Art Spiel – Page 104 – Contemporary Art and Culture

Artist Profile by Etty Yaniv

Manju Shandler in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Manju Shandler

Manju Shandler creates symbolic art that speaks to current events. Building upon established storylines from myth, religion, and history, her mixed media artworks create richly layered narratives that reflect on our dense and complicated times. Shandler believes people are natural storytellers that make sense of the world through by mining both personal experience and collective memories that have been passed down. Her work dips into this well. Training as a theatre designer helps her to envision installations and her background as a puppet builder informs how she approaches building objects. Identifying as a mother seeps into everything she does.

Exhibition Review by Eliot Markell

Here and Hereafter – Lydia Viscardi at Five Points Gallery

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.

Artist Profile by Etty Yaniv

Lacey McKinney in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Lacey McKinney

Lacey McKinney who resides in Upstate New York, is drawn to the alchemy of processes like painting and alternative photography. For the last several years, McKinney has worked within the framework of painting, using figuration to reference embodiment. Usually splitting her time between working in the studio and teaching, this year she feels lucky enough to embark on a one-year teaching sabbatical, which has given her extra time for experimentation with other media such as using cyanotype process to make photograms that incorporate into collage and mixed media works. The artist shares some insights on her body of work in Domestic Brutes, the all women group show at the Pelham Art Center which engages the visitor with diverse approaches of what feminism means in American society today.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Shift Happens at GreenHill

In Dialogue with Heather Gordon

In her drawings, paintings, and installations North Carolina based artist Heather Gordon maps the poetry of life using mathematical elements like numbers and geometry to coax narratives from information related to data of place, time and physical properties. In her collaborative projects she has extended her practice to large scale site-specific installations based on elaborate research, often including sculptural, performance and movement elements which altogether result in multifaceted and thought provoking projects that prompt the visitor’s intellectual and visceral engagement. In this interview Heather Gordon sheds some light on her nine-foot-high site-specific mural on the large exterior window of the GreenHill gallery to be completed late September. Heather Gordon’s public art initiative is the first of a group of works by the artist at GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, as part of the Shift Happensart installation series which aims to explore art engagement at a time of social distancing.

Exhibition Review 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.

Artist Profile by Etty Yaniv

Fay Ku in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Fay Ku

For Taiwanese born artist, Fay Ku, the single, most formative event in life was immigrating to the United States. Ku says that if she had stayed in Taiwan, she would never have become an artist so she would have been a completely different person. It still surprises her how much this one event which she was too young to remember (though of course remembering all its aftershocks), shapes her work, often without her being consciously aware of the themes and issues at the time of making the work. Fay Ku shares some insights on her body of work in Domestic Brutes, the all women group show at the Pelham Art Center which engages the visitor with diverse approaches of what feminism means in American society today.

Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Jacqueline Shatz – Overcoming Gravity

Jacqueline Shatz‘s ceramic based wall sculptures depict biomorphic forms, mostly referring to animals and humans as a single entity. An abstracted silhouette of an agile swimmer, a whimsical hybrid of horse and baby snake, a queen’s bent head fully covered by flowing hair spilling downward – each evokes a mystery associated with ancient civilizations, archetypes, and mythologies or what the artist describes as “states of being and permeable nature of time.” Jacqueline Shatz shares with Art Spiel some thoughts on her work and work process.

Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Will Hutnick – Artist as Facilitator

Will Hutnick is an artist, curator, co-director of Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn from 2015 to 2020 and Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project upstate NY. In his paintings Will Hutnick is using rollers, and includes other mono-printing-like methods to create repetitive passages which form playful and unexpected relationships between shapes and colors. He shares with Art Spiel some of his work process, reflections on the ways his paintings have developed, and some of his other art related practices.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

ALEMBIC: Body and Spirit. Live Art as Healing Art

In Dialogue with Jana Astanov

Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, a poet and an independent curator born in Poland, and living in the US. She is a founder of CREATRIX Magazine, portal for creative expression focused on art, activism and spiritual practice. Her work includes photography, poetry, performance art, sound art, and installation. In her work, she utilizes spiritual traditions, somatic movement, sound art, ritualistic theatre and Astrofeminism, a term she has developed through her character Yannanda The One Who Speaks With The Stars. Together with her partner Niko van Egten she co-created an electronic music group ASTRALOOP featuring her poetry in dark electronic arrangements. She has performed at Tate Modern, Smack Mellon Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Venice Biennale, Documenta 2017, and many other galleries, festivals and independent venues worldwide. She is also the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox. In this interview for Art Spiel Jana Astanov discusses her ideas on performance art and specifically on her most recent upcoming curatorial project ALEMBIC: Body and Spirit. Live Art as Healing Art.

Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Noa Charuvi - Suspended on Site

Noa Charuvi’s paintings convey a distinct sense of place where narratives of the present interrupt those of the past with urgency, sometimes even violence . Yet, her places encapsulate past and present not only as a rupture but also as an ongoing flow of coinciding contradictory forces – ruin and construction, anarchy and order. No matter if the painting depicts an interior of a room or an exterior of a construction site, it frequently portrays a place that is devoid of human figures but charged with the aftermath of human actions. Even if human figures are present, they are typically placed in context of their larger environment, players in a powerful and mysterious systemic forces of history, city, society. Noa Charuvi shares with Art Spiel some insights on her ideas, work, and process.