Robert Stivers, Arm and Hand #1, 1996. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.
Robert Stivers’s photographs are eerie reveries, dreams in which the face or figure of a person you’ve desired or loved or hated or have been terrorized by hovers uncomfortably above your body in the darkness. The subjects of his black and white pictures are what look back at you when you stare at your own reflection in a mirror, a store window, or at the bottom of a glass—when you’re drunk, or stoned, or don’t have your lenses in—and come face to face with something intense and amorphous, that’s there and not there, like the fuzzy photographs that argue for the Loch Ness monster’s existence. Because our understanding of photography is so wrapped up in the medium’s ability to focus and to focus our attention, there’s something compelling about pictures that are soft around the edges and not what we expect them to be. In his debut exhibition of prints (Yancey Richardson Gallery, September 4–October 11), Robert Stivers moves, like the dancer and performance artist he is, through a dark atmosphere of memory, loss, and eroticism. Faces, figures (male and female, nude and shrouded), and body parts, threatening animals and cryptic objects float before our eyes in a primordial photographic midnight. In a beautifully produced monograph of Stivers’s work (just published by Arena Editions, Santa Fe), A.D. Coleman’s introduction tracks the work’s influences from the optics of astigmatism to the theatrics of surrealism, from the volumetric aspects of dance to the theory behind method acting to the efforts we need to expend to keep our bearing in the “disorienting visual swirl” of the real world.
—Marvin Heiferman
Open floor plans are less open than we think—and ripe for intervention. Oppenheimer’s latest effort is on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
The artist Josiah McElheny has published two books that display his collaboration with artists, scholars, scientists and creative writers, offering a multitude of voices, speculations, fictions, and facts.
This is a handsome book about the self-taught filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, who was also a painter and a writer and, from the 1930s to the 1990s, the well-known photo-chronicler of New York artists and their studios.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Gregory Crewdson, Lorna Simpson, Allan Gurganus, Louis Auchincloss, Marie Howe, Rilla Askew, Rupert Graves, Andrew Blanco, and Paula Vogel.
Testosterone is the hormone that is the basis of patriarchy. So if you wanna get really deep, it’s like, Do I want to participate in that? I am totally a feminist and, as much as men might not feel empowered, they are in a more powerful position than someone with a vagina, or someone who is feminine or a woman. So what does that mean for me?
Becca Blackwell
