Weekly Exhibition Reviews 3 Vanessa (Mengqi) Wan A.K. Burns’ A Smeary Spot at PARTICIPAN INC A.K. Burns is a New York-based, multidisciplinary artist employing a vivid combination of sculpture, video and more in an exploration of political attitude, new language, feminist aesthetics, and queer sex. Burn’s most recent solo show A Smeary Spot on view at PARTICIPAN INC, extends the artist’s traditional discussion on body and sexuality, suggests a reorientation of our visions and space outside to
The Dispossessed Following World War I, novels describing utopias gradually decreased in number, until the genre almost went extinct in mid-century, being replaced by dystopias like the famous Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell. Later on, in the mid-seventies, fuelled by the upsurge of social reform that began in the late sixties and continued into the new decade, new utopias graced the scene, the most memorable ones being Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Samuel R. Delany's Triton, and
In his book, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, Tom Moylan highlights Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) along with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) break free from traditional Utopia. Moylan argues that their works are “critical utopias,” depicting the female writers’ awareness “of the dangers of presenting a utopian blueprint, and used their novels to criticize not only the society within which they