Reviews

2016

§ A Review of Matt Mullican: Pantagraph at Peter Freeman, New York, December 28, 2016, Pages 2-6

§ A Review of Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers at PS1, Long Island City, New York, December 21, 2016, Pages 7-11

§ A Review of : Pixel Forest at the New Museum, New York, November 22, 2016. Pages 12-17

§ A Review of Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination at the Museum of Chicago, November 16, 2016. Pages 18-22

§ A Review of Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at The Met Breuer, New York. November 9, 2016, Pages 23-26

§ A (haiku) review of , Not Afraid of Love at la Monnaie de , (unpublished), Page 27

§ A Review of Jason Matthew Lee: Bromide Mayo at Crèvecoeur, Paris, November 8, 2016, pages 28-31

§ A Review of Jean-Luc Moulène at the , Paris, October 31, 2016, Pages 32-35

§ A Review of Kyle Thurman: A Lonely Butcher at Off Vendome, New York. October 11, 2016, Pages 36-41

§ A Review of Henry Hudson: Sun City Tanning at Sotheby's S2 Gallery, New York, October 1, 2016, Pages 42-45

§ A Review of Zoe Leonard's solo exhibition 'In the Wake' at Hauser & Wirth, New York, September 21, 2016, 46-49

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A Review of Matt Mullican: Pantagraph at Peter Freeman, New York

December 28, 2016

Matt Mullican has got them both: brains and brawn. If there were intellectual and athletic decathlons in contemporary art, Mullican would win handily. He has the genetic material, training, and discipline.

Mullican is the son of artists Lee Mullican and . His father’s work was shown earlier this year at James Cohan (New York). His mother’s work is currently on show at Park View (). Mullican’s brother, John, is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Few families have ”the right stuff” way this one does.

Lee Mullican was a member of the three-person Dynaton Group, a loose San Francisco-based collective. The LA Times described the group as “among the wildest [in the 20th Century.] . . . aggressive. Romantic. Space age. Seductive.” They explored indigenous American arts and cultures, filled with mysticism, or as

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Christopher Knight put it, “Surrealism for the New World.” The elder Mullican’s work might be described as transcendent abstraction. Hurtado’s work may be better described as figuration meets abstraction. It is certainly sympathetic with the Dynatons.

Among Matt Mullican’s numerous gifts is his ability to synthesize his parental history and influences along with his training and dialogues from his studies at CalArts during the formidable tenure of . Mullican has recalled one of the first things perfect depiction of nonsubject matter for him. They reduce the world to its simplest form. The connections between symbols are totally individual, non-prescriptive, and non-narrative. Mullican’s cosmology is “a model for a cosmology, not a cosmology itself.” This is an exhibition that requires thinking.

There are three types of work presented here, all grounded in Mullican’s symbols and cosmology. As you enter the exhibition, you see five bright, bold nylon banners, each measuring 5 x 4.5 m (@ 16.5 x 14.75 ft.) They divide the gallery’s cavernous architecture. Their intimidating scale demands attention to some of the icons in Mullican’s graphic language.

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Like the signs and signals in the Convention on Road Signs and Signals (United Nations Publication, ECE/TRANS/196), the symbols depict some of Mullican's cosmos of signs. They are colored coded, signifying order: the material world (green), the as- yet-uncultured (blue), culture (yellow), the arena of signs and language (black and white) and subjective experience (red).” Order and systematization are crucial in Mullican’s world. Alles in Ordnung: everything is okay.

On the gallery’s altitudinous walls, are Mullican’s , termed “rubbings,” a process Mullican has used since 1984. (Mullican’s rubbings were recently featured in a massive, comprehensive catalog, published in conjunction with his 2016-2017 touring exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and Kunsthalle Heilbronn, .) These works are made using acrylic gouache and oil stick using transfers and reproductions. Some of the rubbings are of machines, including a pantagraph, a machine used to copying a figure to a desired scale, consisting of styluses for tracing extended sides. Think of a mechanical, manually operated enlarger.

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These rubbings also include graphic rendering of languages, signs, interiors, and exteriors, and atmospheres, again in Mullican’s color codes. One work in particular, “Organization,” a gargantuan black and white rubbing of the 1853 organizational chart of the New York and Erie Railroad is like a 19th Century floral engraving in contrast to a hard, almost knife-sharp rubbing titled “Untitled (Center Subject of Center Language.”)

Between the banners and the confines of the walls are purpose-built tables, displaying 535 sheets of paper, each measuring 30.5 x 22.9 cm (12 x 9 in.) These , really individual images, each cut and glued from pages in Carl Jung’s posthumously published Man and His Symbols. Most people walk past the tables. Most people do not realize that Mullican made each and added a hand-written page number, as well as his own serial numbers. Big deal? Yes, this is a really big deal. Jung’s book was, in effect, a post WWI examination of man's relation to this own unconscious. In Jung's view the unconscious is the guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious. Mullican reminds us to look within and to explore our own cosmologies.

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This is not easy art. It takes time. It takes thought. It is an encounter with more cerebral issues that many exhibitions seem to avoid. It is not pretty, but it is beautiful. It is encounter with intellectual prowess combined with aesthetic brawn, on a par with Barbara Bloom and Christopher Williams. It is strong stuff worthy of both a MacArthur Foundation grant and an Olympic gold medal.

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A Review of Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers at PS1, Long Island City, New York

December 21, 2016

The smell of meat stock permeated all three floors of PS1. It was an unintended olfactory punch from the Kunsthalle’s in-house restaurant, M. Wells Dinette. Yet, the cloying, unctuous odor created an additional atmospheric in Mark Leckey's sensory assault. PS1 smelled like a fatty broth or stew in an English workingman's café, which seemed sort of appropriate given Leckey’s self-described working class background.

