Exhibition Review by Torey Akers

TRAPS! Ebecho Muslimova at Magenta Plains

Exhibition review by Torey Akers

Human civilization has always maintained an uneasy relationship with female monstrosity—just watch the cavalcade of sirens, witches, harpies and hags that stalk the perimeters of every major mythology on earth, luring hapless men to their deaths. This hyper-visible, oft-storied, but deeply erasive marginalization has long plagued the non-normative woman; however, there’s a certain freedom in the fringes. Take Baubo, the Orphic goddess of chaos and mirth, whose paunchy, wizened appearance belied a frisky bawdiness that ancient Greeks adored. Ebecho Muslimova’s ‘Fatebe’ character, whom she has been drawing since 2011 and features vivaciously in her latest solo exhibition, TRAPS!, at Magenta Plains, New York, builds on Baubo’s cultural legacy with appropriately grotesque panache, taking a wide-eyed, manic approach to the tandem joys and pitfalls of embodiment.

Lily Prince: Honing Plein Air
Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Lily Prince: Honing Plein Air

Lily Prince makes lush plein air paintings depicting the essence of specific places around the world. By utilizing linear and color vocabularies, she creates pictorial fields which resemble disorienting topographical maps where time is fluid and frozen simultaneously. Lily prince shares with Art Spiel her background, ideas. process, and projects.

Exhibition Review by Etty Yaniv

Actual and Implied – Gregory Coates at Monica King Contemporary

Each of Gregory Coates’s wall-based assemblages in Actual and Implied, the artist’s solo show at Monica King Contemporary, commands the space with its own powerful presence. Altogether, the show features over a dozen new mixed media assemblages made of found objects created with post-minimalist sensibility, for which Coates is mostly known for. It is a bold encounter with the objects of art at first, but the longer you look, the more subtle and fragile it becomes. The seemingly simple monochromatic surfaces from afar transform to complex arrays of color, line and dot from close-up.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Isabelle Garbani – on Artifacts of Place

Place and Cultural Heritage at Stand4 Gallery

Isabelle Garbani curated the group show Artifacts of Place at Stand4 gallery in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, running through December 15th. The show features work by Joyce Dallal, Dalia Baassiri, Mary Tuma, Daiffa Dessine, Arghavan Khosravi, Reem Bassous, Armita Raafat, Helen Zughaib, and Ekram Alrowmeim- all women artists who are of Middle Eastern and North African descent and who are dealing in their art with related cultural or political issues. The curator shares with Art Spiel her ideas behind this group show and some information about the participating artists.

Exhibition Review by Julien Langevin

Plastic Expressions in Particularity: Nature Moves in Tracy McKenna’s Shift at Able Baker Contemporary

“Wisdom was the feeling for what is high, great, broad, sharp, even, heavy, bright, light, colorful . . . Wisdom was the feeling for an essentially shared reality, for the mystical, for the indeterminate indeterminable, for the greatest determinacy of all . . . but art is reality, and the reality we share must assert itself beyond all particularity.” Hans Arp, Introduction to a Catalogue

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Artist Interview by Catherine Kirkpatrick

A History of Digital Photography – Lucien Samaha at Pioneer Works

The exhibit at Pioneer Works is called “A History of Digital Photography” and features some of the first images taken with Kodak’s earliest digital camera. The show includes that camera, its maquette, and the ever sharper, smaller cameras Lucien Samaha worked with over the years, plus ephemera. But at its heart, this show is less about technology than an artist’s journey, and is deeper and far more human than its title suggests.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Juliette Dumas – Whale Flukes Paintings at The Neue House New York

In Dialogue with gallerist Silas Von Morisse on the Whale Flukes Paintings and beyond

Silas von Morisse founded a reputable gallery in Bushwick in 2014. Then, in 2018, due to notable shifts in the art world for small venues like hers, she decided to drastically change her model: from exhibiting in a physical venue, to featuring art as a mostly online presence paired with events which enable viewing in person. Silas von Morisse shares with Art Spiel her changed mode of operation, while highlighting the current show featuring Whale Flukes paintings by the French artist Juliette Dumas.

Iris Häussler – Invented Biographies
Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Iris Häussler – Invented Biographies

Throughout her multi-faceted installations, the German-born Canadian based artist Iris Häussler has been slipping in and out of multiple characters. Her invented underdog protagonists live through diverse historical periods and traverse vast geographies. Häussler’s rigorous installations transform any categorization. They are placed between life and art, coalescing multi-disciplinary collaborations including performance, literature, and richly layered visual vocabularies such as drawing, installation and sculpture. The visitor is invited to experience an individual’s life within a specific context of place and history, to decipher the clues from the artifacts and materials throughout installations that reflect on fiction, history and the meaning of a creative identity.

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In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Juan Puntes – on WhiteBox Harlem

In Dialogue with Juan Puntes on PERFORMA 19 @WhiteBox Harlem and beyond

Juan Puntes, who founded WhiteBox as the original Chelsea non-profit alternative art space in 1998, built a highly reputable venue known for its thought-provoking exhibition with cutting edge contemporary artists vis-à-vis little known avant-garde historical influential producers. While focusing on site-specific work, performance, and video projects, WhiteBox is also offering a wide array of programming including readings, lectures, and panel discussions. Juan Puntes is sharing with Art Spiel some of WhiteBox’s history, his vision, and his upcoming programs.