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On Water as Polluted Body, Place of Solace, and Life Force

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sTo Len, detail of FOAM (FutureOfAMaterial) installation. Gomitaku print, sumi ink on linen, 64” x 360,” 2020.

Since June of 2017, artists Jarrod CluckGina R. FurnarisTo LenLeslie Sobel and Rachel Wojnar have been on an intense physical, emotional, spiritual, and art-making journey, which culminated with their MFA Thesis Exhibition, Confluence, on view at the Joseloff Gallery of the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford (Connecticut) from September 10-19, 2020. They are the third cohort to complete the Nomad Interdisciplinary MFA program. Founded by director Carol Padberg in 2015, the program uses an innovative field-based model and offers a curriculum that includes art, ecology, the study of place, indigenous knowledge systems, and technologies. Encompassing two hands-on residencies per year, the Nomad MFA provides courses in El Salvador; New York City; New Mexico; Mexico; Oakland, California; Miami; and Minneapolis.

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The Ocean Inside

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Video still from The Ocean Inside projected on the Veil (2018-2019). Photo by Eveline Kolijn.

Dutch-Canadian printmaker Eveline Kolijn grew up in the Caribbean where she developed an enduring interest in natural history and the environment, as well as a love of the ocean. Having spent a great deal of her childhood scuba diving in the coral reefs, she originally thought of becoming a marine biologist before her life took her in another direction. 

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Imagining Icebergs


Arctic Magnetism, photograph of Russell Glacier, Greenland. Printed on backlit film. Drawing by removal with scratch nibs, steel wool with water-based crayons, 106” x 44,” 2019.

Multi-media artist and educator Itty Neuhaus has spent a great deal of time observing and interpreting environmental changes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and in Iceland and Greenland. Since 2000, when she took her first trip to Iceland, her drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos have addressed the degradation of glaciers and the nature of icebergs. 

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Tina Struthers: Life in Fiber


Tina Marais Struthers, studio in Montreal, 2020, Photo courtesy of Josiane Farand

Tina Marais Struthers’ work develops from a rigorous, personal, and highly technical consideration of fiber as an evocative medium deftly addressing subjective experience, memories of place, and processes of change and growth. Struthers says she is fascinated by how fabric reflects and absorbs light, how it can entice us to touch, and feel comfort, or discomfort, by visual directing textures—”In this world during the pandemic, this need to touch, to feel textural comfort I think has really been amplified. I often challenge the notion of textile as being soft, in manipulating it to appear as metal sculptural forms.”

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Woven and Waxed Water Stories


10° 20′ 32” N, 44” x 96” x 3”, detail. Salvaged fishing nets and lines collected from across the Pacific Ocean with deep-sea leader line, 2021 (in process) .

Hawai’i-based fiber artist Mary Babcock uses discarded fishing nets and lines as well as household wax paper to create tapestries and installations about sea level rise, “our proclivity towards destruction or entanglement,” and our perceptions of and relationship to water. The process of self-laminating wax paper for installations and of cleaning, sorting, and unravelling abandoned, tangled fishing nets and lines and then weaving them into something completely new, is the manifestation of her refusal to see anything as unworkable or unrepairable, including the climate crisis. 

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Thinking About Water on World Water Day

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Installation view

Think About Water (TAW) is a newly-formed collective of 28 international eco-artists and activists whose work addresses global water issues. The organization has scheduled its first exhibition, also called “Think About Water,” opened in commemoration of World Water Day. Originating in 1993, World Water Day celebrates water, calls attention to the 2.2 billion people around the world without access to clean water, and urges individuals to become engaged in efforts to combat the global water crisis. Similarly, the goal of TAW and its member artists is to “interpret, celebrate, and defend water.” 

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Beth Dary at The Front Room Gallery

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Installation view

The Front room Gallery hosts an online tour of “Aqua/Terra”, the beautiful and evocative solo exhibition of sculpture, installation, photograms, layered egg tempera and encaustic drawings by New York Artist, Beth Dary. The artworks in “Aqua/Terra” explore the power of water throughout natural forms and forces of nature, as a force to shape the land, sustain life, and destroy it. Beth Dary’s work also responds to the effect of human activity on land and water – bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide captured in Arctic ice, the rising tides due to the climate crisis, and fractal patterns formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.  

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial: Sari Nordman


Sari Nordman, Assembling on Ancient Towers, 2020, video, video still courtesy the artist

The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) is a volunteer, female-led, artist-run project. TIAB 2020 launched in March in New York City at Brooklyn Museum, and continued in September through December at EFA Project Space, Greenwood Cemetery, and virtually, presenting 60+ artists. This interview series features 10 participating artists.

Sari Nordman, a native of Finland, is a NYC-based interdisciplinary artist working with dance, video and installation. She loves to travel to the isolated parts of the world to reflect on nature, history and female experience, the recurring themes in her works. She continues developing Torni-Tower, an installation work which has received support from the Catwalk Institute and NYU, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, The Amsterdam Collective and Tohmajärvi Residency, for Jamaica Flux: Workspaces and Windows 2021 exhibition and Performance Mix Festival. She worked as a performer with choreographer Dean Moss in 2009-2018, and holds a M.F.A. from NYU/Tisch School of The Arts.

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Americans Looking In at The Center for Book Arts

In Dialogue with Emilie Ahern and Sherri Littlefield


The curators, Emilie Ahern (left) and Sherri Littlefield (right), stand in the exhibition space among the works from Americans Looking In. Photo credit: Andrew Littlefield

In the thought-provoking group show Americans Looking In at the Center for Book Arts the curators Emilie Ahern and Sherri Littlefield explore what it means to be “American” mostly through media such as photography, book art, sculpture and prints. Their personal experience of coming from multicultural backgrounds and growing up in the States has prompted them to ask the question – What is American culture today, and what does an American look like?

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Artists on Coping: Deborah Wasserman

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

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Deborah Wasserman in her studio, The Pool, CalArts 2018, photograph by Rafael Hernan

Inspired by her rich South American and Middle-Eastern background, Deborah Wasserman makes personal and visceral art stirred by Ecofeminist themes. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is a grant recipient of the Experimental Television Center, Aljira Center for the Arts, the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, and is a Skowhegan fellow. She received an IAP Social Practice fellowship from NYFA in 2017, a grant from the Puffin Foundation in 2018, a grant from Citizens committee for New York in 2019, a Queens Council On The Arts New Work grant in 2020, and a Su-Casa award from the New York State Department Of Cultural Affairs every year since 2015.

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