Deborah Krieger

Velarde tells me that girls are said to mature faster than boys do, and she believes they have to do so in order to deal with the reality of living in patriarchy--of dealing with the terror of sexism, machismo, the specter of male violence against women. The graceful waves and shapes that extend from Velarde's half of the composition to the panel containing her daughter symbolize Velarde's stated desire to protect her young daughter from the horrors of growing up.

While Brand New Old Love is ostensibly a romantic comedy about two friends (Aya Cash, You’re the Worst; and Arturo Castro, Broad City) who fulfill their high-school pledge to marry each other by age thirty (which apparently was a thing in the nineties?), it’s also an honest, unglamorous exploration of what it means to be an adult in the 2010s.

Jenny Hval is writing for the senses, conjuring with almost nauseating accuracy sensations both mundane and extraordinary.

Fall is here, and love is in the air. Or, rather, fake dating is in the air. Where first "To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before" captured the internet’s hearts with a damn cute high-school fake dating story, followed by "Sierra Burgess Is A Loser"’s re-imagining of Cyrano de Bergerac with a side of catfishing, now "Analee, In Real Life," the latest novel by Janelle Milanes, has arrived to give you all the dramatic irony via high-school fake dating you crave.

Leaving behind aggression means entering into more subtle forms of romantic devastation, and it takes genuine work to figure out to how get past the physical boundaries and obfuscation and access the sculpture. The figure leans back easily, resting on one arm, inviting you to sit next to it on the remaining slice of cushion, yet both human-figure and cushion are covered in the same piece of dark fabric, literally connecting them.

It’s very clear that Freyer approached this project as a scholar as well from a filmmaker’s perspective, because in less critical hands, All Things are Photographable would have come across as a fawning appreciation of a Great Man, rather than the bracing and refreshing analysis it is.

The first element you experience in Heather Ujiie’s Terra Incognita is not its neon-bright colors or its variety of textures, but rather, the sound of running water. Echoing in the high-ceilinged Art Gallery at Rowan University, this steady low hum is part of “The Goddess,” a white sculptural fountain placed in the center of the space, as if presiding over the technicolor splendor.

Despite the beauty of the imagery, The Song of Sway Lake is a film that conflates that artsy, impressionistic cinematography with profoundly deep and emotional storytelling, as if one can turn the correlation into a kind of causation. Based on how The Song of Sway Lake is paced, how oddly and draggingly it unfurls, it seems like it would have worked better as a short film.

In a meta way, you could argue that the neatness and propulsion of Paper Year’s narrative mirrors the strength and dissolution of their marriage. Perhaps that’s a formal choice by writer-director Rebecca Adelman, but maybe I’m trying to find a justification for why the film, much like Dan and Franny’s careening marriage, ends up treading water uneasily until the end.

A more conventional biopic would try to tell the whole story of the life of the writer born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, rushing through her exciting and scandalous life until we get Knightley slathered in old-age makeup, Going For That Oscar. (It’s still a movie where French people all have British accents, after all.) But thankfully, director Wash Westmoreland, who co-wrote the script, isn’t trying to be conventional. Instead, he focuses on a narrow window in Colette’s life—her decade-plus marriage to Willy—and shows us how and why she reinvented herself simply as Colette.

Despite the confoundingly warm reception and exaggerated Oscar buzz for Close's performance as an archetype that many women can undoubtedly relate to, The Wife fails on nearly every level as a movie. Bogged down by numerous overly broad performances, a plot so formulaic it might as well as been calcified, a maudlin score, and a total lack of visual sensibility or style, "The Wife" is not the story that the collective (American) female frustration and fury of 2018 deserves in the least.

A prostrate human figure about two-thirds life size is built from cracked and jagged layers of ceramics stitched together with wire. Walking around the sculpture, one notices that the figure's skull has been cracked open and the top of its head is missing entirely; the emptiness inside has been left a burned-out gray-black color. The pose of the figure recalls prayer, but judging by the utter disrepair of the body -- skin sloughing off, the lower body connected to the torso with mean-looking loops of black wire -- prayer has proven not to be enough.

The Incendiaries is less a story than a collection of these impressions and imprinted moments, feeling at times like an exercise in teasing out the most abstracted and poetical way of writing about something, often letting any potential sense of narrative propulsion fall to the wayside. It can be roughly sketched out as boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl joins cult, boy loses girl, its crystallized story beats coming almost like a screenplay. But actually reading it means often stepping back from that twisted, lush prose to remember than the story itself is fairly simple.

There are individually-installed works that shine wonderfully as discrete objects. Jill Krementz’s portrait of Eudora Welty, placed in a corner of the gallery space, is beautiful and haunting. The writer is presented in profile at her desk, almost in silhouette, in front of blindingly bright open windows. While the lack of detail given to Eudora herself might make this image seem remote, a peek at the lower foreground of the photo reveals what appears to be a bed frame and rumpled, pale sheets, as if Krementz is sitting on Welty’s bed with her camera.

The sheer variety of forms and textures on display in The Contour of Feeling is a testament to the artist’s endless creativity. Though wall text explains that von Rydingsvard assembles her sculptures from four-by-four inch cedar planks, it’s a bit of a game to study each work and try to figure out how such simple building blocks combine to such elaborate effect.