What to See Across America This December
From the ongoing photographic series of Barbara Probst to Jenna Bliss’ first US institutional show, here’s what to see in America this December
From the ongoing photographic series of Barbara Probst to Jenna Bliss’ first US institutional show, here’s what to see in America this December
Barbara Probst | Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati | 27 September – 6 February
In 2000, the German-born artist Barbara Probst arranged a dozen cameras at assorted vantage points – including one above her and one in a neighbouring building – to record herself skipping gleefully across a Manhattan rooftop at night. This romping performance for the camera became the twelve-panel Exposure #1: N.Y.C., 545 8th Avenue, 01.07.00, 10:37 p.m. (2000), and the catalyst for 25 years of inquiry. Probst isn’t merely employing a formal conceit; her recognition that the telling of this unassuming choreography would shift with the multiplication of photographic coordinates also evinces a rich interpretive flexibility. The ‘Exposures’ series (2000–ongoing) is the subject of a vigorous exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial, curated by Kevin Moore. The succinct title ‘Subjective Evidence’ handily embraces the seemingly contradictory dialectic character of photography, which loiters between interpretation and fact. – Stephen Frailey
Jenna Bliss | Amant, New York | 28 September – 12 January
In Jenna Bliss’s videos and photographs, art is capital and finance is a regime – the mouthpiece of which is television. The works comprising ‘Basic Cable’, the artist’s current show at Amant, infuse observations about art and commerce with absurdity and biting humour. Lower Manhattan, a global financial capital, is often the focus of this native New Yorker’s work, yet Bliss’s oeuvre has been more widely circulated and discussed in Europe; ‘Basic Cable’ is her first institutional exhibition in the US. – Joel Danilewitz
‘Maḏayin’ | Asia Society, New York | 17 September – 5 January
‘Maḏayin’, a gemlike exhibition of 74 eucalyptus bark paintings made with natural pigments by Yolŋu artists from Australia’s Northern Territory, accomplishes a rare feat: it tells a story that is at once social, political, cultural and deeply personal. Its substantial, bilingual catalogue and wall labels featuring quotes by the artists make it abundantly clear that this account only could – and should – be told by Indigenous knowledge-holders. The show’s last stop in New York (after three other outings across the US) fills two floors of the Asia Society. Upon entering, I was immediately reminded of the Australian art museums that feature a permanent gallery, front and centre, dedicated to the continent’s First Nations artists. That approach, which goes beyond mere land acknowledgments at the door, is something other museums should heed. – Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Vicky Colombet | FERNBERGER, Los Angeles | 5 November – 21 December
Since the renaissance, Western painters of landscapes have built compositions around a fixed point from which everything gains its coherence. In shan shui (mountain-water), a classical Chinese genre of landscape painting developed during the Six Dynasties period (220–589), the world is indeterminate, emergent, in flux. While the landscape painter seeks geometric order, as the philosopher François Jullien writes in The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting (2009), the shan shui painter ‘grasps the world beyond its distinctive features and in its essential transition’.
French American artist Vicky Colombet insists that her paintings aren’t landscapes, calling to mind this distinction. In ‘Flying Back Home’, her small yet profound exhibition now on the second leg of a two-part rotation at FERNBERGER in Los Angeles, Colombet paints earth scenes in rippling shades of black and blue. The crystalline azure ridges of Plis et Paysage #1564 (Folds and Landscapes #1564, all works 2024) suggest vast, oceanic currents. The indigo overpainting of Plis et Paysage #1573 summons to my mind the ebb and flow of tidal pools, while the monumental triptych Flying Back Home #1569 reads like a contour map of a cobalt continent – mountains, valleys, plateaux – seen from on high. Simultaneously meditative and unmooring, each abstract composition jostles and churns with breathtaking tectonic force. – Will Fenstermaker
'The Future Is Present, the Harbinger Is Home' | Prospect.6, New Orleans | 2 November – 2 February
New Orleans’s singularity has always been a blessing and a curse. The ‘City That Care Forgot’, they call it, a sticky nickname now coated with irony. What was once a nod to its easy-going charm is now just as emblematic of the conditions that led to its devastation. In either case, it’s easy to think of New Orleans as being held back by its past. But for curator Miranda Lash and artist Ebony G. Patterson, the artistic co-directors of the sixth Prospect triennial, the opposite is true. This isn’t a city behind the times but ahead of them. – Taylor Dafoe
Main image: Barbara Probst, Exposure #120: Brooklyn, 1177 Flushing Avenue, 11.15.16, 5:06 p.m, 2016, ultrachrome ink on
cotton paper, 1.7 x 1.1 m. Courtesy: the artist
