Saturday, November 17, 2012

REVIEW OF UNSOLICITED AT PENTIMENTI GALLERY

Here is another review in City Paper of my show Unsolicited:


Re-View

We check out the opulent “This is Elsewhere” at Pentimenti Gallery.

...[w]hile not exactly landscape, Tileston’s work undeniably has a spatial, topographic element, and Christine Pfister, who runs Pentimenti, has cleverly paired it with a sister show — “Unsolicited,” Francesca Pastine’s X-Acto dissections of contemporary-art periodical Artforum
Artforum, if you’re not familiar, is kind of like the art-world Vogue, in that its editorial pages of writing and photo spreads are at least matched in number by tons of gorgeous, luxe-y advertisements in brilliant colors. Pastine’s “excavations” take advantage of the magazine’s square format and high-production-value colors: She fans out pages beyond the glossy’s border and razors away some colored layers of pages to reveal others underneath. The thick, cut-paper layers, stacked into topographic masses, are a clear complement to Tileston’s paintings. 
Pastine’s cutaways interact with the magazines’ cover images, which the artist considers a “unsolicited collaboration” between herself, the magazine and the artist featured on the cover. Unlike the found-book interventions of Ishmael Randall Weeks, these works don’t feel like a meditation on geography, architecture, colonization or political space. Rather, Pastine’s altered magazines feel like a fun diorama/valentine to the art world — an externally localized topographic fun-fair that pairs well with Tileston’s introverted universes. 

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