Terry R. Myers – författare

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Varda Caivano's exhibition The Density of the Actions, February 22–April 19, 2015 at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.The book features texts by Barry Schwabsky, Paula van den Bosch, Terry R. Myers, Peter St John, Georges Perec, and Solveig Øvstebø, as well as 43 color and 6 black and white images of Caivano’s paintings and the Renaissance Society installation.

The first comprehensive study on the work of visionary painter William MonkWilliam Monk is a British-born, New York-based artist known for his enigmatic and vibrant paintings that often investigate the same motif or theme in different permutations. Deeply interested in the idea of creating images that are not a direct transcript of the real world but a product of his mind, Monk creates starkly divisional compositions carrying irregular intensities of detail, line, foreground, and background, pushing his work and the foundational elements of painting to the point where model and subject become two separate entities.

THE MINAJ BOOK is a soft-cover book with 152 pages and writings about and around the American rapper Nicki Minaj. In a new body of work presented in this book, one of Woodpecker’s own folks, Ditte Ejlerskov, investigates feminism and the gaze of the white middle-class pop consumer, with American rapper Nicki Minaj as the focal point. Minaj has climbed to the top of a male-dominated business and, in the artist’s view, critiques sexuality, power relations, racial stereotypes and patriarchal hierarchies through her acts and lyrics. In order to convey a deeper understanding of Minaj’s unconventional feminist methods, THE MINAJ BOOK unpacks the contemporary mainstream through a body of work which appropriates the rapper’s aesthetics and lyrics. The book endeavors to highlight the gap between pop culture’s feminist efforts and an academic feminism. Primarily via the act of painting, Ejlerskov aims to support the rapper in the mission of spelling out, enhancing and superimposing loaded images. She reuses Minaj’s method of challenging race and gender stereotypes. But since the artist is a white European middle-class consumer and not the Afro-American producer of the material, the focus of the show is twisted. As well as exploring elements of Minaj’s logic, Ejlerskov also explores her own consumption, her gaze, her body, her appropriation, and even her own role as an art practitioner.