Brie Ruais: Recording with Clay

In Dialogue with Brie Ruais


“Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land”, installation of exhibition, courtesy The Moody Center for the Arts and albertz benda gallery. Photo by Nash Baker

Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.

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Peter Hopkins: The Art World as a Coral Reef

In Dialogue with SHIM Art Network Founder Peter Hopkins


From The Coral Reef Principle, French artist Alexandra Mas (with Kandi Spindler) Vanitas Nostrum II, real and artificial flowers, wax, perfume, candles, sound, and empty cosmetic containers.

SHIM Art Network is an arts exhibition service network that provides resources to artists, curators, galleries and non profit organizations through their Exhibitor Groups. Peter Hopkins, co-founder and Chief Executive of the organization elaborates on its premise, ongoing activities, and future plans..

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High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery

In Dialogue


Visiting Artists & Critics Series Lecture Reception for Artist + Curator, UCCS GOCA’s Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ent Center for the Arts. Photos: Allison Daniell Moix, Stellar Propeller Studio

High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery in Colorado Springs, features 20 distinct chapters of Lombardi’s career, with artworks spanning nearly five decades. Curated by T. Michael Martin, Director of the Clara M. Eagle Gallery at Murray State University in Kentucky, the exhibition highlights the common thread throughout Lombardi’s work—an interest in blending qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, through experimentation with various media. Lombardi’s life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (1939) at a very young age and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zap Comix in 1968. Curator T. Michael Martin says, “Lombardi’s masterful mix of high and low culture is as current as the day it was created, showing how little the aesthetics of human behavior have changed. In some ways, Lombardi’s distortions are a more truthful look at society than our daily facade of polite policy and political correctness, especially in the way we prompt contention, as Lombardi offers a much-needed change and disruption through his unique sense of humor.”

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Instituting The Re Institute in Millerton

In Dialogue with Henry Klimowicz, founder and director


The Re Institute empty, 2021, photo courtesy of Henry Klimowicz

The Re Institute is an extension of Henry Klimowicz’s studio, a very large 1960s dairy barn outside of Millerton, New York. About 11 years ago sculptor Henry Klimowicz started the gallery as a response to living in the “center of nowhere”, as he puts it. The artist says that the gallery allows him to have extended working relationships with other artists and their work. “I try not to know what a show will be about before it opens and I get to spend the length of the exhibition becoming aware of all of each show’s nuances,” he says about his curatorial process. A normal season at Re Institute includes 4 to 5 shows, which mostly feature 2 to 3 artists showing in the large space upstairs and another person downstairs. “I try to get each artist to have a specific reason for showing in the gallery outside of the possibility of selling work,” he says. This fits his vision of Re Institute as a non-profit institution. It’s important for him that the featured artists will find reasons to use the space uniquely. “There has to be something in the process of showing an artist that brings depth to the artist’s understanding of their own work or the process of exhibiting their work,” he says. These different ways of interacting with each artist have become the most important aspect of the space for him.

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Jeanette Fintz at Carrie Haddad Gallery

In Dialogue with Jeanette Fintz


Installation view

As an abstract artist, Jeanette Fintz has long been interested in the contrast of hard-edged planar geometry (circles, squares, hexagons) existing within an atmospheric field where shapes can float or hold the plane, in a space that appears expansive, transient and increasingly released from the canvas’s edge.Of her newest body of work currently on view through August 1st at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY, she explains “these paintings are about giving structure to something intangible, ephemeral, in-flux or conversely, revealing the dissolving of structure that has been.” The following is the artist in conversation with writer and art critic, Carter Ratcliff, to discuss her influences and process.

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Lisa Pressman and Jim Napierala at Susan Eley Fine Art

In Dialogue with Lisa Pressman


Lisa Pressman, Things That Were Never Said, 2021, Drawing and encaustic, 48” x 38”. Photo courtesy of Lisa Pressman and Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson

The current exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson features Lisa Pressman’s newest encaustic paintings and works on paper. One of the primary series on view in this show is entitled Messages, a recent and ongoing series of mixed media works on various handmade papers. Pressman collects handmade paper, including Japanese Shikishi board, which is edged with gold, as well as Letraset—the rub-on letters employed by graphic designers before the computer era. Onto these unique handmade paper, she employs the press-on letters of the Letraset, as a mark-making tool to create a symbolic language—hieroglyphic and intuitive.

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The Alternative States at Project Gallery V

In Dialogue with Arina Novak


Arina Novak is holding a laptop with the main page of The Alternative States displayed on the screen. Photo courtesy: Robert Oliver

The Alternative States is a virtual exhibition at Project Gallery V on view from May 3 through June 30, 2021. Inspired by a condition of daydreaming, the show explores the alternative states of mind where one finds solace in creative freedom and ethereal fantasies.

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Sue Havens: Cull at Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

In Dialogue with Sue Havens

The artist, photo courtesy of Mikayla Whitmore

The mid-career survey exhibition, Sue Havens: Cull, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art includes the Florida based artist’s paintings and ceramic work since 2016. Curator Jason Lazarus describes the recent “pandemic paintings” as “a compressor, kettle, and prism” of the artist’s work from the past twenty years. Havens outlines her goal most simply as a question: “What is it to search for form?”

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The Location of Serenity at D R O N E

In Dialogue with Gryphon Rue

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The Location of Serenity (installation image, 2021). Photo: Jimi Billingsley

The inaugural group exhibition at D R O N E, a non-profit arts space in Tribeca, brings together four New York-based artists – Elsa Rensaa, Viktor Timofeev, Yasue Maetake and Eddie Natal – who explore recent memory from loss and death to spiritual regrowth. Gryphon Rue, a New York-based artist, composer, and curator, organized the exhibition and sheds some light on its premise. The show closes June 29th, or July 10th, 2021, depending on imminent leasing of the space.

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Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club

In Dialogue with Dee Shapiro

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Installation view

In the group exhibition Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club in New York City the artist Dee Shapiro brings together six contemporary artists who explore content and form of narrative painting ranging from interiors to landscapes, personal to imagined, realistic to fantastic. Featured artists: Jennifer Coates, Laura Karetzky, Judith Linhares, Ernesto Renda, Kyle Staver, and George Towne. The show runs through June 28th.

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