The best way to encounter the exhibition is to take PS1's voluminous, mid-20th century elevator to the third floor. It sluggishly ascends, creaking, moaning, and beeping. It becomes a portal. You enter a different world governed by Leckey's sampling of

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primarily British culture: visual, auditory, and cinematic. By the time you transit this world you can almost taste the café’s fatty broth. The only sense that seems unengaged is touch.

Containers and Its Drivers is a reconfiguration of a reconfiguration. It needs space, and the definition provided by PS1’s architecture neatly compartmentalizes Leckey’s biography and collections. Leckey and his curator co-organizers—Peter Eleey, Stuart Comer, and colleagues—use it well. By dint of PS1’s labyrinth of stall-like spaces, the exhibition is a blocky reinvention of his 2014-2015 presentation at Wiels (Brussels), Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials. Wiels was elegant and refined in comparison. You could waltz through its adjoining expanses.

That Leckey continues to rethink and reconfigure his icons, personal collections of the bizarre and the banal, and integrates new works is so fresh. At times, the films feel like the didactic lectures of Seth Price; other times the feel like Jean-Luc Moulène. In between there are 3-color LED displays simplifying the entirety of digital media and Leckey's amateur archeology of post-plastic stuff. Some of it is so wonderfully weird, like a cast of William Blake's death mask, a copy of Robert Gober’s

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Untitled (Man Coming Out of a Woman) (1993). The interconnected rooms of displays and vitrines come together like a true cabinet of curiosities, bridging analog and digital eras. Leckey insists, “This isn’t curating, this is aggregating.”

There is a foundation to all this seeming randomness: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a 1999 video. It is acknowledged his breakthrough work, perhaps even a masterpiece. It samples and collages found footage of British dance subcultures from the 1970s to the 1990s. If you are lucky enough to spot it, there is a hand-drawn road map in the small Leckey’s cumulative musical encounters. Music and sound are central to Leckey. You just have to steal a quote: “If ever there was an artist who uses left field pop music as the alter of inspiration, it’s got to be . . . Leckey.” (Kudos to Nadja Sayej, .com, October 27, 2016). He uses music sonically and sculpturally.

The sculptural installation in which Fiorucci is projected looks like an homage to Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis. Ditto the speaker sculptures on the second floor. Both trigger visual memories of the “New Brutalist” architecture that was constructed throughout postwar Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Leckey was born in 1964 in , Wirral, near . He attended Newcastle Polytechnic in northern England. This architecture would have been familiar in his landscape. (There seem to be a few other film-related homages like the street lamps that look inspired by alien life forms in The Day the Earth Stood Still and the transmission towers in the Japanese Mothra series.)

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Leckey is a Brit. (He is even a Turner Price winner (2008), which seems to be a necessary biographical detail.) Britishness permeates everything. But when he freely samples the work of other artists, it is generous, and decidedly European. This makes sense given his longstanding relationships with his English-born gallerist, Gavin Brown, and his German gallerist, Daniel Buchholz. Leckey showed at both venues in 2000, and had a major outing in 2008 at the Cologne Kunstverein. He also triggers a more than casual association with the collaborative installations of Franz West.

When asked about visitors' reactions, a docent responded, "people typically burst out in giggles," especially to the oversized, semi-inflated Felix the Cat figure (referring to the first ever broadcast image by RCA in 1928). It sits in a corner like a drooping Buddha, a perfect Instagram siting. In fact, across from it is a video display of an Instagram feed. This is a recreational moment selfie equal to Pipilotti Rist's downtown theatre. Little do visitors know that they are in a deeper, darker distant world that mines the clubby, carnal consciousness of Mark Leckey. It’s flipping bril.

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Review of Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest at the New Museum, New York

November 22, 2016

“Help me,” reads a cool, white neon sign on the fourth floor of the New Museum, adjacent to Pipilotti Rist’s installation, 4th Floor to Mildness. It is a portent, an augury. It is visual representation, almost an echo, of a sound bite from Rist’s Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless In The Bath of Lava) (Bastard Version), (1994), which is in the museum’s stairwell gallery. Whether you go top down (recommended) or bottom up, this exhibition is vexing and often discomforting, for both aesthetic and physical reasons. It has the veneer of happiness, joyousness, and freedom, with its “lite” musical soundtracks, natural world imagery, and soft psychedelic color palettes. It has the accouterments of comfort with beds, pillows, and floor cushions for museumgoers to use and settle in for the show. Yet, the exhibition and its cluttered installation may trigger a long list of germs) to entomophobia (fear of bugs and insects) to technophobia (fear of technology). [Fearof.net has an illuminating list of the top 100 phobias; phobias that frequently shape and bracket memory and

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experience.] Subversion seems to be the point. It is not obvious. Hence, it succeeds.

Pixel Forest has all of Rist’s characteristic MTV generation loopiness. In the accompanying catalog, Rist says, “I’m totally fine with being a hippie. I am Pipi. And I’m not afraid of the idea that art can heal. That’s what I expect from art—both my own and work by other artists. I want art to be consoling or at least to bring some kind of enlarged logic to the way we are. We are surrounded by so many humming sounds, cables, and things going “zzzzz”—electronic devices, and air-conditioning, and cars, and all this stuff that apparently makes too little sense and makes noise. Like with a homeopathic remedy, for you to heal, you need the same thing that makes you crazy. That’s what I am trying to do.” Her time-based media as homeopathy has more in common with Marina Abramović’s brand of soft shamanic therapy. For those who remember, Rist filled the MoMA’s atrium in 2008 with Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), predating Abramović’s populist and popular The Artist is Present (2010). In her MoMA outing, Rist’s introductory text said, “Please feel as liberated as possible, and move as freely as you can or want to! Watch the videos and listen to the sound in any position or movement. Practice stretching: pour your body out of your hips or watch through your legs. Rolling around and singing is also allowed.”

