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.
