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Self: cutting up definitions of value
Review by Kelly Sheridan "I had assumed craft in a post-industrial, post-colonial society was reduced to the learned skills and techniques for creating aesthetic objects that have domestic function (an artist’s ‘value’ in terms of productivity and capability). In fact, Erika and matt, among many other contemporary artists, use craft to examine the societal issues that result from such conditions. Politically engaged craft-making methods like this are referred to as “craftism”, a term popularized by activist Betsy Greer in 2003. But this concept is seen in practices that even go back to Homer’s ancient epic The Odyssey, which references women weaving messages into fabric when they were silenced or oppressed, using these skills to protest gender-based violence." |
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The Art of Caretaking
by Chenoa Baker "The creative ways that Black mamas, aunties, grandma and ‘em, and fictive kin, navigate and turn a system of scarcity into love and abundance is pure magic. Pittsburgh-based artist Naomi Chambers is one of these women...Inspired by her work, Boston’s Beacon Gallery and I built a micro-residency designed specifically for Chambers, which she is two-thirds of the way through...The residency mobilizes the concepts of marronage and self-sufficiency. As a through-line, Chambers asked questions about how the Boston Black community has been able to thrive and ways that they have created their own sustainable structures." |
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I Was Never There by Armanis Fuentes "Ulcers present a way to think not only about what is at stake in Sardo’s work, but an ulcer is also a potent metaphor for a fundamental challenge in drawing and painting: how does one resolve the tension between the flat surface and the imagined depths? What discomfort arises when the subcutaneous dimension breaks the surface for all to see?" |
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Unclear Sun: Notes on Centa Shumacher’s It is Longing to be Seen
by Dani Lamorte "Bunker Projects showcases Centa Schumacher's latest attempts to dream inside a lens. Having abandoned "the use of the camera as a factual recording device," Centa's photography asks about the slenders and rounds of light delayed and distracted by faults in the lens — a lens formed of 'cast-off glass elements.'" |
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Tits
The Latest from the Hand-Off Series by Vina Nweke "In a space where the erotism of the black femme body is often thrown into despair and denied satisfaction, I wanted to counter narratives that fix this body in a (de)sexed position. This black femme body comes into focus through a series of objectifications where pleasure becomes inextricable from the process of display." |
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The Remembering Room: Impossible Life Cycles
Review by Emma Riva "Sometimes life is boats, and other times it’s bathtubs. But the thing about water is that it’s also in 75% of the human body, so whether we are submerged or afloat, Filippelli shows that even in the deepest moments of isolation we are never truly alone." |
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Notes on 偷偷摸摸 tōutōu mōmō
Workshop facilitated by Elina Zhang for JADED Collective "i’m at the point where my writing has deteriorated because of all the things going around. i’m catching cold trying not to catch up. i can’t be still enough to write the sentence i know comes continuously next. in my box the unboxing happens after. Anne makes things i can touch, things i can sit on, sit like, instead of sit with." |
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The 58th International: Whose America?
Review by Brent Nakamoto "I know it’s nearly over, but please let me tell you how much I hate this year’s Carnegie International... Eventually [the] reliance on historical context over the visual experience begins to feel claustrophobic— like a bad joke, or a recurring nightmare. I keep seeing the same thing, over and over. No matter where you look, all roads lead to 'the geopolitical imprint of the United States since 1945.'" |
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Wanted: a Gay Warhol
Opinion by Dani Lamorte "Specifically, consistently, and despite censorship and harassment, Warhol stayed with his desire for the perfectly-polished face, the Vaseline-smeared lens on life. What's on exhibit at AlUla, then, is all sex, all desire. I don't need to complain that Moore has elided Warhol's sexuality because, in a way, FAME is the most homosexual exhibit he could mount." |
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Anne Chen: Objects and Bootlegs in Diaspora
Studio Visit by Alana Wu "It feels very intimate to have your identity being sold and on display all the time. It’s what people want to take from us. Even if it’s well-meaning with 'representation!' and “'your culture is so important, share it with us!' No, you wanted me to be invisible for so long, and now I’m not comfortable. Part of the whole bootleg, knockoff focus is my discomfort around that. But also, I’m sort of a 'knockoff Chinese person.' I’m fully a real Chinese person, but also a mix of American and Chinese diasporic culture." |
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The Shadowy Brightness of Hot House
Review by Emma Riva "In the sorts of gentrification-washed environments Conrad pushes back against, there’s a sense of objects being removed from their sources. On the mugs, rugs, and wall art of Hot House there are small cracks or pockmarks that show the human element of each work." |
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View from the Hill: Photographers Embrace Pittsburgh's Black Past and Present
Review by Sean Beauford "And I would like to imagine a world in which we see each other fully, and appreciate our beauty. And no matter how many times we encounter or pass by each other, we never stop noticing, and appreciating each other’s presence, even in the moments of departure." |
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Some of Us are Invisible to the Rest of the World
Review of Gavin Benjamin: Break Down and Let It All Out, by Shaheen Qureshi "Benjamin’s work here seems to pinpoint the heartbreak that some Black and Brown citizens, and the immigrants among them, might feel toward their country, or their small town--akin to an unrequited love--and the potentially terrible circumstances of these unreturned efforts." |