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Assume that Rist and her numerous collaborators truly are subversive, and that she is the ardently feminist matriarch of this team. Rist is so clever, so strategic, that her subversions are easily missed by her audience, which is invited to chill out on the floor, the beanbag cushions, or beds. People line up at the waiting for “an experience.” They are unassuming and unwitting patients of Rist’s psychic homeopathy. In fact, the audience may be memory and experience hoarders, a term to describe “a mental compulsion to over-attend to the details of an event, person, or object in an attempt to mentally store it for safe-keeping. . . .done under the belief that the event, person, or object carries special significance and will be important to recall exactly as-is at a later date.” The audience is downright manic with selfie- and picture-taking, wandering through dangling strings of LED lights in Pixelwald (Pixel Forest) (2016) or stretching out on single- and double-beds in 4th Floor to Mildness (2016). The museum guards—one of whom described the exhibition as “hell”—are obliged to monitor the visitors closely, telling people to maneuver carefully through the LED lights installation or to not wear their shoes on the bed. The crowd on a Saturday morning is enough to trigger a profound case of anthropophobia (fear of people).

Rist’s video installations often feel like an uncomfortable marriage between music videos and intergalactic corporate advertising spots, filtered through a nearly impenetrable Swiss culture. Hers a relational aesthetics art, just as is Carsten Höller’s, ’s, and ’s. The viewer can be protagonist or passive participant. There is certainly enough to see. There are too many works, actually, in the frustratingly cramped galleries. Even using the crowded, almost unnavigable, staircases of the New Museum is awkward. (Beware the selfie-takers on the stairs.) There are too many memories and experiences to gather and hoard. The earliest works remains the most persuasive, like Ever Is Over All (1997) with its Lucille Ball mock anger. The placement of a mobile phone displaying a single channel video, Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless In The Bath of Lava)—one of Rist’s greatest hits, a classic—on an internal staircase is genuinely questionable from a safety perspective, as is the neighboring installation of Komme bald wieder (Come Again Soon) (2016). But, overall there is a very real sense of sameness in Rist’s overdose of artist- imposed audience homeopathy. More awkwardly, the path through her installations is confusing in this somewhat seamless exhibition.

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What someone remembers from a museum is not the same as what someone learns. They are related, but to paraphrase John Falk, PhD, a free-choice learning guru, museum visits are deeply personal and tied to each individual’s sense of identity. Now, to quote Falk, “what typically sticks in a person’s mind as important about their visit usually directly relates to the reasons that person stated they went to the museum in the first place; and often they use similar language to describe both pre- and post-visit memories.” [Emphasis added.] The motivational categories of museum visitors are typically narrow, reflecting a desire to satisfy a personal-identity need, even a “fictional one,” like enjoying art. If there was a MacArthur Fellowship for curatorial and museum studies, it should be awarded to the analyst who can explain the phenomenon of memory and experiential hoarders, who embrace immersive exhibitions like Pixel Forest.

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Museums are increasingly popular leisure destinations, maybe venues, which offer experiences. [Emphasis added.] These experiences are actually no different than a visit to a mall or a theme park. They are no different than watching television or playing a Wi-Fi game. They are entirely self-referential activities, associated with identity-related needs like personal fulfillment, parenting, or novelty seeking. Pixel

Forest excels at novelty, just as Abramović’s The Artist is Present did. It liberates the museum visitor from the usual experience of looking at two-dimensional, sometimes three-dimensional, objects in the context of a white cube. The museum becomes a fun place, an awakening place. The museum visitor can physically interact with the art, providing direct memory and experience, all for a general admission price of $16, about the same as the cost of an undiscounted movie ticket.

Thanks to Rist and her benign inoculation therapy, you can walk outside, up and down Bowery, and encounter the diminished authenticity of New York. You can almost see the vestiges of ’s historic “Skid Row,” where flophouses have projects, displacing the few remaining homeless people and threatening the wacky lighting shops that border Chinatown. These shops rival Rist’s Pixel Forest. Just stroll down

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Bowery and peer in the windows. The reality is dazzling. There are memories and experiences to be made. Thank you, Pipi, for sharing your homeopathic prescription, your similimum. “Like cures like.” Reality seems real.

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A Review of Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

November 16, 2016

Diana Thater freely admits: “I couldn’t paint. So I decided I would do something I could do.” Monet was a favorite artist of Thater’s “because of the colors and images. People love Monet.” So while Thater chose not to paint using traditional media, she finesses it using electronic media along with natural and artificial light. Her work has all the transcendent beauty of Hudson River School painters, elevating nature and the environment beyond the normal confines of two-dimensional, representational art.

Traditional art objects—, photography, and —are typically static, such as installation and performance, are immersive experiences, typically engaging the viewer in a more physical way by stimulating greater sensory awareness. The distance between artist and the art viewer in installation is abbreviated, sometimes nonexistent. The viewer is a participant, even part of the object installation. This

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experience becomes even more acute in non-narrative, non-soundtrack works of Diana Thater's, where the viewer’s physical presence is requisite and the closest thing to story line is rendered like haiku.

