My Embarrassing and Enduring Attraction to Taos, New Mexico

Returning to Taos always feels like returning home, and this desire to belong to a community that continues to grow and gentrify and push my artist friends to the brink of their ability to survive there makes me feel guilty. In my article, I write about this guilt, connected to the history of Western expansion and exploitative modernist art-making in the region.

Rat on Rat: The Offensive Art of Todd Field’s Tár (2022)

Tár creates an infinity mirror effect visually and in its textual content. As I argue, the many reflections or repetitions of words and images throughout the film highlight Tár’s postmodern anxiety regarding pastiche, or, the fear that everything one creates, including one’s self, is a copy of something else. Indeed, Tár and Field, as the film’s maestro, possess this fear as much as Tár the character.

Alicia Ordal’s “Birdsmouth” at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art

I asked Alicia Ordal to view the MCA’s current exhibition, Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15, with me and to tell me more about her piece, “Birdsmouth.”