Meryl Meisler: QUIRKYVISION at the PORTRAIT(S) Festival in Vichy

Art Spiel Photo Story

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Meryl Meisler, Close Shave Family Grooming (The Mystery Club), Merrick, NY 1975

Meryl Meisler’s QUIRKYVISION will be featured at Le Palais des Congrès de Vichy during the PORTRAIT(S) Tenth Annual Festival in Vichy, France, from June 24 through September 4, 2022. Meisler’s images of sizzling disco nights and strip-tease clubs, domestic Jewish family in Long Island suburbia, or life in a public school in one of the roughest Brooklyn neighborhoods—encapsulate with humor and a sharp gaze life at the 1970s and 1980s New York City area.

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Invaders


Feral Hog, 24” x 36”, 2021, Acrylic on Panel. © Hovey Brock

Invaders is the first in a series of three interrelated experimental pieces that combine graphics, text, and hyperlinks based on themes coming out of my Crazy River project, for which I gave an interview on this website on May 16th. Invaders plays with the idea of invasive species, which has to be the misnomer of the century. So-called invasive species do reduce biodiversity in their new ecosystems but they are all the result of human intervention. International trade has been the main agent for transport to new locations, but climate change has also forced many species to move beyond their original habitat in order to survive. Every invasive species does what all living creatures do, including our own: take advantage of opportunities. Invaders includes my Crazy River paintings, photographs, and a list of 100 species from an on-line source: The Global Invasive Species Database, produced by the Invasive Species Specialist Group, a global network of scientists dedicated to identifying and tracking invasives.

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ELM Foundation: Art and Healing

In conversation with founder Melinda Riddle McCoy

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Melinda Riddle McCoy, inside Tomas Vu’s spherochromatic dome. Photo by Nathan West @nathanwestphoto

The mission of ELM Foundation is to promote the healing power of the arts. Our methods include advocating the benefits of arts therapy, providing multidisciplinary arts education, and building sustaining mentorships—all working together to cultivate a lifelong love of self-expression and awareness through a creative process. ELM Foundation was launched on February 20th, 2019 in honor of Emma Lauren McCoy whose intense childhood experience inspired the creation of this nonprofit organization which offers children who have experienced parental loss or family structure adjustments, paths for healing through art and art therapy. In addition to its multidisciplinary art education and therapy, ELM hosts at the adjacent boiler space exhibitions, currently featuring Tomas Vu’s solo project, The Man Who Fell to Earth 76/22. Melinda McCoy, the founder of ELM sheds some light on the foundation and how art plays a pivotal role in it.

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Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats by ecoartspace

Featured Project: with curator Sue Spaid

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Tessa Grundon, Invasive Species, 2018-2021/2022, Asiatic Bittersweet root systems and border fencing, dimensions variable.

The group show Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn includes paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations addressing environmental issues by more than fifty artists from the New York City region who are members of ecoartspace. The title is based on Claire McConaughy’s oil painting, Fragile Rainbow, referencing both hope and loss. The show runs from May 7th through June 4th, 2022. Curator Sue Spaid elaborates on this large-scale group show.

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MOD at Platform Project Space

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Installation view of MOD

To kick off the Dumbo Open Studios Weekend in late April, Platform Project Space opened MOD, a five person show commanding strong appeal, curated by Sharon Butler. As the title and press release indicate, modularity, modernism and mods, or modifications in contemporary gaming, are all potentially at play both in the individual works and together as an installation. Each artist’s contribution holds a single wall or area in a small room that’s comfortable, easy, and open. The formal language of color and shape is nuanced to suggest personal and organic qualities and intimate spaces. No mystery here. Instead, curiosity openly hovers in close examinations of the human touch, in the detail and care given to small moments.

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How Soon is Now? On Cat Del Buono’s Art

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Installation view, Cat Del Buono, “Voices,” July 17 – 31, 2020 at Microscope Gallery, New York, NY. Photo by Seze Devres. Courtesy of Microscope Gallery.

The time is passing but the image dwells. 47 men are posing to get their picture taken, completely still. These men in suits and ties are U.S. Attorneys in the year 1933, basking in their moment of power and glory. Above them, an old wall clock’s pendulum keeps moving from one end to the other, its ticking sound loud and clear. The moment is eternalized, and the power remains, even now. 89 years and the image is still relevant: White men are in charge. Artist Cat Del Buono’s video piece Time (2011) is an illusory work in between a video and a still, framed and hung like a photograph that uncannily moves, and it displays a perpetual stalemate.

Cat Del Buono, Time (video still), 2011, video frame with mat. Courtesy of the artist.
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Susan Rostow: Biomorphic Figurations



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Susan Rostow in her studio, Brooklyn, New York, photo courtesy of Carole d’Inverno

Susan Rostow’s sculptures resemble archeological artifacts with biomorphic characteristics, inviting us to probe into their origin, meaning and what they are made of. Textures of abrasive material such as clay and moss-like surface, along with graphic symbols such as linear markings of shore tides and other signifiers from old maps, fuse into hybrid forms where the lines between past and future, what is natural and what is fabricated, are seamlessly blurred.

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