Thater's work can confound people, whose understanding and experience with "video" (“time-based media” in more “elevated” parlance) is most typically via computers, television, and theater screens. There are no seats, benches, or creature comforts in any of Thater's installations. There is no music; there is no sound. This is neither Stan Douglas nor Pipilotti Rist. This is not Doug Aitken and certainly not Lizzie Fitch/. You are not allowed to be passive. You walk in, through, and around the work. You interfere with the visuals, and join the art. Viewers are not used to (and usually not permitted to) interact with art. This creates uncertainty, even discomfort. People hesitate, sensing that they are trespassing, by passing between the projector and the wall.

Viewer interference often creates elongated shadows and out-of-register color separations from the RGB projectors placed on the floor or mounted on walls. Thater’s signature treatment of architecture and light, using colored theatrical gels, distorts internal lighting. She pushes the idea of installation forward and even inside out. You can see solid tinted panes of green glass on the 4th floor of the MCA from the corner of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. Sometimes the work is positioned

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straight on, nearly filling a wall like a transparent or translucent fresco. Other times, the projections are abstractions that segment or fill a room's architecture. Like John Ford’s renowned Westerns, “landscape becomes a character and not just a backdrop” (Thater, Unframed, December 7, 2015.) With Thater’s work, you can step touch the sun and reach to the moon. Projections of bees hover near the ceiling. Mule deer directly stare at you from the meadows and dwarf forests of Bryce Canyon, Utah.

Thater’s installations are particularly well suited for galleries and museums. The works consume volume; they do not just occupy space. This is an important attribute frequently overlooked in describing Thater’s work. “Nothing I do is casual,” Thater freely admits. The work is determinedly engineered. Her work creates particular challenges for domestic environments, making projected installation works more difficult to collect. Her technological solutions have kept apace of both software and hardware developments, using single or combinations of television cubes or flat

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screen monitors for more domestic uses. Thater’s works are now “plug-and-play,” much to the relief of technophobes, who ironically have no problem connecting 54” diagonal wafer-thin flat-screen TV in their family room. Thater’s flat-screen installations are no different from paintings. Her single and combination monitors with their exposed DVD players and electrical cords are video sculptures akin to, but completely unlike, ’s.

Thater addresses her subjects fearlessly. Few artists have focused so resolutely and confidently on the politics of man’s relationship to animals, the environment, and ecology. These themes have been paramount since Thater's earliest shows. It is unfortunate that earlier works are not better represented in this historical overview. Thater is a front-line, consciousness-raising artist, documenting environmental hazards and disasters, like the aftermath of Chernobyl, where the free- ranging Przewalski horses inhabiting the exclusion zone will inevitably die of radiation sickness. Thater’s dreamy depictions of wild dolphins swimming are actually alarms about oceanic pollution and commercial fishing. Her projections of monster-sized bees are reminders about the fragility of food chains and potential for environmental collapse. This is not PETA-enraged activism; rather Thater effortlessly illuminates natural beauty and underscores the fragility of our planet, both its wildness and wilderness.

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Thater's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is a partial reconfiguration of the work she presented in a sprawling 22-work retrospective earlier this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is different not just because of MCA’s space limitations, but also because of the awkward vaulted ceilings and irregular galleries of the museum's architecture by Josef Kleihues. Coincidentally, Thater also had to cope with Kleihues's "poetic rationalist" design during her 2004 mid-career exhibition in Siegen, Germany. Thater has prevailed in both Siegen and Chicago, despite the architecture. She paints in three-dimensions, unencumbered by traditional notions.

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A Review of Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at The Met Breuer, New York

November 9, 2016

Cultural America in the 1950s and 1960s was unrepentantly white. Before I attended university in upstate New York, my exposure to Black Americans was primarily through a handful of television and movie personalities, athletes, and musicians like, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Ernie Banks, and Harry Belafonte. At college on the cusp of the 1970s there were only six Blacks in my freshman class of 800. The campus was mostly white and disproportionately Jewish. All this white created a sort of cultural snow blindness, a funny coincidence in upstate New York where B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Sun Ra played sold-out campus concerts. When many of my classmates applied for junior year abroad, I chose to attend Howard University on exchange. As an anthropology and art history major, this decision seemed right; I wanted to study African-American studies.

These were anxious times in 1968, especially in Northwest DC on Georgia Avenue surrounding Howard. I was one of six white students living on campus. Because of my major, I was privileged to study with the great historian Harold Lewis; the brilliant Nigerian composer and musicologist, Fela Sowande, and a protégé of Margaret Mead, Jane Phillips. During my studies I learned about a literary and ideological philosophy introduced in the 1930s by the Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire. With the intentionally provocative name “négritude,” Césaire and his circle of French-speaking, colonial-era intellectuals described the affirmation (or consciousness) of the value of Black or African culture, heritage, and identity. In contrast to Cartesian logic, "I think,

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therefore I am," Sowande taught me Léopold Senghor’s, "I feel the Other, I dance the Other, so I am." (« Je sens l'Autre, je danse l'Autre, donc je suis.») You participate, you dance. This epigram became my mantra as a PhD anthropology candidate in Jamaica, St. Vincent, and—for two more years—Barbados. “Feeling the other,” active participation, was the way for me to embrace unfamiliar customs and cultures. Nonetheless, the underlying values and aspirations in my Caribbean homes were always the same: family and community were the foundation.

Kerry James Marshall's work is so much about normal aspirations and the desire for “a regular life.” His work is profoundly optimistic, almost heroically so. When you know his personal story, you wonder, "How did he rise above?" Whether he is depicting dead boys or barbershops, artists or beauticians, street scenes or studios, Marshall reaches higher and beyond. He tells everyday stories, complexity, accompanied by word banners and thought clouds, adding commentary to the picture. (For greater biographical detail see Wyatt Mason’s, “Kerry James Marshall Is Shifting the Color of Art History,” which appeared in The New York Times Style Magazine, October 17, 2016.)

