Art Spiel – Page 54 – Contemporary Art and Culture

September 1, 2022November 2, 2022

ADJUSTED for Inflation at Kunstraum
by Art Spiel

Featured Project with curator Ashley Ouderkirk

ADJUSTED for Inflation, Part 1 installation image. (Artworks visible by Sandra Zanetti, Taisha Brehaut, Bartho Staalman, and Amir Hariri.) Photo by Jenna London.

ADJUSTED for Inflation, the group show curated by curator-in-residence Ashley Ouderkirk at Kunstraum LLC features eighteen works by fourteen members and artists in residence—Annette Back, Taisha Brehaut, Laura Clark, Aleksy Cisowski, Giacomo Colosi, Amir Hariri, Catherine Lewis, Rita Nannini, Olga Rabetskaya, Bartho Staalman, Sato Sugamoto, Dimana Zaharieva, Cassandra Zampini, and Sandra Zanetti. The title, ADJUSTED for Inflation, is based on the economic term referring to the “real” value of money, after considering how much the price of an average good or service has increased. The curator says that the exhibition, like the economic concept, aims to reveal how our emotions determine the “real” value of any situation—the more complex the hardship, the greater the emotional cost and more distorted the adjustment. It runs through September 10th, 2022.

August 31, 2022December 30, 2022

What’s Your Golden Spike?
by Hovey Brock

Diagram from the United States Geological Survey, Harvard.edu

What’s Your Golden Spike is the third in a series of three interrelated experimental pieces that combine graphics, text, and hyperlinks based on themes coming out of my Crazy River project, for which I gave an interview on this website on May 16th. Crazy River takes a wide-angle view of the climate crisis, ranging from my own climate grief to an in-depth focus on the many causes and effects of rapid environmental changes on the West Branch of the Neversink in Ulster County. In this piece I investigate the idea of the Catskills as a region, and an incongruous bundle of contradictions and coincidences. The Lands of Kats Kill weaves three timelines together: the geologic, the historical, and the personal. This structure repeats throughout my Crazy River project. The previous piece in this series, Invaders, took apart the idea of invasive species. The following will explore the concept of the Golden Spike in stratigraphy as fact and metaphor.

August 29, 2022October 6, 2024

The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery
by Louisa Pancoast

Annika Tucksmith, Something, Somewhere, 2022, oil on panel, 40 x 30 inches (image courtesy of Carrie Haddad Gallery)

Carrie Haddad Gallery’s summer offering, The Summer Show, is a playful wink and a poke to bastion of every gallery’s yearly program: the month of August. Much like the title of the show, this selection of work is self-referential and effervescent. Modernities collide in depictions of leisure, wanderlust is shown as both fantastical and intimate, and universally bold palettes are a sucker punch to the senses. Though they span an array of media, each of the artists incorporate detail with nuance and ease, their pith and wit happily imbibable. The Summer Show features Robert Goldstrom, Hue Thi Hoffmaster, Louise Laplante, Andrea Moreau, Kahn & Selesnick, and Annika Tucksmith and includes painting, collage, and photography.

August 27, 2022December 30, 2022

Who Gets On The Front Cover?
by Sara Farrell Okamura

*Study for “Mother/Son”*, 1984, Ink on Artforum magazine cover. (March 1977), 10.5″ x 10.5″, photo courtesy of the artist

Enter Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham NY and come face to face with what we as artists, curators, critics, gallerists and historians consciously and subconsciously know; we are missing greats. Arthur González’s exhibition, Ego Diaries confronts the art world and those who control the keys to the kingdom and anoint who is recognized and who is not.

