“When I first encountered Marie Tomanova’s photographs of young New Yorkers—images capturing big, untampered personalities at play and in love—I was immediately drawn to her work. It felt as if these were portals into selfhood, kaleidoscopic and bold.”
A novel about an artist's questions, the possibilities of language, and the walk as a narrative structure.
For this year-end list, BOMB asked Amelia Rina, Cassie Packard, Danni Shen, Jareh Das, Jessica Lanay, Louis Bury, Monica Uszerowicz, Naomi Falk, Osman Can Yerebakan, and William J. Simmons to address the question: “What Is Normal?”
“The artist proposes that those of us born into the world of modern technology have dual senses of incurable panic and apathy. One of his tasks is to shine a new kind of light from within the unvisited, interior side of the screen.“
“It makes you wonder whether memory offers an entry point or a pitfall. Perhaps in resurfacing the things you’ve done, you are the purveyor of your own enchainment.”
“The systems around us are shrouded in robes of opulence and gold. Shiva Ahmadi knows. Enter, she says. Then she divulges that which might otherwise slither, undetected, in the folds. Aglitter under the lowlight like an eye in the cave, Ahmadi’s work hums something long and unplaceable as I enter the room it occupies. Is what I see the detritus of human gore or an elated expression of release?...”
“Visual artist Ryan Bock has created a world of darkness, populated with strange characters, enigmatic architectures, and a perpetual twilight that are reminders of reality while operating within the realms of the fantastical and eerie. If the artwork is the portal into the world of Bock’s creation, then the artist is the oracle, beckoning us to examine the cryptic and veiled labyrinth we experience over the course of our lives...
As the
title Somnambulist suggests, Bock’s work is the stuff of dreams, creating a multitude of experiences that can be relayed but not relived, communicated but never re-created...”
title Somnambulist suggests, Bock’s work is the stuff of dreams, creating a multitude of experiences that can be relayed but not relived, communicated but never re-created...”
“The narrative of art history is what makes it digestible to us. I’d like to think this is a result of humanity’s impulse for creative storytelling. But I’ve always found that the most exceptional artists, ones like Ryan Bock, are those who are not only influenced by trend and observation of contemporary life, but who concern themselves with an unexpected clustering of source material and inspiration...
“It is a Sunday morning in Nancy Elsamanoudi’s studio. Arriving here at Brooklyn Army Terminal to listen to her make long brushstrokes across the canvas brings to mind the cathartic conclusion of a great pilgrimage. Alongside the sound of this labor, she describes how the act of creation in New York City, and how the anonymity and nonlinearity of life here, have recalibrated her lived experiences of art and gender.”
“As New York City’s J train screeches overhead in Chinatown, Maxwell Deter pulls his hand-crafted masks out of a canvas bag, untangling their appendages and inspecting the damage. They’ve been on tour with Onyx Collective, whose home base is here beneath the Manhattan Bridge. The experimental jazz group’s founder, Isaiah Barr, is improvising on his keyboard, as Deter puts on a mask and sits on the arm of a couch. On the floor, thick strands of duct tape stream from the brim of a dirty, white construction helmet, also recently used in one of the group’s performances...”
“Crewdson is deft at provoking our anxieties, at exploring human psychology through scenes of the fantastic in suburbia, of alienation in the everyday. His focus in Cathedral, by contrast, reveals hopefulness in the face of stasis and escapism through soft-edged shadow and panoramic breadth of the nature surrounding the characters in each photograph.”
“Ndulue’s sonorous, rolling language untethers the signified from its immediate associations: things that bring pain are made gentle and the extraordinary becomes quotidien. In his debut chapbook, Ndulue directs the mind away from imagining stereotypes of times and places – whether Kentucky night or metropolis dawn – and coaxes the mind towards a sustained patience with language, one that quite melts the text into the reader.”