Overall, there is a fair amount of writing that addresses the art historical references, sources, and archetypes Marshall has seen and used. To paraphrase Marshall, he is interested in expanding the place of Blacks in art and art history, not indicting nor critiquing it. This is pretty obvious, and much of the conversation surrounding Marshall’s work is not terribly original. Artists have been mining, miming, and meme- ing their predecessors for 35,000 years. More importantly, what seems missing is more critical commentary about Marshall’s work from the Black perspective, such as

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on Victoria L. Valentine’s Culture Type blog, which specifically “shares invaluable interestingness culled from the published record on black art.”

This revelatory exhibition compels you to consider other artists and their commentaries about the Black experience: Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems all address the evolutionary condition of the Black woman in history. Mark Bradford, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, and Kehinde Wiley all digest the history of slavery, Black history, Black identity, and Black masculinity. Marshall also makes you think of the piercing intellect and social commentary of David Hammons and of Afro-British artists Chris Ofili, Hurvin Anderson, and Yinka Shonibare. These artists all go deep into their Blackness. This is all very important, but very different, work.

Content wise, Marshall’s depictions of the Black American experience is comparable— in concept—to Louis-Léopold Boilly’s commentaries about the social life of the French middle class of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Marshall’s paintings and photographs are true social chronicles and heartfelt affirmations of Black culture. His depictions of everyday banality are sometimes using the exuberant colors of Pan- African nationalism. But most of the time, Marshall is painting naturally using the colors of African, West Indian, Latin, and North American street life and culture. His is a blinding, even shocking, visual assault. Yet, the work is nuanced in remarkable ways. Marshall uses seven shades of black “into which not a drop of white is added” (Mason, October 17, 2016). This is a major conceptual feature of the work. For Marshall, “Blackness is non-negotiable…it’s also unequivocal.”

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But, no one even comes as close to Marshall as LaToya Ruby Frazier, a fellow MacArthur Foundation grant winner. Frazier, like Marshall, explores the imponderabilia of everyday Black family and life in Braddock, Pennsylvania, using visual autobiographies to document social inequality and historical change in the postindustrial age. “Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative.” (See Macfound.org, September 28, 2015.) Her work illustrates how contemporary art opens and enriches conversations about race, American history, class structures, and social responsibility. The work is not idealized, nor is Marshall’s. This is reality art.

Marshall's work is Black. Marshall’s work is everyman's. In every painting—and there is some wonderful photography too—Marshall invites us to feel the other, to dance the other, to be the other. He reminds us that Civil Rights history is still fresh and still under attack. He reveals the universal human experience of aspiration and optimism. To quote (and recontectualize) a thought balloon in one of Marshall's light boxes, "It wasn't nothing like they said! I saw the whole thing...I'm telling you!"

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A (haiku) review of Maurizio Cattelan, Not Afraid of Love at la Monnaie de Paris

Punchy one-liners By a guy from Padua Out of retirement

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Review of Jason Matthew Lee: Bromide Mayo at Crèvecoeur, Paris

November 8, 2016

The emerging art market is cluttered with Internet-derived and -based art, most of which is instantaneously forgettable. This art is like scrolling idly and aimlessly through web pages during a conference call. There are artists who sample images and then awkwardly recombine them into Rosenquist-esque paintings with little regard for content or technique. There are artists who strain to play with gaming technologies making video pastiches of tedious nothingness. Entertaining, meh. Enduring, no. It is 420 art. Then . . . there are the few artists working in and around technology and the Internet who have something to say, clearly and confidently. Jason Matthew Lee falls into this rarefied category.

Lee is best known for his reconfigured pay telephones, which are sculptural mini- monuments to the earliest technological hacks. His paintings mine significant Internet

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history, like Stuxnet, the malicious computer worm believed to be a joint Israeli- American effort to hack Iranian nuclear centrifuges. In another series Lee worked with images from the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. A detail from the centerfold -- the model's face -- was the image used to develop image compression, aka the JPEG (Google: "Lena Söderberg JPEG" to learn more.) The pornography industry was a major force for bringing photos and video to the Internet. The technological development of image compression soon benefited us all. Lee's interest in cyber and contemporary history, including hacking and socio-cultural events, confirms a real intellectual curiosity à la Seth Price. (See, for example, Price’s How to Disappear in America.) Lee likes the dark underbelly.

Lee's current exhibition at Crèvecoeur in Paris offers six paintings, a sculpture mimicking a modular retail store rack, and -- most importantly -- a 7-monitor installation with a visually addictive video loop. The video edition is the exhibition's molten core, surrounded by earnest attempts to push his paintings forward with a change of material. Rather than painting on canvas or linen as he has in the past, Lee has printed and painted on Dibond, using his signature text-spewing industrial print gun for embellishment. The first two brashly colored works are not as convincing as they are visually noisy. To each his own. The ideas in the other four paintings are considerably more successful and subversive; their execution is accomplished. Two figurative works look like nods to virtual reality games with an Amazonian protagonist. In the end they look like messed up screen shots. The details are greater than the whole. The exhibition's largest and most successful paintings --

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"Beta" and "Bromide Mayo" -- are real statements, channeling Ed Ruscha from some alternate reality. These paintings require more inquisitiveness and sophistication from the viewer; the other works are not as commanding.

