Art for Let Me Google That For You
Summer reading and where to look after liking an artwork on Instagram
Good morning! Today I’m walking through what happens after you save an artwork on TikTok and Instagram. It’s also my micro-aggression against the algorithm to battle passive consumption of images and information.
A client usually begins with visual interest and will screenshot or DM me an artwork asking for more information. This is just the beginning of engaging with contemporary art before things get juicy.
First, I click the artist’s profile to see what in the world they have sent me. Then, I visit the artist’s website, read their CV, look at the galleries they have shown with, and find the exhibitions that have included their work.
Lastly, I look at their Literature/Publications/Press and read the articles on the CV. Because I do most of my research at night, I don’t have the luxury of calling the galleries and asking them to share more information about the artist’s practice, so I have to rely on what I find online or what I already know from past conversations and research.
The hunt is to find articles that explain the materials, ideas, references, and decisions of the artist’s practice that I can’t glean just from looking at the work. There is only so much you can access visually through Instagram, a PDF, or an online viewing room.
Artists and galleries, I encourage you to include this information on your websites and Instagrams! It’s not enough to accept our digital presence online, we must also optimize it. You’re losing a curious audience that wants to learn and engage but has no idea what a list of residencies means on a CV. Tell us the thesis! Talk about the actual practice behind what we’re seeing online! Explain why you have chosen to invest in, advocate for, and fall in love with these artists. Help me help share your work.
In an effort to show not just tell, below are excerpts from articles I’ve read while researching the artists in this week’s newsletter. Start here, then go forth and find an interview; look for an exhibition review; DM a question to the artist. You will strengthen your eye tenfold, I promise.
Two quick notes before you enjoy the many excerpts below:
Just because a work is listed in a different currency does not mean it’s located abroad
Pay attention to materials today: there are so many interesting ones, including Essie nail polish (!!!)
Full details and pricing of this Ho Jae Kim and 15 other artworks are below the paywall.
Ho Jae Kim in Fondazione Imago Mundi
“His distinctive visual language originates first from his deep fascination for the ethereal perfection of the art of early Renaissance painter Piero Della Francesca. As Ho Jae tells us, being both an artist and a mathematician, Della Francesca perfectly calculated the space in its paintings; everything is positioned in a perfect balance and with a calibrated distance from the other elements to create both a sense of spatial depth and physical, tangible reality, while simultaneously elevating it to another order of cosmic and classical perfection that made his paintings so mysterious and timeless.”
Ragini Bhow in Plaster Magazine
“Raised in Bangalore, India, Ragini Bhow has exhibited across India and Europe. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she paints and sculpts. Bhow incorporates crushed crystals in her paint pigment and works in a deeply meditative state, guided by her intuition and tuned into visions and dreams from her experiences in the Thar desert on the border of Pakistan and India….Loves: Earl Grey, the uncanny, thunderstorms, dunes.”
Raffi Kalenderian in Galerie Magazine
“Raffi Kalenderian’s execution of pattern on pattern and wild, bright-colored leaves is very exciting.”—Beth Rudin DeWoody
Shiyeon Monk in RISD
“Drawing a fantastical structure of the world as well as the figure in an attempt to manifest a weightless reality. I think of my figures as my idols, experiencing the state of freedom that will be forever fictitious to me…To allow myself and others who dream of an escape from the discerning gaze of larger society, I paint with clear intention, refusing to comfort the eye that expects a pleasant presentation of one’s body.”
Cooper Cox in Surface Magazine
"Imagined landscape is where distortion begins. It’s what happens when memory, desire, and intuition start to recombine…The paintings aren’t meant to declare which category they belong to. I want them to hover, recognizable enough to feel grounded, but unstable enough to feel psychological. That instability is where the viewer can enter. If a landscape feels simultaneously familiar and unplaceable, it starts behaving less like a picture of a place and more like a space for projection.”
Karice Mitchell in Autre Magazine
“Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility… While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it… Notably missing are the Players models’ faces- rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer.”
Caroline Zurmely in W Magazine
“At home, in Michigan, she has a collection of more than 1,000 nail polish bottles, most of which are Essie, her brand of choice because it’s available at the average drugstore…For W’s Art Issue, Zurmely captured 10 high jewelry pieces, including a necklace from Graff, a Cartier ring, and Chopard earrings. Her process isn’t totally different from that of traditional painting: She primed her canvases with white nail polish and mixed together shades to match the gems’ colors. But unlike with regular paintings, she applied six to seven layers of topcoat to make the images glossy.”
Josh Cloud in artforum must-see exhibition and Ceramics Now
“[A] series of heavily adorned figurative busts and totemic abstract works built from clay, custom glazes, and found materials. The exhibition continues Cloud's ongoing investigation into the reduced figure, presenting works in which identity is conveyed through adornment, material illusion, and only fragments of faces.” - Gallery Platform LA
Ty Palow in Artwrld
“[P]aintings that merge photography and painting through images transferred onto wood panels and reworked by hand. Depicting flowers, interiors, and found furniture, the works explore memory, nostalgia, and the afterlives of objects. Palow transforms familiar scenes into faded relics, reflecting on beauty, time, and the persistence of cultural taste.”
Anna Rosen in BOMB Magazine
“I was painting the sun a lot, which became a motif I was using for the day and meant happy but also somber. I don’t think I can experience pure optimism, but I can try to approach it and grapple with it. I like to bring opposing moods and spaces together: a deep space with veneer and a crusty surface, which then denies both of those experiences. Both of these things are here, and neither are.”
Tito Terapia in SP-Arte
“This perception of continuity between place and color also runs through the work of Tito Terapia, an artist from São Paulo’s East Zone. ‘I saw that green pigment in Carla Santana’s work and thought: I wanted to find it,’ he says. The desire to find a color, a specific shade of soil, reveals the affective and almost mystical dimension of this search.”
Lyric Shen in Flash Art Magazine
“Shen’s practice primarily involves sculpture and tattoo work, exploring themes of memory, time, and the fragility of life. They use a combination of ancient crafts, like tattooing and handmade ceramics, with modern techniques, such as water transfers, to distort images in ceramic surfaces, reflecting the distortion of memory over time…Following late Wittgensteinian logic, in which language as a system of communication already fails in cleanly transmitting meaning between subjects, Shen seems to lean into this feeling of ambiguity.”
Kemar Keanu Wynter in Hyperallergic
“Each of Wynter’s paintings is displayed from the back, hung without a frame or canvas, an invitation to join the artist in the fog of memory and reverie…Wynter’s talent lies in blending memory, poetry, food, and friendship into a composition that bespeaks this reverence for deep friendship and chosen family. At the same time, the paintings stand on their own, their textures and colors inviting exploration of each detail.”
William Gaucher in The Philly Occasional
“They are painted in somber tones but the handling and imagery don’t read as gloomy. Instead, I had the sense that the darkness indicates density. The central images referred to in the paintings’ titles emerge on the picture plane from the experience of peering through the fog of convention and habit. Gaucher tests the loci of where abstraction totters on figuration.”
Gitte Maria Möller in IMPULSE Magazine
“Her work engages the pop ephemera of millennial culture, evoking the urge to collect Polly Pockets or trade friendship bracelets. In Untitled (Charm) (2024), a corridor tiled with rosettes and medallions invokes Medieval and Early Renaissance geometry while mimicking the labyrinths of contemporary digital space. The result feels distinctly millennial: ancient spiritual practices filtered through pop nostalgia and the aesthetics of New Age consumption, producing a spirituality both enticing and precarious.”
