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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • SUPPORTING STRUCTURES: TAPE, ETC.
        (Something to hold up something worth looking at)

        Magnus Plessen, Paravent, 2007. Oil on canvas, 68.11 × 110.24 in (173 × 280 cm). Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

        Lisa Sigal, That Wood Piece, 2007. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Frederieke Taylor

        Lisa Sigal, Two Shades, 2007. Mixed media, 118×27 in. Courtesy Frederieke Taylor/Lisa Sigal, The Brick Piece, 2007. Mixed media, 102 × 54 × 16 in. Courtesy Frederieke Taylor

        Magnus Plessen, Execution, 2006. Oil on canvas, 75.98 × 111.81 in (193 × 284 cm). Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

        Magnus Plessen, Atelier, 2007. Oil on canvas, 75.98 × 111.81 in (193 × 284 cm). Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

        Lisa Sigal, Untitled, 2007. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Frederieke Taylor



        In the paintings of Magnus Plessen, tape is a template, molding brush strokes to its hard-edged limitations. Sometimes tape is buried within paint and then removed, revealing empty canvas beneath. Sometimes tape is just tape, humorously holding up painted sections, dangling from painted clotheslines, or sitting atop pigment. Plessen often applies color with squeegees, a tool generally used for cleaning surfaces. For Plessen, squeegees excavate, erase, and construct simultaneously. As he scrapes the canvas, his tools leave behind their own inevitable geometry. These marks accumulate like reclaimed second thoughts, giving a voice to deletion. Color glows through like a dirty neon tube.

        Lisa Sigal’s art is also one of functional ambiguity and material doubt. In “That Wood Piece,” blue masking tape reverses its supportive role as it delineates architectonic shapes that climb the walls like vectorized fungus. Within these eccentric, yet possibly utilitarian silhouettes (maybe maps, aerial views, or floor plans?) wooden beams contort to fit the outline made by ephemeral tape. There are also notations where boards have been screwed in, then removed. These areas are sites of subtraction that remain paradoxically active. In “Two Shades,” Sigal uses two drywall panels to frame a section of faux-brick wallpaper. Each of these sky blue facades is a pedestal, a vista and back again, resolutely resisting a purpose or name.





        CLOTHES, BRICKS, AND OTHER COVERS



        Plessen talks about making his paintings from the other side of the canvas, as if each brush stroke were turned inside out. In “Execution,” he paints paint-shirts hung out to dry. These shirts are funny and sad shirts. As in Sigal’s wallpaper shelters, flexibility and rigidity trade roles to poignant effect. One shirt is made up of pieces of tape, another delineated crisply by the blank canvas where tape once was. These fluctuations between inside and out, solid and void, make for both a great hiding place and a false front. The shirts take on the role of the figure with palpable aplomb. No one here, inside or out, they seem to say. The artist is gone, and his surrogates can’t be trusted.



        Sigal’s architectural facades are similarly unreliable. They cover things up and then buckle under the strain. In “Untitled, (Refuge),” wallpaper and newspaper are wrapped up in a shaky structure, equal parts blanket fort and homeless shelter. The newspaper is used as the interior wallpaper. Unseen by outside viewers, it converts transparent information into an opaque hideout. Sigal’s practice is defined by acts of cutting out, repositioning, or covering over, all emphatically surface level. It’s this emphasis on exteriors that lets us know we’re only getting one side of the story. In “The Brick Piece,” Sigal puts support beams on display, and then undoes that inversion one better. A section of sheetrock is removed, exposing its now unneeded metal studs. Behind these ready-made prison bars hangs a piece of paper, crudely painted like a brick wall. A slight bevel of daylight glints at the paper’s edge, reminding us that even a dead-end has its limits.





        INSIDE LIGHTS



        In one of the Sigal’s untitled works — and in one of her best moves — a section of drywall is placed over a window. Background becomes barricade and screen for the world outside. Pointedly, a small rectangle of sky emerges at the top of the window. Above our eye level, the light is unreachable. It acts as a simplified stand-in, a logo for daylight. Circumscribed by Sigal’s damaged geometry, the sun is re-appropriated as one more fragment in her system of hermetic equations. Within her playful interventions there is both protest and despair. She sabotages her working space by telling jokes, hiding out, and making escape plans. These acts of subterfuge interrogate our assumptions about fixed locations and roles, all the while acknowledging the limits of actions that can never leave the room.



        Plessen’s achromatic backgrounds constantly threaten to consume the imagery that sits uneasily on their surfaces. The white light that infuses his work is not one of unification or clarity, but rather an unblinking glare that overwhelms everything it exposes. This bleaching out also occurs beyond the canvas edge, as its corners blend into the brightly lit gallery walls supporting it. Seen in the right light, the paintings aren’t isolated rectangles, but part of a continuum within the gallery cube. This immersion within the surrounding architecture embodies both an attitude of ambivalence and a reality of dependence. It’s a conflict that animates Plessen’s paintings. Barely there, his imagery hides itself in the spotlight, an act of embrace and evasion that’s holding-for now.

        Magnus Plessen at Barbara Gladstone
        Lisa Sigal at Frederieke Taylor

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      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery