Author: avantika

Mask

Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs I Want, 2023, performance still, MOCA LA. Image courtesy of WORKSHOP. Oh how I love a mask. How it allows for simultaneity of identities, the power to invoke and evoke. Multiple personas can come to party in one…

Our Heads Unmade and Remade

Jess Perlitz Masks can turn us into beasts, gods, and kings. They propose the fantasy, even if just fleeting, of our being something else. Masking is an act of concealment that makes identity illegible, a transgressive undertaking to seek agency…

Parts, Not Whole

Erik Geschke All images by and courtesy the artist. I find inspiration in the many ways the head is portrayed, both historically and in popular culture. Their depictions are ubiquitous, frequently disembodied, in selfies on social media, emblazoned on money…

construct-de-construct

Karl Burkheimer On a spring morning in 1991 I set up my tripod and attached a well-worn secondhand Nikon fitted with a borrowed motor drive and telephoto lens. Thanks to a friend of a friend, I was well situated to…

A Conversation

Vishwa Shroff with Avantika Bawa “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” – Paul Klee In May 2022, Avantika Bawa and Vishwa Shroff went walking in Basel, Switzerland, home of several well-known Brutalist buildings, as well as…

Sharpen’er Eras’er

Gabriela Jauregui Sharpen’er Just a       Shard Just — Splinter Eras’er Bubble or Stubble Rubble Gabriela Jauregui (b. Mexico city) is a writer, translator and editor. Her first novel Feral is forthcoming from Sexto Piso in Mexico and Spain. She is…

(un)built

Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing. —Gordon Matta-Clark The ubiquitous built environment is the residue of an exuberant, provisional act of cajoling space through the manipulation of matter. This futile praxis of resisting natural forces while…

Ahora: La Isla

Gabriela Jauregui ÂżPorquĂ© hacemos todo esto? ÂżPara vengarnos? No, porque todavĂ­a queremos amar con pasiĂłn. Wajdi Mouawad, Incendios (trad. Humberto PĂ©rez Mortera) O izcatqui in ohtli tictocaz, ihuin tinemiz, y: ihuiin yn otechmozcaltitiaque, in moteciiotzitzihuan, in totecuyoan, in cioapipiltin, in…

Intentional Misregistration

Shara Chwaliszewski Students from the MFA Print Media program and Watershed Center for Fine Art Publishing and Research, PNCA. Photo courtesy of the artist. “I like how the registration kind of goes off here,” Chris Chandler explains, leaning as he…