#artreview – Page 4

May 1, 2019November 15, 2020

Sandra Chamberlin, on Breathing Underwater

Sandra Chamberlin, Procession, charred cedar, 2019, variable size. as shown 20’ x 10 x 26” d

“The stream of sap in the trees varies according to the phases of the moon.”

-Theodor Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos

Sandra Chamberlin’s sculptural installations invites the viewer to enter a three-dimensional drawing of alternate life-forms. Lines made of wood float off the walls, hover in the air, or balance on the ground, altogether creating a sense of abstracted life-forms. These linear sculptures are deeply rooted in the artist’s intriguing relationship to materials and processes which overall tie into her intricate perception of nature. Since the early eighties, Chamberlin has been making out of wood abstracted shapes through meticulous manual and mechanical processes she has perfected over these years.

April 12, 2019May 30, 2020

Nota Bene with @postuccio [v]

The Painting Center, Present Company, Talking Pictures, NURTUREart, Slag, SOHO20, M. David & Co., Fresh Window, Studio 10

The Painting Center

I’ve been looking at and occasionally commenting on the virtues and various points of particular interest in Alannah Farrell’s lusciously pictorial, sometimes lushly lusty paintings for a number of years now, and one thing I’ve enjoyed noting is that there seems often to be something stealthily, furtively, sometimes perhaps a bit serpentinely surreptitious about many of her works.

March 28, 2019March 29, 2019

Nota Bene with @postuccio [iv]

Knockdown Center, Orgy Park, CLEARING

Knockdown Center

Wonderfully striking in bright luminosities, diagonal analogousness, situational room-to-room parallels, transporting suggestiveness and subtly warmed circumstantial frigidities are the two installations ‘contained,’ in a way, by “A Continuous Stream of Occurrence,” an exhibition that opened a few weeks ago at Maspeth gem The Knockdown Center .

At top is Luba Drozd‘s room. It both looks and sounds like a veritable spatial knot of brilliantly site-specific polyphonia involving significant degrees of multidisciplinarity, multimateriality and strata within circumstantial strata of shadow-play. It’s a tough but fun knot to look at and into, and listen closely to, to begin to untie just how it works with totality and relative simplicity, though not in ways simplistic in the least.

Rather than necessarily site-specific or sonic, the active state of William Lamsom‘s installation in the adjacent gallery is like that of a shimmering, gradually phase-changing antechamber to Drozd’s comparative cavern; they scan instantly as visually coherent in many satisfying and still individualizable ways. Entering Lamsom’s room alone is like stumbling into an abandoned research lab in a yearless future. Seeing the rooms in tandem is like being dropped in some nicely mysterious nook on Krypton and having no idea why.

Great installations, great show. Curated by a duo going by the ‘name’ XP (@xaviacarin & @parkcmyers).

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019

Ethereal Anaesthetic

Joanne Ungar at Front Room Gallery

All Photos by Sharilyn Neidhardt

Joanne Ungar at Front Room, partial installation view

Pain produces sharp, bright sensations or sometimes ripping agony. It’s often intensely specific. The substances that bring us relief often do so by blurring the hard angles of our pain, allowing us to focus elsewhere. Some substances can leave us in a disconnected fog, far away from the source of discomfort. Others mute and muffle the pain, giving the relieved a sense of floating in a cushioned world. Calibrating effective pain relief can be a struggle for balance between an alert connection to the present and a silencing of uncomfortable sensation. Continue reading “Ethereal Anaesthetic”

February 22, 2019February 22, 2019

Nota Bene with @postuccio [iii]

Five Myles, Slag Gallery, Fresh Window, SOHO20, Studio 10, SARDINE,Sikkema Jenkins

Five Myles

No matter how banal it might seem to say that Barbara Campisi‘s “Sound of Light” — the artist’s massive and joyfully interactive, labyrinthine installation at Crown Heights gallery Five Myles — is lit, it’s still a fully legit thing to say: it’s both lit and LIT. Lit up in both senses was also Campisi’s packed opening, during which visitors were invited to ‘draw’ their own light doodles all throughout the translucent-panel maze of sorts while listening to live music, encountering meandering dancers, and constantly running into strangers who didn’t feel like moving — not out of confusion, but because they were just fine and dandy right where they were, playing around with LEDs like all adults should do more, as every single kid in attendance that night would’ve surely agreed.

