Art Spiel – Page 83 – Contemporary Art and Culture

In Dialogue by Marley Massey Parsons

Brie Ruais: Recording with Clay

In Dialogue with Brie Ruais

Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.

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Featured Artist by Art Spiel

Claire McConaughy: Nearby at 490 Atlantic Gallery

Featured Artist

In her solo show at 490 Atlantic Gallery, New York based painter Claire McConaughy features landscapes depicted in vivid colors and expressive linear marks. In Delicate Rainbow for instance, the painting plays on tension between horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations – an unexpected pale pink flow becomes a backdrop horizon to green vegetation spreading its limb-like branches diagonally upwards; on the top, blue-purple brush strokes depicting sky or water, lead the eye sideways, and then right above, a surprising orange linear brush stroke with the other rainbow colors hinted, stretch across the middle top.

Featured Artist by Art Spiel

Paul Loughney – Consequences of Competing Narratives at Vorderzimmer

Featured Artist

Paul Loughney’s collages resemble daydreams where seemingly unrelated elements coalesce into a fantastic mindscape where body parts, typography, geometric shapes, and hints of architectural elements scramble into unique environments that are oddly believable despite their quirky nature.

Featured Artist by Etty Yaniv

Deborah Kruger – Plumas at PRPG in Mexico City

Featured Artist

Plumas, featuring Deborah Kruger’s recent work, is PRPG.mx’s premiere show in their newly expanded exhibition and residency space in Mexico City. In this sculptural installation, curated by Micheal Swank, Kruger focuses on the extinction of Mexican bird species, the death of Mexican indigenous languages, and the impacts of climate change on migration.

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Exhibition Review by Ágnes Berecz

Remote Work

How can artists unmute themselves and make work in creative dialogue with each other while they experience forced solitude at faraway places? How can collaborative practices be reinvented in social isolation? And how can virtual and chance encounters between strangers can lead to the making of jointly authored images and objects? The un/mute project, initiated by EUNIC New York and Undercurrent, the independent exhibition space in DUMBO, was an attempt to probe these questions by inviting 32 artists to work across borders, languages, and media, while sharing the global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic at distant locations, under varied social circumstances, and in cultural contexts.

Artists & climate Change by Joan Sullivan

In the Beginning There Was Only Water

While some of us taught ourselves to bake sourdough bread or to mend socks during the pandemic, the American painter and arts writer Susan Hoffman Fishman plunged herself into her studio and emerged, a year later, with a revised creation story. The result: a magnificent, nearly 50-foot (15 meters) opus entitled In The Beginning There Was Only Water. Currently on exhibit at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut through December 19, 2021, In The Beginning There Was Only Water reframes the biblical creation myth – in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – into a new, non-human-centric story.

Featured Artist by Art Spiel

Rebecca Welz – Displacement at June Kelly

Featured Artist

In Rebecca Welz’s recent sculpture series, the sculptor reflects on the global phenomena of people who have been displaced from their homes due to a wide range of hardships—political, economic, climate change. The steel structures in her Displacement series represents a quest for safety and belonging. This body of work is featured at the June Kelly Gallery through January 4^th, 2022.

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Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Juan Hinojosa: Ensemble Iconographies

New York based artist Juan Hinojosa collects found objects from everywhere he passes by. A toy snake, a wooden bird, a Good Luck charm, fragments from advertisements and billboards—find their way into his intricate compositions, creating altogether layered sculptural assemblages and intricate two dimensional collages. In both dimensional and flat formats, Hinojosa’s vocabulary is grounded in Pop aesthetics with a tint of Surrealism. Through super vivid colors and elaborate graphic shapes he depicts imaginary worlds where extravagant shrines and hybrid flowery creatures become a convincing presence. When you get closer, you can most likely trace where they came from.

Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Baris Gokturk: Danse Macabre in Public Spaces: Painting Euphoria and Madness in Times of Crisis

Baris Gokturk’s installations are intricate, layered, and admirably ambitious in both meaning and form. The Turkish born New York based artist asks the big questions – what is his role as an artist, individual, immigrant within the larger context of a world in crisis? In All Saints he exhibited at the Boiler space at the ELM foundation he combined imagery of dance and fire into a monumental installation.

Artist Profile by Art Spiel

Evan Paul English – VIEWFOUND at Chashama

Featured Artist

Brooklyn-based artist Evan Paul English uses a small viewfinder to discover compelling compositions within the fabrics he collects and enlarges them to abstract paintings of different scales, working across painting, sculpture, murals, and wallpaper. VIEWFOUND, his current solo exhibition in Brooklyn, features work along these lines and is on view at 324 5^th Avenue through December 6^th, 2021. Presented by Salt Gallery in collaboration with ChaShama, the show includes eight new works that translate American vintage floral design into paintings, referencing gender, sexuality, and class.