Untitled, 2023, resin, Styrofoam, paper mache, subway tiles, mirror, fabric, mesh, acrylic, and Sumi ink 58” x 41” x 7”, photo courtesy Max Yawney
In Traces and Silences, exhibited at High Noon Gallery in New York, Armita Raafat showcases multimedia sculptures and handmade paper works. By blending elements like the historic Muqarnas from Islamic architecture with subway tiles from her current base in New York, Raafat offers a juxtaposition that liberates and challenges traditional associations of these materials. Here, the artist elaborates on the insights behind this body of work.
Window on Hudson Between Shadow and Light Photo: Jeremy Bullis
Mimi Graminski started her work for Between Shadow and Light with small textile sculptures, using remnants from other projects. She pinned these pieces to the wall and experimented with light to produce pronounced shadows. Graminski was invited to create a new installation for her second exhibition at Window On Hudson. She magnified these small textile sculptures, suspending them using monofilament (fishing line), a method she had previously applied with other materials.
(l) Mona Brody, Getting Answers, 60” x 48”, 2023, and (r) Anne Trauben, a section of the installation, Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky, 2023
PE Pinkman, the chief visual arts curator and executive director of the Watchung Arts Center in New Jersey, notes that two exhibitions — Mona Brody: Portals, Apparitions, and Other Voices and Anne Trauben: Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky — emerged from separate discussions with each artist. For over 45 years, the nonprofit Watchung Arts Center has been a prominent stage, showcasing works from regional artists in New Jersey and New York. Their central mission is to provide visual artists with a platform for engagement, promoting arts education while offering unique exhibition opportunities. At a first glance, both Mona Brody’s paintings and Anne Trauben’s installations appear straightforward. However, Pinkman emphasizes that they reveal deeper layers upon closer inspection. He observes a fascinating contrast: while Brody’s art unveils forms from the shadows, Trauben emphasizes light and shape within a darkened setting.
It consists of nature walks and community interventions in the gallery and various locations throughout the Bay Ridge community from April 15 through June 17, 2023. Art Spiel features a series of interviews related to this project throughout its duration. Kate Dodd, whose library installation will be until after Labor Day, is featured here.
Jonathan Torres is a Puerto Rican artist born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010 and was recently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO. In his paintings and sculptures a sense of otherworldliness and living in the diaspora recur. For over 15 years, Torres’ practice has grown from exploring different emotional and mental stages that have affected the way people interact with each other throughout various stages of life—crisis and anxiety with a bent of dark humor that have been crucial to the development of Torres’ imagery.
Inner Landscapes | Paesaggi Interiori, a video installation by Angelica Bergamini and curated by Alessandro Romanini and Maurizio Marco Tozzi, marks the beginning of a new season of multimedia work at the MuSA museum in Pietrasanta, a city in northern Tuscany, Italy. This installation artfully weaves together a rich tapestry of visual and auditory elements.
Ashley Garrett: Ambrosia, Garrett’s second solo show at SEPTEMBER in Kinderhook, NY, features a body of work she has made over three years—some evolved over years and others more quickly. Garrett has been working on large-scale 94 x 57-inch paintings on canvas since 2019. Garrett says that the weaving of brushstrokes creates a space that changes perspective between up and down, water and air. The gallery space also offers an experience of movement with sight lines through three distinct rooms. In the installation, small paintings on canvas can be seen from each corner of the rooms to the farthest corners of the gallery.
Sanié Bokhari. It’s 11.49 pm here, 2022. 3 x 4 ft. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.
The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, titled “Contact Zone”, will showcase the work of 48 artists at seven locations across New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. The curatorial trio adopted the biennial’s theme from a term coined in 1991 by linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt, which she used to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations.” Katherine Adams, co-curator and an affiliate of EMPAC, explains in a statement how this concept guided their curatorial research: “It allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home.”
In their first joint exhibition, Every Place is Also Another, Mar Ramón Soriano and Paul Mok engage in a compelling exploration of the relationship between manmade and natural materials within the Yi gallery space. The exhibition celebrates the ordinary, featuring concrete, conduits, plants, clay, and canvas that respond to and resist the force of gravity.
Asianish potluck gathering (photo credit: Sara Jimenez, September 22, 2022)
Co-curators Cecile Chong and Sophia Ma are delighted to present “Gathering,” an exhibition that showcases the connections between forty-five Asianish artists and their artwork. Asianish, an informal collective of AAPI artists and art professionals, was established in March 2018 to foster a safe and inclusive environment for a diverse community of Asian identities. Through conversations, artistic expression, and shared meals, the group explores themes such as code-switching in art contexts and the longing for a sense of belonging in their adopted homeland. The exhibition will be held at Tiger Strikes Asteroid–New York (TSA-NY) in Bushwick from June 24 to July 30, 2023, and at FiveMyles in Crown Heights from July 8 to August 13, 2023.
