:reviews
again. Her medium is graphite and geometry;
the effect is pristine and personal. Her solid
graphite columns float an inch or so above
the ground, and are scaled roughly in a 1:1
relationship to the human body. York’s highly
polished pieces recall Donald Judd’s Minimal-
ism in their forms, but are decidedly
Post-Minimalist in their sensibility. The sur-
faces deny entry, like the self-contained
monolith of “2001: A Space Odyssey”
(1968). Still, graphite is organic, as non-threat-
ening as a grade-school pencil. It absorbs and
reflects light; it is warm and cool, compelling
and confounding. To add to the paradoxical
nature of her columns, York skews their
geometry just enough that the viewer may
not realize consciously that something about
them is slightly off. The columns cause a
shiver of vertigo in the viewer. We’re not
quite sure we’re supposed to be feeling this
sensation, but it brings with it a secret, illicit
thrill. Her drawings do something similar:
It feels as if the geometric shapes would,
if they weren’t under glass, float right off
the page.
It’s not enough, however, to describe the
artist’s work here, because another player
has made all the difference. Curator Carolyn
Kastner put this show together with a flaw-
less vision. She used her deep familiarity
with the museum’s galleries, and with the
Santa Fe-based artist’s work, as well as her
encyclopedic understanding of Georgia O’Ke-
effe’s paintings, installing York’s works in the
museum’s main galleries, in dialogue with
O’Keeffe’s. The result is a perfect installation.
Even the museum’s architecture is brought
into play; the softly rounded adobe surfaces
suggested by Richard Gluckman’s renovation
in the late 1990s are reflected in O’Keeffe’s
nearly abstract My Last Door, a painting from
- In turn, York’s Tilted Columnis lit in
such a way that it reflects the blacks, grays,
and whites of O’Keeffe’s painting of her
beloved patio door.
The last gallery belongs to York, and she
shines. In it, the 1915 Suprematist exhibition
“0.10” in St. Petersburg is revived, thanks to
Kastner’s knowledge of art history, and the
installation is effectively Malevichian. Two of
York’s graphite sculptures hang high in the
corners, as Russian icons, and Malevich’s
Black Square, once did. It doesn’t hurt that
York and Kastner know how to work every
angle in the room while deflecting attention
from their own talents and intelligence—the
work is just that good.
—KATHRYN M DAVISSANTA FE
Thomas Roth: “White”
at Tansey Contemporary
We live in a material world, and mixed-media
artist Thomas Roth is a material guy. He’s in-
terested in what happens at the edges of
empiricism, when things fall apart, and cen-
ters cease to hold. His work comments on
the accumulation of objects and items in our
post–industrial lifestyles, and the scale of the
systems of mass production consumed with
producing consumables. Where Warhol gave
people what they wanted in the form of
Marilyn and Elvis, Roth provides a perfectly
warped picnic of plastic products. Some of
the best of the nearly all white works in his
current show are wrought from (spastic)
plastic forks, and sliced Styrofoam cups.
Even during these deeply jaded days there
is something slightly audacious about making
your art out of disposables. Not that every-
body from Duchamp to Tuttle hasn’t already,
but as Roth’s exhibition goes to show, the
fine line between what lands in the landfill,
and what wears well on the wall is exactly
the point.Roth wins the prized golden hot-glue-gun for
his gestural abstractions accomplished in this
largely under-explored medium, and in the
even stickier substance of silicon caulk. In
a signature Rothian turn, the stuff that other
artists use to glue their work together, the
unacknowledged, invisible in-betweens, be-
come both subject and object of his practice.
The large chevron diptych (titled G2 andG3)is an especially excellent example. Moon
craters, rings of Saturn, planetary topogra-
phies, and other interstellar associations orbit
the small square piece G6, composed prima-
rily of the aforementioned sliced Styrofoam
beverage containers. Transformation of mate-
rials, and ultimately, the transformation of our
material culture, are the key concepts for
grasping the significance of Roth’s process.
Like Lee Bontecou, Roth produces work in
an idiosyncratic visual language that is en-
tirely his own. The most radical alteration,
the show’s masterpiece, takes the form of
a large vertical relief, that protrudes nearly
a foot off the wall, composed primarily of
melted plastic picnic forks with an overlay
of plastic sheeting, also subjected to heating,
melting and tearing. Reminiscent of a giant
papery insect nest, or some natural mineralaccretion on a cave wall, the work asks view-
ers to look through the holes and tears in the
overlay to the twisted, nearly unrecognizable
forks within. Evoking a strong sense of
interiority, it affords wonderful moments of
curious exploration and intimate discovery,
which is really what art is all about, after all.
—JON CARVERSALT LAKE CITY
Yoshua Okón: “Oracle”
at Utah MOCA
It is impossible to anticipate what sort of
shelf life a politically inspired piece of art will
have. When Mexico City-based artist Yoshua
Okón visited the border town of Oracle,
Arizona, to ask members of the AZ Border
Defenders to reenact their protest against
the entrance of unaccompanied children into
the US, the story of the Central American mi-
grants was already being nudged aside by
other news items. And by the time his result-
ing video piece “Oracle” opened at the Utah
Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) at
the end of January, the issue had almost
completely faded from collective and journal-
istic memory. Even so, Okón has captured a
fragment of American culture that promises
to retain its relevance for some time.In
Okón’s multi-channel video piece, the protes-
tors are shown walking along a dirt road,
bearing the Stars and Stripes and a “Don’t32 art ltd - March / April 2016“G6,” 2016, Thomas Roth
Mixed media, 18" x 18"
Photo: courtesy Tansey Contemporary“Oracle,” 2015, Yoshua Okón
Video still
Photo: courtesy of the artist. Produced in conjunc-
tion with the Arizona State University Art Museum“Tilted Column,” 2008, Susan York
Solid graphite, 70" x 14" x 15"
Collection of the artist
Photo: InSight Foto Inc. 2016, ©Georgia O’Keeffe Museum