Contemporary Art and Culture
The figures in New York City based painter Keisha Prioleau-Martin, become an essence of motion and emotion – exuding a sense of radical joy and playfulness, expressed through gestural brushstrokes and vibrant colors.
Continue reading “Keisha Prioleau-Martin: I Have Been the Dancer”
Armita Raafat is a New York based artist, born in Chicago and raised in Iran. Her sculptures, installations, and wall reliefs draw upon traditional Iranian architecture, specifically the Muqarnas Domes, the vaulting element in Islamic architecture. She is exploring their form and symbolism through her personal lens by using contemporary materials, transplanting them into new cultural, historical, and geographical contexts to assume a new meaning.
Continue reading “Armita Raafat: Reflective Tactility”Thomas Motley in conversation with Elisa Lendvay and Sara Cardona
The unique design and location of the Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery at The University of Dallas proved a most fitting space for the exuberant content of Sara Cardona and Elisa Lendvay’s exhibit, titled Meridian. Picture a giant treehouse, spanning the edge of a steep ravine, extended over a leafy canopy of thick post oak trees. From the gallery’s atrium entry, visitors enjoy a dramatic bird’s-eye view of a sylvan campus below. Under gallery director John Watson’s sculptor’s eye, Cardona’s and Lendvay’s lively celebration of nature, a Gaia shout-out, projected joyous meridian energy-lines from gallery to surrounding woods. Meridian expressed the artists’ shared interests in earth’s natural shapes and cycles, regeneration of discarded or out-of-fashion cultural designs and hardware, and celebration of movement, of dance.
Continue reading “Meridian at Haggerty Gallery: Sara Cardona and Elisa Lendvay”Art Spiel Photo Story
“…I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places in time.”
– Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
The undulating asymmetry of Stephanie Eche’s weavings in her solo exhibition Handmade Landscapes: Ocean Meets Sky that ran through July 26th, 2021 at High Line Nine, leaves space for you to interpret. The first work that your eyes encounter, Agua/Cielo, mirrors staring out at an ocean horizon that becomes the air above, a direct embodiment of the show’s title. The loosely woven piece speaks to the cyclical nature of water; its evaporation and transformation into rain that returns it to earth.
Continue reading “Overflowing Skies: Stephanie Eche at High Line Nine”
In her drawings, murals and paintings, Japanese born, and Brooklyn based artist Naomi Kawanishi Reis, utilizes paper and fabric to make idealized spaces, ranging from utopian architecture of modernism, gardens, and more recently, still life in domestic spaces. In this recent body of work, Reis starts with photographs taken by her mother of her ikebana arrangements displayed outside the family home in Kyoto. Reis downloads the images from the family online chat, the link that has connected her diasporic family across oceans.
Continue reading “Naomi Kawanishi Reis: Snippets of Beauty”
Tina Marais Struthers’ work develops from a rigorous, personal, and highly technical consideration of fiber as an evocative medium deftly addressing subjective experience, memories of place, and processes of change and growth. Struthers says she is fascinated by how fabric reflects and absorbs light, how it can entice us to touch, and feel comfort, or discomfort, by visual directing textures—”In this world during the pandemic, this need to touch, to feel textural comfort I think has really been amplified. I often challenge the notion of textile as being soft, in manipulating it to appear as metal sculptural forms.”
Continue reading “Tina Struthers: Life in Fiber”
Hawai’i-based fiber artist Mary Babcock uses discarded fishing nets and lines as well as household wax paper to create tapestries and installations about sea level rise, “our proclivity towards destruction or entanglement,” and our perceptions of and relationship to water. The process of self-laminating wax paper for installations and of cleaning, sorting, and unravelling abandoned, tangled fishing nets and lines and then weaving them into something completely new, is the manifestation of her refusal to see anything as unworkable or unrepairable, including the climate crisis.
Continue reading “Woven and Waxed Water Stories”
Working across media— from VR and robotic installations to gestural and vivid paintings—Los Angeles based artist Vita Eruhimovitz creates landscapes of imagined environments which resemble hybrid worlds with references to actual, fictional, and digital realities.
Continue reading “Vita Eruhimovitz: Fluctuating Environments”
Dibnah in Lights is hard to miss. The name of that legendary Yorkshire steeplejack flashing in red, white, and blue bulbs against the green felt backdrop of a repurposed snooker table is the first piece that greets you as you walk through Grove Collective’s doors. This piece by Mitch Vowles, a sculptor who works with found objects to draw out their cultural and personal contexts, nestles easily amongst Connor Murgatroyd’s pastel-hued still life paintings of anthuriums, signet rings, Sinatra albums and a scaffolders A-Z, and film photographer Alfie White’s hand-printed images of boys at Brixton bus stops, on Tottenham blocks, and playing in Burgess Park.
Continue reading “History’s Shadow Marks the Beginning at Grove Collective”
Test Kitchen, Carolyn Case’s show at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, consisted of 4 oil paintings on panel along with 8 pastel drawings. Hefty brush strokes fill the surface area of the oil paintings. The painterly process involves a buildup of incremental adjustments, the layers of paint applied one by one until the shapes solidify into a kaleidoscopic arrangement; one nudge and the elements will shift accordingly, morphing the image into an entirely new pattern. Each of the paintings gives the impression of a specific time of day, indicated by the character of light and color playing across the space. Monet’s Water Lilies come to mind. But in place of Monet’s serene refuge, Case’s light lingers over a sink full of dirty dishes.
Continue reading “Test Kitchen: Carolyn Case at Reynolds Gallery”