#artexhibition – Art Spiel

March 12, 2025March 10, 2025

Up: Janet Goldner’s Zigzags at FiveMyles

Janet Goldner, installation view at FiveMyles

A cavernous cubbyhole with a variety of enigmatic gunmetal stalagmites emerges from the relative monotony of the urban backdrop of St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. Janet Goldner’s collection of sculptures, called Zigzags, populate FiveMyles’ exterior space, and while the viewer can enter this space through the gallery, the initial impression of jagged edges, pent-up energy, and the cold solidity of the welded metal objects makes one relieved there is a metal gate between us, the viewer, and them, the sculptures.

December 9, 2024December 8, 2024

Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space

A couple of men in a room

Description automatically generated — Moran Kliger, Installation

In the group show Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space, people, animals, and places shift and juxtapose, coming together like pieces of a map—one that charts the shared inner terrain of memory, trauma, and identity. Curated by Noa Rabinovich Lalo and Carolina Werebe, with L’Space founder Lily Almog, the show, as Almog puts it, draws on “a shared Israeli heritage and a deep connection to the contemporary art scene in Israel, a country with a rich cultural history and traditions amidst ongoing uncertainty.” And it’s that sense of uncertainty that pulls everything together—voids and absences linger in the air. Even when the work seems rooted in specific places, the setting remains layered and elusive, offering more questions than answers. This is evident in Netta Lieber Sheffer’s sweeping charcoal drawing installation of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna clinic, where he lived and worked for 47 years before fleeing the Nazis in 1938.

December 6, 2024December 7, 2024

Shiva Ahmadi – Tangle at Shoshana Wayne

First thing that pulled me into Shiva Ahmadi’s Tangle exhibition were the pressure cookers. It took me a moment to recognize them: from a distance, they appeared as intricate decorative objects and archaeological relics simultaneously. While the vintage pressure cookers evoked associations of domestic warmth and memories of my grandma’s kitchen, their surfaces etched with Arabic calligraphy and floral ornamentation recall artifacts from a Persian or Arabic cultural heritage museum. The patience and meticulous craft of such engraving parallels the labor of generations of women who spent countless hours in the kitchen crafting their family’s meals.

November 26, 2024December 10, 2024

In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty

Eva Zanardi, the guest curator of the group show—In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty—observes that many times in her life, art has raised her awareness and consequently even made her reconsider her point of view on important issues. Zanardi says that the prerogative that should belong to most art is to be thought-provoking; as the educator and activist Cezar A. Cruz says, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Eva Zanardi shared some of her curatorial process and gave us here a brief guide through the show.

February 7, 2024February 7, 2024

Small Myriad: Sharon Horvath at Bookstein Projects

Installation view, detail, photo courtesy of Etty Yaniv

Sharon Horvath’s paintings in Small Myriad, her current exhibition at Bookstein Projects, create a sense of an alluring universe where dazzling colors, interflowing shapes, and tactile surfaces merge, meander, and as a group form an enigmatic universe unified by a mysterious code. Horvath’s spiraling lines and patterned forms create ebbing and flowing movements echoing Theodor Schwenk’s anthroposophical approach to the unifying principle of all movement and form. In his book Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, Schwenk posits that water movements reveal fundamental, archetypal patterns in natural and human-made environments. This deeper order finds resonance in Horvath’s paintings, but simultaneously, her imagery and use of collage also lean toward the enigmatic, paradoxical, and absurd.

January 27, 2023January 26, 2023

Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing room, gallery, scene

Description automatically generated — Jac Lahav, Immersive blue vine installation on the hardship and beauty of being a foster parent

Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief at Sugarlift is an immersive installation about the artist’s experience as a foster parent. At the center, a large sculpture titled 29, references 29 points of contact that the artist has had with different foster children. The lines of saffron and gold leaf across abstracted canvases, and a site-specific wall drawing allure visitors to enter Lahav’s world.

December 1, 2022December 6, 2024

RADIANCE: THEY DREAM IN COLOR. THE UGANDA PAVILION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

::untitled folder 3:install unganda.jpg — Install photo of Radiance: They Dream in Color

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.

November 11, 2020November 12, 2020

In My Room – Susan Carr at LABspace

A Photo story

Upon entering In My Room, Susan Carr’s solo show at LABspace in Hillsdale, NY, my senses are overloaded in the best way by the colorful and tactile work. The gallery is teeming with an impressive amount of work that fills the walls, floor, and pedestals. As I walk around, I am greeted with the fond familiar smell of fresh oil paint— thick, bold, and often mixed on the surface. This application is important to the overall sensation of Carr’s work. It makes me grasp the immediacy and the confidence that are necessary to make the work. Squeezing paint directly from the tube onto the canvas requires a commitment from the artist and Carr dives in headfirst to create paintings of zombies, clowns, self-portraits, and eyeballs.

January 24, 2019February 5, 2019

Rutland: Real and Imagined

Ric Kasini Kadour, The Modern Is The Way, photo courtesy of the artist

Photography is inherently effective at telling a story of place. Not only of documenting its history, but also possibly of predicting its future – projecting how a place is or is in the process of becoming. For the group show, “Rutland: Real and Imagined,” which opens in January 31, 2019 at The Alley Gallery in Rutland, Vermont, artist and curator Stephen Schaub brings together eight internationally recognized artists who interpret through their use of photography what constructs a sense of place. Altogether, the resulting photographic imagery in this exhibition creates an engaging story about Rutland – not as a single place but rather many places that come together in the minds and lives of the people who live there.

January 14, 2019January 14, 2019

Valerie Hegarty – Memory of a Place

In Valerie Hegarty’s work, autobiography, history, and art history merge seamlessly into engaging installations with a distinct sense of place – visceral and subtle, layered and focused. An inquisitive rigor runs through her work, stirring in the viewer an appetite for more. Valerie Hegarty shared with Art Spiel some thoughts on art making, her own art journey, and some of her upcoming projects.