Exhibition Review – Page 22

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February 11, 2021November 2, 2022, by Adam Aslan

The Process of Weaving the Intentionally Fragmented at Transmitter

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.

February 8, 2021February 26, 2021, by Sarah Corona

Mercedes Matter Awards Show at Margalit Startup City

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.

September 9, 2020September 9, 2020, by Eliot Markell

Here and Hereafter – Lydia Viscardi at Five Points Gallery

Lydia Viscardi, *Maybe Hereafter, detail, photo courtesy Jeanne Tremel*

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.

September 2, 2020September 2, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

artists-X-change – Artists Helping Artists

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.

July 9, 2020August 31, 2020, by Nina Mdivani

Confronting History through Herstory

ecofeminism(s) at Thomas Erben Gallery

Installation view of ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska, left to right: Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, and Jessica Segall. Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June/July 2020 (photos: Andreas Vesterlund).

The exhibition ecofeminism(s), on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from June 19th to July 24th, will reopen Tuesday, September 8th through Saturday, September 26th, 2020. Curator Monika Fabijanska brings together works of sixteen artists in graceful, yet dense and thoughtful way as a museum show would. Albeit in the gallery consistently staging pivotal and sophisticated exhibitions,including among many others shows of Senga Nengudi, Dona Nelson, Painting Forward and Looped and Layered – Contemporary Art from Tehran.

June 1, 2020May 26, 2020, by Steven Pestana

Rachel MacFarlane’s Paradise at Super Dutchess Gallery

A picture containing indoor, chair, table, computer

Description automatically generated — Rachel MacFarlane | *Beacon* | Single-channel video | 32” (Animation still) | 2020

I haven’t seen Rachel MacFarlane’s painting Sliver (2020). It would be reasonable to assume that I had, because Sliver is the centerpiece of Paradise, the show that this review is about. In fact, Sliver is the only painting in Paradise.

March 2, 2020May 30, 2020, by Riad Miah

Museum as Muse at the Flatiron Project Space

*Museum as Muse, Installation, Image courtesy of Leigh Behnke*

A favorite experience of mine is to visit the Metropolitan Museum without a show or work of art in mind to see. I enjoy wondering the galleries until I come across something I had not noticed before and then spend the time looking and analyzing the work. This experience is likened to one I have recently had at “Museum as Muse”, a show curated by Leigh Behnke, consisting of works by the artist herself, Joe Fig and Peter Hristoff. The show is not at a sprawling Chelsea gallery or at a small, but relevant Lower East Side venue. It is tucked away within the confines of an academic institution, School of Visual Art, located on 21^st Street in the SVA Flatiron Gallery Project Space. As the title suggests, all three artists have used the museum in some capacity as a starting point for their work.

February 29, 2020February 13, 2020, by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Magdalena Dukiewicz at Stand4 – In Every Dream Home a Heartache

*In every dream home a heartache, installation view. Photo courtesy of the Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen*

A former medical office located in the heart of Bayridge Brooklyn, hosts Magdalena Dukiewicz solo exhibition “In Every Dream Home a Heartache“, a visual, physical and poetical exercise in which the artist revisits particular objects and memories from her childhood in Poland to explore an idea of “home” that has been inoculated in her mind from an early age. For Dukiewicz, the thought of a home brings a cumulus of anxieties related to social expectations, which calls into question the preconceived ideas of how things are supposed to be in life: motherhood, marriage, work, living in a place other than your birthplace, fulfilling certain obligations.

February 27, 2020May 30, 2020, by Peiyue Wu

Controlled Entropy, Taher Jaoui at 81 Leonard Gallery

*Taher Jaoui: Controlled Entropy installation view, photograph by Hannah Rozelle, photo courtesy of the artist*

One might find Taher Jaoui introverted the moment meeting him. It might be less about an aloof temperament commonly found in an artist than a reserved and prudent character often associated with a science person. The way in which Jaoui’s artworks act out follows a similar interpersonal pattern. Those scratchy mathematics signs and formulas are the most prominent elements of the new series of monochrome paintings featured in Taher’s current solo exhibition Controlled Entropy at 81 Leonard Gallery, co-hosted by Uncommon Beauty Gallery. The juxtaposition of the handwritings of mathematical formulas and the gestural brushwork in an abstract expressionist manner not only prompts questions about Jaoui’s background, but also problematizes the hostile split between art and mathematics. Reminding viewers of a lecturer running a mathematical calculation across the blackboard with chalk, this series of paintings highlights the performative elements in mathematics, as well as the craft aspects of labor invested in this intellectual activity.

February 21, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Surface and Sky: Jeffrey Morabito at SFA Projects

Jeffrey Morabito’s show “Birds and Flowers, Vases and Windows” is beautiful and lush and draws you in. There are vibrant colors and wandering lines, rich passages that feel like small works unto themselves–secret gardens waiting to be discovered within each larger piece. But if there are elements that delight the eye, there are ideas that tease the mind. For running through his art and practice is a sense of duality and contradiction where opposites collide and play, posing gentle questions as they merge into new concepts and forms.