Spiritual World at RAINRAIN

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Installation view, photo courtesy of the gallery

Spiritual World, the title of the current group show at RAINRAIN, references Alfred Stieglitz’s Spiritual America, a 1923 photograph of a harnessed, castrated horse. The powerless restrained stallion—a traditional American symbol of unstoppable prowess—symbolized for Stieglitz the loss of spirituality in his contemporary American culture. The organizer of Spiritual World, Theodor Nymark, a Copenhagen-based artist who also shows work in it, brought together seven artists from Denmark, Korea, and the USA to explore how spirituality can exist today outside conservative religious ideals and ultra-liberal new-age paganism. In a text for the show, Nymark specifies further how he sees spirituality—”like a multifaceted metaphor, many-sided, a prism with no central outpost, only imagination. Not just a lake, a mirror. Not just a car, a vehicle.” These notions reflect the overall premise of this show.

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All Tomorrow’s Parties: M. David & Co. at Art Cake

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A room with art on the wall

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Installation view

Lou Reed’s song All Tomorrow’s Parties, featured on the Velvet Underground & Nico’s debut studio album, was allegedly inspired by the musician’s observation of Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory,’ an epicenter where camp, craze, and creativity flowed in abundance. With a tangible sense of energetic exploration, M. David & Co.’s mega-scale group show at Art Cake echoes this creative exchange by articulating the dynamic intergenerational connections between emerging and established artists across media.

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Passing through Thin Places with Sun Young Kang

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A person standing behind a curtain

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Sun Young Kang, Memories, Veiled installation view

If I could only choose one word to describe Sun Young Kang’s works, it would be inversion. Inversions are defined as the state of being reversed in position, changed to the contrary, or turned upside down, inside out, or inward. Experiencing Kang’s work does just that – it changes me to the contrary, beckons me to reorient from the inside out, and turns my receptors inward.

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Michal Gavish: Neuro Land at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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Synapsing 2023, mixed media on translucent architectural paper 76-82” H X 200” W (5 panels)

In planning her new exhibition at the AAAS gallery, artist Michal Gavish envisioned painted images of neurons enveloping the spiral-shaped gallery space, extending upward, downward, along, and away from the walls. Following an extensive phase of research and creation, spurred by personal family tragedies, Gavish created Neuro Land, a field guide to neurons. She devoted a piece to representing each type, painting a set of larger-than-life nerve cells images on fabric and paper. Gavish later assembled these pieces layer by layer, echoing the scientific method used in constructing representations of the unseen—similar to how MRI technology captures internal snapshots in segments and reconstructs them in three dimensions. While engaging with this invisible realm, Gavish reflected on her former practice as a scientist, interrogating the expansive vistas revealed through IR, X-ray spectra, or under the electron microscope.

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Travelers, Liars, Thieves at Garrison

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A group of white bears statues

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David Packer, Bears that Dance, ceramic with glaze, each 12” high approx, 2024

The three-person show Travelers, Liars, Thieves at Garrison presents the work of artists Margaret Lanzetta, David Packer, and Niki Lederer, who also curated the exhibition. Margaret Lanzetta’s paintings, crafted with acrylic on satin, cotton bedsheets, and sari fabric, explore the fusion of decorative traditions from various cultures, reflecting interconnectedness between cultural and political narratives. Niki Lederer’s artwork, made from repurposed discarded materials such as umbrella canopies and nylon threads, highlights environmental concerns. David Packer’s bear sculptures serve as a metaphor for personal, economic, and political upheavals. Collectively, the three artists re-imagine the world with united boundaries, new environmentalism, and migrating identities.

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Monika Drożyńska: Resistance Embroiderer

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Latte Capitalizm, hand embroidery on cotton, 8×14 inch

Polish artist Monika Drożyńska brings her resistance embroidery to a New York audience in a solo show at Open Source Gallery and her Urban Embroidery project. The connections she makes with words within many different languages are a dexterous game of text and symbols on fabric, an adept study of transformative change for a better world. Polish curator Bartek Remisko, speaking about the work, said, “Embroidery can be about threads that bring us together to create social change.” Remisko’s insight speaks to Drożyńska’s focus on embroidery techniques in contemporary art and textiles in public spaces to further the collective conversation and play with conventional expectations.

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The Golden Thread – BravinLee Offsite at The Seaport

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A colorful piece of art on a brick wall

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Christopher Myers Ghezo’s Throne, 2021 Appliqué textile, 72 x 48 inches

BravinLee Projects has just launched an audacious, big, and bold exhibition of 60 contemporary artists working in textile or textile-related mediums. It’s a massive show in an unlikely pop-up space. A five-story historic brick warehouse building in the Seaport that is anything but the cool, clean white box gallery that we are used to. The walk-up gallery space has vintage wide planked flooring, old fireplaces, and deeply aged brick walls. Though it must have been a challenge to curate in the space and even more of a challenge to install, the result is a fascinating presentation of artists working in a wide range of materials and styles.

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This Bitter Earth: Deborah Wasserman at Kuma Lisa

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Deborah Wasserman, Rubble, 2021, ink and acrylic on paper, 28″ x35.5″

Rubble, mutated crop fields, floods, scorched earth, and occasional female figures floating or submerged unfold throughout the sixteen landscape paintings in Deborah Wasserman’s current solo show, The Bitter Earth at Kuma Lisa. Though the paintings differ in scale and media—from small acrylic and oil on panels to larger acrylic, oil, and stained clothes on canvas to medium-sized works on paper—they all share the sense of a world where multiple perspectives from different vantage points co-exist. Wasserman’s energetic strokes and searching lines create a rhythmic movement upward, downward, and sideways—reminiscent of the fluidity in Chinese and Japanese calligraphic scroll paintings and the clear, directional lines of a hand-drawn map. These linear dynamos intertwine with a palette of earthy tones, greens, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, and pure blacks, creating multiple vignettes within a layered landscape.

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