Exhibition Review – Page 19

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March 31, 2022November 2, 2022, by Christopher Stout

Making Sense Without Consensus at Equity

A picture containing wall, indoor

Description automatically generated — The curatorial team held a fascination with exploring and activating the ceiling, corners, and floors of Equity Gallery via the works that comprise *Making Sense Without Consensus*. Here are 2 examples of this; on the left, Linda King Ferguson’s work stretching downward to the floor; and on the right, Diogo Pimentão’s work installed to live and extend around the corner of a gallery wall.

Now on view at Equity Gallery in the Lower East Side is a notable group exhibition, cogently titled Making Sense Without Consensus, with works by 14 remarkable artists and 3 astute curators at the helm. The exhibition statement says that these artists explore reality through fragmented connections and geometric materiality, “investigating whether the linearity of time is real or if past and future overlap.”
In further absorbing what this exhibition might represent, I also want to offer an illuminating quote from The Radicant (2009), an essay by celebrated curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. This thought piece provides context for the development of Making Sense Without Consensus:

“In ordinary language, ‘modernizing’ has come to mean reducing cultural and social reality to Western formats. And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own problematics: an alter modernity …”

March 24, 2022March 24, 2022, by Nina Potischman

Revisiting Pritika Chowdhry’s Feminist and Decolonial Installations Speaking to India’s Partition for Women’s History Month

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Description automatically generated — Pritika Chowdhry. What the Body Remembers, 2008. Paper pulp, mason stains. 6 ft. x 3 ft. x 10 ft. installed dimensions. All photographs courtesy of the artist.

On India’s 75th year anniversary, the horrors of the Partition cannot be forgotten. Yet despite the atrocities committed against women, their experiences are often excluded from discussions of Partition’s impact. In What the Body Remembers and Queering Mother India, artist Pritika Chowdhry pushes back against this historical erasure. Revisiting two of Chowdhry’s installations for women’s history month, one is struck by the sensitivity and delicacy of her work alongside the urgency of her message.

March 10, 2022March 10, 2022, by Maggie Pavao

Not knowing is most intimate at Amos Eno

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, Installation view of *Somewhere Around There,* 2022. Photo courtesy of Maggie Pavao

It is perhaps in this state of “not knowing” that we first encounter the works in artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda’s current solo exhibition Somewhere Around There, on view at the Amos Eno gallery. The exhibition, which presents works from the artist’s KuroKuroShiro series (‘black-black-white’ in Japanese), features dynamic shapes in shaded monochrome that seem to alternately emerge and recede from view. Faced with this shifting visual field, the viewer gradually develops a kind of intimacy with these unknown forms, opening up new possibilities for interpretation and engagement.

March 9, 2022March 9, 2022, by Melissa Stern

KATHY BUTTERLY AT JAMES COHAN GALLERY – COLOR IN FORMING

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Description automatically generated — Installation view

Staring at Kathy Butterly’s ceramic sculptures, I am overwhelmed by an urge to reach out and touch them. The marriage of color and form is perfectly wrought, shapes and colors inextricable yet sharply distinct. I want to trace my finger along that delicate whisper thin band of orange in Between Things, and feel the little bumps along the rim of Luminious Flow. I want to feel the change between matte and gloss surfaces and the weight of the sculpture in my hand.

December 20, 2021December 20, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Drawing a Line at Five Myles

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Description automatically generated — Installation view

A line drawing is a dot that went for a walk,

-Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook

From line drawings and cutouts to wall reliefs and sculptures, lines shift forms throughout the group exhibition Drawing a Line at Five Myles. Curator Klaudia Ofwona Draber says she was inspired by the gallery founder Hanne Tierney’s vision to organize a drawing exhibition. Ofwona Draber’s interest in social justice and post-colonialism guided her choice of artists as well as the theme of the exhibition – drawing a line as an action of drawing boundaries, whether to protect personal boundaries in the quietude of one’s own home, or at the heart of a political conflict. “By drawing a line, we protect ourselves, our families and our communities from the violence and inequalities that are happening around us,” says Ofwona Draber.

