conceptual art – Page 19

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November 17, 2020November 2, 2022, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial: Yikui (Coy) Gu

Yikui (Coy) Gu, *Oriental Flavor*. 2019. Gouache, charcoal, acrylic, gouache on photograph, chopsticks. Ramen noodle packaging & flavoring pack on bristol board.

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 continues in September through December at EFA Project Space, Greenwood Cemetery, and virtually, presenting 60+ artists. This interview series features 10 participating artists.

Yikui (Coy) Gu was born in 1983 in Nantong, China and emigrated to the United States at the age of seven, growing up in Albany, NY. Yikui (Coy) Gu has a BFA from Long Island University and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He has exhibited his work nationally in New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, and St. Louis; and internationally in London, Berlin, and Siena, Italy. His work has been reviewed in the Washington Post, KunstForum International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Yale Daily News. His work has appeared on the cover of the Lower East Side Review, and in Fresh Paint and Art Maze. He resides in Philadelphia and teaches as Associate Professor of Art at the College of Southern Maryland. He is currently plotting in his South Philly studio, while remaining mostly harmless.

November 16, 2020October 20, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Bonny Leibowitz – Not This, Not That, Yet This and That

A close up of an animal

Description automatically generated — Bonny Leibowitz

Bonny Leibowitz makes site responsive sculptural installations with painterly sensibility – they hover in the air, spill on the floor, or sprawl on the walls. Her love of Baroque compositions, Abstract Expressionist gestures is underscored throughout her work. Bonny Leibowitz had a long-standing interest in the illusory nature of experience and the supposition of stability. In Terra Unfirma, her most recent body of work, she tackles what it means to deconstruct expectations and perceptions by using a variety of materials which play off one another – natural appearing manufactured, manufactured appearing natural – constructing environments which may feel ephemeral, eternal, fleeting, solid, light or looming at the same time. The artist refers to this quote: “Everything worth knowing is cloaked in paradox because everything substantial defies being revealed in its totality” – Mark Nepo

November 5, 2020October 28, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

All the Way to Hell

In Dialogue with Eliza Evans

Last year, after artist Eliza Evans learned she had inherited the equivalent of three acres of mineral rights in Oklahoma, she started receiving offers from agents for fossil fuel companies to buy or lease these rights. After researching the law, Eliza Evans learned that she could not refuse and that the property could be fracked without her consent if the neighboring property owners agreed. Eliza Evans says that since like most artist she does not like being told what to do, she took a deep dive on mineral rights and property law to see if she could create some options. This resulted in the conceptual art activism of All the Way to Hell.

All the Way to Hell is giving away fractions of this property to as many people as possible. Nearly 300 people are participating so far, and signups will remain open until mid-December. This aggressive fragmentation of the property drives up the driller’s acquisition costs and will impede their interest. All the Way to Hell is a platform for a new form of protest, the foundation for a 100-year sit-in. Although each fractional mineral property is minuscule from a practical and legal perspective, the space it occupies is vast. All the Way to Hell may be the largest land art project ever.

September 17, 2020September 17, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Diana Schmertz in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Diana Schmertz

Diana Schmertz has always been interested in systems that people create to organize what they perceive in the world around them — based in science, religion, psychology, philosophy or politics. The artist says that no matter how cerebral a system or an idea may appear, it is always experienced through our physical senses and in order to communicate balance between reason and senses, she paints imagery of the body expressing emotional understanding juxtaposed with systems of verbal and/or mathematical reasoning. In Domestic Brutes, the women group show at Pelham Art Center Diana Schmertz shows a painting installation. Her virtual artist talk hosted by PAC is scheduled for October 8th.

September 4, 2020November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Shift Happens at GreenHill

In Dialogue with Heather Gordon

Heather Gordon, 2019, photo courtesy of Eli Gray

In her drawings, paintings, and installations North Carolina based artist Heather Gordon maps the poetry of life using mathematical elements like numbers and geometry to coax narratives from information related to data of place, time and physical properties. In her collaborative projects she has extended her practice to large scale site-specific installations based on elaborate research, often including sculptural, performance and movement elements which altogether result in multifaceted and thought provoking projects that prompt the visitor’s intellectual and visceral engagement. In this interview Heather Gordon sheds some light on her nine-foot-high site-specific mural on the large exterior window of the GreenHill gallery to be completed late September. Heather Gordon’s public art initiative is the first of a group of works by the artist at GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, as part of the Shift Happensart installation series which aims to explore art engagement at a time of social distancing.

