Mira Dayal, installation view (wall text), “…In That Empire…” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist.
In her inaugural solo exhibition with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal has rubbed by hand the entire gallery floor in graphite, resulting in a map of the space’s topography – all lines and no borders. Drawing on Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, the show explores notions of scale, control, ethics, materiality, and simulation. The show runs through April 4th, 2021.
Installation view, Performance Anxiety, on view at the Allegheny Art Galleries, 2021. Featuring works by Eric D. Charlton, Taha Heydari, Wednesday Kim. Image courtesy of the Allegheny Art Galleries.
The three person show Performance Anxiety at the Allegheny Art Galleries in PA features videos, paintings, and sculptures by Eric D. Charlton, Taha Heydari, and Wednesday Kim, who all respond in their work to the intense digital terrains most of us inhabit, exploring how the intrapersonal and interpersonal elements interplay— how self-image is being manifested and how does it affect communication with others in an ever-shifting social media landscape? Paula Burleigh, the curator of the show and the gallery director, elaborates on the premise of the exhibition, the artists’ artwork, and her curatorial process.
Holly Wong working on “Phoenix.” Graphite on drafting film with sewing. 132 x 132 in. Photo courtesy of Al Wong
Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:
“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”
Katerina Lanfranco Rose Garden, 2020. Oil paint and mixed media on canvas, 22 x 28”
Art is a refuge both for the viewer and the maker. Katerina Lanfranco’s recent exhibition at Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Nature Poems, offers respite from these strange and unsettling times. The exhibition starts with an exquisite painting titled, Bouquet for You. Its deft placement in the gallery is significant as it presages the story of the entire show in microcosm. Three encapsulated womb-like flower forms grow amid a dense, swirling, chaotic background teeming with what look like sperm cells and luminous spinning orbs. Practically buzzing with a sparkler’s sizzle, this wellspring of life is shot through with skeins of golden paint tracing through and around the orbs. The golden trails recall the rays of golden light falling onto the Virgin in Renaissance Annunciation scenes. Here instead of symbolizing the conception of Christ, Lanfranco suggests the secular, “scientific” conception of the Universe.
Laura Mega is wearing one of the 20 limited edition surgical masks she created. All proceeds went to Feeding America for Covid-19 emergency aide.
Laura Mega is an Italian visual artist based in Rome and New York. As everything around her in Rome became sad and empty when Europe was hit by Covid-19, she felt the need to connect with the outside world through the language she is most familiar with, art. As all the museums and galleries were closed, she thought —what if I video project the art outside, connecting people trapped at home around the world? In Laura Mega’s mind, ideas have no value if there is no one who believes and supports them. Her international project Art Heals, presented by LAZZARO_art doesn’t sleep, is a video projection exhibition offering an element of brief happiness.
Local Artists and Cultural Organizations in Each Borough to Host Outdoor, Socially Distanced Press Conferences with Performances March 18-19
FreeDa Banana leading an outdoor dance class during LEIMAY Block Party. Image courtesy LEIMAY. Image Credit: Shige Moriya
One year after New York City’s arts and cultural sector suddenly shut down over the period of one week in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, events in each borough will mark the somber anniversary. Comprised of speeches by local elected/cultural leaders and performances by New York artists, this day of programming memorializes the shut down while looking forward to the needs of a resilient NY artistic community. The events are united by the dual themes of #CultureRemembers and #CultureForward, and will take place on Thursday, March 18, and Friday, March 19. Local leaders and artists will participate in all of them.
The Front room Gallery hosts an online tour of “Aqua/Terra”, the beautiful and evocative solo exhibition of sculpture, installation, photograms, layered egg tempera and encaustic drawings by New York Artist, Beth Dary. The artworks in “Aqua/Terra” explore the power of water throughout natural forms and forces of nature, as a force to shape the land, sustain life, and destroy it. Beth Dary’s work also responds to the effect of human activity on land and water – bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide captured in Arctic ice, the rising tides due to the climate crisis, and fractal patterns formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.
Jen Dwyer, Stay Hard & Soft, Ceramic sculpture, 2020
In the several years preceding the pandemic, Jen Dwyer completed her MFA in Ceramics at the University of Notre Dame, exhibited at Miami Context in 2019 as well as in back-to-back iterations of Spring/Break, and saw her work profiled by Forbes and Architectural Digest. Then, when the rapidly increasing toll of the coronavirus caused the collective art world to press pause on what promised to be yet another whirlwind year, she took the slower pace of life as an opportunity to embrace deeper introspection in her studio practice. This newfound creative intuition wove its way into the production of her most recent collection of sculptures and paintings, which the artist recently debuted at Wassaic Project in New York.
“Last Wash at Midnight” at The Border Project Space, installation view courtesy of The Border Project Space, New York
At a time when one would have to work 78 hours at minimum wage to afford a studio apartment in most of the US, the idea of a rusting laundromat provides a fitting theme for an exhibition to reflect the struggles faced by so many in the US. While the show curated by Jamie Martinez evokes layers of meaning, the sagging laundry machine of Chelsea Nader, provides an ethos for the current state of the world grappling with economic stress in a pandemic.
“Popular Jewelry” featuring Arkadiy Ryabin, Johanna Stroebel, Clarissa Hurst, and Ann Treesa Joy, on September 26, 2020, photo credit to Adam Golfer, image courtesy of P.A.D.
The artist-run Project Art Distribution (better known as P.A.D. or @project_art_distribution on Instagram) hosts day-long outdoor exhibitions on versatile packing 72”x80” pads. Set up in Soho, one of New York’s art and retail hubs, the padded surfaces become the metaphorical and physical exhibition space of the usual pristine white cube galleries. Unlike the current Soho rental clientele of luxury brands and gallery spaces, P.A.D. has no walls. Lacking barriers in more than one way, the sidewalk gallery provides the public, the artists, the curators, and the organizational collaborators a welcomed openness to art and discussion. The project creates an ongoing network that ever-expands its community.
