Wu Tsang’s work employs the fruits of creative human exchange as both a subject and a method. Whether engaging with various facets of queer community (Wildness, 2012, and A Day in the Life of Bliss, 2014), or previously unfamiliar subjectivities (The Shape of a Right Statement, 2008, based on a speech by autism rights activist Amanda Baggs), Tsang’s films, performances, and installations make space for reliance and collaboration. Tsang’s latest solo exhibition at New York’s Clifton Benevento is the result of an exchange with Fred Moten, the poet and theorist whose explorations of representation and identity in black avant-garde culture have over the last few years brought him into the art-world fold. The central work of this exchange, Miss Communication and Mr:Re (2014), was initiated as a long-distance communication experiment. Moten and Tsang left each other voicemail messages every day over a two-week period, never actually making contact, but often riffing off of the other’s previous message. The recording of these messages plays over separate speakers, with the two channels laid over each other, making only segments of either party’s monologue distinguishable. Gratifyingly, the transcript reads out on a video screen across the gallery. The typed text allows their two distinct …

Michael E. Smith has left the gallery nearly empty. Entering the space of Clifton Benevento, my first impression was one of absence, in sharp contrast to its location. Finding the show on the sixth floor of a building in the center of New York’s boutique-saturated SoHo commercial district, I could feel my eyes struggling to adjust as if blinded by a sudden transition from light to darkness. For a long time, images of luxury goods lingered like ghosts orienting my experience, as when one of Smith’s untitled works appeared to be looking up towards another, in the same way I had just been looking up at the billboards in the street. The first work (all works 2013), a pair of ostrich eggs, drained, as if for Easter, resembled a set of eyes, staring up and across the empty gallery at a painting hung in the far corner of the room. Composed of rubber, cotton, chicken feathers, and plastic, the painting represents an aspirational image of what the eggs might have been, albeit flattened out and optimized for viewing from a distance. In the same way that the pedestrian stands agape at billboards, which are constructed from advertising images rearranged to sell …