On first glance, the saccharine pop imagery, neon colors and DIY aesthetic of Derek Larson’s mixed-media works seem one more contribution to our instant culture. (The giant, freestanding screen with projected animation that he constructed for the PRAVA festival in Washington, D.C., in 2015, for example, became a crowd favorite as a selfie [...]
By Kristina Olson
Like the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in the Coen brothers’ film Raising Arizona, the first Whitney Biennial in the spacious, Renzo Piano-designed building, while impressive, is hard on the little things. Small-scale works like Matt Browning’s collapsible wood grids and Ulrike Müller’s modest, enamel paintings and works on paper [...]
Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh
By Kristina Olson
Roaming this large exhibition of recent drawings was akin to stepping into a life-sized children’s pop-up book. Patricia Bellan-Gillen’s prolific output over the last five years comes in three formats included here: smaller colored pencil and collaged works, painterly large-scale pencil and acrylic [...]
Kristina Olson is associate director of the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University, where she teaches modern and contemporary art, architecture and theory. She has been an exhibition reviewer for Art Papers, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine and the former New Art Examiner. She is a contributor to the [...]
