conceptual art – Page 9

December 27, 2023March 6, 2024, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Images and Art: In and Out of Politics with Carlos Franco and Keren Anavy

Keren Anavy. *Archipelago*, 2023. Ink and colored pencils on mylar, plexiglass, shells, concrete bricks, and plywood. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.

As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023, artists Carlos Franco (b. Puerto Rico) and Keren Anavy (b. Israel) both showed their work in the group exhibition Enmeshed: Dreams of Water at NARS Foundation. Franco’s work often deploys appropriated images and linguistic symbols. He seems to be exploring the contextual complexities behind how signification takes shape and how signification continues to evolve as a context-dependent subject. Anavy’s site-specific work has been connected to the multifaceted paradigm of “ecological order,” according to the book Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts. Her fabricated environments consider the “liminal geographic spaces between political art and escapism.”

December 26, 2023December 25, 2023, by Ágnes Berecz

At the Limits: Elena Dahn at Revolver

Thin, translucent layers of shaped and stretched natural latex are mounted onto walls or wooden boards to extend the limits of painting—these are Elena Dahn’s New Bodies, on view at the Buenos Aires-based artist’s first New York exhibition. Hosted by Revolver, a contemporary art venue launched in 2008 by Giancarlo Scaglia in Lima and subsequently in Buenos Aires and on the Lower East Side, the exhibition is an invitation to rethink the relationship between body and painting, performance and mark-making, space and surface.

November 22, 2023November 17, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Shay Arick: Demons and Fields

Featured Exhibition

A white room with a white floor and a white rectangular object

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

In Demons and Fields, Shay Arick’s solo show in Tel Aviv Artists’ Studios Gallery, most sculptures are made of dried Ficus leaves he collected near his home. The vertical constructions are like linear drawings of delicate figures—they sway gently with the air or rotate in place through an automated mechanism. Each has its rhythm and character, evoking wonder and awareness of life’s fragility. Arranged along an extended white platform reminiscent of a road, these characters appear as if caught in a paused procession—some still move but remain anchored as part of a collective entity, an undefined network, or an intricate matrix. It is a nuanced and powerful metaphor for life’s transience in a complex reality. It is the second exhibition by Shay Arick since his return from New York City to Israel a year and a half prior. The show, curated by Eitan Bognim, opened on October 6^th but was closed the next day on October 7th, due to the devastating Hamas attack on southern Israel and the subsequent ongoing war. The conversation with Shay Arick focuses on his art and his process.

November 7, 2023November 4, 2023, by Matt Moment

The Sublimity of Simplicity in Dai Ban’s Sculptures

On view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through November 26

Artist Profile

A person in a striped shirt

Description automatically generated — The Artist in his Studio, Great Barrington, MA. Image Credit: Matt Moment

When Dai Ban first traveled from his native Japan to the United States, he was struck by the nonchalant vibrance of American street art. The year was 1985, and although the golden age of graffiti had come and gone, its ethos had indelibly permeated the fine art world. Imagery that had been considered lowbrow just ten years prior became astronomically salable, so long as it decorated a canvas and not a subway car. Ban was bemused by the transformative power of gallery spaces. “Anything you show at the gallery looks like some kind of art,” he observed.

October 18, 2023October 9, 2023, by MICHELE JASLOW

Joanne Ungar on beauty and pain

Featured Artist

Joanne Ungar is a singular talent. Her work is a luminous masterclass in the manipulation of color and wax. A gifted encaustic artist with a scientific approach to her art practice, she speaks directly through her chosen medium to address questions of beauty and pain. We spoke about living in analog and digital worlds, women’s beauty, and finding your own art world.

October 16, 2023September 28, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Emily Culver: The Idea of a Thing

In Dialogue

Virginia-based artist Emily Culver’s background is as multifaceted as her artwork. With a father who is a carpenter and contractor and a mother who transitioned from being a midwife to a nursing professor, she was raised in a world that merged craft and body. This upbringing influenced her own creative direction. Adept at procedural tasks, she nonetheless felt a pull towards a less constrained form of expression. College introduced her to painting, but she soon sought more than just surfaces, finding herself intrigued by the interplay of gravity, physics, and mechanics.

October 4, 2023October 6, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Interior Worlds of Sculpture and Performance: Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith

Nyugen Smith and Marvin Fabien, *After the Fracture* 2019. Performance at Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Photography Pascal Bernier.

Creating work that both resists and grapples with their immigrant experiences, Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith offer distinctive approaches to sculpture. Their perspectives on their immigrant experiences show some overlap but also many differences. As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Kim’s work in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water explores how new morphologies of identity emerge across time, place, and patterns of self-reflection, while Smith and De Lara’s work that will be on view in Excavated Selves, Becoming Magic Bodies begs the viewer to interrogate place through storytelling. Together with the artists, co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand discusses the politics of art and how the artists approach personal histories and historical and political events before the exhibit.

September 25, 2023September 3, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Peter Eudenbach: From Cricket Songs to Solar Panels

In Dialogue

A framed picture of a person sitting in a chair

Description automatically generated

Virginia-based artist Peter Eudenbach says that while he has always been interested in making things, his pathway to studio art was through the humanities. The history of art and ideas became part of his language even before he found his voice as an artist. His belief that studio practice has the most potential to make sense of human experience was a significant driver in his choice to pursue an art career.

September 6, 2023September 4, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Art of Getting It Together

Jesse Benson, *Packaging*, 2003/2023. Ephemera from all projects completed in grad school, vacuum-formed plastic, plexiglass, silkscreen on board. Installation dimensions variable, individual dimensions 21 x 28.8 x 3 in. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy As-Is LA.

In Organizer, Jesse Benson’s first solo gallery show since 2017, the Los Angeles artist unpacks the “dialectic of order and chaos” by introducing heterogeneity to organizing systems.

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023, by Meg Hitchcock

Martha Bone and Janice Caswell: Two Solo Shows at Garrison Art Center

A painting of a snake

Description automatically generated — Martha Bone, Mapping the Invisible #3, 2020, acrylic, aluminum enamel, charcoal, joint compound, pastel on pieced paper, 63 x 88 in., photo courtesy of the artist.

Two artists currently showing at Garrison Art Center use scale, structure, and geometry to examine and reinterpret their respective environments. Martha Bone’s large-scale paintings and assemblages express a sweeping view of the cosmos, bringing the macrocosm within our reach, while Janice Caswell’s small-scale sculptures find the infinite within the microcosm, showing us the vast potential in all forms. Both Bone and Caswell photograph their natural and man-made landscapes, later referring to these images when creating their works. And both artists construct their forms as improvisations inspired by their observations, although neither artist is interested in a literal interpretation of nature. But this is where the similarities end, their distinctive styles diverging toward an expansive contemplation of form and space and an intimate exploration of the fabricated structures that inhabit our lives.