Contemporary Art and Culture
Soon after the Corona pandemic hit NYC, a resourceful and talented group of NY based artists came together to create an informal collective called artists-X-change (aXc) with the aim to alleviate the growing distress that both artists and art organizations have been facing. They were united by a sense of urgency — the severity of the situation coupled with the need to help others in their community.
Continue reading “artists-X-change – Artists Helping Artists”In Dialogue with Fay Ku
For Taiwanese born artist, Fay Ku, the single, most formative event in life was immigrating to the United States. Ku says that if she had stayed in Taiwan, she would never have become an artist so she would have been a completely different person. It still surprises her how much this one event which she was too young to remember (though of course remembering all its aftershocks), shapes her work, often without her being consciously aware of the themes and issues at the time of making the work. Fay Ku shares some insights on her body of work in Domestic Brutes, the all women group show at the Pelham Art Center which engages the visitor with diverse approaches of what feminism means in American society today.
Continue reading “Fay Ku in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center”
Jacqueline Shatz‘s ceramic based wall sculptures depict biomorphic forms, mostly referring to animals and humans as a single entity. An abstracted silhouette of an agile swimmer, a whimsical hybrid of horse and baby snake, a queen’s bent head fully covered by flowing hair spilling downward – each evokes a mystery associated with ancient civilizations, archetypes, and mythologies or what the artist describes as “states of being and permeable nature of time.” Jacqueline Shatz shares with Art Spiel some thoughts on her work and work process.
Continue reading “Jacqueline Shatz – Overcoming Gravity”
Will Hutnick is an artist, curator, co-director of Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn from 2015 to 2020 and Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project upstate NY. In his paintings Will Hutnick is using rollers, and includes other mono-printing-like methods to create repetitive passages which form playful and unexpected relationships between shapes and colors. He shares with Art Spiel some of his work process, reflections on the ways his paintings have developed, and some of his other art related practices.
Continue reading “Will Hutnick – Artist as Facilitator”In Dialogue with Jana Astanov
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, a poet and an independent curator born in Poland, and living in the US. She is a founder of CREATRIX Magazine, portal for creative expression focused on art, activism and spiritual practice. Her work includes photography, poetry, performance art, sound art, and installation. In her work, she utilizes spiritual traditions, somatic movement, sound art, ritualistic theatre and Astrofeminism, a term she has developed through her character Yannanda The One Who Speaks With The Stars. Together with her partner Niko van Egten she co-created an electronic music group ASTRALOOP featuring her poetry in dark electronic arrangements. She has performed at Tate Modern, Smack Mellon Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Venice Biennale, Documenta 2017, and many other galleries, festivals and independent venues worldwide. She is also the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox. In this interview for Art Spiel Jana Astanov discusses her ideas on performance art and specifically on her most recent upcoming curatorial project ALEMBIC: Body and Spirit. Live Art as Healing Art.
Continue reading “ALEMBIC: Body and Spirit. Live Art as Healing Art”
Noa Charuvi’s paintings convey a distinct sense of place where narratives of the present interrupt those of the past with urgency, sometimes even violence . Yet, her places encapsulate past and present not only as a rupture but also as an ongoing flow of coinciding contradictory forces – ruin and construction, anarchy and order. No matter if the painting depicts an interior of a room or an exterior of a construction site, it frequently portrays a place that is devoid of human figures but charged with the aftermath of human actions. Even if human figures are present, they are typically placed in context of their larger environment, players in a powerful and mysterious systemic forces of history, city, society. Noa Charuvi shares with Art Spiel some insights on her ideas, work, and process.
Continue reading “Noa Charuvi - Suspended on Site”
Malaysian born and New York based artist Padma Rajendran works in diverse media yet currently views paper and fabric as her primary materials. She highlights the portable nature of paper and fabric, along with their significance as “keepers of culture, comfort, and call upon the function of the decorative”. Padma Rajendran shares here some insight on her work, what brought her there and where she is heading from here.
Continue reading “Padma Rajendran – On Cultural Tenderness”
Meg Atkinson‘s paintings resemble puzzles open to multiple solutions. Her imagery is embedded with associative literary and visual layers, as clues to an open-ended riddle. Meg Atkinson shares with Art Spiel what brought her to art, as well as the way she has developed her approach to mark-making, space, gird, and color.
Continue reading “Meg Atkinson – Painting as a Leap of Faith”
Gabriel J. Shuldiner dislikes categorization of his work to the point that he invents new “isms” to describe its allusive hybridity – its DNA can be traced to abstraction with elements of minimalism, expressionism, and Arte Povera. While Shuldiner’s use of material is extensive , his use of color is restricted to mostly black, with tinges of other colors at times. Gabriel J. Shuldiner shares with Art Spiel some of his thought and work processes.
Continue reading “Gabriel J. Shuldiner – Hybridsculptural Bruteminimalism”In Dialogue with Curator Jac Lahav
Now that many cultural institutions are still closed and we get much of our visual information from social media, artist and curator Jac Lahav has launched the provocative group show Instagram’s Shaodw exploring through the stories of 17 artists how their artwork is being censored on social media and how they are fighting back. The show started in June 1st and will be online through August 31st, then it will go live on the website as an archived history. It includes work by Betty Tompkins, Christen Clifford, Chiara No, Clarity Haynes, Joanne Leah, Raw Meat Collective (Kyle Quinn), Karlheinz Weinberger, Kumasi Barnett, Lissa Rivera, Leah Schrager, Michael X Rose, Micol Hebron, Peter Clough, Shona McAndrew, Steve Lock (Bill Arning), Sara Jimenez, and Tiffany Saint Bunny. Jac Lahav discusses here why he sees this group show as particularly timely and shares the background for some of the work.
Continue reading “Instagram’s Shadow”