Part of the Editor's Choice series.
Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
Elliott Green, Gravity and Float (pear), 1997, oil on panel, 80 × 60 inches. Courtesy of Postmasters.
With a Jungian insistence, psychic activity punches its way into consciousness via Elliott Green’s latest paintings. Their backgrounds contain the most puzzling penciled-in farmhouses, vaguely sketched forms that seem to act as behavioral barometers for the foregrounds cast of morphing characters. In the movie The Stepford Wives a strange bell sounds each noon and all the village women become hypnotized. These farmhouses have a similar effect on Green’s characters: their central position in each painting seems to force the characters into compliant circles, giving the effect that the farm exerts a subliminal directorial role. Green’s characters, in their simple, cartoon-like forms are like caricatures of emotion, one represents greed; one lust; one envy. Grotesque in their consumptive gestures, poking and prodding each other like Harpies, they are connected to each other by various limbs, appearing to morph from one personality to the next. These circling fiends are unignorable and raw. And through them, Green explores the complexity of human desire, and the unseen forces that form such desire.
—David Schulz
Roberto Juarez on the way that Robert Brinker’s paper cutouts balance warm, Disney-like comfort with strident sensuality.
Three films that explore the effect of the internet on intimacy and connection.
Painting and drawing that confront sex, death, and religion.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Gillian Wearing, Mona Hatoum, Jim Lewis, Dale Peck, Maureen Howard, John Sayles, Steve Earle, Martin McDonagh, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
