12/29/19:

In Joomi Chung’s Image Space/Memory Space, there are mountains and motorbikes, traffic cones and tree branches, satellites and skyscrapers, flocks of birds and pedestrians, lichen, barcodes, and jetliners. Meticulously drawn in black ink (with occasional colorations, such as red blood-like spotting), forms coalesce like a delirious Rorschach on transparent acetate — surfaces coiled, furled, layered, drifting across illuminated video screens and in cut rubber teeming across the gallery floor like metal filings to the poles of interfering magnetic fields. Videos’ gentle rumble emanating through the gallery, words by novelist Julian Barnes’ come to mind: “Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”...

11/24/19:

“Yes, I understand these,” I might have said to myself on my first encounter with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. In the Los Angeles photographer’s first major museum survey, arriving from the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, fragments of figures bend and tangle against cool walls and in dark rooms. Everything is visible, yet much is hidden. A tripod leg visible behind a thigh that ends abruptly in empty space; a muscular arm nests around a camera lens that reflects back my own gaze. The longer I look, the more complicated these images become. Spaces and bodies are doubled, tripled, weaving in and out of bent mirror-space. I was mistaken. I don’t understand these images at all. Yet I’m drawn into them. Allowing my gaze to take in three or four at a time, each with its own gravitational pull, I feel the weightlessness of desire...

10/31/19: