Installation view, Ahavani Mullen: Across Centuries and the Earth, 2023. Dennos Museum Center, Traverse City, MI. Photo by the artist
In Ahavani Mullen’s studio, humble materials of pigment, metal, limestone, and resin transform into spiritual relics. She enters into the act of creation in silence from which paintings, sculptures, and installations evolve and become artifacts of human consciousness. In connecting the seen to the unseen, her objects hold memories of time, space, and sound, referencing the very turning of the earth with its movements and vibrations.
Portrait of the artist in his studio in Poughkeepsie, NY. Image Credit: Matt Moment
In Carl Grauer’s latest suite of paintings for Carrie Haddad Gallery titled A QU(i)E(t)ER Interior, the Kansas-born visual artist elicits a disregard for distinction between the animate and the inanimate. Throughout, Grauer characterizes the home he shares with his husband Mario in Poughkeepsie, paying special attention to the majesty of light as he portrays his abode and the mementos that adorn it. Hearkening back to his Lost & Found series from 2017—wherein Grauer also documents everyday objects—he now contextualizes his personal artifacts in space and time. At once, he conveys his meditations on queerness, mortality, and the omnipresence of his mother, Janice, who passed away early in 2023 following her battle with Alzheimer’s.
James Esber- Ladybug. 2016. Acrylic on panel. 40 x 40 inches.
A droll and aptly named group exhibition opened at Pierogi in Williamsburg in early April. Entitled Out of Character, the exhibition has been curated from local artists all working in and around the figure and focused on a humorous take on the human condition.
Jules Olitski ,Wanderings: Bilbao, Orange, Yellow and Blue, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 45 ½ x 39 1/2 inches, from the exhibition Jules Olitski: Late Works at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery on the campus of Golden Artist Colors in New Berlin, New York
Painter Elisabeth Condon’s reflections on a painting by Jules Olitski she had seen at the exhibition Jules Olitski: Late Works—were initially presented in the first episode of Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting, a new series artist Amy Talluto has recently launched in her podcast Pep Talks for Artists. In each episode in this series Elisabeth Condon shares her way of looking at one painting, here, at the acrylic painting (2004) Wanderings, Bilbao: Orange Yellow and Blue, by Ukrainian- American artist Jules Olitski. The show at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery in New Berlin, NY is up until March 2023 and another concurrent show of his works was up at Yares Gallery in New York (till February 11, 2023).
Hovey Brock: Frost Valley, 2019, 36” x 48”, acrylic on panel
A central theme in my Crazy River project has been highlighting the emotional toll of the climate crisis by putting under a microscope, so to speak, my own feelings about not only the impacts of the crisis but the knowledge that humans’ actions are the cause. This series of three on-line essays, thought experiments if you like, expands that project to change the POV to non-human actors that are inextricably bound with the habitat in the Western Catskills: the black-legged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica). All three have seen their habitat change dramatically through climate change and human interventions. Using my imagination and research, I try to enter the umwelt of all three species, an impossible task, as Thomas Nagel pointed out in “What Is It LIke to Be a Bat,” for which artistic license may give us the best chance to accomplish. My intentions in doing so fall along three axes: theoretical, aesthetic, and spiritual, dimensions all essential to my own art practice. What follows is a look at the umwelt of white-tailed deer from the perspective of aesthetics.
In conversation with Adèle Eisenstein and Saba Farhoudnia
No Signal, 2022, acrylic on acrylic mirror sheet, 7 panels, 48×16” ea., 48×112”. Photo: Farzan Ghasemi
Reflection, the solo show of Saba Farhoudnia in Jamaica Center for Art & Learning, highlights the cruel and tragic practice of so-called “honor” killing, by way of individual stories which give the victims their voice back, and shed a light on this reality for far too many women, girls and LGBTQ+ (taking at least 5000 lives annually per the United Nations Population Fund). The ensemble of individual panels and stories welcomes the visitor into a colorful and intriguing landscapes. Adèle Eisenstein, the curator of the show, says that the layers of paint reveal a reflective surface, which delivers a direct message to the observer—this might have been you. While dishonor killing is the most extreme end of the spectrum, the subject addressed also touches upon and exposes stratified layers of gender-based violence.
Curator Jennifer McGregor in conversation with the artists
Kate Collyer, Bundle: Alaska, 2022, mixed media and video, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Artists Kate Colyer, Lorrie Fredette, and Megan Porpeglia talk with curator Jennifer McGregor about their framework to create whispered conversations, on view at Stand4 Gallery and Community Space in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The collective was active during COVID via Zoom reading about the natural world. They created bundles in response to their individual trips in 2021. These were shared through the mail to instigate a series of new artworks. Jennifer McGregor was brought in as curator to help shape the exhibition.
Scherezade Garcia, Paradise According to the Tropics/Sunburnt Jesus, Acrylic, Charcoal on Linen, 72 x 48 inches
Metaphor Projects is an artists-run space for contemporary art and culture founded in 2001 by two working artists. Directors/ Curators: Julian Jackson and Rene Lynch have mounted more than 100 solo and group exhibitions presenting the work of hundreds of artists and spent two decades developing what they call “the social sculpture that is Metaphor.”
Portrait in Zoya Private Museum Solo Show “semagdniM”. Photocredit: Juraj Fifik
For the last few years the Slovak painter Peter Cvik has been layering different experiences and stories out of sheer visual memory. Without using photos or any other found imagery, Cvik builds new positions of “synthetic” reality that reminds us of something real or experienced within a flux of time where memories float. His landscapes evoke a sense of collision between opposing worlds without evoking the sense of a specific place. Peter Cvik equates his paintings to a sentence that ends with three dots which viewers can complete on their own.
The Venice Biennale, a sprawling art Universe, takes over the city every other year alternating its focus between art and architecture. Due to Covid, 2020 was cancelled, and the 2022 festival attracted an unprecedented number of visitors. The 2022 exhibition has received almost unparalleled praise for its inclusiveness, its artistry and its cohesion as a statement of the art Zeitgeist. It hasn’t hurt that the principle exhibition, The Milk of Dreams was curated by women, celebrates women and under-represented artists, and is for the most part simply superb.
