What to See Across America This Autumn

Hugh Hayden | Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas | 14 September 2024 – 5 January 2025

Pinocchio was a block of wood who dreamed it was a boy. The sculptor Hugh Hayden is a man who dreams he’s a tree, and so is everything else – a wooden world. Hayden titled his first solo show in Dallas, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, ‘Homecoming’, because he grew up in the city. The 14 pieces on view explore variations on the motifs for which the artist is known: furniture growing branches, shiny cookware with faces like Edgefield jugs and basketball hoops with rattan baskets for nets. The idea of return also finds expression in the sweep of the exhibition, across thematic rooms representing church, school, home and nature – a local kid made good, describing the legs of a Dallas coming-of-age. At one end, ‘church’ takes the form of a steepled building made of unfinished cedar, scaled like a playhouse, titled Happily Ever After (all works 2024). At the other, a whitewashed Adirondack chair with a side table, both sprouting brown branches, faces one of the Nasher’s picture windows and outdoor sculpture garden. It’s titled Heaven. That’s a homecoming, too. – Travis Diehl

Liliana Porter | Dia Bridgehampton, New York | 21 June 2024 – 26 May 2025

Liliana Porter rarely alters the found toys and figurines that comprise her extensive collection, viewing them as complete in their own right. Across the decades, the Buenos Aires-born, New York-based artist has staged these objects – often nostalgic mementos of mass production – in photographs, videos and large-scale assemblages. Her exhibition, ‘The Task’, at Dia Bridgehampton features this familiar cast – Elvis Presley busts, Mickey Mouse statuettes, porcelain dolls – alongside video documentation of her 2018 play, THEM, and significant photographic works from the 1970s, reaffirming the artist’s conviction that physical objects and their representations are equally ‘real’. – Macaella Gray

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess​​​​​​​ | Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles | 18 August 2024 – 5 January 2025

Twice a year in Venice, Los Angeles, during the mid-century revival of the bohemian enclave, an artist couple organized an outdoor market on Abbot Kinney Boulevard to sell their ceramic wares. For Michael Frimkess, that meant stylized sculptures drawn from classical forms that he fired in a homemade kiln. By the late 1970s, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess was on to something much stranger. Exhibited now in ‘The Finest Disregard’, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, there’s Mickey (2004), a lumpen, discoloured mouse, and Donald Tea Pot (2014), with the Disney duck rendered awkwardly on a wobbly, misshapen vessel. Pueblo kachinas recur, as do Mayan warriors who disembowel their enemies with obsidian clubs. – Will Fenstermaker 

Constantina Zavitsanos | Artists Space, New York | 10 September – 9 November

In my upcoming show I’m thinking through matters like, how wishes are invaluable despite the value of the coins you make them on; how images can be what I call ‘extra-visual’; how image can be fleeting not just fixed; and how imaging systems may blur sculpture and performance. Right now, I’m working with the Buffalo Springfield song, ‘For What It’s Worth’ [1966] and several of its interpolations, especially the Public Enemy song, ‘He Got Game’ [1998], which features Stephen Stills of the former band. By layering renditions, especially those with differing tempos and lyrics, I’m also thinking through how to caption overlapping sound, both temporally and spatially. 

Captions need to fit the sound they transcribe or describe. We think we look to song lyrics for meaning, but they’re usually a bit ambiguous. The songs that we cherish most are saying something that feels clear to us, but they are also open to many readings. The lyrics to ‘For What It’s Worth’ literally state that ‘there’s something happening here’ but ‘what it is ain’t exactly clear’. There’s more clarity in the open affective power of being unclear. – Constantina Zavitsanos 

Kristin Walsh | Petzel Gallery, New York | 12 September – 19 October

As we hurtle towards a confrontation with the awesomeness of algorithmic intelligence, there is something particularly poignant about the sadness and simplicity of primitive machinery. All that pre-digital friction. Pipes and chutes and arm-sized bolts. All that mere matter. Many of the works in Kristin Walsh’s show, ‘The working end’, at Petzel Gallery, resemble mechanical components stripped from their functional assemblies. Their consequent dysfunction has not proven unproductive, though; inscrutably yet insistently, they have begun to dream. – Brecht Wright Gander 

^{Main image: Liliana Porter, The Task ​​​​​​(detail), 2024. Courtesy: Dia Art Foundation and © Liliana Porter; photograph: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York}