August 25, 2022November 2, 2022

Ellpetha Tsivicos + Camilo Quiroz-Vázquez
by Art Spiel

Grantee of Brooklyn Arts Fund

Project Profile: QUINCE

Quince22-136 — Ellpetha Tsivicos (Director/Co-Creator) and Camilo Quiroz-Vázquez (Writer/Co-Creator) of QUINCE as Selena and Father Joaquin in QUINCE, photo courtesy of Catharine Krebs

Brooklyn Arts Council announced in March 2022 an allocation of over $1.3 million to 238 Brooklyn-based artists and cultural organizations. This year marks the highest number of grantees and awardees as well as the largest amount of funding BAC has ever distributed. Art Spiel in collaboration with Brooklyn Arts Council features some artists who received a Brooklyn Arts Fund, Local Arts Support, and/or Creative Equations Fund grant in 2022.

August 24, 2022August 24, 2022

Some last words on the Whitney Biennial as a cultural labyrinth
by Saul Ostrow

Opinion

I would hate to think I have become an old and conservative critic who believes our best days are behind us. I would rather believe that my structuralist perspective is capable of evaluating contemporary emerging practices and recognize the social, cultural and political value of these tendencies. What brought this on is having recently seen the 1962–64 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. This show examines how artists living and working in New York during this three-year period responded to rapidly changing social and cultural conditions, by questioning what was considered to be art’s normative forms and subjects. This post-AbEx generation was concerned with creating aesthetic configurations that would result in novel perceptual modes and political subjectivities.

August 22, 2022February 10, 2023

Deanna Sirlin: Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo
by Art Spiel

Featured Artist

Deanna Sirlin, *Borders of Light and Water*, 2022, C-print transparency on glass, 199.5 x 493 inches, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy

In Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo in Venice, American artist Deanna Sirlin utilizes the architecture and translucency of the large-scale windows overlooking the Grand Canal, to create a luminous and ever-changing patches of bold color. The beauty of this installation allures you in and prompts you to gaze out at the flickering water of the iconic canal below, raising awareness to what is at stake with rising water and changing climate. This installation is part of the Venice 2022 Art Biennial organized by the non-profit organization European Cultural Center, running from April 23, 2022 through November 27^th, 2022.

August 20, 2022November 2, 2022

Sensing Woman at C24 Gallery
by Art Spiel

Featured Project with Curator Christina Massey

Jung Eun Park – In the Womb 13, 2003, pencil, thread, fabrics, watercolor on coffee-dyed Korean mulberry paper, 7” x 8”

Sensing Woman is a multisensory event taking place at C24 Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, for five days and four nights of Art by 50 contemporary visual artists, along with conversation, storytelling and music – altogether around the future of being female. All profits from this event will be donated to organizations working to protect autonomy over our bodies and improve maternal and sexual health, including the groundbreaking advocacy organization the Center for Reproductive Rights.

August 17, 2022August 18, 2022

Motel in the Catskills
by Melissa Stern

The rural Catskill mountain village of Fleischmanns an unlikely a place to find a world-class contemporary art installation.

In the nineteenth century, the village was a flourishing, prosperous Catskill vacation spot for the New York well-to-do, resplendent with Victorian mansions and lodging houses, attracting both Jewish and non-Jewish summer residents. By the mid-twentieth century, the town had languished, and many properties had fallen into disrepair. Over time, Fleischmanns became a summer retreat for a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish community who juxtapose oddly with deer hunters, RV owners, motorcycle enthusiasts, and other locals. “Eclectic” is an understatement. If Fleischmanns were on a deli menu it would be an Everything Bagel.

August 15, 2022December 30, 2022

Harriet Salmon: Tracing Genologies at Heroes
by Art Spiel

Featured Project: with artist and co-founder of Heroes Gallery

Harriet Salmon with (from left) Benny Merris’ *An Other Another 196*, 2022 and an Emilio Pucci silk scarf from 1964. Courtesy: Emilio Pucci Heritage.

Hrriet Salmon is an artist, gallerist, as well as a podcast host and producer. Her engagement in art is deep and wide—in her own art she makes sculpture, drawing, photo, installation, and weaving; in Heroes, the gallery she co-founded with her partner, Jesse Penridge, they create vibrant visual dialogues between contemporary artists and historical art; in her Craftsmanship podcast she discusses technical skill in the contemporary artworld told through oral history of fabricators.