Art Spiel – Page 48 – Contemporary Art and Culture

April 17, 2023April 10, 2023

Liz Collins in DUMBO Open Studios
by Art Spiel

Featured Artist

Liz Collins in her studio. Photo by Joe Kramm.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Liz Collins whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

April 15, 2023April 16, 2023

A Conversation with Curators of Pro-Ukrainian Exhibit Sovereignty Reimagined
by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Sovereignty Reimagined. Installation view, Maenad Collective, NY, US © photo by Alex Faoro. From left to right: Jaroslav Pobezhan, Marina Naprushkina, Dana Kavelina, Serhiy Popov, Daria Maiier x Äsc3ea.

Pro-Ukrainian video art from antiwarcoalition.art (https://antiwarcoalition.art/) curated by Alex Faoro, Maxim Tyminko and Aleksander Komarov both members of The International Coalition of Cultural Workers In Solidarity with Ukraine were on view in the group exhibition Sovereignty Reimagined March 18-24, 2023 at Maenad Collective in Brooklyn.

With artists: Oksana Chepelyk (UA), Helena Deda & Alex Faoro (US), Daniil Galkin (UA), Uladzimir Hramovich And Lesia Pcholka (BY), Zhanna Kadyrova (UA), Anton Karyuk (UA), Dana Kavelina (UA), Daria Maiier x Äsc3ea (UA), Elturan Mammadov (AZ), Metasitu (GR), Vladimir Miladinovic (RS), Marina Naprushkina (DE), Valentyna Petrova (UA), Iaroslav Pobezhan (UA), Serhiy Popov (UA), Mykola Ridnyi (UA), and Igor Sevcuk (NL).

April 13, 2023April 13, 2023

Rachael Wren: Site Lines at The Shirley Project Space
by Jeanne Brasile

A picture containing floor, indoor, empty

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Rachael Wren: Site Lines at The Shirley Project Space, March 2023 – installation view. Photo courtesy of Kate Glicksberg.

The Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn is a sympathetic environment for Rachael Wren’s Site Lines, a solo exhibition of six paintings and an unexpected site-specific installation. With two large windows on street level, the gallery’s abundant natural light heightens the relationship between the paintings and the outside world. This bright and airy effect is amplified by the minimalist architecture and tall ceilings, leaving the artist’s painted trees room to grow, an illusion propelled by the restrained installation which leaves ample space around each work.

April 10, 2023March 18, 2023

Dana Yoeli: Staging Memorials
by Etty Yaniv

Dana Yoeli in her Tel Aviv studio, 2022, photo by Roni Cnaani

In her installations, sculptures, and drawings, the Tel Aviv based artist, Dana Yoeli, digs into collective and biographical memories, to create multi-layered environments which prompt us to discover a rich array of interconnected references—from theater and cinema to history, place, and architecture. In Yoeli’s visual universe the “I”, “we”, and “they” entangle to form a new entity, offering us complex shifting perspectives.

April 8, 2023April 10, 2023

Denise Sfraga: Strange Brew at The Garage Art Center
by Art Spiel

Featured Artist

The work included in Strange Brew, Denise Sfraga’s solo show at the Garage Art Center, explores the life cycle of plants. This fascination with plants has always been at the root of the artist’s creative inspiration. Sfraga, who is based in New York City, says that working in her own garden and experiencing its constant state of flux, gives her the opportunity to witness first hand actual seed germination, leaf and flower growth, the dispersion of the next generation of seeds and the final stages of decay, “an ever evolving landscape of life forms that change color, shape and appearance daily.”

April 6, 2023April 6, 2023

William Norton – Styx & Stones- at The Boiler – ELM Foundation
by Art Spiel

Photo Story

A picture containing building, graffiti

Description automatically generated — “Cop,CodPiece, and Tigger”, “Lurking Cop”, “Cutting the Head Off the Thug”, “in the rain i feel myself swallowed, savored, teased by your tongue”

William Norton’s large-scale paintings at The Boiler – ELM Foundation evoke imagery of oppression and protest through gestural graphic marks and bold color on recycled vinyl advertisements as canvas. “We are always being sold something in this age of hyper-ventilating propaganda. And there is just enough of the advertising image left over to titillate the viewers’ eyeballs,” Norton says.

April 3, 2023March 9, 2023

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts
by Amy Talluto

The Proof is in the Punctum

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Description automatically generated — Film still from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Once, my day job was a freelance graphic designer and I worked from home in Brooklyn. My desk was in a corner of the combination living-room-kitchen-dining-room, right next to the TV. I had cable, and while I worked, I would put on Turner Classic Movies because they didn’t play commercials. And those of us who worked from home during the golden age of cable know that the middle-of-the-day commercials were the most depressing.

TCM showed black and white movies from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s in an unending ribbon of celluloid, one right after the other. And after months of working like this, it began to amaze me how little the films stuck in my head. They just pleasantly wafted into one ear and floated out the other. There were two exceptions, though, that seemed to have the ability to stick: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and The Bells of St. Mary (starring Casablanca’s Ingrid Bergman as a nun). And this forgettable/unforgettable phenomenon got me wondering: Why those two? Why did they stick and not the hundreds of others that I had watched?

April 1, 2023April 4, 2023

Finding My Folk at Old Stone House
by Art Spiel

Featured Project

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Description automatically generated — *L to R: Ai Campbell, Carl Hazlewood, Angelica Bergamini, Damali Abrams, Carl Hazlewood, Angelica Bergamini, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Blanka Amezkua (center).*

Finding My Folk, curated by independent curator Krista Scenna at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, features work by seven contemporary immigrant artists whose practices embrace the folkloric in their own traditions, rituals, and customs by blending elements of their past, memories of “home,” their present, and future. The notion of Folklore underscores the show, how it is often so seamlessly embedded in daily lives that people may tend to overlook it—myths, dances, rhymes, toasts, jokes, holidays, and festivals are all essential characteristics of a community—ranging from the family unit, to a nation, to the global population. The show is on view through April 9, 2023 with a closing event on Monday, April 10th from 6:30pm – 8:00pm.

March 31, 2023March 31, 2023

Eva Davidova: Re-coding Our Paradox
by Hovey Brock

HOT AIR

*Garden for Drowning Descendant/*Garden Sequence from “Flying and Drowning Dream,“ interactive mixed reality installation, 2022, with performer Danielle McPhatter.

Eva Davidova makes new media works that focus on ecological disaster, our interdependence as a species, and the political implications of technology which she unpacks with performative works rooted in the absurd. She imagines the paradox that one day our descendants–human or cyborg–will be constructing our reality as a simulation, and asks: “If we are the games our children will program one day, can we influence the code they are writing?”

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023

Nancy Bowen: Sometimes a Body is Not Just a Body at WCC Art Gallery
by Art Spiel

Featured Artist

Nancy Bowen with “Third Eye” and “Throat” from Chakra Series, 2009, mixed media on paper, photo by Lindsay Walt

What links Nancy Bowen’s work at Westchester Community College Art Gallery—from abstract to narrative work—is the presence of the female body in some form. “I will always be compelled to create work from a feminist point of view, work that needles or asks questions, and given our current political and social climate, that seems even more necessary than ever,” Bowen says. The show runs through April 12th, 2023.