Soraya Palmer published her debut novel, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, a week before her former professor, Matthew Vollmer, published his sixth book, and first book-length essay: All of Us Together in the End. Both books, as the above title asserts, are about ghosts. To be more specific, they are also about mothers. Even more specifically: mothers who die before their time. And what happens next to everyone they love.
I DANCE ALL THE TIME is a piece that never loses sight of its audience—performers deliver well-timed glances, make jokes about creating, and ask for audience participation. The relationship between spectator and performer is clear and defined.
Orlando (2003) is its own meditation on metamorphosis, and it’s Ruhl’s most direct engagement with gender fluidity. Featuring one performer as Orlando and an ensemble of discernible size to play every other part, Ruhl’s script suggests “as few as three gifted transformational virtuosic actors or as many as you can fit on a stage and pay.”
Like a soldier trained to watch Bikini Atoll through Rembrandt’s eyes, Roy Lichtenstein, arguably art’s greatest humorist, takes us from the ridiculous to the sublime. As an artist who repeatedly swore that his works were purely abstract, devoid of message, Lichtenstein’s work may have been full of mantic allusions and meditations over our civilization’s fragile future.
The twentieth iteration of the international photography biennial contends with our relationship to land. A symbiotic cycle of molding and destruction is present in many of the works. It might be an expectation that this exhibition presents a cry against intensifying climate change, its impacts, and our culpabilities as a human race.