Photo Story – Page 4

November 18, 2021November 14, 2021

Jon Bunge’s Presence at the Bonsack Gallery

A group of pine cones on a table

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Installation view, 13.5′ x 10.5′ x 3.5′, 2021

In Jon Bunge’s exhibition, Presence, at the Bonsack Gallery of John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri, 23 sculptures, moving and turning in invisible air currents, appear to float inches above a hardwood floor. Made from the branches of trees, they evoke both a sense of mystery and a clear expression of the universe’s forces. Eight more works are included in a display case outside of the installation.

November 14, 2021November 2, 2022

Ballad of Spread – Michal Gavish at Delaware Contemporary

Art Spiel Photo Story

A room with art on the walls

Description automatically generated with low confidence — Exponential Bloom, 2021

During the past year of the pandemic, Michal Gavish used her background as a scientist to research and draw on the sub-microscopic struggle between viruses and our body. Throughout this year of isolation, she became absorbed with the science and imagery of these biological attackers facing body defenders, the antigens against the antibodies. Imagining each virus from its initial exponential expansion to its final abrupt elimination, she sketches and experiments with color-field displays generated by genetic research. Her visual search incorporates mixed media in which she adopts the color-coded language of molecular modeling that she has learned as a chemist.

November 5, 2021November 2, 2022

Where We Meet Ourselves at Yi Gallery

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing wall, scene, room, indoor

Description automatically generated — Installation view: GJ Kimsunken, Figuration 21. 15, 2021, Oil on canvas; Debra Ramsay, *Twilight & Dawn_ 2_3, Twilight & Dawn 9 3:1, Twilight and Dawn 4_9 3_1*, 2021, Acrylic on cast acrylic

The two-person show Where We Met Ourselves at Yi Gallery’s new space in Brooklyn’s Industry City, features abstract paintings and works on paper by Debra Ramsay and GJ Kimsunken. Both artists share a minimalist sensibility to painting and each of them explores in their own way notions of transcendent spaces through form and color. Although they both use reduced color palettes to create elegant and restrained abstractions which are subtle and luminous, their work is grounded in different traditions.

November 3, 2021November 2, 2022

Jim Condron and Ilse Sørensen Murdock – Toss at Platform Project Space

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing text, indoor, room, scene

Description automatically generated

Installation view, Jim Condron (front), Ilse Sorensen Murdock (back)

At first glance, Jim Condron’s whimsical sculptures and Sørensen Murdock’s landscape paintings are an unexpected match for a two-person exhibition. Yet, in Toss, the current show at Platform Project Space, artist and curator Elizabeth Hazan made it into an engaging duet. The show runs the gamut from landscape paintings on canvas to paintings and sculptures made of scavenged materials, but regardless of the used media, both artists prioritize color, texture, and composition.

October 3, 2021November 2, 2022

Susan Mastrangelo at 490 ATLANTIC

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing text, wall, person, indoor

Description automatically generated — The artist with her work, photo courtesy of Barabara Friedman

Susan Mastrangelo’s five paintings featured in her solo show at 490 ATLANTIC vibrate with vivid and visceral energy, a culmination of the emotional journey she has experienced this past year and a half. The artist says that as she is standing in front of this painting series, she remembers how the fear during COVID prompted her urge to “seize the moment and focus on being present every minute in the creation of each work.”

September 19, 2021November 2, 2022

Remade in Brooklyn by the Birdhouse Gallery

Art Spiel Photo Story

Back in about 2009 friends invited artist Sunny Chapman to a gallery opening in their apartment, a gallery of tiny art in an about 1 x 2 foot rectangular inset in one of their apartment walls. Sunny Chapman loved the idea and wanted to do one in her own apartment too but since they lived close by she thought it would be disrespectful. Yet, the idea of making a tiny gallery was always nagging at her.

September 1, 2021November 2, 2022

Earthscapes: Emerging to a Brighter World: Pamela Casper at Wisner House

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In her solo art exhibition at Reeves-Reed Arboretum, Pamela Casper invites the garden-loving public to reconcile a personal relationship of guardianship that goes beyond admiring nature’s beauty. The artist says that the trajectory of the work in this show follows her own path of transformation—from observing beauty and imagining nature “above ground” to exploring the endless networks hidden below. The show is curated by Executive Director Jackie Kondel and runs through October 31tst, 2021.

July 22, 2021November 2, 2022

I Wish I had a River, The Underground Lobby Garden: Keren Anavy at ZAZ10TS

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing outdoor, road, ground, person

Description automatically generated — The artist in front of the billboards featuring her work, *I Wish I Had a River, The Underground Lobby Garden.*Photo credit:ZAZ10TS

Keren Anavy’s site-specific multi-media installation I Wish I Had a River creates a sense of a painted garden made of paintings, drawings, laser cutouts, sculptures, and video within the confines of the lobby of 10 Times Square. The artist draws on the history, architecture, and ecology associated with her installation site–the center of the bustling garment district; and Art Deco architecture of the building. Moreover, merely 40 years before its completion, New York’s biggest reservoir and supplier of all of Manhattan’s drinking water in the 19th century was decommissioned and torn down one avenue to the East. This relationship between nature, particularly water, functioning as a cultural agent and an important element of consumerism is of particular importance for Anavy, who grew up in a desert region of conflict, where the water resource was scarce. The show is curated by Lauren Powell and runs at ZAZ10TS through August 31, 2021.

July 20, 2021July 22, 2021

Overflowing Skies: Stephanie Eche at High Line Nine

Art Spiel Photo Story

../Downloads/drive-download-20210718T211005Z-001/120%20dpi/Agua-Cielo_Stephanie%20Eche%20.jpg — Agua/Cielo, 2021 Cotton, wool, indigo, wire and steel. Photo by Brian Schutza courtesy of the artist.

“…I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places in time.”

– Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

The undulating asymmetry of Stephanie Eche’s weavings in her solo exhibition Handmade Landscapes: Ocean Meets Sky that ran through July 26th, 2021 at High Line Nine, leaves space for you to interpret. The first work that your eyes encounter, Agua/Cielo, mirrors staring out at an ocean horizon that becomes the air above, a direct embodiment of the show’s title. The loosely woven piece speaks to the cyclical nature of water; its evaporation and transformation into rain that returns it to earth.

June 23, 2021November 2, 2022

Melissa Stern: Stronger than Dirt: A twenty year Retrospective

Art Spiel Photo Story

Stronger than Dirt: Melissa Stern at the Lockwood Gallery, installation shot

Walking into The Lockwood Gallery in Kingston NY one is instantly transported into another Universe. One populated by people and things who clearly are living in a world parallel to ours, but profoundly different. Smiling figures stand tall, grinning at the world, while all the time missing a limb or two. Or having their feet nailed to the ground. Images from vintage magazines merge seamlessly with Melissa Stern’s drawings. Her world is populated with folks who exhibit a stubborn resilience in the face of cosmic obstacles. Hence the exhibition’s title – Stronger Than Dirt.