Jennifer Rose Sciarrino
Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
Canadian artist Jennifer Rose Sciarrino (b. 1983) explores the entanglements of various living species through sculpture, video, and installation. Finding inspiration in the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin and Donna Haraway, she is both critical and curious about human intervention in natural processes, imagining a future where human, plant, and animal organisms can come together in varying degrees of cohabitation, communication, and care. The sculptures that feature in a new series titled ‘Buoy’ (2021) reference the various sizes and shapes of yeast cells, which live inside and outside the human body and can be equally beneficial or harmful to human life. Sciarrino carves enlarged ‘cells’ from rock and places them within metal-and-mesh baskets shaped like diatoms (single-cell algae). Humans may try to control other species but boundaries are always porous and other life-forms can never be fully contained.

Wang Ziquan
MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai
Wang Ziquan’s interest lies in the Internet and virtual worlds. In a range of relief works and videos, he explores the threshold between virtuality and reality, between the supposedly distinct online and in real life. For his series ‘Control Interface’ (2021), Wang (b. 1993, Liaoning, China) creates fictional characters using computer software and then digitally deconstructs the figures, disassembling and flattening their bodily parts. The resulting images, with recognizable hands, torsos, arms, et al, are printed onto sheets of aluminum. Affixed on top of the discombobulated figures are transparent pieces of acrylic engraved with wireframes (visual guides that represent the skeletal framework of a website) and bones that correspond to the body parts beneath. In the eye of a computer, the ‘real’ images are not the figures themselves but rather these fractal engravings.

Sable Elyse Smith
JTT, New York City
The New York City-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles) works with photography, neon, text, appropriated imagery, sculpture, and video installation to intertwine ideas surrounding language, violence, and pop culture. A recurring motif in her work is the carceral state: She uses surveillance tape in video work, standard-issue prison furniture in sculptures, and drawing material given to children exposed to the justice system in large-scale two-dimensional works. In a series titled ‘Coloring Books’ (2017–), games like connect-the-dots are paired with clichés about who does and doesn’t belong in a courtroom. Smith manipulates such imagery and texts, pointing to the multitude of injustices inherent in the justice system.

Michael Igwe
Rele Gallery, Lagos and Los Angeles
In his ethereal paintings, Nigerian artist Michael Igwe (b. 1994) aims to capture the essence of human thoughts and beings. Figures are thus rendered in dark, moody colors, often with abstracted faces and bodies. In a recent series, ‘Between Extremes’ (2021), he specifically investigates the way the body mediates across different spaces. Human forms appear in various poses – some even upside down – against fluid backgrounds, seeming to float in nothingness, in a space devoid of any temporal or spatial understanding. He thus proposes time and space as subjective concepts based on one’s own lived experiences, the lack of concrete visual references allowing each to conjure their own understanding thereof.

Emily McDermott is a writer and editor living in Berlin.

Top image: Arturo Kameya, The desert gardeners (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam, New York City.