Contemporary Art and Culture
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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?”
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.
Painter Elisabeth Condon’s reflections on a painting by Joseph Stella were initially presented in the second episode of Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting, a new series artist Amy Talluto has recently launched in her podcast Pep Talks for Artists. In each episode in this series Elisabeth Condon shares her way of looking at one painting, here, at the oil painting (1919) Tree of My Life, by Italian – American artist Joseph Stella (1877-1946)
In her solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery Gabriela Vainsencher exhibits wall hanging porcelain reliefs, referencing the nuts and bolts of motherhood entangled in layers of epic mythological context—Medusa reveals a worried woman with a frying pan and a baby’s pacifier as weapons at hand. The show runs through April 8th, 2023.
Most artists’ studios give us a glimpse into their thought and work process but wandering through David Dempewolf’s studio gives more than a glimpse. It is an experience of entering a wonderous world— a hidden niche reveals a station for experimental animation, a corner serves as a station for wood printmaking, a quaint staircase to a small attic leads to imaginative series of drawings, and a “peephole” in a wall further guides our gaze below, to Marginal Utility, the non-for-profit gallery space he runs with his partner and spouse Yuka Yokoyam. It feels like entering a Borgeisan world where the artist’s thoughts and the endless possibilities of “cataloging” entangle and materialize into a new entity in a tangible space.