Contemporary Art and Culture
Alice Pixley Young’s Still Life takes shape in semi-darkness at A.I.R. Gallery as an immersive meditation on ecological time, stratified and shadowed by industrial residue. Installed as a multisensory environment …
Fanfan Yuxuan is a New York–based curator who has worked with galleries and art fairs in Paris and New York. Through this experience, she became attentive to how exhibitions shape the presentation and understanding of artists’ work, and to the gaps that can emerge between artistic intention and exhibition context. Fan develops projects that create platforms for artists, including those connected to graduate programs in the New York metropolitan area, and approaches curating as an evolving practice informed by collaboration and the logistical realities of exhibition-making.
Language is having a moment—again—but it no longer behaves as it once did. Words now arrive compressed, automated, endlessly replicated, stripped of duration even as they multiply. Becky Brown has been tracking this condition for years, painting language not as message but as environment: something we live inside, skim through, and increasingly struggle to feel.
As one enters the space, the air changes first.
Nag champa. Sage. The faint illusion of burning wax.
The scent settles low and heavy, as if the room itself is breathing. The atmosphere feels dense and slow, yet charged. Fixed and fluid at once. Calm and alert. Sacred and unsettled.
This is not simply an exhibition to be viewed. It is a room to be entered with the whole body.
I walked into the PPOW gallery the morning my friend Riki died. The 182-panel illustrated small drawings by New York artist John Kelly, which extend as an open graphic memoir around the gallery, captured me instantly, letting me in on a personal journey of mortality, pain, and beauty. There was something generous in the way Kelly handed his notebook and shared the manuscript of his injury. It resonated with my thoughts of investigating and dwelling on mourning and mortality.
The exhibition titled Grit of the Hearth Beyond the Brambles creates a sense of place, wonder, and belonging. The title itself invites introspection, especially after reading the poem in the press release. It offers an exhale to the stressed, a release from tension, and a bright light to those who may be unsure.
To the Studio, a three-person exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery in LES brings together paintings by Elisa Jensen, John Lees, and Liam Murphy-Torres, whose works collectively explore shared traditions of observation, light, and painterly practice. The title is inspired by a series of paintings by Frank Auerbach depicting a view of three artists’ studios, but also alludes to the New York Studio as an institution, tying them together. Both Jensen and Lees have been professors of Murphy-Torres at this historic institution.
Downtown in Tribeca, beneath the Derek Eller Gallery, the George Adams Gallery sits like a quiet afterthought. Easy to pass by. Down a short flight of stairs, away from the street glare, Elisa D’Arrigo’s recent sculptures gather in a small white room and hold their ground. The scale is modest. The presence is not.
Adria Arch and Keith Wiley had never met before working on Still / Moving, their exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Living on opposite coasts—Arch in Boston and Wiley in Atascadero—they developed the project from afar, connecting through shared images, ideas, and a common interest in movement and form. In the exhibition, Arch’s bright paintings and hanging shapes reach outward with color and rhythm. Her flowing, curving forms feel energetic and playful, as if they are moving through the air. Wiley’s portal-like sculptures draw viewers closer. Built from small marks and quiet details, they invite pause and careful looking, with openings that pull you inward. Emma Saperstein, the exhibition curator, discusses her curatorial vision and reflects on the museum as a venue for this project.
As the vague New Year comes barreling in, trailing behind is a hazy fog that distorts perceptions of time and space, folding into one another like delicate parchment paper. It reads as hopeful uncertainty, especially as artists create in response to their surroundings. It is in those folds that art and dreams converge to inspire fantastical work that propels us into a new reality.