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Show Me Something That Isn't For Me
Video by Alice Tirard "As our online spaces become places to live, I hope they will retain some genuine pointlessness and not swap out travel with teleportation for the sake of efficiency. When I walk around online I want to see it full of happenstance, glittering with pebbles and candy wrappers, and getting in the way of my goals." |
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Mooncalf
The Latest from the Hand-Off Series by SJ Powell “Mooncalves are a threat to human life, for they cannot be tamed or domesticated, made into workers or kept as companions. Their milk is toxic, their bones are ash, and their meat is full of worms. The only value is in their corpses — not as trophies or relics — but as the physical proof of death. Mooncalves are without fear.“ |
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Bunker Talks: Armanis Fuentes
In conversation with the Hand-Off Editor Harrison Kinnane Smith Armanis Fuentes is an artist and writer based in Pittsburgh. They are a member of the artist collective Hotbed. In their essay "Tablillas and the Puerto Rican Interior" Fuentes explores diasporic place-making in domestic decoration, and the community resilience engendered in the Puerto Rican architectural tradition. |
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The Distributive Property of the Unknown
Feature on Darkhouse Lighthouse, by Emma Riva "The lighthouse being unmoored from the coastline further added their interest in creating a space that spoke to deeper, speculative, geologic notions of time than our own minutes and hours...Darkhouse Lighthouse is full of small surprises like that, each object with some story or factoid behind it---Troy Hill Art Houses’ distributive property of viewing experience in action." |
Documentation by Tom Little
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Fat.
Review by Dani Lamorte "Soma Grossa doesn't lie to us. There are no hackneyed celebrations of fatness. None of the works on display claim to have somehow unilaterally transcended the societal pressure to be thin, to have found a way to be unabashedly fat in American culture. Instead, several artists mobilize the precise ways that they experience that pressure." |
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Finding the Body on the Grid
Review in absentia by Elina Zhang "The grid repeats throughout the exhibit, like a net that catches you when you fall, or a net that ensnares you like prey. In one mixed media painting, the grid appears to be actual netting, of varying size gaps, resembling the kind citrus fruits are sold in. The netting is overlaid onto the painting, over a checkerboard pattern that is painted. The layers warp the plane, creasing as if in movement." |
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Lord Carcass
Poem by Ed Steck Local poet Ed Steck writes concrete poetry about the Alpha and the Omega, gardens and stones and soil, beginnings and endings, inspired by HEAVY LIGHT by Pittsburgh artist Branden Koch, currently on view at Bunker Projects. |
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Black Butterflies: the South's Mourning and Nostalgia
Review by Sean Beauford "I’m... referring to the loss of a life we once knew. I’m talking about the killing of systems, myths, and relationships. I’m talking about the killing of that which the undead has made alive... I’m talking about when the grim reaper pulls up for us but it doesn’t pull up on us. Instead, it walks with us in its shadow, swinging its scythe to clear a path for our harvest." |
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How AnthroCon Wrecked My Closet
by Mark Zubrovich “When the closet holds you back it can feel like safety, a defense against potential violence. But as it protects you, it suffocates you. I’m reminded of late music producer and trans icon SOPHIE’s track where she asks the listener repeatedly ‘Is It Cold In The Water?’ I did not find out until I jumped.” |
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Surprises of Coral Street
Off South Winebiddle by Eric Anthony Berdis "Johnson's ninjas, smiling, welcome me to escape into the world built in front of me. Time becomes nonlinear as spring flowers are juxtaposed with Halloween-dress witches and a spider's web. “I have a Miss Piggy Costume. Can I join you, Kermit?” I think to myself.” |
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Tabllillas and The Puerto Rican Interior
The Latest from the Hand-Off Series by Armanis Fuentes ""Living in the sweaty turbulence of diaspora turns homemaking into an anxious enterprise. How do we make home away from Home? How is a filial fissure sutured together again? How do we bridge blood and soil and saltwater?" |
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Shrine: An Exhibition that Honors Black Mothers
Review by Vina Nweke "The space is sacred and safe, and actively elevates the various Black m/others and womxn that find themselves amongst the art, making them part of the ritual and adoration that exhibition spotlights." |
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Deep Field Narration
Feature by Jessie Rommelt "In this new series, John Burt Sanders deliberately brings in moments and icons from the past and present — the atomic bomb, the iceberg, the galaxy, the forest. As curator Lexi Bishop puts it, 'It feels like in this body of work, it's about human excesses, but especially in relation to nature and its effects on the natural world.'" |
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PREVIOUSLY ON VIEW
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Eric Anthony Berdis in Conversation with Fred
Interview Eric: I have been thinking of ways to honor these other deaths that have happened… This show was one way of thinking about that, and pulling imagery. I did not want the exhibition just to be about death and dying, and these sad, really hyper-sad spaces. Fred: Almost like Day of the Dead, where it's a celebration in connection with the past and across time. |
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Symmetry of Standing in a Kitchen in Relation to a Witch in the 13th Century (camp songs)
Poetry by Andrew W. Allison "I value intimacy, which means, I’m not trying to trick you. Staring at the wall is my fuckstyle. My love language is I’m in my thirties." |
