Triton Mobley’s research-based media art unearths the power relations sedimented in pixels. Juxtaposing intimate imagery of Black and Brown skin with abstract, digital color palettes, his video installations reveal how racial ideology has literally been encoded into digital image-making technology. His work can be situated within a larger effort of artists, scholars, and journalists to expose how racial domination has been baked into technology design. Artists like John Akomfrah, Arthur Jafa, and Bradford Young have commented publicly on the challenges of working in a medium that was not made for them: the first film stocks were not sensitive enough to light to record non-white bodies in the same legible detail as white ones. Scholars like Lorna Roth, Richard Dyer, and Ramon Amaro have shown how the same bias has been reproduced at every major transition in media history. From photochemical film, to magnetic tape, to digital cinema, to machine vision, visual technologies have been designed with white people in mind first and only later modified to picture everyone else—that is, the majority of people. Journalists have recently brought mainstream attention to the issue with stories about facial recognition software that can’t see Black people and iPhones that can’t tell Chinese faces apart. Mobley's media archaeological artworks do more than just reveal and critique this history, however. Experimental in the true sense of the word, they explore whether it would be possible—or desirable—to reengineer visual technologies to adequately image Black life.

Artist and educator Triton Mobley’s first New York exhibition examines how technology often misinterprets race and class. Curated by multidisciplinary artist Melissa Joseph, Keloid Archives repurposes archival materials from the African diaspora into a sprawling glitch in the cultural matrix. The computational animations in Mobley’s Outside the Loop series, for example, purposely conflate Black migration patterns with the spreading of Black Death as a critique of technological anti-Blackness. In this way, Mobley exemplifies the artistic responsibility to resolve systemic disruptions.

Imagine that you wake from surgery, and your doctor hands you a portrait of the gallbladder that was just removed from you. In the photograph, your gallbladder is about to be eaten by a pelican, stacked on tomatoes. It’s a gift, made out to you in swirling calligraphy.
Hundreds of people in the town of St. Marys, Pennsylvania, had something close to this experience. K. C. Joseph, an Indian American surgeon, spent 15 years making surreal art with his patients’ organs, and now, a selection of which are now on view at Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg.

At Soloway, one of the last galleries in Williamsburg, look for Wells Chandler’s show, “HOs in the House.” Chandler has determined that there are four stages of Santa: “You believe in Santa. You don’t believe in Santa. You are Santa.You look like Santa.” Which stage are you at?

I first returned to the body through an interest in cave paintings, or I guess I got interested in cave paintings after I traced myself on canvas to imagine how to make a clothing pattern. When stood upright, the outlines of my body turned into piles of tumbling limbs. I wanted to portray movement, defy gravity, and invite viewers to imagine themselves falling. It’s the view of the body as seen from the inside, looking out at itself. The earth-red and ochre pigments, the portable canvas, my living situation in a tiny space behind Soloway at the time got me relating to our ancestors in caves. Moving from place to place and making paintings because of an innate human need resonates with me.

Saul Chernick’s Enlightened Objects are both physically and perceptively sensible. They are so magnetically tangible that it’s difficult not to touch them, yet they have a transcendental quality that belongs to a different kind of universe. This universe reveals itself through the sculptures’ muddied colors and sand-like material, emanating from the textures, smooth and coarse. Found objects peek through like fragments of real life in a dream.

Artists often curate group shows in their own image. Broken Dishes at Soloway Gallery is a mosaic of a show organized by Nancy Shaver, and follows her own process of making. Like the found pieces of furniture she embellishes with pottery shards and multi-colored yarn, the narrow storefront volume of Soloway becomes an object on which to affix unexpected treasures, by the curator and her two colleagues Pam Cardwell and Tracy Miller, and fill with words (provided by the poet Charity Coleman). Shaver consciously seeks to remove the notion of traditional gallery etiquette and hierarchy: the artists’ works are tangled together—their placement is about concept, not convenience—and while the works share aesthetic affinities, this is not a group show in the typical sense but more of a collaborative presentation.

Nina Katchadourian: I find myself thinking a lot about the “cake-ness” of some of your forms. Similar to the way some cake batter softly but surely transgresses the edges of the pan that initially kept it contained, some of your forms also swell up and threaten to overflow their edges. I think of foods that act that way as having an unpredictable agency of their own. (Flashbacks to a soufflé I made a long time ago that became monstrous, too fluffy for the form that held it.) Do you ever think about your sculptures as something related to food preparation?

