Contemporary Art and Culture
In March 2020, Nicola Ginzel arrived at the Q21 Art Residency at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria. This residency, which hosts international artists and selects one American artist every two months with the support of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, is designed to foster creative exchange through collaboration, networking, and studio visits.
Continue reading “Nicola Ginzel: How Do You Restructure Form?”
Spiritual World, the title of the current group show at RAINRAIN, references Alfred Stieglitz’s Spiritual America, a 1923 photograph of a harnessed, castrated horse. The powerless restrained stallion—a traditional American symbol of unstoppable prowess—symbolized for Stieglitz the loss of spirituality in his contemporary American culture. The organizer of Spiritual World, Theodor Nymark, a Copenhagen-based artist who also shows work in it, brought together seven artists from Denmark, Korea, and the USA to explore how spirituality can exist today outside conservative religious ideals and ultra-liberal new-age paganism. In a text for the show, Nymark specifies further how he sees spirituality—”like a multifaceted metaphor, many-sided, a prism with no central outpost, only imagination. Not just a lake, a mirror. Not just a car, a vehicle.” These notions reflect the overall premise of this show.
Continue reading “Spiritual World at RAINRAIN”
Naomi Okubo has been creating works that explore the themes of identity and relationships with others. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations often feature multiple portraits of herself in imaginary, fantasized settings full of decorative patterns and vibrant colors that blur the boundary between the self and the surrounding environment. This ambiguity regarding identity stems from her experiences of struggling to establish selfhood in relation to others during her adolescence. One of her turning points was when she developed her interest in Wardian cases or what she calls “closely glazed spaces.”
Continue reading “Intimate Space, Entangling Threads – Sharon Liu and Hanna Hirakawa with Naomi Okubo”
Many wonderful artists wielded their prowess in and around New York this month, in a myriad of ways and media. Moving around the city in the height of summer can be a daunting task, but these shows draw you into other realms that make you forget all about humidity and glad you made the trip. From Brooklyn to Governors Island to Storm King, here are some standouts that were definitely worth the journey.
Continue reading “July in NY – In & Outdoors Around the City”
This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The second article in this series highlights the work of American artist Josh Kline.
Continue reading “Josh Kline’s Greatest Emergency”
There are many thought-provoking shows in Philadelphia this July. Beginning at Fleisher Art Memorial, three innovative Philadelphia sculptors combine materials in unexpected ways to reflect on intimacy, vulnerability, and natural phenomena. At the Fabric Workshop in center city, artist John Jarboe brings her cabaret aesthetic to create a stunning immersive experience titled Rose Garden following her life and gender journey. In Kensington, at Peep Projects Todd Stong’s delicate drawings and wall-sized multi-panel monotype reflect on the complexities of history, contemporary life, and what the artist terms queer cultural production.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in July 2024”
Bat Ami Rivlin, who has lived in New York City for over a decade, finds her artistic practice profoundly shaped by the city’s relentless cycle of object turnover. The daily expulsion of waste from restaurants, buildings, and homes onto the streets, followed by the inevitable clear-out, is a stark reflection of urban existence. This phenomenon sparks contemplation on how these transient objects organize our spatial interactions, both during their use and after their disposal.
Continue reading “Bat Ami Rivlin: Functional Narratives”
Jiwon Rhie often explores moments of deep personal depression, social misanthropy, and cultural alienation in her work. You would never know it, though, from first viewing. Walking into La Mama Galleria in the East Village, NY, visitors are greeted by the playful whirring sound of over a dozen mechanical toy dogs, each covered in exploding layers of colorful, fake flowers. The dogs walk across a blue moving pad, bumping into walls, each other, or the artificial boundaries Rhie erected. In the center of the moving pad, two quarter candy vending dispensers shake with the motion of encased and enflowered toys, which act, of course, unperturbed by their enclosures. Viewers are invited to borrow quarters from the gallery to dispense pods filled with custom keychains and temporary tattoos from the candy machines. Though only a corner of a room within a larger exhibition, Rhie’s Flower Dogs make it impossible to enter the gallery without stopping to smile, take a photo or video, and procure ones own custom keychain art.
Continue reading “Jiwon Rhie: Suddenly, Images Explain Everything at La Mama Galleria”
Installation view of Gentle Mist group exhibition at the Tutu Gallery, Photo Credit: Yulin Gu and Yuhan Shen
The exhibition titled Gentle Mist at the Tutu Gallery in Brooklyn could be mistaken for primarily being idea-driven, in which case the ideas precede artwork production, along the lines of artists working with clarity of vision, such as the Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt and the Minimalist artists Tony Smith and Robert Morris. However, upon closer examination of the works by this group of New York and Baltimore artists, we realize that the makers of the art objects are more intuitively engaged with their art. There is a great deal of trial and error and improvisation in the creative process, and the ideation and production processes integrate up into a complex maneuver or dance.
Continue reading “The Philosophy of Physical Existence at Tutu Gallery”
Mapping the Invisible, the final show of the ’23-’24 season at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut, showcases the work of Laura Battle, Jaq Belcher, and Amy Myers, each of whom contemplate and explore the mysteries of our existence through the lenses of science, math, and geometry. Co-curated by Francene Langford and Caren Winnall, the show runs till June 19, 2024. Langford elaborates on the curatorial process and highlights the work in this show.
Continue reading “Mapping the Invisible at the Flinn Gallery”