Contemporary Art and Culture
Kit Warren‘s works on paper present complex and elaborate visual cryptography – patterns of lines, dots, and bold colorful shapes. They evoke layered associations ranging from microcosmic to cosmic. Kit Warren shares with Art Spiel some of her ideas and work process.
Art Spiel in Dialogue with Steve Hicks
Painter Steve Hicks shares with Art Spiel his reflections on the body of work he is currently exhibiting at George Billis gallery, focusing on how he sees these paintings within the wider context of his overall work.
Continue reading “‘Fabrications’ at George Billis”Anna Mikaela Ekstrand in dialogue with Mumbai-based artist Akshita Gandhi
Miami Art Week is bigger than any other global fair as it attracts a wide range of audiences. Centered around Art Basel Miami, Miami Art Week is the catch-all term for the seven day art world bonanza in December packed densely with art fairs, public art, interventions, activations, pop-ups, parties – basically all forms of art shows – often sponsored by companies who capitalize on the opportunity to reach art world professionals, art lovers, celebrities, and trend-setters. You might already know this, great. What you might not have considered is what it feels like to be an artist within this bustling eco/nomy/logy.
Continue reading ““Now You’re Looking” – Akshita Gandhi at Pulse”
Lily Prince makes lush plein air paintings depicting the essence of specific places around the world. By utilizing linear and color vocabularies, she creates pictorial fields which resemble disorienting topographical maps where time is fluid and frozen simultaneously. Lily prince shares with Art Spiel her background, ideas. process, and projects.
Continue reading “Lily Prince: Honing Plein Air”
Riad Miah‘s vivid abstract paintings and bold installations reflect his deep ongoing preoccupation with representation of materiality, time, and light. Riad Miah shares with Art Spiel some thoughts on his own trajectory as a painter. He describes how his painting process has evolved, and elaborates on some projects, including his upcoming exhibition “Magical Spaces, Familiar Places” at Kean College Gallery.
Continue reading “Riad Miah: Moving Pigments”
In her lush paintings and complex installations Zahra Nazari draws largely on architecture and her Iranian roots both in terms of cultural heritage and personal experience as an immigrant, while utilizing gestural forms invoking early 20th modernists like Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich, or mid century Abstract Expressionists in NYC. This fertile amalgam of cultural cues makes her work current and thought provoking. Zahra Nazari shares with Art Spiel her experience as an artist, her approach to art making and some of her projects.
Continue reading “Zahra Nazari: Metamorphosing Gestures”
Tansy Xiao is a curator, artist, writer, translator, and an overtly out of the box thinker. She shares with Art Spiel some insights on her upcoming curatorial project at Radiator, her art-making, as well as translation and writing processes.
AS: Tell me a bit about yourself and what brought you to art – writing, translation, curation and making.
Tansy Xiao: I wasn’t properly schooled, neither did I consider myself an artist when I was travelling around and painting abstract murals in exchange for food and accommodation. Now you might call it an unprompted residency. During my long trips and brief sojourns, I would write book length letters to my friends, with a mutual understanding that they were not obligated to reply. I joined and formed communities, then left them, until I have relatively settled in New York, a city with such transience that the fear of being trapped in a constricted niche no longer haunts me. That’s when I began my practice as a curator and translator. If I were to describe my status quo now, I’d quote D. H. Lawrence’s last paragraph in Rainbow:
Continue reading “Tansy Xiao – The Echo of Journeying”curated by Emily Burns
Linger Still, (installation view). Image courtesy of Assembly Room Gallery
Diaspora consciousness is an acute mindfulness of one’s cultural origins post-migration. This awareness can be, “heightened by communication and visits, and is retained in memories, storytelling and other creative forms.” Individuals or families who take the risk to migrate must navigate a series of unanticipated complexities away from the support of their families and communities. For those who choose to leave or flee from their homelands the sensation of “otherness” is a pervasive factor in their quest for opportunities, stability, and safety. This uncanny sensation serves as the conceptual pulse and subtle heartbeat for Kaveri Raina’s solo exhibition “Linger Still,” curated by Emily Burns currently on view at Assembly Room Gallery.
Continue reading “Linger Still – Kaveri Raina at Assembly Room”Mary DeVincentis paintings conjure worlds that are simultaneously inner and cosmic, personal and universal, unexpected yet strangely familiar. Some of the core concepts of Buddhism, such as impermanence, emptiness, interdependence and the origins of suffering, aversion and ignorance, often surface in her work in allegorical forms. Her imagery, conveyed with a remarkable fluidity of color and form, takes the viewer deep into their own inner worlds. The artist shared with Art Spiel some of the experiences that led her to art, some of the ideas behind her work, and her overall process.
Kelsey Shwetz’s paintings bring to mind fantastic landscapes and ornamented interior spaces at the same time. Her imagery depicts artificial environments saturated with unexpected color combinations, altogether conjuring intense psychological urgency- unsettling yet playful. In this interview with Art Spiel Shwetz shared some of her thoughts, specifically about color, narrative and style. Continue reading “Kelsey Shwetz – Other than Linear Reality”