#artspiel – Page 34

September 20, 2023September 14, 2023

PE Pinkman: Two Solo Shows at Watchung Arts Center

Featured Project

A collage of a couple of images of a person

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — *(l) Mona Brody, Getting Answers, 60” x 48”, 2023, and (r) Anne Trauben, a section of the installation, Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky, 2023*

PE Pinkman, the chief visual arts curator and executive director of the Watchung Arts Center in New Jersey, notes that two exhibitions — Mona Brody: Portals, Apparitions, and Other Voices and Anne Trauben: Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky — emerged from separate discussions with each artist. For over 45 years, the nonprofit Watchung Arts Center has been a prominent stage, showcasing works from regional artists in New Jersey and New York. Their central mission is to provide visual artists with a platform for engagement, promoting arts education while offering unique exhibition opportunities. At a first glance, both Mona Brody’s paintings and Anne Trauben’s installations appear straightforward. However, Pinkman emphasizes that they reveal deeper layers upon closer inspection. He observes a fascinating contrast: while Brody’s art unveils forms from the shadows, Trauben emphasizes light and shape within a darkened setting.

September 18, 2023August 18, 2023

Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10 – Alejandra Seeber and Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon

Dance

The impetus for this series of conversations between a visual artist and a choreographer comes directly from my recent collaborative work with a choreographer as part of Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10. In this unique project a choreographer is paired with a visual artist to create together over two months a dance performance that integrates the two disciplines into a cohesive vision. Here is the conversation between artist Alejandra Seeber and choreographer Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon.

September 15, 2023August 18, 2023

Tempestry Project: Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly with Amy Brady

hot air

Amy Brady published in her newsletter Burning World a conversation with Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly, a knitter and data scientist who founded the Tempestry Project, a fiber art collaboration that uses yarn and other fibers to create artful representations of climate data. This summer, they are partnering with Colossal Magazine and the Design Museum of Chicago in two different ways: first, their “Paleo New Normal Tempestry” will be exhibited in the museum’s group show, At the Precipice. And secondly, they’re collaborating with the museum to develop a Chicago Tempestry Collection that will be exhibited along with the Paleo piece. Amy Brady asked Emily and Asy about their work and what they hope viewers take away from their art.

September 7, 2023September 6, 2023

Myth Maker: Laleh Khorramian at SEPTEMBER Gallery

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Alon Koppol

Finally! What a joy to meander through a show that is not just a formulaic scaffolding rendered to execute a marketing plan rather than make art. Walking into the building that houses September Gallery’s new space in Kinderhook, NY, The first thing you see is not a wall or architectural ornamentation but a monumental scroll that immediately hints you might be here for a while. This colossal collage introduces Myth Maker, the second exhibition at September Gallery by Laleh Khorramian.

September 6, 2023September 4, 2023

The Art of Getting It Together

Jesse Benson, *Packaging*, 2003/2023. Ephemera from all projects completed in grad school, vacuum-formed plastic, plexiglass, silkscreen on board. Installation dimensions variable, individual dimensions 21 x 28.8 x 3 in. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy As-Is LA.

In Organizer, Jesse Benson’s first solo gallery show since 2017, the Los Angeles artist unpacks the “dialectic of order and chaos” by introducing heterogeneity to organizing systems.

September 4, 2023August 29, 2023

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

A Meditation on Artists’ Residencies, a Dune Shack and the Twilight Zone

Ray Wells dune shack with well pump in the bottom left foreground, Provincetown/Truro 2016, photo courtesy of the writer

Sometimes I find myself scrolling Instagram on a dark day in February or March, just wondering what it would be like to make art in a lighthouse…or in Robert Rauschenberg’s old fishing shack…or in a Florida swamp…or in a small RV in a Utah ghost town…or on an island in Italy. Artists’ residencies are a nice thing to dream about when you feel stuck or in a rut and when life is wearing you down with mundane pressures. Sure, there are the big ones like MacDowell and Yaddo, but those are uber-competitive and hard to get into. There are so many other off-the-beaten-path secret outposts that will happily allow a creative person to try on their lifestyle for a bit. As an artist, it’s so helpful to get out of dodge now and then and hit the road for new sights and sounds.

