Mike Nelson, A Psychic Vacuum, (detail) Mixed media installation, 2007.

Biking through Manhattan in the fall of 2007, I came upon a strange scene on the Lower East Side. It was one of those shuttered, derelict buildings I had passed many times, but that day there was an intriguing opening in its brick facade: a blank door on Delancey Street, through which a trickle of people flowed into an eerie interior. I had unwittingly stumbled into A Psychic Vacuum, an installation by the British artist Mike Nelson. There were no catalogs or placards; no conceptually abstruse artist’s explanations; I wasn’t even sure whether the labyrinth of rooms I found on the other side of that rabbit-hole entrance was intentionally created or merely found, a fully-intact wonderland. Read More »

Spencer Finch, The River That Flows Both Ways, rendering, 2007

Brooklyn-based artist Spencer Finch is a man in search of lost time. Take, for example, his installation West (Sunset in My Motel Room, Monument Valley, January 26, 2007, 5:36-6:06 PM): 9 TVs face a wall, playing films whose composite, haloed reflection reproduces the colors of a sixty-minute sunset viewed from Finch’s hotel room in Monument Valley. Or there’s 2 hours, 2 minutes, 2 seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007), in which 44 fans recreate the gusts and ebbs of wind over at the eponymous pond on March 12 of the same year. Read More »

He’s a thin man: a black sweater, sloping shoulders, an expression somewhere between fear and defiance. In his hands, he holds a board bearing the plaintive words, “God, can I bring my boyfriend to heaven?” He is only one of hundreds of people between the ages of 18 and 24 captured in the new photography book American Youth, put out by New York photography agency Redux Pictures, but he embodies the simultaneous hope and bewilderment, humor and gravity, that characterize the 240 vivid pages of the book. Read More »