Contemporary Art and Culture
The French born Brooklyn based artist Julien Gardair makes carpets, paper cutouts, paintings, sculptures, video or everything in between. This proclivity for smooth sail between forms in context of specific sites globally paired with his insatiable explorations, make his body of work versatile, whimsical and layered. Julien Gardair shares with Art Spiel his ideas, experiences, and what is behind some of his many projects.
Continue reading “Julien Gardair: Polyphonic Situations”
Rhonda Wall‘s collaged paintings depict surreal landscapes where the wacky and the tragic co-exist. Her topsy-turvy worlds, in which enigmatic and often over the top cartoony characters go on with their daily business, are idiosyncratic and current. Rhonda Wall shares with Art Spiel her downtown NYC art world experience during the 80s, her work process and ideas.
Continue reading “Rhonda Wall: Survival in Delirium States”
Julie Peppito‘s visceral and imaginative installations refer to our ecological, cultural, and political environments through explosive colors, textured surfaces, and interconnected loopy forms. Julie Peppito recalls how growing up in Oklahoma and later moving to NYC impacted her development as an artist. She shares some of her thought process, her work as an activist, and some of her projects.
Continue reading “Julie Peppito: Making Meaning out of Anything”
At the end of “Dragons of Iceland,” a video the NYC based multi-media artist Elizabeth Riley made throughout her SIM residency in Reykjavik, the dragon protagonist is determined to escape the societal constraints and limitations placed on women when the artist was growing up. The dragon flies into a gushing waterfall which for Riley symbolized finality. But later-on, after she returned from the residency, Riley has both deconstructed and reconstructed this video into a sculptural installation, and throughout the process of art making, the dragon’s route shifted from a fall into the abyss to a portal into a different artform. Elizabeth Riley’s solo show, “Ribbons Become Space,” at SL invites us to experience an exuberant journey. The journey starts as you enter the front gallery space with a 2011 video installation “Dragons of Iceland,” continues throughout the back gallery space with two related large-scale wall works made recently for the SL Gallery, then loops back as you exit, leading us back to the video installation with a new perspective.
Continue reading “Ribbons Become Space at SL”The Chimney, Ulmer Arts, Transmitter, Century Pictures, CLEARING, Superchief
The Chimney
The Chimney has two strong exhibits for you to visit sooner or later. One is on-site at the Chimney’s home outpost, the other not too far away in an outpost you might call new or newish — historical emphasis on -ish.
At the gallery’s home space is “Twilight Chorus,” where a duo of cleverly brick-niche’d, collaged-in assemblies lingering in the circumstantial hinterlands scan as a scrapbook-like index of the trappings of street art, potentially hinting at rather immediate exteriors. Objects elsewhere place you in the landscapes and atmospheres of paintings by many a surrealist. Works tucked into yet other nooks unfurl in extended intimacies, and chromatically order, reflect and unfold like mascara compacts and make-up tables.
Many objects rich in reference and reminiscence in this also somewhat quietly rambunctious group show. Taken all together, it’s like an immersive diorama à la Miró.
Continue reading “Nota Bene with @postuccio [vii]”
Nancy Bowen‘s layered sculptures, installations, and collages coalesce stories of different cultures, of past and present. Her objects bring to mind a flavor of unidentified myths, archetypes and rituals, often involving images of the female body. The artist talks about her art making process, projects, and the way she sees her role as an art educator.
Continue reading “Nancy Bowen: The Story of Objects”
The tension between “inside” and “outside” in Erika Ranee’s paintings draw you into an enclosed space with an explosive and rhythmic internal movement. The vibrant colors, organic shapes, and linear marks that link the forms like veins, altogether resonate with living organisms, body, or microscopic landscapes. The artist shares with Art Spiel what brought her to art, her thought and work processes, as well as her current projects.
Continue reading “Erika Ranee – Wired for Bold”
Rachael Wren’s delicate paintings pulsate with repetitive brush strokes that both allure you to look closely at the elaborate geometric surfaces and at the same time pull you into mysterious psychological interiors or perhaps cosmic fields. Her grid structure serves as an anchor for the paint /space- anchoring facilitates a greater freedom of movement and flow within. The artist shares with Art Spiel her ideas on color, painting, and studio process.
Continue reading “Rachael Wren – Shimmers and Hums”
Nancy Baker’s art is colorful and bright, with filigree shapes that fuse, multiply and pulse outward in vibrant, sweeping waves. Individually the panels seem molecular and scientific; layered together they suggest vast networks and digital flow, yet clearly are the work of an artist’s hand. The eye zooms in and picks out familiar details–a candy wrapper, a takeout tray–then moves out again to appreciate the larger whole.
Pat Lay‘s Digital work conjures ancient iconography, or maps organized in what appears to be a binary logic. Throughout her abstracted digital and more figurative sculptural work she consistently reflects on the role of technology in our life, merging cultural cues with a seemingly mathematical order. For Art Spiel the artist elaborates on her interest in technology, what brought her to art, and her 42 year experience as an art educator at Montclair State University – both as a teacher and as the founding director of the MFA in Studio Art.
Continue reading “Pat Lay: Mapping New Interiors”