Tag: collage

Posted on , by Thomas Motley

How Unexpected: Encounters With the Divine, Emelie Stenhammar

Emelie Stenhammar, How Unexpected

Emelie Stenhammar’s works echo the aims of Elizabeth Murray to reshape our relationship with painting. Cozy rectangular formats are denied. Twisted Perspective prevails. Both artists’ depictions of domestic spaces reflect a mutual fondness for cartoons and whimsy. Stenhammar paints compelling allegory about the human condition, with a compassionate gaze akin to that of Kathe Kollwitz. 

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

From A to Z and the Bodies In Between at Nunu

Nancy Bowen, From A to Z and the Bodies In Between at Nunu Fine Art

Borges once described a fictional Chinese encyclopedia that classified animals into categories so incompatible — beings that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that look like flies from a distance — that the whole idea of classification begins to feel like a kind of absurd fiction. Nancy Bowen’s first solo exhibition at Nunu Fine Art invokes exactly that suspicion: that the dictionary, the archive, the great pre-internet repositories of everything, are not neutral records but constructions, and that constructions can be dismantled, embellished, and made to mean something new.

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Posted on , by Melissa Stern

Women Across America 1945-1979 at Eric Firestone

Eric Firestone Gallery, in its continuing support of underrepresented and female artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, has mounted an ambitious and interesting exhibition on now through July 11 at the gallery’s location on Great Jones Street in NYC. The exhibition is devoted to women who worked in abstraction from 1945 to 1979, thus giving the curators a very specific window within which to work.

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Posted on , by Mike Dressel

On the Edge of Meaning: Lucy Sante’s Collages

Interspersed throughout the stately library of the Academy of Arts and Letters in Washington Heights, in and around shelves holding works by Academy members like John Cheever, Pearl S. Buck, and Grace Paley, a new exhibition of collages by the cultural critic, essayist, and Dylanologist Lucy Sante is on display. Knots, organized by curator Kristin Poor, features mostly recent works from the last few years, save one, Haussmann, or the Barricades, which dates to 1979.

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Posted on , by Will Kaplan

Unreliable Narrators: Rochelle Voyles

In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles’s collages hold both a capacious nihilism and a hope to build stories from the void. From this fulcrum, I think of Joan Didion’s classic essay The White Album, and its opening truism: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”  Voyles’s compositions of found photographs extend to viewers, a branch, a bone, a tool in making sense of the randomness that seems to rule our lives. Cutouts layered into loops capture chaos, but the care in each cut, the curation, and the collision of hyperspecific images betray a belief in an idiosyncratic order. These works are at once figurative mazes of manifold meaning, and objects calculated to short-circuit our thinking and experience pure sensation. 

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Posted on , by Ella Jackson

Lacey McKinney: Where Bodies Blur

Born and raised in New York, Lacey McKinney is a New York-based fine artist whose work explores the tensions between interspecies dynamics, gender and ecology, the paradox of life and death, and bodily transformation and decay. Having exhibited nationally, received major grants such as the NYFA/NYSCA Project Grant, and completed residencies including the McColl Center, McKinney’s practice continues to evolve. Her work meditates on the complexities of existence, as self and in relation to others, unraveling the differences that separate us, and highlighting the interdependence entangled within all species, ecosystems, and identities. 

McKinney’s gestural material application and stylistic dynamism merge, meld, reconfigure, and transform figures, flora, and fauna, creating liminal compositions that blur where form begins and ends. Her pigments and paints examine the relationship between predator and prey, a relationship that, though antagonistic, still relies on reciprocity to survive. Insides become outsides, differences become diffused, and touch becomes transformative.

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Posted on , by Jac Lahav

Maureen McCabe: Feminine Surrealism, Witch Culture and the Original Goth

Tod Gangler (b. 1953), Professor Maureen McCabe, 1975, Hand-altered photograph, 5″ × 4⅜”

I’ve never been to a séance; however, walking into Maureen McCabe’s exhibition Fate and Magic at the William Benton Museum of Art invokes strong séance vibes. Artworks on black slate whisper, engravings of shooting stars, goddesses, brew potions, and long-forgotten stage magicians appear at the Benton like reliquaries of the past.  For over six decades, Maureen McCabe has been an overlooked alchemist of memory, transmuting her personal experiences and arcane cultural references into this intimate magical retrospective.

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