The Brooklyn Rail

Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam before his family moved to the United States. His work explores the multifaceted qualities of memory, be they historical, social, personal, and how those qualities inform our present moment. On the occasion of Nguyen’s exhibition, Lullaby of Cannons for the Night, he spoke with poet and translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng about his kinetic sculptures crafted from bomb fragments, the two-channel video installation which makes use of the song lyrics of Vietnamese poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, and the unsettling relationship of idolization and extinction.

Widely regarded as an elusive multidisciplinary artist who traverses abstraction, figuration, photography and performance, Lucio Pozzi defies easy categorization. Throughout his six-decade career, his art has thwarted conventional art-historical analysis and sidestepped trends in critical art theory.

Sin Wai Kin brings fantasy to life through storytelling and moving image, performance and writing. Their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification, and consciousness. Sin’s film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, as well as screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival. Their work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. In mid-February Sin joined McKenzie Wark on the New Social Environment (Episode 1160) to discuss their new exhibition, The End Time!.

Sara Cwynar’s current exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, centers unattainable desire: that drug-like haze of possibility seducing the mind while convincing the body to stay at work. In October, Cwynar and Chloe Stagaman spoke over Zoom about desire, her recent photoshoot with Pamela Anderson, the color blue, and Baby Blue Benzo’s central protagonist: the dream car.

On the occasion of Mara De Luca’s upcoming exhibition at TOTAH, artist and Rail Editor-at-Large Tom McGlynn paid a visit to De Luca’s studio. They engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about the “critical core” of De Luca’s work, the influence of the West Coast on her practice, and by what means the painting can invent itself.

Lee Mary Manning practices a lost art: looking closely and paying attention. Their photographic compositions are comprised of snapshot-sized prints of closely observed details—a braid, a sunflower, the zipper of a sweatshirt—often combined with carefully chosen bits of ephemera (decorative paper bags, a tangle of yarn). The resulting works—far more than the sum of their parts—are deceptively simple and deeply evocative.

Following the opening of his solo exhibition at Galleria Lia Rumma, Haim Steinbach sat down with art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo to discuss—among other things—art as “display,” the object, language, the vernacular, the everyday, architecture, social exchange, the digital, and music. What follows is the edited version of a much longer conversation. 

On the occasion of an interconnected pair of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery—one for which Boyce co-curated the work of Lygia Clark, and the other of which presents Boyce’s work—the artist joined Mark Hudson on the Rail’s New Social Environment (Episode #1023) to discuss her deep appreciation for Lygia Clark, the role of performance in her own work, and the importance of engaging with one’s audience.

In the late sixties, Mel Bochner began making works of art that were measurements. These took many different forms, some more ephemeral than others, and challenged notions about what an artwork could be. Among this expansive body of work is a series called “48" Standards,” which the artist developed over the course of a month in a notebook of graph paper. For the first time, the complete set will be exhibited in New York. Ahead of the installation the artist spoke with Rail Managing Editor Charles M Schultz about the origins of his measurement works in Singer Labs, the musical subtext of the “48" Standards,” and what happens if you just stop believing in the things you’re supposed to believe in.

The paintings of Walter Price have breath. They are nuanced. They are fluid, and they freely associate. Sometimes this fluidity breaks. It staggers, it stops, it snaps, only to give way to new formation. The paintings transcend even the simplest of polemics. They are nimble and difficult worlds. Michelle Grabner spoke with Price on the occasion of Pearl Lines, his exhibition at the Walker Art Center.

The word “tombarolo” rings in the ear like an ancient ritornello, like a musicalized refrain that carries within it, and in this way protects, a popular wisdom that belongs to everyone and no one. The word’s multiplicity reflects the many roles of tombaroli, from thieves to collectors, from lovers of archaeology to criminal looters, from folk heroes to unscrupulous looters, from misfits to magicians and tricksters.

Charles Ross is a pioneering member of a group of artists generally based in the West who explore light-driven relationships between objects and our perception, sometimes working in such varied media as acrylic and epoxy, sometimes utilizing utilitarian materials such as neon or fluorescent lights, and sometimes relying on the very movements of the Earth and the stars.  But he also engages in a particularly unique way with the land itself, literally, as he says, “entering the Earth in order to reach the stars.”