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Backscatter: Light Studies and Everyday Alchemy at OVERLAP

Backscatter gallery view

Sparkling surfaces abound in Backscatter, OVERLAP’s quietly radiant summer show of works by Funlola Coker, Katherine Mitchell DiRico, Jesse Kaminsky, Joetta Maue, Leah Piepgras, and Esther Solondz, curated by Alicia Renadette. On a clear summer midmorning, sunshine falls across shimmering layers of glass, crystal, gold leaf, copper, bronze, salt, acrylic, and clear liquid. Materials catch and refract light. The overall effect is of a hushed brilliance that draws you in, inviting a closer look.

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Ghada Amer: New Directions and Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery

Installation view

Upon entering this exhibition, I was taken to the wall pieces immediately, especially the use of vibrantly colored embroidery string mimicking paint strokes on the canvas. Art historical references and connections are very prevalent in the works of this exhibit. It was refreshing to see this conversation of the painting canon being brought up in a contemporary light by the use of this novel medium. Amer’s love and interest in the history of painting is apparent, and her works show art historical influences intertwined with intuition and a strong painterly hand that is present despite there being no paint in the show.

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Into the woods – Immi C. Storrs at The Century Association

Immi Storrs, Trees with Man and Birds

Immi C. Storrs is obsessed with depth: she manipulates it, refusing to render it as-is. Instead, her adventures in depth-perception range from steeply sloping forests—her favorite subject— to thickly layered glass light-box dioramas, and to truncated and oddly meshed animal forms in bronze. While the animals merge together into multi-legged seemingly mythological beasts, or emerge pseudo-two dimensionally from a bronze cube, it’s less about the creatures themselves—horses, sheep, and oxen, but more of a slow-down lugubrious space in which forms melt together and time becomes unpredictable.

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Gizmos and Gadgets: The Meticulous Craft of Kathleen Studebaker

Kathleen Studebaker: Gizmos & Gadgets, at Patricia M. Nugent Gallery at Rosemont College, @rosemontcollege is on view through: Mar 30, 2025

AstroObject [2f.x1] Copper, Bronze, Brass, Steel, Aluminum, Walnut 7.25” x 8.5” x 9” 2023, photograph courtesy of the artist

Gazing upon Kathleen Studebaker’s solo show at Rosemont College, one is immediately reminded of an inventor’s workshop. Puzzle-like constructions of gleaming rods, intricate gears, and nested circles radiate from central points in the sculptures, reminiscent of gyroscopes and astrolabes from a bygone era. Each sculpture is situated on a regal walnut base and many are suspended in the air by elegant arching armatures. They possess an old-world charm, but the pristine copper, bronze, brass, steel, and aluminum components suggest the vibrancy of active use.

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Rope and Revolver at Catharine Clark Gallery

Installation shot of WOUNDED, Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

In 2023, I saw Ansel Adams in Our Time at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Along with Adams’ famous gelatin silver photographs of national parks and the Southwest, the show had work by contemporary photographers such as Binh Dahn and Meghann Riepenhoff, and it aimed to present a narrative of the West that didn’t depict it as a vast, empty land ready for settlement. I was thinking about this show and how art and the way institutions present it isn’t neutral when I saw Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s ‘The Broncho Buster’, the engaging exhibition at San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery.

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Beijing Stories at the Liu Shiming Art Gallery

A sculpture of a building

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Residential Building. 2005. Copper. 12.2 x 10.3 x 8.7

In 2021, a group of friends, family members, and former colleagues of the renowned Chinese artist Liu Shiming (1926-2010) banded together to form the Liu Shiming Art Foundation, an organization dedicated to both preserving the artist’s legacy and furthering his dedication to the power of the arts. The Foundation has undertaken an ambitious program of granting scholarships to university students around the world with a goal of funding 100 scholarships per year. They also have opened a gallery space on 15 East 40th Street in Manhattan to showcase Mr. Liu’s work and eventually to showcase the work of pan-Asian artists.

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Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in October 2024

HIGHLIGHTS
Hanne Friis, ​​The Mountain, hand-stitched faux leather and steel, 37 13/16 x 54 5/16 x 37 13/16 inches, at Locks Gallery, photograph courtesy of the gallery

Sometimes, we are confronted with artwork that hums with possibilities so profound you can feel them taking root in your chest and making a new home. You stand in the gallery, soaking it in, and you want to share it with as many people as possible. That said, I hope you take a good chunk of time to sink into the transcendent earthy abstractions of Warren Rohrer at Locks Gallery. Afterward, head upstairs and marvel, open-mouthed, at the unexpected forms created by sculptors Hanne Friis and Lynda Benglis. Then, journey over to Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and get lost in Sarah Gamble’s glittering forest interiors and interdimensional abstractions, filled with mystery and magic.

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Divisions: To Be Human Is To Act Humanely

Featured Project

Image at Griffiss International Sculpture Park , Rome, NY

Linda Cunningham – Divisions

… hunger and fear can vanquish all human resistance, and all

freedom … Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in danger.

But to know … is to have time to avoid & prevent the moment of

inhumanity … the infinitesimal difference between the human

being and the non-human being …

————–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

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Rachel Frank: Ritual and Rehabilitation

Hot Air
A collage of hands holding a clay dog

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Rewilding Franconia Sculpture Park, Participatory Performance as part of 4Ground: Midwest Land Art Biennial, Franconia Sculpture Park, 2022. Photographer: Rachel Frank

Rachel Frank is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice includes sculpture, video, and performance. Her art explores our shifting perspectives towards natural history, climate change, and relationships with non-human species. She grew up near Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, the birthplace of American paleontology, where large mammoth and other megafauna fossils were found, altering Western views on extinction and evolution. She works as a staff wildlife care manager at The Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Manhattan.

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Farideh Sakhaeifar: You Are in the War Zone

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Farideh Sakhaeifar, You are in the war zone., 2016-17. Gelatine Silver Print, 8 x 10 inches

In her latest solo exhibition at New York’s Trotter&Sholer gallery, Iranian artist Farideh Sakhaeifar invites the viewer to reflect on the human experiences that connect us all. You are in the war zone confronts conflict, war, and social injustice head-on. Presented in partnership with the non-profit arts organization KODA, and curated by Klaudia Ofwona-Draber, the exhibition covers Sakhaeifar’s rich artistic practice, from her performance pieces to her sculptures to her hand and digitally manipulated photographs made over a seven year period. The works in the show underscore the artist’s strong critique of US foreign policy and Western portrayal of war in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as her impactful representations of shared experiences, the subjectivity of the media, and the inevitable distortion of memories and information over time.

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