Contemporary Art and Culture
Michael A. Robinson’s site-specific project Somma, at DISPLAY in Parma, Italy, is the sum of many parts, all operating in tandem. The installation appears simple, featuring three wall-mounted LED works and metal arcs and hoops suspended from the ceiling. The space’s glossy floor and glass façade and door reflect the light emitted by the LEDs, potentially multiplying their presence based on the viewer’s position and the level of ambient light.
Alice Zinne‘s paintings draw from literature and mythology to create dramatic landscapes in which light and dark interplay as main protagonists. Her oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings often depict floods of light intertwined with fragmented darker patches, evoking dense and fluid inner spaces.
To Whom It May Concern, the current exhibition featuring an installation and collages by Los Angeles based artist Genevieve Gaignard, raises poignant questions related to nostalgic notions of American history and culture. The work ranges from staged photographs, questioning social stigmas and beauty standards, to a room installation made of found furniture and other objects. The artist says the aim is to “beckon viewers to dig into the imperfect relationship between our inner worlds, public lives, and modern events.” Mary Salvante, the director and chief curator of Rowan University Art Gallery sheds some more light on this show. The show runs through October 29, 2022.
Wayfinding, Arden Bendler Browning’s solo exhibition at Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, follows the artist’s recent completion of a major public art project, Elastic Geography, a 25 by 140 foot mural on the side of Yards Brewery, commissioned by Mural Arts Philadelphia. The show includes 21 new paintings, a Vault installation of over 50 mixed media works on panel, and a custom interactive virtual reality. It runs through October 22nd.
NonCoreProjector is a collective of visual artists, technologists, scientists, and musicians experimenting with physical, biological, conceptual, and political data systems, along with human/AI symbiosis. In their projects they explore consequential relationships between spoken and written language and multisensory, visceral experience. Their project Rec Lobe TV is currently exhibiting at The University of Wyoming Art Museum through December 23, 2022. The NCP collective members—Jack Colton, Elias Jarzombek, John O’Connor, Rollo Carpenter and Nat Clark—are in conversation with Art Spiel about their projects and collaborative work.
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.
So much has happened in six years. It was six years ago that I last wrote about the work of Vanessa German for Hyperallergic. Donald Trump had just been elected, and the country was bracing itself for a trip down a new and dangerous path. Vanessa German, a poet, activist and visual artist, had mounted a powerful show at Pavel Zoubek Gallery entitled I am armed. I am an army. German filled the gallery with a fighting corps of women, armed with weaponry, poetry, history and power. It was a fierce exhibition, and one that both mourned and celebrated the power of women.
The two-person exhibition Luscious Wasteland at Radiator Arts features landscape paintings by Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader. Both artists embed in their imagery elements from personal experience, nature, visual art, music, literature or science, to create intricate and imaginative landscapes. The exhibition opens Fri, September 16 and runs through October 23, 2022. Art Spiel invited the curator of the show, Patrick Neal, and the two artists, Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader to reflect on the featured paintings as separate bodies of work and in relation to each other.
What does Cognitive Bias and Fallacy Look Like? Natale Adgnot’s Work Tests What We Are Really Seeing. Natale Adgnot’s work explores the power of psychology and the impact that cognitive bias has on our everyday life, routines and choices. Her work incorporates patterns and systems to explore different cognitive biases such as stereotyping and pareidolia (seeing patterns in random information) to reflect on the elusiveness of truth. Best known for wall sculptures made of painted thermoplastic adhered perpendicularly onto birch panels, she challenges the viewer to consider her work from multiple perspectives. Her new series, Bird Brains, continues to delve into her exploration of bias and fallacy. Bird Brains matches entries in the cognitive bias codex with the birds that best exemplify them. From black swan theory to the duck test to the proverbial canary in the coal mine, she taps into this rich language to point out the stunning variety and sheer magnitude of ways we humans misconstrue the world.
Habby Osk’s work rests upon basic physics—gravity, balance, movement, time and force. These concepts are the concrete medium for her artistic practice which toys with the limits of balance and stability using gravity and force. Through sculpture, photography, and installations, Osk reveals a tension between movement and stillness by placing objects in seemingly unstable positions, capturing a moment of perpetual precarity. These compositions of fragility emphasize the potential for destruction but within an equally mirrored state of balance and stability using a variety of materials such as concrete, wood, aluminum, wax, sugar and jello. Her work references impermanence and the contingency of an action—probing how far objects can go without tipping over, to capture the moment of stillness before a looming collapse or transformation over time.