The centerpiece installation combines 7 used computer monitors of varying ages and manufacture that simultaneously play a 14-minute video loop. The scattered components are as assured as Jason Rhoades’s and Karen Kilimnik’s 1990s installations, whose seemingly randomness was always considered and calculated. Lee's configuration is equally precise. The video is worthy of comparison to the cultural history captured in Mark Leckey's Fiorruci Made Me Hardcore. A lengthy segment traces the failed 1986 trajectory of the space shuttle Columbia, from liftoff to implosion. It re-documents the catastrophic failure of technology. The video also samples from the blog Erowid.org, the mission of which is "Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives." There is a lengthy confession about using 2C-B, an ecstasy-like drug and one of numerous psychedelics available on the Internet. It reads, in part:

“I went outside, smoked one of the biftas that I’d rolled, and then laid in bed (I was glad of my duvet when the ‘chills’ started to roll in), pulled the curtains and put on some chilled out tunes, started to play with the computer. I wear a digital wrist watch exclusively when tripping, because I never want to know what the time (real-time) is, but I find that the stopwatch function comes in very handy.”

This passage is practical information for watching the time. There are cameos by a tearful cartoon waif, a rustic double door, the exploding NASA shuttle, and a motorcycle burning in a grassland. The

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connections are uncertain but seem spliced into an autobiographical narrative. The overwhelming effect of the video and installation is riveting. They successfully anchor the exhibition, making something good into something really worthwhile.

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A Review of Jean-Luc Moulène at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

October 31, 2016

You want to touch. You want to feel the velvety surface of metamorphic rock, the cold clammy-looking surfaces of painted hard foam, the donkey's skull embedded in concrete, and the alien bronze form of a geometric shape. You want to feel the heft of every object, large and small. Everything is perfectly executed and flawlessly presented,

"I was interested in science before I developed a taste for art," Moulène confesses in the exhibition's artist-annotated catalog. "I did, at some point, say that I saw myself at sort of a crossroads that links together a technical culture (of which photography is part), industrial communications, and the experimental approaches to the body that artists explored in the seventies." These comments are key, so much so that they are recycled in emphasis in the exhibition’s literature.

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Jean-Luc Moulène's career began and reputation grew as a photographer. The closest evidence of this at the Centre Pompidou is three videos mounted on an expansive white wall. The first is a creepy loop titled "Black Sun," which reads like a celestial purple UFO or alien being. The second, "Errata Control," feels like a static homage to Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs. The third, "Business," is a mesmerizing video of the intake fan of an airplane jet engine filmed in flight. It sucks you in. These works are not incidental afterthoughts in the exhibition, nor are the stacks of newspaper takeaways and the custom-designed artist's uniform made in a French laborer's blue. These works add incrementally to Moulène's historically diverse skills and technical exactitude.

By their sheer numbers and scale, Moulène's sculptures, which he terms protocols, are the obvious focus of the show. Any reference to modern and contemporary art is intentional. "Since the beginning of my artistic practice," Moulène says, "there are two things I have been trying to challenge: the concepts of mastery and of authorship." The mastery is obvious in precise rendering and exact cuts. There is art historical familiarity about the objects, which are Moulène's primary focus nowadays. He samples contemporary art by association rather than direct appropriation. Intellectual DNA from other sources is evident throughout the exhibition: , Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Miro, , Naum Gabo, and Robert Lazzarini. Moulène also samples banal objects from everyday life: English garden sculpture divided and reassembled with a bolt; various 3-D depictions of a laundry detergent bottle, and a teacup sliced and divided. In another recent interview, Moulène

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stressed that “You must be contemporary, and create a patina for the next century. A problem is that we only have so much available.”

Moulène makes a clear distinction between medium and material, underscoring originality and freshness. For him, material is “a solution to the problem.” He rarely uses a material more than once. Individually or in combination in the protocols, the material elements contribute to a greater whole. This underscores an artistic challenge in aesthetic decision-making. "The first gesture is often the best one, it shouldn't be overthought," Moulène asserts. But repeated gestures are necessary to validate the first. Moulène learned this from photography, but reassessed and reapplied it in his objects. Each piece approaches an ideal. There is no room for technical wabi sabi. Moulène’s separations and recombinations do not deny the original object, whether it is bone or plastic. He hides little and reveals a lot.

The catalog is essential reading, since the exhibition signage is minimal and the handout is selections of Moulène's sometimes-dense quotes, decontextualized from

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the catalog. The catalog’s photography is reflective and more than an index to the exhibition. The bibliography is extensive -- 13 pages long -- reflecting the broad curatorial interest in Moulène's career. The catalog is an antidote to much of the multi-syllabic, often quasi-intelligible criticism that of art criticism. What makes the catalog most compelling are Moulène's own reflections on his personal history and process. He concludes, "I do not exhibit resolutions, I exhibit tensions." [Emphasis added]. “I consider myself more of a lyricist – I’m interested in love, life, and death. The rest is nothing.”

Even more revealing is Moulène's observation that in contemporary art, “we have passed from the work to the exhibition as art work. And this drives a lot of artists to the spectacle as a work. I wanted to continue to get away from the process so I decided that the show would be a programme . . . a programme of production.” The program at the Centre Pompidou looks like a group show, which is the artist’s intent: it is the success of collaboration between “’me and me, we are millions,’ millions of authors.”

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A Review of Kyle Thurman: A Lonely Butcher at Off Vendome, New York

October 11, 2016

“Work“ is the activity and “discipline” is the pervasive ethic in a diverse selection of seductive drawings, paintings, and sculpture that make up Kyle Thurman's current exhibition at Off Vendome. The works seem deliberately unrelated, reflecting a deeply conceptual – strongly Germanic – approach to art making, rare among the many one-medium, one-look artists. There is a unifying story here, nonetheless. Multiple studio activities stitch together concepts and convention. They mine and extract personal values and art history.

