Contemporary Art and Culture
The Space Between, curated by Tracy McKenna at Platform Project Space, combines works in paint and fiber by Lauren Luloff, Tessa Greene O’Brien, Mark Olshansky, and Amy Kim Keeler. They all share a sense of desire to capture the elusive space in between—where the artist’s perception and hand meet your gaze.
Continue reading “The Space Between at Platform Project Space”
Polish artist Monika Drożyńska brings her resistance embroidery to a New York audience in a solo show at Open Source Gallery and her Urban Embroidery project. The connections she makes with words within many different languages are a dexterous game of text and symbols on fabric, an adept study of transformative change for a better world. Polish curator Bartek Remisko, speaking about the work, said, “Embroidery can be about threads that bring us together to create social change.” Remisko’s insight speaks to Drożyńska’s focus on embroidery techniques in contemporary art and textiles in public spaces to further the collective conversation and play with conventional expectations.
Continue reading “Monika Drożyńska: Resistance Embroiderer”Hot Air
Ten years ago, Judy Hoffman became enthralled with clay and hand-building. The current exhibition Evolvers and Wildtypes at the Long Island City Sculpture Space is her first solo show of these ceramic sculptures. Hoffman’s ceramics’ imagery and forms tap into a previous installation work made from sculpted paper pulp, natural materials, and man-made debris. Paper clay techniques permit the bonding of wet clay to fired forms, enabling the construction of diverse configurations. These components are conjoined to initiate a dialogue between organic and mechanical elements, yielding imagery that defies expectation. The artwork evolves through a rhythm of construction and deconstruction, encapsulating cycles of creation, deterioration, and renewal. Viewers are meant to encounter an elemental rawness, surprise, and a touch of humor.
Continue reading “Judy Hoffman: Evolvers and Wildtypes at Sculpture Space”
Simona Prives’s latest installation at Philadelphia’s PRACTICE Gallery, towards the noise of dark waters, combines projection and collage to explore themes of renewal and decay. This site-specific installation by the Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist features life-sized projections of collages built upon densely packed drawings, ink paintings, and various printmaking techniques. These collages suggest maps, geological patterns, and industrial imagery, creating abstract yet recognizable worlds.
Continue reading “Simona Prives: towards the noise of dark waters at PRACTICE”
Tatiana Arocha is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice has focused on installations that include rubbings, photographs, and drawings of plants and landscapes taken from the many ecological niches of her native Colombia. Increasingly, her art and advocacy have focused on the coca plant, notorious for its role in the war on drugs, which has destroyed indigenous communities and their territories across South America. Informed by her research, her current installations and publications highlight the coca plant’s ceremonial role in the indigenous cultures that cultivate it, pushing back on the demonization it has endured in the West. Her work also suggests new avenues for how the plant can be a force for good in the Global North and South.
Continue reading “Tatiana Arocha: Mama Coca”
In the summer of 2017, Beth Dary and Patricia Fabricant visited the Museum of Modern Art to see the Robert Rauschenberg show Among Friends. As they were looking at the exhibition, they separated and later found each other at the installation of Hiccups, which consisted of ninety-seven sheets of handmade paper with original Xerox transfer collages zipped together. “At that moment, we both had the same thought—we could hand out zipper papers to our friends to create a great collaborative show,” they recall. Patty had been simultaneously talking with Alexandra Rutsch Brock, who was similarly inspired by Hiccups and had even gone so far as purchasing some zippers. They reached out to their friend groups, and it took off from there. “We had no idea how it would turn out, but we knew it would be a fun adventure,” the co-curators say. Since this art project initiative started during the Trump administration, when women’s rights were under attack. it was important for them to include a charitable component such as Planned Parenthood.
Continue reading “Among Friends”
Jody Wood uses mediums of social practice, video, photography, and performance in her art practice. On a brisk January afternoon in Brooklyn, we discussed the joys of transformation and the metrics to determine success and trauma in healing. Wood’s recent work re-imagines routines in poverty support agencies, aiming to sculpt power dynamics and relationship networks and resist stigmas surrounding poverty. Her solo show Collecting Health at Open Source Gallery features Social Pharmacy (2021-ongoing), a project that redefines public health as a collaborative performance and asks what healing rituals can be found in simple acts of generosity between members of society and by utilizing the natural world around us. Collecting Health at Open Source Gallery runs from February 10 to March 22, 2024.
Continue reading “Jody Wood Is Taking Care”In conversation with Hannah Barrett and Saul Chernick
The Grotto: Shrine group exhibition at Soloway Gallery, curated by Hannah Barrett and Saul Chernick, featuring works by Orli Swergold, Laurel Sparks, Ben Pederson, and Saul Chernick, merges the physical with the mystical. It showcases sculptures and installations that draw on the use of scale and a diverse range of materials—obsolete electronics, dried grains, paper pulp, and glitter. These elements serve to connect viewers to celestial, underworld, ritualistic, and imaginative realms, referencing the reflective and immersive qualities of shrines and grottos.
Continue reading “Grotto: Shrine @ Soloway”
In the heart of Sunset Park, within the historic Brooklyn Army Terminal, BioBAT Art Space stands as a pioneering gallery that blurs the lines between art and science. The current exhibition, Embodied Futures & the Ecology of Care, Curated by Elena Soterakis & Eve Barro, showcases eleven artists whose work merges research methods and materials from scientific practices such as genetics, mycology, microscopy, and bacterial cultivation with artistic creation. By using living yeast as their palette and mushrooms as their sculpting medium, these artists challenge conventional artistic norms.
Continue reading “Embodied Futures and the Ecology of Care at BioBAT Art Space”
Susan Hoffman Fishman and Leslie Sobel met in 2019 at a virtual “mixer” sponsored by SciArt Initiative for artists and scientists who either were already working together or who wanted to work together collaboratively. Hoffman and Sobel quickly determined that their mutual interests in water and the climate crisis overlapped. Looking for ways to collaborate, they applied for and were awarded a joint residency in 2021 during the height of the COVID pandemic at Planet Labs, a global satellite imaging company based in San Francisco. Planet had created its residency program to see what happened when artists were given access to their scientists and satellite resources. Because of COVID, the three-month residency ended up being entirely virtual.
Continue reading “In the End, a Devastating Beauty at Stand4 Gallery”