assemblage art – Art Spiel

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

May 14, 2026May 14, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

At Some Point, Every Household Object Stops Being Innocent

No one ever thinks the plate is going to become a problem.

A plate survives three apartments and one bad Thanksgiving. A suitcase gets hauled across borders or shoved beneath beds; sometimes it is packed in hope, sometimes because someone has no choice. An iron presses school clothes and funeral clothes, then outlives its usefulness and sits in a closet somewhere, still holding the pressure of human hands.

That is the animating idea behind extraORDINARY things, the quietly arresting exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich Library.

May 11, 2026May 9, 2026, by Elizabeth Johnson

Carol Diamond in her studio: Go Ahead, Make Me

During a studio visit with Carol Diamond before her upcoming exhibit, Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me (Equity Gallery), our discussion of her recent sculptures elicits the term “Janus heads”–not because she makes two-headed portraits, but because each dynamic work encapsulates a battle of competing forces that hint at varying degrees of figuration and diverse human backstories.

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

When I Stopped in Feldwood: Jeff Feld at Marquee Projects

Jeff Feld’s invented, minimalist island of Feldwood transports its audience into a tropical, still space that is at once childlike and naive, holy in its fetishizing of the pathetic object and rooted in place.

October 28, 2024November 19, 2024, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Art Spiel Picks: New York City Exhibitions in October, 2024

HIGHLIGHTS

The *Object Library*, photo courtesy of Yasmeen Abdallah

Mementos abound all around us in our day-to-day activities. Often, they hold dear memories: some we wish to keep, and some we wish to release so that we can move on to new experiences. Be it a trinket that houses memories of better days, a gift from someone we cherish, or a serendipitous discovery that found its way into our orbit, we become fused in inexplicable ways. What happens then, when we are asked or forced to part with such gifts? It can be freeing to release ourselves from materialism, but it can also be devastating, depending on the circumstances.