Deborah Krieger
I write about art and culture.
Arts writer/curatorial assistant. Swarthmore/Fulbright Austria alumna. I love museums/galleries/curating/pop culture/fan studies/tv/movies/transmedia/writing. deborahkrieger20@gmail.com.
PROJECTS
popmatters.com
So, Why Does Anyone Like David Sedaris?
When you get on the phone with David Sedaris, naturally you need to have a good icebreaker. Of course, naturally, he manages to disarm you, throwing you off by taking note of how you answer the phone, and how formal and polite your tone is. It's a daunting conversation when you're talking to someone you've read for over a decade; you end up talking about everything you've ever wanted to know, from the big-picture details of how he sees his audience, to whether the painter he refers to as "Broderson" in Calypso was actually called "Bradlington" in When You Are Engulfed in Flames. (It is.)
popmatters.com
Getting Lost in Thought with David Sedaris
The sharpness and exaggerated pettiness of his earliest books are all but gone, replaced with a gentler sort of wryness that, one assumes, comes with the wisdom of middle age and experience. When a David Sedaris story made you feel wistful, it used to be the exception; in Calypso, it's the rule.
theartblog.org
Queer forms on display at Grizzly Grizzly’s “Two Spiders”
In a two-person show like this one there’s a tendency, at least on my end, to compare and contrast: to see how each artist uses their own works, mingled amongst each-other, to create a coherent narrative or satisfying rhythm. With regards to Two Spiders, then, I found that each artist brought something totally different to the table: while Harrod’s sculptures and drawings were cheeky and raunchy in glorious technicolor, Bogia’s large-scale sculpture and three small, deceptively-simple drawings cohesively “queer” the forms depicted in them.
popmatters.com
What Kind of Art Will Hold a Viewer's Attention? 'My Art'
"At once both episodic and strongly narrative-driven in nature, 'My Art,' ultimately, is about the art of performance, and of the possibility of self-(re)invention."
WhiteHot Magazine
Landscapes Get Wonderfully Complicated at NYU's Grey Art Gallery
While the wall text of "Landscapes After Ruskin" nods to the idea of our living in the Anthropocene era, in which the world around us is now largely shaped by human events and actions, the idea of the depiction of a landscape to be seen by others is in and of itself a bit Anthropocene. Even in a photograph, even in the most faithful painting or drawing recreation of anything in the field of vision, there’s always going to be the human impact of the artist’s intent that shapes not only what we see, but the mere fact of how we see it in the first place.
Artillery
David Hartt at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia
In striking meta-moments that consciously call attention to the social uses and connotations of drones, Hartt focuses in on small details, for example, a single cluster of leaves, or a piece of litter. These seconds of footage are the most striking of the entire twenty-plus minutes of video because they present a deliberate tension.
LA Review of Books
Giant Mezuzahs: The Yiddishkeit of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”
As someone who was raised in an upper-middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family, "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is not only speaking my language, but also showing me a cinematic version of my own Jewish New Yorker ancestors.
theartblog.org
The past is present in “Victoriana Reimagined” at Germantown’s Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion
'Victoriana Reimagined,' the new intervention at Germantown’s Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion, is another example of how contemporary art in a decidedly non-contemporary space can not only delight the eye, but also encourage the viewer to think more deeply and critically about the relationship between past and present.
theartblog.org
Layers of narrative in Maria Dumlao’s “History in RGB” at Vox Populi Gallery
The feeling upon entering "History in RGB" is that of walking into some kind of glitch; the violently-bright color posters hanging on the walls combine with the arrangement of plants in the center, faintly simmering under red, green, and blue lights, to invoke a state of heightened anxiety. Aside from ocular discomfort, there are several kinds of intellectual tension at play in this work — the struggle between history and myth-making, the struggle over the role of photography as a truth-telling medium, and, as it turns out, a struggle between the viewer of "History in RGB" and the work itself.
popmatters.com
'How to Stop Time' Is Thoughtful but Thin
Only in a work of fiction or in a history textbook can we see these decades and centuries judged against one another and contextualized through the sweep of history; it's apt, therefore, that Tom feels the need to make history come alive for his students, since he's basically a living textbook. Even if his students can't literally live through the centuries as he has, Tom has seen enough of the world and its incredible seismic shifts to know that understanding history is important, even if to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
BUST
"My Happy Family" Celebrates Women Living For Themselves: BUST Review
There’s no clichéd moment of catharsis in "My Happy Family" in which we see Manana instantly make the decision to leave her family, no shouted declaration of “I’ve had enough!” Rather, we get a portrait of a woman worn away by degrees, like waves carving into a cliffside.
popmatters.com
Paul Goldberg's 'The Château' Is a Farcical Familial Fable for the Trump Era
Goldberg's book is clearly the culmination of some serious thought about what the alarming rise of MAGA-ness means, skillfully deployed in a glib, almost theatrical fictional setting with an undeniably intimate touch.
hafny.org
Photography Exhibition Shows an Unexpected Relationship Between Landscapes, Sculptures, Air Jordans, and Pinball
Christine Elfman’s Even Amaranth, an eerie selection of nature scenes and images of Classical sculpture, plays off Mark Jayson Quines’ companion exhibition NOBODY, which comprises snapshots of people and objects in everyday settings, interwoven with actual examples of these valuable artifacts of daily life: smartphones and Air Jordans sneakers. Despite the vastly different nature, style, and subject matter of Elfman’s and Quines’ practices, Even Amaranth and NOBODY cannily come together to form the two halves of the answer to the question: "what lasts?"
popmatters.com
'The City of Lost Fortunes' and How Writing Goes from the "Goo in a Cocoon" Stage to a Fully-Realized Tale
"The City of Lost Fortunes," as Saturday Night Live's Stefon would say, "has everything": bewitched poker games, trickster gods, sinister vampires, magic powers, elaborate spell-casting rituals, sexual tension, intertwined mythologies, dramatic betrayals, and a good dash of humor, all wrapped up in the mystery of the city of New Orleans.
hyperallergic
A Photography Display Infused with the Scent of Flowers
The combination of photography with scent is a curious, if slightly unsettling one. Photography is still held to have some measure of honesty, or a documentary nature to the images it captures (or, more accurately, creates); yet smell is less objective, since it conjures up memories and associations in immediate, primal, and affective ways.