Alyssa Fanning: A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space

In Dialogue with Alyssa Fanning

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Alyssa Fanning in her studio in northern NJ, 2020. Photo courtesy of Emma Fanning.

A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, features Alyssa Fanning’s elaborate and richly layered graphite and colored pencil drawings on paper, focusing on the duality of strength and fragility of the natural world. The work includes drawings from two related series, created through a process of combining projection, stencil and improvisation. The pieces range in size from 2.75 by 4.75 inches to 16 by 20 inches and within these intimate boundaries, Alyssa Fanning creates intricate worlds which invite you to plunge in. The exhibition opens June 5th with an opening reception June 4th, and runs through July 3rd, 2021.

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Beatrice Scaccia: My Hope Chest at Katonah Museum of Art

In Dialogue with Beatrice Scaccia


Beatrice Scaccia at the KMA, in the spot Gallery with the install of My Hope Chest. Courtesy of Ellen Rachlin. The animation was realized also thank to the Queens Arts Fund Grant.

Beatrice Scaccia’s solo show at The Katonah Museum of Art includes a stop-motion animation and site-specific wall drawings, altogether exploring the links and tensions between tradition and modernity. This body of work by the Italian born and NYC based multi-disciplinary artist has developed based on a furniture item with layered connotations – Hope chests were (and are) used by young women to collect items in anticipation of married life. The show runs through June 27, 2021

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Patricia Miranda + Christopher Kaczmarek: Entering a Material Discourse

In Conversation


PM working on Kaczmarek’s Labyrinth project

Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek are artists and partners living and working in Washington Heights, New York City. Art Spiel prompts served as a catalyst for a dynamic conversation between them which they recorded as a free-flowing dialogue. Here is a short excerpt of what became a much longer free-ranging conversation about art, education, and life as an artist couple.

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Sammy Lee: Remind Me Tomorrow at the Emmanuel Art Gallery

In Dialogue with Sammy Lee


BTS (Beating Tadumi Station), 2014, video projection, immersive installation at BMoCA, photo by Tricia Rubio

Denver-based, Korean American artist Sammy Lee’s solo exhibition at the Emmanuel Art Gallery explores motherhood, domesticity, immigration, and prejudice through installation, artist books, performance art, and sculptures. The artist is using a multitude of textures and mediums that re-contextualizes familiar objects, ritual, and scenes into art. Remind Me Tomorrow opens May 25, during Asian American and Pacific Heritage (AAPI) month to celebrate Asian culture and speak out against the alarming bigotry manifested against Asian people. The exhibition runs through July 15th, 2021.

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Clive Knights: Fragmentary Intimations of Shared Meaning


Clive Knights in his studio, Portland, Oregon, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist

Clive Knights practices architecture and art, in particular mixed media and monotype printmaking. He holds professional architectural design undergraduate and graduate degrees from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, and a Master of Philosophy in Architectural History and Theory from Cambridge University. Clive has taught architecture since 1984 and was a full-time lecturer at Sheffield University for six years before moving to Portland State University in 1995 where he currently resides as a professor and director of the PSU School of Architecture. His primary areas of interest include the cultural meanings of architectural representation understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the revelatory capacity of metaphor in poetic work; and speculations in architectural design studio pedagogy. Publications include many journal articles and book chapters on the theory, history and pedagogy of architecture. 

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Natalie Westbrook: Surface Tension at Freight + Volume

In Dialogue with Natalie Westbrook


Natalie Westbrook in her studio, 2021.Image courtesy the artist. Photography Johannes DeYoung.

The Pittsburgh based painter Natalie Westbrook’s solo show at Freight + Volume in Tribeca features her recent body of bold and highly energetic paintings ranging from monochromes to vivid colors. Jeffrey Grunthaner writes in his essay for the show that Westbrook’s works “confront the limits of what painting makes possible.” The show runs from May 21st to June 26th, 2021.

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Scherezade Garcia: Navigating Histories


Las Meninas and War, from the series Tales of Freedom,1997,Acrylic, charcoal, and ink on camouflage fabric, 58 x 39 inches.

For New York based artist Scherezade Garcia drawing gives rise to visual codes, which lead her to spontaneous compositions and meanings at the same time. Scherezade Garcia loves stories. The books she grew up with still provoke her imagination, words inspire a continuous production of images – “from The Arabian Nights to Greek Mythology, to Hans Christian Andersen to Crusade tragedies, to El Cid, Don Quijote, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, to Alejo Carpentier, Allan Poe, Garcia Marquez to so many others, I cannot imagine life without it,” she says. Through a variety of media, Scherezade Garcia evokes in her artworks the physicality of art making while alluding to layered narratives of history.

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Daughters of Lam at FiveMyles

In Dialogue with Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Rachelle Dang


Rachelle Dang and Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow in front of Dang’s work at the opening of their exhibition Daughters of Lam at Five Myles.

Daughters of Lam at FiveMyles features work by two artists of Chinese descent – one from Jamaica and one from Hawai`i – paying tribute to Wifredo Lam, an artist who drew on an Afro-Cuban and Chinese heritage to create works evoking spirituality and the power of nature. Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Rachelle Dang reflect in their installation work on notions of landscape, history, and myth.

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Tomo Mori: Fibrous Points of Origin


Filling the gap, 2020. 24″x30″. Acrylic, painted canvas fabric on masonite board.

Tomo Mori is a Japanese-born and New York City-based fiber artist who has been focusing on two main bodies of work: wall based collage series and sculptural
installations . In both she is working with used materials like old clothes and linens, fabrics she keeps reusing and transforming into new forms. During this 2021 Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Tomo Mori shares what brought her to art making, what role her cultural background plays in her work, and what are some of her recurrent themes and processes.

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Jennifer Macdonald: We Met in Kaarthijenkia at Sala Projects

In Dialogue with Jennifer Macdonald


Jennifer Macdonald, We Met in Kaarthijenkia installation at Sala Projects, 2021, photo courtesy of Tania Cross

Jennifer Macdonald’s solo inaugural exhibition at Sala Projects features a group of unique cast bronze sculptures, made by using prototypes that are built from textured wax and wax-coated materials such as card stock, pasta, balsa wood.

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