM_MAGE_N is on view through August 4 at ASHES/ASHES 56 Eldridge Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy the artists and ASHES/ASHES, New York