December 6, 2021November 2, 2022, by Ágnes Berecz

Remote Work

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Description automatically generated — Kris Grey (NYC) and Barbara Maria Neu (Austria), *Miss(ing),* 2021. Video (runtime: 4 minutes, 8 seconds), performance (15 minutes) and sculptures. Photos: un/mute team

How can artists unmute themselves and make work in creative dialogue with each other while they experience forced solitude at faraway places? How can collaborative practices be reinvented in social isolation? And how can virtual and chance encounters between strangers can lead to the making of jointly authored images and objects? The un/mute project, initiated by EUNIC New York and Undercurrent, the independent exhibition space in DUMBO, was an attempt to probe these questions by inviting 32 artists to work across borders, languages, and media, while sharing the global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic at distant locations, under varied social circumstances, and in cultural contexts.

October 27, 2021October 4, 2021, by Susan Hoffman Fishman

Revisiting HOLOSCENES During the Global Pandemic

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On May 13, 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center in the United Arab Emirates hosted a streaming event consisting of a four-and-a-half-hour filmed version of HOLOSCENES, a durational performance installation that was originally presented there live in November of 2016. The event also included a conversation with Lars Jan, artist, writer and project director, as well as members of his team. HOLOSCENES is comprised of performers going about common, every-day tasks while the aquarium in which they are confined fills and empties with water. Although conceived as a commentary on “states of drowning” – rising seas, melting glaciers, intensifying storms, floods, and their impact on daily life – the project takes on additional meaning as we struggle with our own physical and psychological confinements during the great global quarantine.

September 20, 2021September 20, 2021, by Sophia Ma

Trusting Hands at Andrew Edlin Gallery

One finds a simple common thread between the three exhibitions of women artists in Andrew Edlin Gallery this fall 2021: spiritual internal guidance in the artistic process. The work of German artist and known medium healer Agatha Wojciechowsky (1896-1986), curated by Aurelie Bernard Wortsman, is in Spirits Among Us at the entry and main gallery space, while the work of French artist Margot (b. 1982) is in Margot’s Cosmic Sanctuary at the back gallery. The solo presentation of American artist Karla Knight (b. 1958) was at the recent Independent Art Fair in New York City, which briefly overlapped with these two fall season starters at the gallery. Led by their individual connection to the otherworldly, the artists make work that invites viewers to ponder the source of creation and artistic agency.

August 27, 2021August 31, 2021, by Vittoria Benzine

Generations of Public Artists Converge at Welling Court Mural Project

*Daze and Crash for Welling Court Mural Project. Photo by Joe Iurato*

A few weeks back, an intergenerational group of five iconic NYC graffiti and street artists descended on Welling Court Mural Project (WCMP) in Astoria, Queens. The latest batch of mid-sized murals to grace this otherwise unassuming treasure trove of paint at the intersection of Main Avenue, 30th Avenue, and Welling Court includes Chris “Daze” Ellis, John “CRASH” Matos, JM Rizzi, Queen Andrea, and Joe Iurato, a world-class lineup whose collective come-up eras span the 1970s into the aughts.

August 24, 2021October 4, 2021, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Guzman Revisits Kurt and Courtney

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Description automatically generated — Guzman, *Kurt Cobain In Bed, Los Angeles*, 1992, Archival Ink on Mulberry Paper, 32 x 22 inches

Portraits are collaborations between the sitter and the artist. Sometimes the artist can be overwhelming or patronizing but in most cases the sitter’s vision of how they would like to be seen now and in perpetuity wins out. This is particularly seen in cases of well known personalities. Prime examples are the portraits of Andy Warhol exposing his scars after being shot to both Alice Neel and Richard Avedon. In these vastly different images Warhol clearly wanted the world to know what had been perpetrated against him and how his suffering lingered. When the portraits are images of celebrities, particularly those in the last few decades, the public has a strange sense of possession, teetering on full-blown obsession. The success of the portrait hinges on several factors from the artist including generosity, intelligence, empathy, skill, and creative facility. Fortunately this is what is on exhibition at LABspace in Hillsdale NY, Kurt and Courtney, by collaborative photography duo Guzman. Guzman is made up of Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock. In their 30+ years of photography they have solidified a reputation across all genres from conceptual and documentary work to bringing cool, enlightened, humanizing aesthetics to the commercial worlds of fashion, advertising, and celebrity portraits. As summed up in a recent discussion about their work, Constance Hansen said the intent is not to make a mean photo, but a photo that embraces the person.