Fawn Krieger: My friend Branden Koch calls my studio “The Bakery,” which I love because the studio gets much more interesting to me as a theater space. I’m really into the making-of-making, the irreversibility of a moment, the no-turning back, and the defiant analog-ness of becoming—when stuff transforms into more stuff or totally different stuff. I’m in continuous awe that physical things transform through their interactions with other things.

Despite their brute physical weight, my sculptures appear much lighter than they are. I love handing off a sculpture for someone to hold, and I can see on their face another understanding of the work. This recognition—knowing a thing through our bodies (carrying, tasting, touching…)—is the beginning of revolution.

Resistance is a manifestation of fierce hope. After Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Fawn Krieger took this notion to heart and into her studio, where she began to make a new body of work by pressing fired, underglazed pieces of clay into ceramic, frame-like troughs, filled with wet, often dyed, cement. Four years and 113 sculptures later, Krieger’s “Experiments in Resistance,” 2017–21—a series of ceramics done in vibrant Atomic Age hues (’50s-bathroom pinks, subdued yellows, and Formica greens)—reads like a record of time, tactility, and emotional perspicacity. Arranged in clusters spanning the floor, set upon pedestals and shelves, or directly mounted onto the gallery’s walls, these hanging and freestanding objects—fifty-eight in total here—combine geometric and organic forms in considered yet spontaneous ways. In Experiment in Resistance 70, 2019, among the first pieces one encounters upon entering the exhibition, the dried cement looks chocolaty and malleable, like cookie dough. Squished within it are hollowed rectangles, which contain toylike cubes and cylinders that recall the textures and shapes of childhood, tinged by a subtle forcefulness.

The sculptor Fawn Krieger began conducting what she calls “experiments in resistance” shortly after Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration. Filling clay boxes with a mixture of concrete and epoxy, she slowly pressed in solid clay blocks. Then she let them dry.

In her first solo show in 2010 at Soloway Gallery, New York-based artist Fawn Krieger presented several utilitarian-scale objects made of clay that resembled artifacts. The show’s title —Ruin Value— refers to a concept originating with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s reveries on the ”state of nature.” The idea was then borrowed by Albert Speer, (Adolph Hitler’s architect) who developed the theory that mimicking the ruins of classical antiquity would leave behind aesthetically-pleasing ruins via his architecture. He used this approach for planning the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where it was hoped that his “pre-ruined” architecture would glorify the German national public image. It was a ready-made historicizing for a modern-day society.

Richanda Rhoden’s story ended like many others. Her husband’s work found its way into a permanent collection after his death, following a life full of admirable exhibitions and honors.

Richanda Rhoden, Untitled (Figures in Pink), c. 1985. Oil on canvas in wood artist’s frame. 72 x 50 inches. Courtesy Soloway Gallery.

The kaleidoscopically colored canvases [by Richanda Rhoden] on display at Soloway share the mystical, folkloric leanings of Rufino Tamayo and Marc Chagall, with a compositional undulance all their own.

Richanda Rhoden reportedly painted every day until she died at age 99, but rarely ever was she given the spotlight during her lifetime…

The latest entry in this South Williamsburg gallery’s always interesting lineup is “Several Years Have Passed,” which its curator, Jenny Nichols, named after a title card in Marcel Carné’s World War II-era film “Children of Paradise”…

This exhibition gathers five women who have taken time away from their artistic careers, be it to raise children or care for the “sick and dying,” as the show’s press release states. The word practice suggests a commitment to and constancy in an endeavor that disregards other responsibilities. However, the demands of life can eclipse those of the studio. Curator Jenny Nichols proposes that living fully—through happiness, tragedy, or daily drudgery—is just as essential to art as its actual making…

Start this narrowly focussed but mind-expanding show by the Ukrainian-born New York artist in the back room, where a short video tracks several oversized buttons as they slip in and out of view through slits in a cloth background….

“I enjoy a little bit of perversity,” confesses Nancy Shaver, who has spent her four-decade career avoiding what is comfortable, either for herself—avoiding the risk of complacency with any one visual style—or those around her…

When we were kids, we played a ridiculous but subtly instructive board game called “Chutes and Ladders.” A player’s progress toward the goal, marked by a cartoon drawing of a blue ribbon, was by way of a tedious, back-and-forth path across a checkerboard-like grid…