July 27, 2020August 8, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Gabriel J. Shuldiner – Hybridsculptural Bruteminimalism

sLAY1_2019, postapocalypticblack®* [ modified acrylic polymer emulsion | carbon black pigment | calcium carbonate | water | modified industrial urethane enamel | modified polyurethane thermoset cellular plastic | vinyl acrylic co-polymer emulsion | acrylic stain-block sealant | mastic adhesive | polyurethane adhesive | solvent-based ink | nuisance dust | studio detritus | spit | air | light ]*proprietary | chrome enamel spray aerosol | cotton duck canvas | repurposed polystyrene | blackened stainless steel flat head hinge screws | reinforced galvanized steel wire, overall dimensions: 20.75 x 19 x 5.25 in.

Gabriel J. Shuldiner dislikes categorization of his work to the point that he invents new “isms” to describe its allusive hybridity – its DNA can be traced to abstraction with elements of minimalism, expressionism, and Arte Povera. While Shuldiner’s use of material is extensive , his use of color is restricted to mostly black, with tinges of other colors at times. Gabriel J. Shuldiner shares with Art Spiel some of his thought and work processes.

July 9, 2020August 31, 2020, by Nina Mdivani

Confronting History through Herstory

ecofeminism(s) at Thomas Erben Gallery

Installation view of ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska, left to right: Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, and Jessica Segall. Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June/July 2020 (photos: Andreas Vesterlund).

The exhibition ecofeminism(s), on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from June 19th to July 24th, will reopen Tuesday, September 8th through Saturday, September 26th, 2020. Curator Monika Fabijanska brings together works of sixteen artists in graceful, yet dense and thoughtful way as a museum show would. Albeit in the gallery consistently staging pivotal and sophisticated exhibitions,including among many others shows of Senga Nengudi, Dona Nelson, Painting Forward and Looped and Layered – Contemporary Art from Tehran.

June 21, 2020June 21, 2020, by Melissa Stern

Artists on Coping: Merritt Johnson

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

Merritt Johnson was born in West Baltimore and spent her childhood navigating between trees, tarps and concrete. She earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. Her work navigates the spaces between bodies and the body politic, land and cultures by making images and objects that connect, reflect and refract vision and experience. The multiplicity of materials and processes Johnson employs embody her multiplicity, exploring layering, allegiance and agency in the face of continued threats to land, water and bodies. Johnson’s works are containers for story, feeling and thought: images of what cannot be seen, exercises for existence, and political bodies. She lives and works with her family on Tlingit land in Sitka Alaska.

June 20, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Artists on Coping: Sally Boon Matthews

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

art%20spiel/ArtSpielfinished%20images%20for%20interview/artspielimages/1.portraitsally.jpg — *Sally Boon Matthews with Soundscape for March, April, May 2020. Water Colour, Ink, Felt Tip, Pencil, Thread on Mulberry Paper. 12”x 288”, 2020*

Sally Boon Matthews is a British born and educated artist, educator, and yogi living in New York City. Though her background was originally in photography, in the last eight years she has developed a multi-discipline practice that includes video, painting, collage, and drawing. Her work has been exhibited and published in Europe, the United States and Latin America. Publications include Tricycle Magazine, NY Times, Blitz Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Penguin Books, Random House, Warner Books, A&M Records, Om Yoga, Battersea Museum of Art, UK, Galerie Solado, Caracas, Venezuela, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Louisiana Museum of Art, Chateau de Trousse-Barriere, Briare, France, Jamaica Arts Center, NY.

June 19, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Artists on Coping: Bill Travis

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

*Bill Travis, self portrait as a young man*

Bill Travis is a photo-based artist, working in alternative techniques around such themes as desire, nostalgia, and impossible worlds that exist only in the imagination. He earned a Ph.D. in art history and was a tenured professor before turning full-time to creating art. He has had over sixty shows in museums, galleries, universities, and public institutions from New York City (where he lives) to San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and others. His work was featured in two monographs published in Italy and he recently co-curated an exhibition on Photography After Stonewall for Soho Photo Gallery in New York. He has lectured on his photography at Columbia University and was interviewed on Italian television. His work has been collected by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, The Kinsey Institute, Yale and Harvard Universities, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The New York Public Library, and national collections of photography in Russia, Japan, Portugal, and Hungary.