For this portfolio, guest curator Lauren Cornell has chosen the work of two young artists who began showing around a decade ago in San Francisco. Both work most often in two dimensions, mainly on paper, and both make use of what could be called “found traditions”: modernist design and typography for Tauba Auerbach, Victorian realism for Colter Jacobsen.
For her Shatter series Tauba lays down a panel and then, over that, a sheet of glass and then, over that, a sheet of cardboard. Then she shatters the glass in one blow, removes the cardboard and, lifting each shard one by one, she fills each space, with either black-and-white or color. She establishes a system, but then what is unleashed is spontaneous and chaotic. Each piece is produced by the frisson between chance and order.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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