Conduct a “Kyle+Thurman” Internet search, particularly for images, and the results are disproportionately about his iconic white-on-red "flower" paintings. Thurman made his flower paintings in four standardized sizes. Like Jacob Kassay's silver-plated canvases, the “flower” paintings were singled out and elevated in a collector-

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speculator dominated market. Thurman’s “flower” paintings had the requisite sexiness and a strong recall factor to become “big.”

Why is this important? All of these works are genuinely compelling in their own right. But Thurman has developed a highly individual, intellectually rigorous, and materially multi-faceted approach to art making. This exhibition, like Thurman’s most recent exhibitions in Brussels and London, continues to provide an antidote to any market bias or blindness about his work. He makes many things with many materials.

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Thurman expresses a breadth of ideas that reflect his brainiac undergraduate studies in film studies and photography at Columbia, where he made little physical work. His visiting student status at Der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and his MFA studies at Bard College further enhanced an unfaltering academic résumé. Thurman honed his gifts in rich intellectual environments under the guidance of some of the most respected artists of our time. Attending Düsseldorf between 2011-2012 was something akin to a pilgrimage to the Bodhi Tree, the acknowledged place of the Buddha's enlightenment. Most importantly for Thurman, the faculty included the American Conceptual photographer Christopher Williams, whose guiding principles were to investigate, experiment, make, and . . . repeat. Williams’s seminars are notoriously free form, imposing no boundaries or limitations. Not everyone responds well to such freedom, even liberation. Thurman did. His intellectual inquisitiveness was revealed and his skill sets developed.

Completing Bard‘s MFA, three-year summer program, required even more focus amidst a diverse faculty that included Amy Sillman, Fia Backstrom, Thomas Eggerer, Dana Hoey, and Cheyney Thompson. Drawing has always been part of Thurman’s art

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making. It takes discipline and real practice. Through encouragement from his mentors and peers, he has taken drawing out of the studio and into the world.

Drawing is center stage in his current exhibition at Off Vendome. The works are dreamy, vaguely homoerotic. They consist of simple lines and blushes of color, almost like an unfinished Egon Schiele. Drawn approximately life-size, the figures depict various (highly disciplined) professions that Thurman was encouraged by his family to consider as an adolescent: soldier, athlete, and priest. The drawings are positioned in the gallery as the figures might appear in life: standing, reclining, and just lounging around.

In contrast, Thurman’s Minimalist paintings, made from burlap twine that looks like it was snapped on canvas, are schematics of psychological maps. They look like dance maneuvers, recalling – but only just – ’s dance diagrams. Thurman’s

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schematic paintings have a mid-Century Modern graphics look, but they are inherently menacing and intimidating, especially when you see the titles, “Fear,” and “Envy.”

A carpeted platform was added to the gallery and placed in a central position. As a work, it references a series of paintings, which depicted fictional stage architectures that Thurman exhibited in London. While the platform seems more of a psychological prop than a sculpture, it can be used for performances. It also invites comparison with Felix González-Torres’s “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform”) 1991. Finally, there is a sensuous, cast, supersaturated blue, glass replica of a heart-shaped Tramp Art picture frame. (Tramp Art is humble homemade craft made by factory workers, farmers, and laborers from just about every conceivable occupation or made by itinerant workers – hobos – to make extra cash.) It recalls the shape of classic Pennsylvania Dutch graphics that appear in Frakturs. This is a fitting association and consistent with Thurman's origins in Chester County, PA. The glass heart also symbolically frames absent portraits.

All these works fit together in a single space, like large pieces of a puzzle of an intense intellect and uncertain, but cool, emotions. Having moved beyond a speculative

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period in the art market, it is refreshing to see so many talents and techniques in one person’s output.

Once I had a love and it was a gas Soon turned out had a heart of glass Seemed like the real thing, only to find Mucho mistrust, love's gone behind

“Heart of Glass,” Blondie (© Deborah Harry + Chris Stein, 1978)

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A Review of Henry Hudson: Sun City Tanning at Sotheby's S2 Gallery, New York

October 1, 2016

When asked about the title of his exhibition at Sotheby's New York headquarters, Hudson responded:

Sun city tanning is actually the tanning salon next to my studio in east London. When I Instagram, it always comes up as my location feed. But I thought it worked well for the title of the show in regard to ayahuasca being the drug of the "kale" age, and how churches and public buildings in urban cities are now being rented for drug to purge themselves to: create the most perfect inward tan and bathe in the drug’s glory in a small gathering among bankers, lawyers, and vets. It is urban city escapism via a tropical plant, the latest fad.”

If you were to read the exhibition's catalog, you would read three very different essays. The introduction, written in high art speak by an unnamed Sotheby's staffer, refers to Georges Bataille in the first sentence. The next page invokes Joseph Conrad, making a rather grave literary connection. This is a bullet between the eyes. Hudson’s own explanation is much more engaging and true.

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The second essay is a vaguely romantic piece written by Hudson's aunt, Cressida Connolly, an award winning author and journalist. The piece is written in an ekphrastic manner (a graphic, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, real or imagined), weaving an engaging story about Hudson’s real and, perhaps, imagined adventures. We learn of Hudson's exposure to Henri Rousseau at the age of six at the National Gallery and about an encounter with Paul Roche, who acquainted Hudson with the "benign and healing aspect of plants and forests and jungles." (HENRYHUDSON: Sun City Tanning, p. 12.) This is where "the story" gets interesting, particularly as Connolly recounts Hudson's affection for the films of Werner Herzog.

The catalog ends with an ecstatic, but overreaching, essay by David Risley, who mentions 17 different artists, ranging from Jasper Johns to Jayson Munson, from the eccentric Victorian painter Richard Dadd to the American Conceptualist . The focus on medium and process actually undermines Connolly's affectionate and himself.

