Contemporary Art and Culture
Sue McNally lives and works in Rhode Island and when life permits, as she puts it, in rural southeast Utah. Her landscape paintings and her self portraits encompass everything in between — the views of nature she has encountered, and her shifting states of being. Sue McNally reflects on her art making and shares ideas on her new body of work.
Continue reading “Sue McNally: Learning how to Find”
Jessica Lagunas is Interested in working with unconventional materials—makeup, hair, perfume, organic materials—through video-performance, installation, drawing, prints, artist books, embroidery, and recently, weaving. She is a New York City-based Latinx artist, whose group exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio’s The (S) Files Biennial, The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and Laxart, among others.
Continue reading “Jessica Lagunas: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center”
In his stop-motion animation and mixed media installations the Brooklyn based artist Brian Zegeer creates fantastic landscapes which draw on his domestic family life, dissecting what is the meaning of identity – body as an organism, cultural heritage of childhood in Appalachia with Lebanese roots –altogether fuse into a mysterious and complex system where the viewer is prompted to get immersed.
Continue reading “Brian Zegeer: Porous Identities”In Dialogue with Mira Dayal
In her inaugural solo exhibition with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal has rubbed by hand the entire gallery floor in graphite, resulting in a map of the space’s topography – all lines and no borders. Drawing on Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, the show explores notions of scale, control, ethics, materiality, and simulation. The show runs through April 4th, 2021.
Continue reading “Mira Dayal: In that Empire at Spencer Brownstone Gallery”In Dialogue with Paula Burleigh
The three person show Performance Anxiety at the Allegheny Art Galleries in PA features videos, paintings, and sculptures by Eric D. Charlton, Taha Heydari, and Wednesday Kim, who all respond in their work to the intense digital terrains most of us inhabit, exploring how the intrapersonal and interpersonal elements interplay— how self-image is being manifested and how does it affect communication with others in an ever-shifting social media landscape? Paula Burleigh, the curator of the show and the gallery director, elaborates on the premise of the exhibition, the artists’ artwork, and her curatorial process.
Continue reading “Performance Anxiety at Allegheny College Art Galleries”In Dialogue with Holly Wong
Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:
“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”
Continue reading “Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary”In Dialogue with Laura Mega
Laura Mega is an Italian visual artist based in Rome and New York. As everything around her in Rome became sad and empty when Europe was hit by Covid-19, she felt the need to connect with the outside world through the language she is most familiar with, art. As all the museums and galleries were closed, she thought —what if I video project the art outside, connecting people trapped at home around the world? In Laura Mega’s mind, ideas have no value if there is no one who believes and supports them. Her international project Art Heals, presented by LAZZARO_art doesn’t sleep, is a video projection exhibition offering an element of brief happiness.
Continue reading “Art Heals: LAZZARO_art doesn’t sleep”
In the several years preceding the pandemic, Jen Dwyer completed her MFA in Ceramics at the University of Notre Dame, exhibited at Miami Context in 2019 as well as in back-to-back iterations of Spring/Break, and saw her work profiled by Forbes and Architectural Digest. Then, when the rapidly increasing toll of the coronavirus caused the collective art world to press pause on what promised to be yet another whirlwind year, she took the slower pace of life as an opportunity to embrace deeper introspection in her studio practice. This newfound creative intuition wove its way into the production of her most recent collection of sculptures and paintings, which the artist recently debuted at Wassaic Project in New York.
Continue reading “Rituals & Reflections with Ceramic Artist and Painter Jen Dwyer”In Dialogue with Heather McLeod
Heather V McLeod is an artist exploring identity and the psychology by which we perceive others. Interested primarily in portraiture and representative work, McLeod creates pieces with the intent of capturing the character of the figure portrayed. She plays with the use of symbolism and concealment to enhance the narrative and evoke a playful yet ominous side to portraiture.
Continue reading “Heather McLeod: Hide and Seek”
In her multi layered installations Babs Reingold‘s brings together drawing, sculpture, found objects, and at times video, to create potent environments alluding to the body, the environment, and the passage of time. Equipped with a fine tuned sensibility to materiality and an imaginative approach to spatiality, Babs Reingold’s installations inhabit spaces as an alternate force of nature and take a life of their own.
Continue reading “Babs Reingold: Palette of Materials”