Art Spiel – Page 74 – Contemporary Art and Culture

July 20, 2021July 22, 2021

Overflowing Skies: Stephanie Eche at High Line Nine
by Katherine Earle

Art Spiel Photo Story

../Downloads/drive-download-20210718T211005Z-001/120%20dpi/Agua-Cielo_Stephanie%20Eche%20.jpg — Agua/Cielo, 2021 Cotton, wool, indigo, wire and steel. Photo by Brian Schutza courtesy of the artist.

“…I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places in time.”

– Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

The undulating asymmetry of Stephanie Eche’s weavings in her solo exhibition Handmade Landscapes: Ocean Meets Sky that ran through July 26th, 2021 at High Line Nine, leaves space for you to interpret. The first work that your eyes encounter, Agua/Cielo, mirrors staring out at an ocean horizon that becomes the air above, a direct embodiment of the show’s title. The loosely woven piece speaks to the cyclical nature of water; its evaporation and transformation into rain that returns it to earth.

July 19, 2021July 22, 2021

Naomi Kawanishi Reis: Snippets of Beauty
by Etty Yaniv

In her drawings, murals and paintings, Japanese born, and Brooklyn based artist Naomi Kawanishi Reis, utilizes paper and fabric to make idealized spaces, ranging from utopian architecture of modernism, gardens, and more recently, still life in domestic spaces. In this recent body of work, Reis starts with photographs taken by her mother of her ikebana arrangements displayed outside the family home in Kyoto. Reis downloads the images from the family online chat, the link that has connected her diasporic family across oceans.

July 16, 2021November 2, 2022

Jorge Otero-Pailos: Distributed Monuments at Sapar Contemporary
by Alex Feim

A picture containing gallery, room, scene, indoor

Description automatically generated — *Installation view of Jorge Otero-Pailos: Distributed Monuments. Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary*

One could say that the primary medium of Jorge Otero-Pailos’s work is liquid latex, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his medium is time – or rather, the passage of time made visible. In Distributed Monuments at Sapar Contemporary, Otero-Pailos presents a series of latex casts mounted on canvas from the old U.S. Mint in San Francisco, California and from the pool at Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York. Two monumental sites on opposite coasts come together – one representing the literal creation of wealth, and the other an accumulation of it by an elite family. These latex casts have extracted dust from the sites, which are both in states of preserved ruin, but can be visited by the public.

July 14, 2021June 20, 2021

Imagining Icebergs
by Susan Hoffman Fishman

*Arctic Magnetism*, photograph of Russell Glacier, Greenland. Printed on backlit film. Drawing by removal with scratch nibs, steel wool with water-based crayons, 106” x 44,” 2019.

Multi-media artist and educator Itty Neuhaus has spent a great deal of time observing and interpreting environmental changes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and in Iceland and Greenland. Since 2000, when she took her first trip to Iceland, her drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos have addressed the degradation of glaciers and the nature of icebergs.

July 12, 2021July 22, 2021

Tina Struthers: Life in Fiber
by Etty Yaniv

Tina Marais Struthers, studio in Montreal, 2020, Photo courtesy of Josiane Farand

Tina Marais Struthers’ work develops from a rigorous, personal, and highly technical consideration of fiber as an evocative medium deftly addressing subjective experience, memories of place, and processes of change and growth. Struthers says she is fascinated by how fabric reflects and absorbs light, how it can entice us to touch, and feel comfort, or discomfort, by visual directing textures—”In this world during the pandemic, this need to touch, to feel textural comfort I think has really been amplified. I often challenge the notion of textile as being soft, in manipulating it to appear as metal sculptural forms.”

July 7, 2021July 22, 2021

Woven and Waxed Water Stories
by Susan Hoffman Fishman

10° 20′ 32” N, 44” x 96” x 3”, detail. Salvaged fishing nets and lines collected from across the Pacific Ocean with deep-sea leader line, 2021 (in process) .

Hawai’i-based fiber artist Mary Babcock uses discarded fishing nets and lines as well as household wax paper to create tapestries and installations about sea level rise, “our proclivity towards destruction or entanglement,” and our perceptions of and relationship to water. The process of self-laminating wax paper for installations and of cleaning, sorting, and unravelling abandoned, tangled fishing nets and lines and then weaving them into something completely new, is the manifestation of her refusal to see anything as unworkable or unrepairable, including the climate crisis.

July 5, 2021July 22, 2021

Vita Eruhimovitz: Fluctuating Environments
by Etty Yaniv

Working across media— from VR and robotic installations to gestural and vivid paintings—Los Angeles based artist Vita Eruhimovitz creates landscapes of imagined environments which resemble hybrid worlds with references to actual, fictional, and digital realities.

June 30, 2021July 22, 2021

History’s Shadow Marks the Beginning at Grove Collective
by Emily Blundell Owers

Installation view featuring Mitch Vowles, *Earnie*, 2021, Fruit Machine, Photographs, Water, 175 x 70 x 65cm courtesy of Grove Collective, photographed by Ollo Weguelian

Dibnah in Lights is hard to miss. The name of that legendary Yorkshire steeplejack flashing in red, white, and blue bulbs against the green felt backdrop of a repurposed snooker table is the first piece that greets you as you walk through Grove Collective’s doors. This piece by Mitch Vowles, a sculptor who works with found objects to draw out their cultural and personal contexts, nestles easily amongst Connor Murgatroyd’s pastel-hued still life paintings of anthuriums, signet rings, Sinatra albums and a scaffolders A-Z, and film photographer Alfie White’s hand-printed images of boys at Brixton bus stops, on Tottenham blocks, and playing in Burgess Park.

June 28, 2021June 9, 2021

Test Kitchen: Carolyn Case at Reynolds Gallery
by Rachel Jeffers

*Shadow Sink,* 2021 oil on panel 42 x 50 inches

Test Kitchen, Carolyn Case’s show at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, consisted of 4 oil paintings on panel along with 8 pastel drawings. Hefty brush strokes fill the surface area of the oil paintings. The painterly process involves a buildup of incremental adjustments, the layers of paint applied one by one until the shapes solidify into a kaleidoscopic arrangement; one nudge and the elements will shift accordingly, morphing the image into an entirely new pattern. Each of the paintings gives the impression of a specific time of day, indicated by the character of light and color playing across the space. Monet’s Water Lilies come to mind. But in place of Monet’s serene refuge, Case’s light lingers over a sink full of dirty dishes.

June 26, 2021July 22, 2021

Lisa Pressman and Jim Napierala at Susan Eley Fine Art
by Etty Yaniv

In Dialogue with Lisa Pressman

Lisa Pressman, Things That Were Never Said, 2021, Drawing and encaustic, 48” x 38”. Photo courtesy of Lisa Pressman and Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson

The current exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson features Lisa Pressman’s newest encaustic paintings and works on paper. One of the primary series on view in this show is entitled Messages, a recent and ongoing series of mixed media works on various handmade papers. Pressman collects handmade paper, including Japanese Shikishi board, which is edged with gold, as well as Letraset—the rub-on letters employed by graphic designers before the computer era. Onto these unique handmade paper, she employs the press-on letters of the Letraset, as a mark-making tool to create a symbolic language—hieroglyphic and intuitive.