Kiki Smith. "Worm," 1992. Image courtesy the artist and the High Museum of Art.
In this week’s roundup Kiki Smith’s graphic works are on display in Atlanta, Ann Hamilton’s work focuses on mouths and hands, Raymond Pettibon opens a cultural grab bag of artwork, and more.
- Kiki Smith‘s Rituals is a solo show at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) that showcases the institution’s recent acquisition of 56 Kiki Smith prints from collector Stephen Dull. This group of prints makes the High a major national repository for Smith’s graphic work and includes works made between 1991 and 2004, including many of the artist’s best-known prints. It represents all aspects of the extraordinary range of techniques and imagery in her graphic work. The prints are on view until January 22, 2012.
- Ann Hamilton – Recent Works at Gallery Paule Anglim (San Francisco) features Hamilton‘s largest video, clapclap (2010) with two screens mounted in a corner, depicting an anguished-looking figure constantly reaching out from side to side. The artist works with the body’s primary creative movements, focusing on hands and mouths as transmitters of signs and sounds. Her work describes essential human activities and communication. This work is on view until November 26.
- William Wegman and Eleanor Antin are part of Performa: Not Funny, a series presented by Performa 11 at Anthology Film Archives (NYC) about the overlap of filmed stand-up comedy and video performance art in the politically electric late 1970s. Wegman’s video art is deadpan and succinct in brilliant jokes that are deconstructions of the punchline. Antin’s The Little Match Girl Ballet is a studio-bound video art telling of The Black Swan, made 35 years before. Here, Antin is transformed into Elinora Antinova, or the Black Match Girl, before dancing to her death. The show closes November 15.
- Raymond Pettibon‘s Desire in Pursuyt of the Whole is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at Regen Projects. The featured work is a cultural grab bag of imagery that offers plenty in the way of pop subtext, political baggage, art/kitsch tension and an off-kilter sense of humor. This heady mix, colliding with phrases and text snippets culled from a variety of sources, makes for enigmatic and pleasantly sensory-overloading works. This exhibition runs until December 22.
- Allora & Calzadilla is the artists’ third solo show at the Lisson Gallery (London). Allora & Calzadilla explore different mediums – sculpture, photography, performance and video – that question the notions of nationality, human survival and democracy through a conceptual, metaphoric and spacial manner. The use of metaphor and of the reversion of objects is a constitutive element of their art allowing them to allude to a particular history and culture of politics. The exhibition will run from November 23 – January 14, 2012.
- Walton Ford has nine new, large-scale watercolor paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery (NYC). I Don’t Like to Look at Him, Jack consists of two series of works: one comprising three portraits of King Kong; and the other six meditations on a passage from the memoirs of the ornithologist John James Audubon (1785- 1851). Both series were painted in 2011, and are consistent with Ford’s practice of expanding the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting. This work is on view until December 23.
