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Installation view. “To Ripple with Water” at The Border Project Space, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist
In unstable and changing times, haunted by a pandemic and conflicts unfolding worldwide, the installation by artist Bel Falleiros creates an introspective space that allows us to pause and reflect on how we relate to ourselves and the environment. Presented at The Border Project Space and curated by Jamie Martinez, “To Ripple with Water” is an invitation to be present, to disconnect from the frantic times we live in, and reconnect to our bodies and to the earth, in a quietly performative experience.
Down and Dirty, recent works by Bonnie Rychlak and Jeanne Silverthorne on view at Duck Creek Arts in East Hampton, NY, is a vaudevillian collection of subtly crafted works that tickle our collective psyche. The narrative of banal objects formed largely from wax and rubber elicits empathy, provokes thought and causes laughter, a complex jumble visually and emotionally. Arranged on the floor in the massive wooden barn, rejecting the hierarchical placement of art on pedestals, the works address a child-sized viewer, or perhaps an imp. They deftly implicate our inner child. The worn wood panels and flooring of the barn are complicit with Rychlak’s and Silverthorne’s works, collaborating to generate an experience in which the “feeling” or “haptic” sense is awakened, enriching the viewing experience. That Down and Dirty also blurs the boundaries between the works of the two artists is gleefully conspiratorial, the word defined here as “to breathe together.” It is a feminist gesture which includes an actual collaborative work titled Grate of Unintentional Consequences.
Farideh Sakhaeifar, You are in the war zone., 2016-17. Gelatine Silver Print, 8 x 10 inches
In her latest solo exhibition at New York’s Trotter&Sholer gallery, Iranian artist Farideh Sakhaeifar invites the viewer to reflect on the human experiences that connect us all. You are in the war zone confronts conflict, war, and social injustice head-on. Presented in partnership with the non-profit arts organization KODA, and curated by Klaudia Ofwona-Draber, the exhibition covers Sakhaeifar’s rich artistic practice, from her performance pieces to her sculptures to her hand and digitally manipulated photographs made over a seven year period. The works in the show underscore the artist’s strong critique of US foreign policy and Western portrayal of war in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as her impactful representations of shared experiences, the subjectivity of the media, and the inevitable distortion of memories and information over time.
Katerina Lanfranco Rose Garden, 2020. Oil paint and mixed media on canvas, 22 x 28”
Art is a refuge both for the viewer and the maker. Katerina Lanfranco’s recent exhibition at Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Nature Poems, offers respite from these strange and unsettling times. The exhibition starts with an exquisite painting titled, Bouquet for You. Its deft placement in the gallery is significant as it presages the story of the entire show in microcosm. Three encapsulated womb-like flower forms grow amid a dense, swirling, chaotic background teeming with what look like sperm cells and luminous spinning orbs. Practically buzzing with a sparkler’s sizzle, this wellspring of life is shot through with skeins of golden paint tracing through and around the orbs. The golden trails recall the rays of golden light falling onto the Virgin in Renaissance Annunciation scenes. Here instead of symbolizing the conception of Christ, Lanfranco suggests the secular, “scientific” conception of the Universe.
“Last Wash at Midnight” at The Border Project Space, installation view courtesy of The Border Project Space, New York
At a time when one would have to work 78 hours at minimum wage to afford a studio apartment in most of the US, the idea of a rusting laundromat provides a fitting theme for an exhibition to reflect the struggles faced by so many in the US. While the show curated by Jamie Martinez evokes layers of meaning, the sagging laundry machine of Chelsea Nader, provides an ethos for the current state of the world grappling with economic stress in a pandemic.
“Popular Jewelry” featuring Arkadiy Ryabin, Johanna Stroebel, Clarissa Hurst, and Ann Treesa Joy, on September 26, 2020, photo credit to Adam Golfer, image courtesy of P.A.D.
The artist-run Project Art Distribution (better known as P.A.D. or @project_art_distribution on Instagram) hosts day-long outdoor exhibitions on versatile packing 72”x80” pads. Set up in Soho, one of New York’s art and retail hubs, the padded surfaces become the metaphorical and physical exhibition space of the usual pristine white cube galleries. Unlike the current Soho rental clientele of luxury brands and gallery spaces, P.A.D. has no walls. Lacking barriers in more than one way, the sidewalk gallery provides the public, the artists, the curators, and the organizational collaborators a welcomed openness to art and discussion. The project creates an ongoing network that ever-expands its community.
Sunset, mixed media on board, 36 x 44 inches, 1990s
My first encounter with the work of the artist Alexander Rutsch was through his daughter, the artist Alexandra Rutsch Brock (Alexi), a friend and one of my fellow co-founders of the London Calling Collective. I visited the Rutsch family home in Pelham where she grew up and where her mother still lives. The home, an eccentric, polymathic cacophony of hand-hewn art and embodied life, reflects my experience of Alexi as a passionate and energetic artist, teacher, and friend. A labyrinthine artist’s house- the type that real estate brokers abhor, is brim-full of paintings, sculptures, built-in furniture, object d’art, hand-tiled stone walls, curved nooks, hallways to a warren of rooms, and Alexander Rutsch’s overflowing attic studio, where the work from this exhibition came. I marvel at the fecundity of imagination a childhood in that house must have fostered. This history makes it a special honor to step back and review the exhibition, Alexander Rutsch, a Pop-Up, at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY, on view March 4-7 and March 11-14. 2021. The exhibition includes paintings on panel, works on paper, sketchbook pages, and whimsical bronze sculptures cast from industrial materials and found objects.
Installation of Patchwork at Transmitter, image courtesy of the gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2021)
The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire speaks on the essential character of dialogue for revolution. Seen as the thread that connects communities to revolutionary ideas and actions, dialogue is a continual process. A continuum revolves visually and semiotically within the walls of Transmitter gallery these days with the new exhibition Patchwork. Time is of central significance as the theme of fragmentation provides illuminative access through each of the three artists in the show, highlighting complex pasts that beget the enormous project of both appreciation and reconciliation via understanding the significance of each layered memory.
Artist, writer, and educator Mercedes Matter’s legacy is a memorable one. Matter studied and worked with many notable artists including Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning during the 1930s and 40s, and then founded the New York Studio School in the tumultuous year of 1964. The Studio School became one of the defining institutions of the New York art scene and delivered high profile artists from that year on. One telling fact is that Leo Castelli and company were habitual goers, and this is still the case today.
Lydia Viscardi’s scintillating multimedia tarpaulins festoon the airy, post-retail environs of Five Points Gallery in Torrington CT. This quaint looking old mill town straight out of middle America may seem an unlikely destination for contemporary visual art, but Viscardi’s new work is worth a trip to the hinterlands. Ostensibly Viscardi’s imagery encompasses the weighty notion of life after death, but I was inspired by their joie de vivre.