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If, in addition to going to the Sotheby’s gallery, you add a visit to Hudson's Wikipedia page, which was last modified on 12 September 2016 by a Frederick Hudson, and if you visit the artist’s Instagram account, you get a more personal picture of Henry Hudson the explorer, the adventurer. In Wikipedia there are sentences about close encounters and mishaps in Congolese jungles, along with hints of shamanistic self- explorations. On Instagram, there are tender photos of Hudson’s family and banal observations on everyday life. Consciously or not, Hudson projects a persona rather like the 19th century explorers Sir Richard Burton or Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Knowing all this, the paintings and ceramics have a different presence. Imagine a Dutch still life from the 1600s painted under the influence of shrooms. This would certainly fit with Hudson's tropical pictures mediated by his chosen material. Each of paintings in the gallery depict a jungle scene at 8 different times of day. They are labor-intensive confections made from color-mixed plasticine, a petroleum-based, nondrying version of PlayDoh. They will always be juicy, perhaps dangerously so. The paintings are like a gooey, oily, over-frosted sheet cakes in lurid colors. They are visually compelling, but very, very weird. Imagine a Claymation portrait of Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors.” As a defined body of work, any more paintings in this series would be too many.

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In contrast, the hand-coiled, pit-fired, and hand-painted bisque ceramic pots are entirely seductive and magical. Hudson works collaboratively with his brother, Richard. At Sotheby’s they presented 8 pots, each representing a different psychotropic drug or indigenous medicinal plant. The pots' interiors are loudly painted in near Day-Glo oxides. The hand-waxed exteriors have deliciously iridescent and opalescent surfaces. They are sublime. They could have starred in a room of their own.

To read the catalog essays, one might conclude that Hudson embraces a Victorian-era eccentricity. He is actually a rather normal 30-something. His work is different and original. But the paintings are idiosyncratic because of his chosen medium, not the imputed subject matter. With some persuasion he should translate his work into other media, like painting, tapestry, and installation. Medium alone is not enough. The Hudson brothers’ pots should quickly disappear into smart collections. They are that good.

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A Review of Zoe Leonard's solo exhibition 'In the Wake' at Hauser & Wirth, New York

September 21, 2016

As a phrase, "In the Wake" means in the aftermath. Zoe Leonard’s exhibition is not just one thing, not one idea, not one emotion. It consists of single and sets of silver gelatin prints and sculptural installations. (Only the vibrant dye-transfer prints seen in

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"Analogue," which was last hung in 2015 at The , are "absent" from this presentation.) While Leonard’s work is often called elegiac and nostalgic, "reflective" and “heartfelt” are more appropriate. Her biographical works address both the past and present thoughtfully, but without cloying sentimentality.

The exhibition -- Leonard's first commercial exhibition in New York since 2012 -- exhibition in New York since 2012 -- is presented on three floors at Hauser & Wirth. The first floor is grounded in biography with marginally manipulated reprints of snapshots taken of Leonard's mother and grandmother, who were in the Polish Resistance Movement. They joined the post WWII Diaspora as refugees, traveling first to Italy, then onto London before arriving in New York. Their pictures highlight their stateless transits.

Intermingled among the snapshots are ones that are semi-obliterated by flares and reflections, reminiscent of Leonard's more recent photographs of the sun. One snapshot captures a pose of Leonard’s grandmother, who worked on the RMS Scythia. The picture reveals a small, but critical, detail: a lifebuoy on the Scythia. This vessel began life as a luxury liner before it was requisitioned during the war to relocate children, ferry troops to North Africa, and transport war brides and refugees from Europe to North America. Leonard’s grandmother served the displaced, while stateless herself.

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The third floor has photographs taken from Leonard's apartment window, capturing the seemingly chaotic clouds of pigeons. These photographs harken back to earlier works: the untitled aerial works from the 80s and 90s, nests and trees from the 90s. Nature is alive in both Leonard’s urban aerialscapes and landscapes. Her images of seabird nests from the 1990s underscore vulnerability: abandonment. The birds in this new work are in active flight: displacement. These images are not only visual metaphors for her maternal relatives, but are also a subtle, yet effective, commentary on refugee migrations globally, which are often difficult, haphazard journeys.

Leonard manages the architecture of exhibition perspective. The sculptural installations on all three floors (and which predominate the gallery's second floor) are a photographer's wry take on picture-taking and -making manuals. These installations are stacks of post-war photography books, bearing titles like "Dealing with Difficult Situations,""Total Picture Control," and "How to make Good Pictures." Like Leonard's arrangements of dolls, luggage, postcards, and sewn and zippered fruit peels, these neat stacks of books are all biographical placeholders for Leonard, her family, and friends. They also connect and contrast the rise of everyday, low-cost photography with advent of post-War, Cold War surveillance.

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It would be an injustice to critique the works as "easy to make," "easy to consume." Many of the images are things we all forget or take for granted. It feels like rummaging through a shoebox filled with yellowing family snapshots. From time to time, we look at these pictures, recognizing a face from the past or from a family story. Sometimes we embellish or invent histories and stories made from partial memories, which are passed along in an oral history accompanied by pictures that are crumpled, folded, and frayed.

Leonard's total presentation is packed with intent and meaning -- past and present -- which distinguishes it from the utter banality that permeates photography in the digital age. Black and white photography is difficult. There are actually few gimmicks at the photographer's disposal. Realistic photography is even harder, when the artist cannot retreat behind technical skills (that is, Photoshop and other software.) Yes, "In the Wake" is an apt title for this exhibition, but it could also have been titled, "Dealing with Difficult Situations." The show recalls "then," her grandmother and mother's flight, "and now, “the exceptionally complex times we live in.

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