Curated by studio artist / writer / DJ Dennis Kane

Christian Boltanski

meditations on memory

This week’s art post features the work of French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021). Boltanski’s work has a contemplative, poetic, ethnological quality. Absence, the remains and impact of war, the silenced subject, and the power of memory all are investigated, as is a quiet celebration of the dignity and poetics inherent in the mundane.

His work was rich in visual and aural impact, and open-ended in its invitation to the viewer to contemplate the past and partake in the present moment — for what has been lost and what endures.
— Merrian Goodman Gallery

Photo Credit:

MetaLocus, BOLTANSKI AT IVAM: DÉPART - ARRIVÉE

Jupiter Art, CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI:THEATRE D'OMBRES

Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski

Art Review, The Spectres of Christian Boltanski

Nowness Asia, Everyone and No One, The Art of Christian Boltanski

Merrian Goodman Gallery, Depart-Arrive

Merrian Goodman Gallery, Christian Boltanski Selected Works

Portrait Credit: Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski

Read More

Shirin Aliabadi

iranian subversion

This week’s art post features the work of Shirin Aliabadi (1973-2018). Aliabadi’s work focused on Iranian women and their unique relationship to Western culture. Not singularly a critique of Western capitalism, the work explores secular transgression, body image and female identity under a repressive religious regime.

Miss Hybrid, 2008
Shirin will always be remembered for her kind soul, the depth of her work and the mark she left on the world. The female protagonists of her best-known series presented themselves as a radical counter-design to the officially propagated image of women, and displayed a young generation’s ways of breaking free from regulations.”
— Third Space Gallery, Dubai

Photo Credit:

Universes Art, Operation Supermarket

Phillips.com, Shirin Aliabadi

Art Fund, Shirin Aliabadi

Aperture, She captured the modern face of Iran

Portrait: The Art Newspaper, Shirin Aliabadi, known for depicting rebellious Iranian women, has died

Read More

Annette Lemieux

ideological minimalism

This week’s art post features the great work of Annette Lemieux. She works in a variety of media and works in a theater of memory, examining aporias in accepted, dominant narratives. Check her work at her website.

She’s looked at archetypical images from art — 20th century art history, but also film — and edited them and tweaked them to give them new meaning, whether that’s cheeky or critical, She’s always taking something from the world and turning it on its head to give it new meaning.
— Al Miner, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Photo Credit:

Mitchell Inns & Nash, Annette Lemieux

Whitney Museum, Annette Lemieux

Quote and Portrait Credit: WBUR, Annette Lemieux, Whose Art Addresses History And Politics, Wins MFA’s $10K Prize

Read More