All posts by Nadja Rottner

140 Ruth C. Koelewyn

Artists, , ,

Born Newberry, South Carolina, 1983. BFA, Syracuse University; MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art / Lives in Detroit, Michigan

The observation that an artist’s surroundings influences their work finds new relevance in the delicate geometries, intricate textures, and subtle color variations of Ruth Koelewyn’s restrained abstractions. A key reference for Koelewyn is the sky as it appears framed by architecture. This has given rise to the striking cyan blue monochromes of her ongoing Skyshapes series (2014-present), and the conceptually related Blue Triangles (2014-2015), Blue Crowns (2017), and Can Serrat Skyshapes (2019).

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90 Eli Gold

Artists

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Born Ithaca, New York, 1987 / BS, Skidmore College; MFA, University of Kansas / Lives in Detroit

Eli Gold’s conceptual performances explore the value of labor in art by using the artist’s own body as medium, material, and live-tested instrument. To consider art as a form of labor places emphasis on measures of time and physical effort, and on the demonstration of the processes by which a work of art is made. In addition, Gold’s work exposes how gestures of doing are inextricably intertwined with gestures of feeling, as his practice foregrounds how institutions such as art galleries regulate human behavior. The conceptual approach to performance art in Gold’s work also makes intellectual labor significant, as an a priori plan prefigures each task-based event—whose execution is an ultimately perfunctory affair.

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New writer – Nadja Rottner

Writers

Nadja Rottner is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 2009. She writes in the fields of American and Latin American art after 1945, with an emphasis on the intersections between the visual and the performing arts of music, theater, dance, and film. She has written for journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Modern Drama, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift: Journal of Art History, Artforum International, and others. She is currently at work on a book on the intermedia poetry, performances, sculptures, and films of Claes Oldenburg.