August 30, 2023August 29, 2023

Here Now: Contemporary Photographers of the Hudson Valley

Phyllis Galembo Photographer, Carnival Mexico. Fujiflex print. 30 x 30 2017.

The Kleinart James Center in Woodstock, New York, is currently presenting a very ambitious and interesting photography exhibition. Entitled Here Now: Contemporary Photographers of the Hudson Valley, the show presents 17 artists representing a portion of the many photographers working in this geography. Organized by curator Jane Hart, the show offers a wide range of aesthetic visions and techniques.

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023

Martha Bone and Janice Caswell: Two Solo Shows at Garrison Art Center

A painting of a snake

Description automatically generated — Martha Bone, Mapping the Invisible #3, 2020, acrylic, aluminum enamel, charcoal, joint compound, pastel on pieced paper, 63 x 88 in., photo courtesy of the artist.

Two artists currently showing at Garrison Art Center use scale, structure, and geometry to examine and reinterpret their respective environments. Martha Bone’s large-scale paintings and assemblages express a sweeping view of the cosmos, bringing the macrocosm within our reach, while Janice Caswell’s small-scale sculptures find the infinite within the microcosm, showing us the vast potential in all forms. Both Bone and Caswell photograph their natural and man-made landscapes, later referring to these images when creating their works. And both artists construct their forms as improvisations inspired by their observations, although neither artist is interested in a literal interpretation of nature. But this is where the similarities end, their distinctive styles diverging toward an expansive contemplation of form and space and an intimate exploration of the fabricated structures that inhabit our lives.

August 28, 2023August 28, 2023

David Dew Bruner reinterprets still life in Equipoise at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Artist Profile

A person sitting in a chair with his legs crossed

Description automatically generated — Portrait of the Artist in his studio, Hudson, NY. Image Credit: Matt Moment

David Dew Bruner is no more a thief than the next artist—it’s only that he is candid enough to tell us outright who he has stolen from. In “Equipoise: Stasis and The Power of Suggestion in Still Life,” a group show on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through October 1, Bruner presents a series of drawings, each titled “Morandi Bottle.” More accurately, it is not so much Morandi’s bottles that Bruner has lifted (he’s the first to admit that the works “don’t look anything like Morandi paintings”) but rather the essence of Morandi’s mark-making. “Sometimes, I just love the way other people make marks,” Bruner enthuses. “My endeavor is [to riff off] the gesture of the form, the gesture in the detail, the quality of the line. It may be a subject matter that’s dull as dishwater to me, but the way it’s painted… I’m jealous.”

August 25, 2023August 12, 2023

Bay Ridge Through an Ecological Lens: Kate Dodd

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Kate Dodd installing “Bay Ridge Tree Collection”

Bay Ridge through an Ecological Lens is a multi-faceted public art exhibition hosted by Stand4 Gallery and presented in collaboration with ecoartspace

This interactive, public, community arts exhibition is curated by Jennifer McGregor, featuring artists Rebecca Allan, Aaron Asis, Chris Costan, Kate Dodd, Peter Edlund, Kristin Reiber-Harris, Ellen Coleman-Izzo, Sergey Jivetin, Nathan Kensinger, Rita Leduc, Christopher Lin, Nikki Lindt, E.J. McAdams/ Jimbo Blachly, Nancy Nowacek in collaboration with Carla Kihlstedt and Carlos Alomar, Benjamin Swett and filmmakers: Aaron Assis, Nate Dorr, Sean Hanley, Nathan Kensinger, Nikki Lindt, Emily Packer and Lesley Steele, and Kristin Reiber-Harris

It consists of nature walks and community interventions in the gallery and various locations throughout the Bay Ridge community from April 15 through June 17, 2023. Art Spiel features a series of interviews related to this project throughout its duration. Kate Dodd, whose library installation will be until after Labor Day, is featured here.