February 16, 2019February 16, 2019

Nota Bene with @postuccio [ii]

SRO Gallery, M. David & Co., ODETTA, Klaus Von Nichtssagend

SRO Gallery

Dozens of warmly chromatic landscapes with hints of fantasy and abstract intrigue are on view in “Unextinguished,” a kind of amuse-bouche of a genre-specific group show that opened at SRO Gallery a couple weeks ago. It features a great many paintings, and a great many relatively literal as well as apparently non-objective takes on landscapes by Sahand Tabatabai, Sheila Lanham , Cathy Diamond , Moses Hoskins, Cathy Nan Quinlan and Cecilia Whittaker-Doe. If you need a respite from the drudgery of winter (I always do), head over to SRO.

February 7, 2019May 30, 2020

Re-Orientation at La Esquina Gallery

Carrying Herself as a Corpse (red), Samira Abbassy (2014) (oil on gesso panel), dyptych #2, image courtesy of the artist

The group show “Re-Orientations” at La Esquina in NYC features Samira Abbassy, Camille Eskell, Dhanashree Gdiyar, and Sheida Soleimani, 4 US based female artists who bring through figurative representation feminist perspectives rooted in the Near East and South Asia. The co-curators Natasha Stefanovic and Audra Lambert present these distinct feminist voices in context of “Orientalism,” the 1978 seminal and polemic book by renowned scholar Edward W. Said, a must read in Post-Colonial Culture Studies. Ranging formally from painting to embroidery, and thematically from identity to immigration, the images overall depict tragic and at times nostalgic moments rooted in the artists’ cultural background. Underscored with post-colonial sensibility, these intimate narratives humanize and defy the stereotype of what is “oriental.”

January 29, 2019February 7, 2019

Nota Bene with @postuccio

Microscope Gallery, Underdonk, Transmitter, TSA New York, Studio 10, Amos Eno, The Border Project Space, Green Door Gallery, Scholes Street Studio

Microscope Gallery, Underdonk, Transmitter, TSA New York

Above are just a handful of hints and glimpses of notions of formal analogousness I noted among four quite different works by four different artists in four different excellent exhibits, all of which opened at the 1329 Willoughby building in Bushwick on the same night earlier this month.

At top left, an instant of a video involving a ‘vectorial world’ by Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten at Microscope Gallery . At top right, one of Amy Butowicz‘s amusingly alt-quotidian metamorphs in her bizarrely joyous solo show at Underdonk . This piece in particular seemed immediately suggestive of Humpty Dumpty’s pants, or The Penguin’s pants, or the pants worn by some bloviating politician in a parodical caricature by Daumier. I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be anything of the sort. I am sure I want pants, or I guess culottes, of just that sort. Moving along, the painting to which those pants, or maybe ‘pants,’ point is by Alessandro Keegan . It’s one of several strong works he’s showing in “Heed,” a winning two-person show at Transmitter that features also very strong work by Angela Hiesch . At bottom left, a sculpture that seemed to imply a distilled tincture of time frozen still in atemporal liquid motion, or something of such a strangely wordable sort, in “Object of Desire,” a large group show curated by Amanda Martinez at TSA .

January 28, 2019November 2, 2022

1947, Simone de Beauvoir in America

Coast to Coast, SONJ ©Esther Bubley, 1947

From de Tocqueville on, travelers have chronicled America, fascinated by its vast space, bustling cities, and diverse people, the gap between the idealized vision of itself and the version outsiders see. In 1947, before Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank took their famous road trips, Simone de Beauvoir took one of her own. Traveling East to West by trains, cars and Greyhound buses, she crossed nineteen states and visited fifty-six cities in four months, recording impressions that were published in 1948 as “America Day By Day”.

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.