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Theory The cute thing about knowing lots of theory is that you can use it to prove whatever you like - you can applaud "clarity" or you can mock its naivity; you can claim that disorganisation is amateurish or that it emulates our troubled times; a joke can be "weak" or "subtle" depending on how you like your humour served. There's a workshop exercise where one first gets the group to "objectively" list the technical features of a poem, then breaks the group into 2 - one subgroup being told to use these features to show why the poem's good, and the other subgroup using the same features to show why the poem's so bad. It's fun. Fashion plays a role here. One of the more common swings in taste involves what might broadly be termed "flashiness" (or "foregrounding language and technique") versus transparency - sometimes Donne is a showman, sometimes Larkin's inhibited. With some writers (topically Derrida) opi...

SIGNS OF LIFE March 6–May 20, 2007 Jeanine Anthony, Jordan Buschur, Jamie Chiarello Langdon Graves, Jac Lahav, Jesse Martin, John Monteith Jeremy Olson, Purdy Eaton, Colette Robbins PLANET THAILAND, 133 North 7th Street, Williamsburg take L train to Bedford Ave and walk ¾ of a block west Jeanine Anthony Jordan Buschur Jamie Chiarello Langdon Graves Jac Lahav Jesse Martin John Montheith Jeremy Olson Purdy-Eaton Colette Robbins This exhibition explores a subject matter, a generational attitude, and a population of overt talent all at once. The search for new experience always begins with a search for life, since it is life itself, in vernacular terms, which both defines and gives hope to the prospects of new experience. Life presents itself in a variety of means, and implies the possibility of communication. Each different life form impresses upon us a profound reinvention of what it means to originate, grow, thrive, take on habits and fulfill instincts, and create anew. Nowhere do we se...

What are your favorite shows that you have curated, and why? First I would have to decide what factor made one of my shows a favorite. The ones that seemed least likely to get pulled off, I suppose. These include my first two, SUGAR+SPICE and SOME (ARE) PAINTING; then three exhibitions which I co-curated at the Riva Gallery, EROTIKA, CARTOON, and BEAUTIFUL GROTESQUE. That same year also found me organizing my first exhibition for a university gallery, LIMINAL, and participating in an art fair with PRESENCE at Scope New York. In 2005 I curated EVERLAND for Annina Nosei, an art world legend and old family friend; in September of that year, my first regional nonprofit exhibition at Spaces Inc in Cleveland, Ohio, with BEAUTIFUL DREAMER which included 28 artists and was exhibited in a 3,800 square foot gallery. The entire show was shipped there and back, and a catalogue was also published. How has your curating evolved from the beginning of your career to now? I don’t know if my cura...

The Ernest Rubinstein Gallery at The Educational Alliance 197 East Broadway at Jefferson Street, New York December 6, 2006 – January 11, 2007 Peter Barrett, Caroline Burton, Jeff Feld Danielle Mysliwiec, Keiko Narahashi Mary Ann Strandell, Bradley Wester, John Zinsser PETER BARRETT SQUARED engages the cultural significance of the right angle, a supposition of orderliness and authority in all matters intuitive. The artists participating in this exhibition have taken it upon themselves to confront the quality of disinterested hegemony which right-angled forms represent. In some cases, they have attended to the interior area of the square, producing labyrinths, while others have found inspiration in replicating the silhouette of this primary form in quantum varieties and progressions; others still have applied their interest to the visual form of the grid, in which minimal forms intersect with utility and coalesce in each segment with a degree of infinite perception, as if they were measu...

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The following review by D. Dominick Lombardi of Gae Savannah's exhibition at Dam Stuhltrager was published in the September 2006 issue of Sculpture Magazine. Gae Savannah’s art is precious. It links to a trait that we all seem to have, especially in this day and age—the desire to find treasure. In looking at Savannah’s work, I am reminded of an experience that recently sprang to mind when my 10-year daughter showed me a rock with shiny little flecks of mica and announced with great glee, “Dad, I found gold!” I was transported to my own youth, to the moment when I had found an eerily similar rock and asked my father if I had found gold. It took a while before I gave up on that rock—and the chance I might stumble upon something of great value has never left me. I relay this story because it relates directly to what I see in Savannah’s works, which have a reverence for the common object, funneled, in this case, through cultural reference and manipulated scale. The cultural reference ...

September 27-October 22, 2006 The Allen Priebe Gallery of The University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh Co-curated with Yael Lipschutz Susan Hamburger mines the traditionally female dominion of the home to unearth social and psychological dimensions of decorative objects. Her large and sensuously painted Truss canvases exhibit lavish, bound drapery that advertises seduction yet simmers with inner unease. The beauty and neuroticism of these tethered window treatments allude to the attraction of middle-class women to the endless project of beautifying their domestic surroundings. By contrast the Ongepatchket series depicts archetypes of interior design held up to the American woman as aesthetic models: ornate vases lie coquettishly aside lush velvet curtains in these nimbly painted canvases. That Ongepatchket is a Yiddish word meaning overly done or garish signals that these paintings are time capsules returning us to the home, and design aesthetic, of Hamburger’s immigrant grandmother. Thoug...