assemblage – Page 6

March 29, 2021April 12, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary

In Dialogue with Holly Wong

A picture containing person, laying

Description automatically generated — Holly Wong working on “Phoenix.” Graphite on drafting film with sewing. 132 x 132 in. Photo courtesy of Al Wong

Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:

“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”

January 5, 2021December 5, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Margaret Roleke: Getting a Dialogue Started

Margaret Roleke, Margaret Roleke: Made Visible, 2020, window installation of cyanotype banners and mylar, Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT., photo courtesy of Rashmi Talpade

When Margaret Roleke finished her MFA, she was a sculptor and installation artist. From early on she created installations dealing with issues of water, sound and light and after becoming a mother to four children, notions of motherhood and domesticity became central in her work. As her children grew, current political events became increasingly part of her visual expression. For instance, around 2002 she started including toy soldiers in her sculptures, referencing the Iraq war, and also around this time for a public art project in Brewster, NY, she made seating for the day-laborers who were regularly gathering on that site. She continued to make work that spoke to issues that were important to her, mainly gun control, domestic abuse, and immigrant rights. She says she had no intention to be an activist artist, but became one in the course of making art and exploring her true voice — “The Trump presidency led me to march on the streets and register voters, but I feel I can be a better activist when I create work which starts a dialogue on these important subjects, as this seems to be what comes naturally to me,” she says.

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping : Gregory Coates

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

C:\Users\Kiki\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Outlook\34M85MJB\IMG_2207.JPG — *Physical distance can translate into uncontested time—studio shot “Center left, Center right” acrylic, feathers 48×360” 2018*

Despite gaining recognition as an abstract expressionist for his bold sculptures, installations, and assemblages, Gregory Coates primarily defines himself as a painter. Coates exploratory studio practice and compositional experiments with found objects have established him as a prolific artist with a compelling and extensive catalog. He studied at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world including, the Smithsonian Institute of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Galerie Denkraum in Vienna, Austria, and Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, Japan among others. Recent publications include an opening paragraph of “Abstract Truths” by Angela N. Carroll for Sugercane Magazine, Art Pulse, and White Hot Magazine. He is exhibiting with N’Namdi Contemporary, Miami.

February 23, 2020November 15, 2020, by Noa Ginzburg and Kristen Clevenson

Catchat, following an Interview With a Cat

Kristen Clevenson in conversation with Noa Ginzburg, February 2020

Catchat, a screenshot of a skype conversation, 2019.
Photo by Hannah Bruckmueller

“This is an interview recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 12 Burgplatz Düsseldorf,” announces the interviewer. “MIAOW! MIAOW!” replies the interviewee.” In 1970, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) conducted and recorded an Interview With a Cat. In Catchat, a trans-Atlantic collaboration between Hannah Bruckmüller, Michal Ron, and Noa Ginzburg which was recently published on PROTOCOLS, the three listen carefully to the protagonist cat and transcribe French and Cat tongues into Hebrew and Latin letters. Kristen Clevenson and Noa Ginzburg share with Art Spiel their conversation about cats, collaborating while in different time zones, transcribing illegible languages, and using deep listening to assert agency.

November 26, 2019May 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Actual and Implied – Gregory Coates at Monica King Contemporary

Gregory Coates, My Big Brown Peace, 2019 deck brushes 76 x 252 x 3 inches

Each of Gregory Coates’s wall-based assemblages in Actual and Implied, the artist’s solo show at Monica King Contemporary, commands the space with its own powerful presence. Altogether, the show features over a dozen new mixed media assemblages made of found objects created with post-minimalist sensibility, for which Coates is mostly known for. It is a bold encounter with the objects of art at first, but the longer you look, the more subtle and fragile it becomes. The seemingly simple monochromatic surfaces from afar transform to complex arrays of color, line and dot from close-up.

November 11, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Peter Gynd – Jody MacDonald: Freaks, Geeks, and Strange Girls at Radiator

In Dialogue with Peter Gynd on Jody MacDonald’s upcoming solo exhibition he curated at Radiator

Jody MacDonald, Conjoined Twins, 2019, mixed media, 26 x 26 x 24 in.

Peter Gynd is an artist, curator and gallerist whose recent curatorial project is currently on view at Radiator, a solo show featuring new works by the Canadian born and NYC based Jody MacDonald. MacDonald’s sculptural dioramas explore a set of characters on the fringe by merging fact, fiction, and art history. In this Art Spiel interview Peter Gynd elaborates on the genesis of the exhibition.

October 29, 2019November 21, 2019, by Katie Hector

When the Artist Speaks

A Review of Michael A Robinson’s Solo Exhibition

The Object as Evidence at SL Gallery, New York

Michael A. Robinson, The Origin of Ideas, 2013, found lamps, tripods, and electrical cords, 6 x 6 x 9 ft,, Image: courtesy of SL Gallery

Trekking down 38th Street in the heart of the garment district on a Thursday evening in October, I made my way to SL Gallery where Michael A. Robinson’s solo exhibition, The Object as Evidence, was on view. As I pushed open the large steel door to the gallery I found myself immediately subsumed within a group of onlookers similarly clad in all-black. The artist’s talk had already begun and attention was fixed upon Robinson, a tall slender man with sandy-blonde hair standing beside a projector that cast images of artwork onto the wall behind him. Arms extended and eyes twinkling, Robinson elucidated upon the evolution of his work.

July 29, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Julie Peppito: Making Meaning out of Anything

Toxic Frock (This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein), 2016, canvas, trim, oil paint, gouache, thread, acrylic paint, found objects, fabric paint, fabric, grommets, variable dimensions (84″ x 156″ x 10″), photo courtesy Dan Gottesman

Julie Peppito‘s visceral and imaginative installations refer to our ecological, cultural, and political environments through explosive colors, textured surfaces, and interconnected loopy forms. Julie Peppito recalls how growing up in Oklahoma and later moving to NYC impacted her development as an artist. She shares some of her thought process, her work as an activist, and some of her projects.

June 28, 2019August 2, 2019, by Paul D'Agostino

Nota Bene with @postuccio [vii]

The Chimney, Ulmer Arts, Transmitter, Century Pictures, CLEARING, Superchief

The Chimney

The Chimney has two strong exhibits for you to visit sooner or later. One is on-site at the Chimney’s home outpost, the other not too far away in an outpost you might call new or newish — historical emphasis on -ish.

At the gallery’s home space is “Twilight Chorus,” where a duo of cleverly brick-niche’d, collaged-in assemblies lingering in the circumstantial hinterlands scan as a scrapbook-like index of the trappings of street art, potentially hinting at rather immediate exteriors. Objects elsewhere place you in the landscapes and atmospheres of paintings by many a surrealist. Works tucked into yet other nooks unfurl in extended intimacies, and chromatically order, reflect and unfold like mascara compacts and make-up tables.

Many objects rich in reference and reminiscence in this also somewhat quietly rambunctious group show. Taken all together, it’s like an immersive diorama à la Miró.

June 10, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Nancy Bowen: The Story of Objects

Nancy Bowen, Princess T, ceramic, turtle shell, metal stand, mixed media,, 48 x 20 x 20 inches

Nancy Bowen‘s layered sculptures, installations, and collages coalesce stories of different cultures, of past and present. Her objects bring to mind a flavor of unidentified myths, archetypes and rituals, often involving images of the female body. The artist talks about her art making process, projects, and the way she sees her role as an art educator.