Download as PDF
View on Cultured Magazine

Our editors have done it again. Summer in the city means exhibitions galore. Works old and new grace New York’s finest spaces and we’ve put together the best of the month.

Woody de Othello at Karma Gallery

I can’t help but think of Louise Bourgeois and her Cells as I peer into one of Woody De Othello’s sculptures where a desktop mirror stands inside a set of closed doors only viewable through the hinged slats. In Bourgeois’ Cell series, her impenetrable rooms play with bodily association of chambers within chambers and the way these structures both house and cage us. It is a kind of visual pun and De Othello’s seems to be too. His show title “To live in hope” certainly bites and encourages us not to take his ceramic praying hands at face value. But who could? They are paired with the imagery of sorrow: broken clocks, barred windows, chains and a sawed off ladder that calls to mind Bunny Roger’s milky-pen colored Columbine props at the Whitney. The effect is like a graveyard or memorial where objects stand in for the ones who couldn’t anymore.