Category: Featured Artist

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I Make My Own Weather at the MAC

Featured Artist
Bonny Leibowitz “I Make My Own Weather”, “Raindrop installation”. photo courtesy Bonny Leibowitz

In her installation-based exhibition titled I Make My Own Weather at the MAC in Dallas, Bonny Leibowitz explores the validity of social constructs and the reliability of acquired or assumed perceptions, implying separateness, otherness and disconnection. Leibowitz’s work utilizes and expounds upon the landscape painting traditions of idealized histories, such as the Hudson River School, Romanticism, and Baroque. The installations act as deconstructed paintings, as though walking through fragments of represented landscapes—a tree root painted epoxy green, an Astro turf tarp in the shape of a pond, a peeling away of a blue sky.

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Sara Jimenez: the rain from dreams or from breaths at Rachel Uffner

Featured Artist
Installation view

Sara Jimenez’s new installation, “the rain from dreams or from breaths,” at Rachel Uffner Gallery is a thought-provoking and multi-sensory experience. Jimenez is known for examining the colonial history of the Philippines, an archipelago of over 7,000 islands in Southeast Asia that was colonized by the Spanish for almost 400 years and then by the United States for another 50 years until after World War 2.

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Bob Seng: Cutting Corners at John Molloy Gallery

Featured Artist
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John Molloy Gallery: installation view “Cutting Corners”

Bob Seng’s collages at John Molloy remake and reimagine the iconic EXIT sign. The artist says that he has chosen these ubiquitous signs for their attitude, a “go out” directive to an alternate space and time, and for their combative red and black elements. Initially he approached these signs as if they were archaeological excavations, selectively removing layers of the red and black paint to reveal what he imagined as “lost” civilizations buried underneath, “possibly a harbinger of our own in future time.”

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Frances Smokowski: Biomorphic Abstraction

Featured Artist

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Welcoming Good Fortune 2012 graphite 24.8 x 28.6 x 0.8 in. Antique frame hand finished by artist

Frances Smokowski’s intricate drawings are currently receiving their NY debut at Cavin-Morris Gallery. EDGEWALKERS: Sacred and Profane presents a dynamic array of contemporary works. Randall Morris and Shari Cavin have gathered a diverse, international group of artists for this rather groundbreaking exhibition. Randall notes the select do not respond in any intentional way to mainstream movements or trends but for sidestepping, ignoring or living in honest unawareness of them. “These artists are not Outsiders,” he explains. “They are vitally connected to this world, whether spiritually, socially, or politically. We look for the place where labels become irrelevant and the work remains urgent, immediate and singular.”

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Holly Wong: Guardian of the Spirits

Featured Artist
Installation views, photo courtesy of Wes Magyar

Holly Wong’s solo exhibition Guardian of the Spirits at the Curfman gallery, Colorado State University at Fort Collins, combines sewn patchwork of silk, organza, other transparent materials, and drawings—to memorialize her mother whom she lost to alcoholism and domestic violence. The text for her show says that the installation is a “prayer for revolt against the limiting notions of beauty and body size.”

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Liz Collins in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Liz Collins in her studio. Photo by Joe Kramm.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Liz Collins whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

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Denise Sfraga: Strange Brew at The Garage Art Center

Featured Artist
Denise Sfraga, installation detail

The work included in Strange Brew, Denise Sfraga’s solo show at the Garage Art Center, explores the life cycle of plants. This fascination with plants has always been at the root of the artist’s creative inspiration. Sfraga, who is based in New York City, says that working in her own garden and experiencing its constant state of flux, gives her the opportunity to witness first hand actual seed germination, leaf and flower growth, the dispersion of the next generation of seeds and the final stages of decay, “an ever evolving landscape of life forms that change color, shape and appearance daily.”

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Gabriela Vainsencher: Epic, Heroic, Ordinary at Asya Geisberg

featured artist
Gabriela Vainsencher with “Epic, Heroic, Ordinary” at Asya Geisberg gallery, March 2023

In her solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery Gabriela Vainsencher exhibits wall hanging porcelain reliefs, referencing the nuts and bolts of motherhood entangled in layers of epic mythological context—Medusa reveals a worried woman with a frying pan and a baby’s pacifier as weapons at hand. The show runs through April 8th, 2023.

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Kahori Kamiya: Long Eclipse at Amos Eno

Featured Artist

Kahori Kamiya, Solo show Long Eclipse Installation view at Amos Eno Gallery

Long Eclipse, Kahori Kamiya’s NY debut solo exhibition currently showing at Amos Eno Gallery, delves into the artist’s deeply personal experience of motherhood, breastfeeding, and the impact of the pandemic. Through paintings and sculptures, Kamiya explores the emotions and challenges of this unique time in her life, while also reflecting on themes of racial discrimination and grief. Her organic shapes run through semi-figurative drawings and painted sculptures, resonating with ancient Japanese spirituality and its relation to nature. The show runs through March 26, 2023.

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Melanie Daniel at Mindy Solomon SHADOW WEAVING

Featured Artist

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Artist in studio, 2022

The oil paintings featured in Shadow Weaving, Melanie Daniel’s second solo show at Mindy Solomon, depict magical landscapes of forests, ponds, and their inhabitants—a moth, a pair of coyotes, a beetle, an occasional mystical spirits. The paintings begin for her as meditations and transform into fleeting environments—both hallucinatory and recognizable. The show runs through March 18th. 2023.

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