The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

6 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022

COURTESY THE ARTIST / ENTRANCE

transition between mediums and her command

of symbolic excess make for an absorbing and

visually energetic exhibition.—Johanna Fateman

(Derek Eller; through Jan. 5.)

Michelle Rawlings

Frugal applications of pale pigment on very

small linen canvases lend the works in this

Santa Fe painter’s show a furtive air. Portraits

of lithe (and, notably, all white) models in gauzy

floral prints and dotted-swiss gowns—at wed-

dings, on runways, in lush gardens—suggest

aspirational, or even escapist, fantasies. (In

fact, the images are based on fashion shoots

and other contemporary media sources.) These

paintings are complemented, rather enigmati-

cally, by pixelated pastel abstractions. Rawlings

has titled her show after “La Fille aux Cheveux

de Lin” (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”),

by Claude Debussy; perhaps her geometric

compositions are A.I. visualizations of that

piano score. More interesting is a selection of

1

DANCE

New York City Ballet

An eventful winter season is planned, COVID

permitting. Of particular interest is a new

ballet by Justin Peck, the choreographer of

the eye-catching dance sequences that drive

Steven Spielberg’s excellent new version of

“West Side Story.” The ballet is performed in

sneakers and set to Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for

8 Voices,” a mostly a-capella piece. (The vocal

group Roomful of Teeth, for whom the music

was composed, sings live at the ballet’s first

three shows, on Jan. 27 and Jan. 29.) Another

new work, no less intriguing, is the first for

the company by Jamar Roberts, a creator of

powerful dances for Alvin Ailey, where he is

the choreographer-in-residence. Roberts tends

to favor jazz, and his new piece, “Emanon—in

Two Movements” (premièring Feb. 3), is set

to music by the jazz saxophonist and composer

Wayne Shorter. The company is also bringing

back two rarities from the repertory: Jerome

Robbins’s pioneering ballet “Moves,” from 1959,

which is performed in silence, and Balanchine’s

streamlined, one-act “Swan Lake.”—Marina

Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; Jan. 27-Feb. 27.)

American Dance Guild

The New Dance Group is an underappreciated

force in American dance history. Founded in

1932, as an artist collective dedicated to the

struggles of the working class, it lasted into

the nineteen-seventies, in the form of a racially

integrated school and presenting organization

promoting a passionate and progressive mod-

ernism. In 1993, the American Dance Guild

mounted a retrospective concert of eighteen

reconstructed works by the group’s choreog-

raphers, and now, in the program “New Dance

Group: Voices for Change,” it’s putting foot-

age of that show online (on its Web site and

Vimeo) in weekly installments. Some pieces,

such as Donald McKayle’s “Rainbow ’Round

My Shoulder” and Pearl Primus’s “The Negro

Speaks of Rivers,” are still well known. Others,

such as Eve Gentry’s “Tenant of the Street” and

Jane Dudley’s “Time Is Money,” are time-cap-

sule discoveries.—Brian Seibert (americandance-

guild.org/2022-festival; Jan. 31-Feb. 27.)

1

TELEVISION

Landscapers

This HBO miniseries is based on the true story

of Susan and Chris Edwards, an English couple

who, in 2013, were arrested for murdering Su-

san’s parents—and burying the bodies in their

back yard—fifteen years earlier. The show’s

co-creators, Will Sharpe, who directed, and

Ed Sinclair, who wrote the script, fully inte-

grate the breaking of the fourth wall into their

haunting study of marriage, victimhood, and

In 2017, Louis and Jack Shannon opened a gallery, Entrance, in a narrow

basement at 48 Ludlow Street. The brothers, who are native New Yorkers,

were born into the art world—they are the great-grandsons of Marcel Du-

champ and the great-great-grandsons of Henri Matisse—but they weren’t

conventional gallerists. Instead, they were members of the disbanded Luck

You Collective (and Jack is an artist himself ). The two had taken over the

group’s former HQ to show their friends’ work, run an on-site artists’ resi-

dency, and host events, including a cybersecurity workshop with the Free-

dom of the Press Foundation and an intro to feminist bird-watching under

the auspices of the anti-capitalist nonprofit 8-Ball Community. Entrance

has since expanded beyond its underground lair to the street-level storefront

above, where the exceedingly talented figurative painter Hannah Lee is now

making her spellbinding solo début, in a show titled “First Language,” on

view through Jan. 30. The interiors portrayed in seven small works, rendered

on panel in oil and wax, often dwarf the figures inside them (as seen in

“Spa,” pictured above), lending the scenes a haunted, cinematic uncertainty.

Lee’s true subject is intimacy—its tenderness, its discomforts—and the

mysteries of the bodies and the rooms that contain it.—Andrea K. Scott

AT THEGALLERIES

evocations of circa-1900 America, the pastiche
has something churchy about it.—Peter Schjeldahl
(Metropolitan Museum of Art; through March 6.)

Jiha Moon
This Atlanta-based painter and ceramicist, who
was born in South Korea in 1973 and has lived
in the U.S. for two decades, has developed a
strikingly varied vocabulary of forms—elegant,
cute, grotesque, and all of the above. “Stranger
Yellow,” the title of her appealing, clamorous
new show, refers to the color that dominates
the works on view, as well as to racist, xenopho-
bic, and sexualized Asian stereotypes and the
related dynamics of estrangement and assimila-
tion. Her brightly patterned paintings on hanji
(Korean mulberry paper) and her delightfully
perverse glazed sculptures mingle images of ba-
nanas, fortune cookies, and breasts with botan-
ical motifs and fantastic creatures drawn from
Korean folklore, augmented by flowing passages
of abstract brushstrokes. The artist’s seamless

totally inscrutable collages installed between

the paintings—tiny, almost accidental-looking

constellations of what appear to be paint daubs

and scraps of ribbon affixed directly to the wall.

In these distilled, whisper-like, site-specific ges-

tures one detects the show’s weirdly exacting,

hesitant pulse.—J.F. (Chapter NY; through Feb. 5.)