Art Spiel – Page 51 – Contemporary Art and Culture

February 8, 2023February 7, 2023

Scaling Nature at the Bronx River Art Center
by Art Spiel

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing indoor, floor, room, colonnade

Description automatically generated — *Left: Wildriana Paulino, Right: Linda Cunningham. Photo courtesy of Michele Brody*

Scaling Nature at the Bronx River Art Center features large-scale mixed-media installation works by three artists: Michele Brody, Linda Cunningham and Wildriana Paulino. Curated by Gail Nathan, the premise of this show is to represent nature as a force of nurture and destruction through the use of materials from the ephemeral to the concrete. Paulino and Brody both work with cast handmade paper that hangs from the gallery ceiling to command the space. Their massive artworks invite the viewer to be engulfed by a feeling of being one with nature and simultaneously wary of the effects of climate change.

February 6, 2023March 1, 2023

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts
by Amy Talluto

How is an Artist Like TV’s Columbo?

A picture containing person, person, green, male

Description automatically generated — Publicity photo of Peter Falk from the television program “Columbo,” NBC Television

Do you remember how people were bingeing TV shows like The Sopranos or Mad Men during those long pandemic days and nights? Well, I was also bingeing–but on that old television chestnut, Columbo. If you’ve never watched it, Columbo is a detective murder mystery show, but…it’s an anti-whodunnit. The show always opens with all of us witnessing the villain committing the crime (off-camera—which is much appreciated by the squeamish). It’s a unique formula for a detective show because we know right from the get-go who the killer is. The audience watches Peter Falk as Detective Lt. Columbo, guilelessly but cunningly noticing clues, making connections, and solving the case, all the while hilariously pestering the murderer to distraction.

January 30, 2023February 5, 2023

Ulf Puder at Marc Straus Gallery
by Melissa Stern

:ULF:Ulf Taomina.jpg — Taormina, Oil on canvas,39.4 x 47.25, 2018

Marc Straus Gallery is currently presenting the paintings of Ulf Puder, a German artist whose landscape paintings are deeply evocative and strangely alluring. I was not familiar with the artist or his work, and I’ll admit, it took a beat to enter his Universe. But once in I began to see deeper into the complex issues he deals with in his paintings.

January 27, 2023January 26, 2023

Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief
by Art Spiel

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing room, gallery, scene

Description automatically generated — Jac Lahav, Immersive blue vine installation on the hardship and beauty of being a foster parent

Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief at Sugarlift is an immersive installation about the artist’s experience as a foster parent. At the center, a large sculpture titled 29, references 29 points of contact that the artist has had with different foster children. The lines of saffron and gold leaf across abstracted canvases, and a site-specific wall drawing allure visitors to enter Lahav’s world.

January 23, 2023December 30, 2022

Keeper of the Waters
by Susan Hoffman Fishman

A city next to a body of water

Description automatically generated with low confidence — *A Living Water Garden*, Chengdu, China

For the last 50+ years, eco-artist and environmental activist Betsy Damon has devoted herself to community building – the coming together of individuals to achieve a common purpose. Since the 1980s, after a decade of engaging the public through public performances in New York City, she has worked at the intersection of art and science, focusing on the topic of water and on creating models for communities in the United States and China to know and become stewards of their own water sources. The brief descriptions below, highlighting four of Damon’s many exhibitions, ecological and sustainable design projects, publications, and organizations are only a brief glimpse into her prolific and important body of work.

January 16, 2023December 27, 2022

Gail Winbury: The Girl who Drew Memories at the Wilson Museum
by Art Spiel

Featured Artist

The Girl Who Drew Memories, Hunter Gallery

Gail Winbury’s multidisciplinary art exhibition The Girl Who Drew Memories at the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum on the campus of the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, Vermont, addresses the intersection of art and psychology, specifically “vulnerability and creativity”. Winbury proposed to include poetry as a component of the exhibition and curator Alison Crites brought together Winbury’s paintings and collages, with poetry by living poets. The exhibition altogether raises the question “how do we tell the stories of our early childhood when at times there may be no words, or we dare not utter the words aloud?”

January 11, 2023December 22, 2022

Crazy River Umwelt Series Part I
by Hovey Brock

Featured Project

Map

Description automatically generated — Hovey Brock: *Blackleg Tick,* 2021, 24” x 36”, acrylic on panel

A central theme in my Crazy River project has been highlighting the emotional toll of the climate crisis by putting under a microscope, so to speak, my own feelings about not only the impacts of the crisis but the knowledge that humans’ actions are the cause. This series of three on-line essays, thought experiments if you like, expands that project to change the POV to non-human actors that are inextricably bound with the habitat in the Western Catskills: the black-legged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica). All three have seen their habitat change dramatically through climate change and human interventions. Using my imagination and research, I try to enter the umwelt of all three species, an impossible task, as Thomas Nagel pointed out in “What Is It LIke to Be a Bat,” for which artistic license may give us the best chance to accomplish. My intentions in doing so fall along three axes: theoretical, aesthetic, and spiritual, dimensions all essential to my own art practice. What follows is a look at the umwelt of black-legged ticks from the perspective of theory.

January 9, 2023December 9, 2022

Jody MacDonald: Under the Veneer of Whimsy
by Etty Yaniv

Jody MacDonald, *Everywhere All Over. All Over. Everywhere.* (detail), mixed media, 168″ x 180″ x 96″, 2022.

Jody MacDonald dissects in detail the concept of “identity” through a cast of small-scale 2-D and textile-based 3-D surrogates. She uses repurposed materials to create figures and detailed, miniature accessories (wigs, clothing, shoes furniture) set inside elaborate, mixed media environments with clues which shed light on the complex, often conflicting narratives.

January 4, 2023December 25, 2022

Smashworks Dance – CITY STORIES at Center for Performance Research
by Art Spiel

DANCE

Though I saw Smashworks Dance’s CITY STORIES over a month ago, it still lingers in the back of my mind. As a New Yorker, how could it not? The images from the show are the images of my daily life. Flashes of scenes and movements weave their way through my commute and my coffee run, popping up like absurdist smash-cuts in early-2000s sitcoms. That’s where Artistic Director Ashley McQueen’s magic lies: the source material is everyday, the execution is something else entirely.

January 2, 2023March 1, 2023

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts
by Amy Talluto

Midlife Big Bangs

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Description automatically generated with low confidence — Faith Ringgold, Women Free Angela, 1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee, © Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As an artist, have you ever looked around and felt ancient, withered, and uncool? Well, this pep talk is for you, because we’re about to find out how later in life, big bangs can be the bravest and most creative big bangs of all.