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You are Standing Here: Gallery Closed in Troy Hill
Feature by Erin Gordon "So how does a gallery stay open-yet-closed? As a current year-long exhibition and conceptual research project, Historic Site and the gallery itself are only intended to be experienced from the outside of the building and its storefront windows; immediately placing the viewer in the position of curious voyeur. This strange amount of distance pushes back against the typical proximity through which we mindfully view art, It also invites its audience to consider ideas of place and its deep historical roots through Gallery Closed’s exterior meditation on what it truly means to be a “historic site.” |
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Constellations of Carcerality in Upstate New York
Review by Shaheen Qureshi “Curator D’Amico juxtaposes three newly commissioned paintings by Scruggs — a 2021 artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects — with works by the famous 19th century painter to underscore the artists’ often opposing expressions of traditional landscape painting. The marked differences in style, gesture, and materiality between Scruggs and Church allow for a re-imagining of the pastoral, idyllic representations of rural spaces common in landscape paintings of the 19th century.” |
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Saturation Fatigue: A Return to Informatic Infancy
An essay in the Information, Intimacy & Immateriality series by Kira Bell “Selfhood can be understood to work like the application Google Maps— it uses so much power because it is constantly trying to assess where it (the individual) falls in relation to everything else (its community, work place, social circles).” |
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Help and Harm: Untangling Care from Violence
A review of You were born good at make die by Sidney Mullis "To help understand their paternal intergenerational trauma, each artwork grapples with how intimacy, care, and nourishment can occur directly alongside violence." |
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Representation: Display and Displacement
An essay in the Information, Intimacy & Immateriality series by Kira Bell “Since the beginning of the 24-hr news cycle, media has infiltrated our experience both in and outside the home; information envelops us like an aspic, simultaneously transparent and grotesque.” |
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You Love the Camera and the Camera Loves You
A review of Lena Chen's Camopticon installation at the Miller ICA by Elina Zhang "As sex workers try to create the conditions under which they can survive, they are perceived as a threat, one that is met with the full force of censorship, violence, and incarceration." |
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Sense and Subjectability
An essay in the Information, Intimacy & Immateriality series by Kira Bell “[There is] a logical fallacy embedded in the structure of language: how can we pretend to exist in a perfectly shared reality when our ways of defining that reality are relative?” |
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Shades of History and Identity
Studio Visit with Craft Fellowship Resident Krystal DiFronzo by Alana Wu "This dough has been a way to talk about nourishment… plant matter, to fire, to food. Dead dough is a code for support and comfort, but it’s dead. It’s not something you can actually eat; it’s a duality." |
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by Kira Bell
“At first glance, a romantic approach to science or a bureaucratic approach to art seem like oxymorons. In these essays, I want to question that assumption and propose instead that multiple forms of representation working in conjunction are necessary to account for multiple forms of understanding — each no less important than another.”
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post mourning: clarity
Essay in the Hand-Off Series by Corrine Jasmin "we can’t be foolish enough to count on forever you see, forever is a concept pinky promises are for kids but isn’t it a little fun to be naive sometimes?" |
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Extrasensory in 35mm
An editorial on Eastern Standard Photo and the future of the Bunker Review by The Editors "I think that it's about showing people that film can have a place in somebody's life, even if it's just to have a pandemic activity. Anybody can go for a walk in the woods by themselves and take pictures. It's a perfect activity." |
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Bunker Talks: Shori Sims in Conversation with Harrison Kinnane Smith
In her essay "In some far off place, I'll wait for you" Cybernature and the Preservation of Space , published in the Bunker Review's Hand-Off series, Sims advocates Black cyber-feminism in the face of late-stage capitalism's disregard of nature. Sims positions nature a historical place of respite and communion for the oppressed, and presents "cybernature" as a the new frontier in anti-capitalist, communal freedom. Watch the virtual conversation with Sims about her essay and how she addresses these themes in her art. |
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Radial Lineage, Pittsburgh Roots
A feature on Silver Eye Center for Photography's "Radial Survey Vol. 2" by Nick Drain "...the artist transports viewers down into the tunnels with these men, where the dust that clouds the air serves as both a specter of the history it represents, and a representation of the continued obfuscation of the history depicted." |
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Alienation, Connection, Hope Within and Beyond Prison Walls
A review of the Brew House Association's exhibition, "Empathy is the Seed, Truth is the Water, Solidarity is the Bloomage" by Sarah Shotland "The curation of the show puts the pieces in dialogue with each other, challenging viewers to make connections between the artists whose work was created in prison, and those whose work was created as an act of solidarity." |
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At The Door: Placemaking and Memory at The Mattress Factory
"Njie conserves the emotion of an event in the auditory and visual matter, in an attempt to salvage it from the obscuring flow of time and from human inattention." |
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Frenetic Labor of Love
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