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.

Allison Dell

...[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. 

Many thanks to Art Enthusiast Blog

Many Thanks to Art Enthusiast Blog for review and pictures of , Unsolicitied, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery

REVIEW IN ART Ltd.

My work is reviewed by DeWitt Cheng in Art Ltd.

Artforum, the art magazine published in New York City (after a childhood in San Francisco and adolescence in Los Angeles), is accorded ecclesiastical status by many art worlders, despite its history in the 1960s and '70s as the de-facto Ministry of Formalism, a purist doctrine now fallen into disrepute: an undoctrine, almost, in Orwell-speak. Francesca Pastine's sculptural interventions with copies of the magazine for the past four years, then, have a certain sly humor. Notes Pastine: "They were familiar fixtures in my friends' homes, nobody wanted to throw them away. I was intrigued by their square format, particularly when the bloated art market was reflected in their one-inch thickness... Starting with the covers, I cut, bend, manipulate, pull, and dig my way through them, revealing a visceral topography of art trends... My X-acto blade mimics a pencil, subtracting rather than adding... Through physically intervening with these familiar icons of the art establishment, I suffuse the inanimate with emotional power, creating a palpable complexity of form and information." Pastine's intricately cut assemblages resemble, variously, quilts, lava flows, tree fungi, clouds, and kids' pop-up books; some of them, labeled "unsolicited collaborations," name names--of famous, envied cover artists. From May 26 to July 7 at Eleanor Harwood Gallery.