Art Picks: Activism Through Flowers, and Pop Culture Clips
Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 3:54 AM
2. Flickering screens
In “Rhetoric,” the current show at Aran Cravey, snippets of commercials and sitcoms flicker across the HD TV that Martine Syms, who refers to herself as a conceptual entrepreneur rather than an artist, installed on two poles at the center of the main room. In the adjacent room, Jibade-Khalil Huffman has layered clips from feature films, projecting them on an angled partition and two parts of the longest wall. Novelist-essayist James Baldwin lectures in a film by Marco Braunschweiler in the small back screening room. Only Baldwin’s white silhouette is visible against the pitch-black background. Intellectualism and pop mingle throughout the exhibition, and the screen vacillates between disorienting and seductive.