contemporary art – Page 49

April 6, 2022July 27, 2026, by Art Spiel

Climate Conversations at Easton’s PA Nurture Nature Center

Previewing

A wall with art on it

Description automatically generated with low confidence — Susan Hoffman Fishman, *In the Beginning There Was Only Water*, 30 in. x 50 ft., acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper, 2021, Installation view at Janice Charach Gallery, West Bloomfield, Michigan

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 through 2021, eight women artists from the Midwest and the East Coast of the United States came together via Zoom to read and discuss All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D. and Katharine K. Wilkinson, Ph.D. The book contains essays and poetry by a cadre of diverse women policy wonks, scientists, writers, journalists, lawyers, activists, and others who address the most critical existential issue of our time with the intention of offering different ways to effect change and mend the significant damage that we have caused to the Earth. The artists’ responses to the essays form the exhibition Climate Conversations: All We Can Save. The exhibition runs through June 30^th, 2022.

April 4, 2022April 5, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Jim Condron: Texts and Textures

Jim MacBook Air:Users:jimcondron:Desktop:Art Spiel :Photos:1b.Condron with work.JPG — Jim Condron installing Close to You, Karen Condron’s clothes, straw, yarrow, 50 x 30 x 30 inches at Wings over Wall Street, Chelsea, NY, 2019

In his sculptures and installations Jim Condron merges found objects—fragmented or whole—to create colorful and textural hybrid entities with distinct yet very open-ended textual undercurrents. Bed frames and tractors, furs and fabric, painted pieces of wood and plastic refuse, assert their past function and hint at potential narratives in playful variations, revealing the artist’s hand and his vivid imagination along the way.

April 1, 2022March 31, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Shuffling Liminal Episodes at Project: ARTspace

Previewing

A picture containing text, indoor

Description automatically generated — Michelle Weinberg, A Personal Situation, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 20 3/4” x 16″

The two-person exhibition Shuffling Liminal Episodes at Project: ARTspace features drawings by artists Leslie Kerby and Michelle Weinberg, whose works on paper and vellum resemble snapshots of settings, some of specific places, some imagined, capturing an arrested moment from daily life. Both storytellers at heart, the two artists draw objects as protagonists in their visual tales. A desolate bench, a studio table with a lamp, a tiny figure stepping out of a big house —random belongings, furniture, activities of daily life come to the forefront, projecting an inner life while also hinting at human life outside their inanimate existence—always with a lingering whiff of humor. Kerby and Weinberg also share a collage aesthetic which works well to unify their fragmented narratives.

March 31, 2022November 2, 2022, by Christopher Stout

Making Sense Without Consensus at Equity

A picture containing wall, indoor

Description automatically generated — The curatorial team held a fascination with exploring and activating the ceiling, corners, and floors of Equity Gallery via the works that comprise *Making Sense Without Consensus*. Here are 2 examples of this; on the left, Linda King Ferguson’s work stretching downward to the floor; and on the right, Diogo Pimentão’s work installed to live and extend around the corner of a gallery wall.

Now on view at Equity Gallery in the Lower East Side is a notable group exhibition, cogently titled Making Sense Without Consensus, with works by 14 remarkable artists and 3 astute curators at the helm. The exhibition statement says that these artists explore reality through fragmented connections and geometric materiality, “investigating whether the linearity of time is real or if past and future overlap.”
In further absorbing what this exhibition might represent, I also want to offer an illuminating quote from The Radicant (2009), an essay by celebrated curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. This thought piece provides context for the development of Making Sense Without Consensus:

“In ordinary language, ‘modernizing’ has come to mean reducing cultural and social reality to Western formats. And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own problematics: an alter modernity …”

March 23, 2022March 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Melissa Stern: Chat & Chew at Garvey Simon: Previewing

In her solo exhibition Chat & Chew at DFN Projects, multi-disciplinary artist Melissa Stern features drawings, assemblages, and sculptures which probe into the surface of social decorum not only with a biting wit but also with a tender gaze. Her outlandish characters invoke in the viewer an unsettling tension between elusive simplicity of forms and deep psychological complexities. Couples stare or reach out to one another, mouthless faces seem to whisper—whether rendered with graphite, pastel, and colored pencils, or molded with clay, these figures form an array of characters we may interpret as archetypes in dreams or comic strips. They remind me of duos in a Becket play or characters in Saul Steinberg’s absurd universe—with Stern’s very own take. Stern’s protagonists express distinct attitudes and appear to have lots to say. Underneath the verbiage, you can sense a vulnerable core that is silent, on the verge of coming up to the surface.

March 21, 2022March 21, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Paul Behnke – a Champion of Painting

Portrait of Paul Behnke in the studio with Gloria’s Guardian, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 60 inches, photo courtesy of Robin Stout.

Paul Behnke is a champion of painting – and he does it with evident gusto. His paintings come from idiosyncrasies, life experience, and a process that begins as intuitive, mixed with periods of sharp critical gaze. His paintings have evolved from early contained and minimalistic bold-color geometries, to more recent chaotic forms and layered complexity, at times almost explosive.

March 12, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Entanglement at BravinLee Programs

In Conversation

*Entanglement (Paintings by Cecile Chong, Sculpture by Jack Henry, courtesy BravinLee Programs*

Entanglement is a new exhibition of works by Jac Lahav, Cecile Chong, Jack Henry, and Erik Olson. The work ranges from the psychological to the sentimental with many references to the natural world. Much of the work is dissimilar, like a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing leopard print and a leafy necklace which stands in contrast to atmospheric encaustic paintings referencing Chinese landscape. Together these pieces take us deep into a post-pandemic psyche. The binding theme is plants, using nature as a metaphor for an internal growth many of us have experienced during the past two years. Entanglement opened on Thursday March 3rd and is up at BravinLee Programs in Chelsea New York until April 9th. We sat down with gallerist Karin Bravin and two of the artists to talk about the show.

March 10, 2022March 10, 2022, by Maggie Pavao

Not knowing is most intimate at Amos Eno

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, Installation view of *Somewhere Around There,* 2022. Photo courtesy of Maggie Pavao

It is perhaps in this state of “not knowing” that we first encounter the works in artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda’s current solo exhibition Somewhere Around There, on view at the Amos Eno gallery. The exhibition, which presents works from the artist’s KuroKuroShiro series (‘black-black-white’ in Japanese), features dynamic shapes in shaded monochrome that seem to alternately emerge and recede from view. Faced with this shifting visual field, the viewer gradually develops a kind of intimacy with these unknown forms, opening up new possibilities for interpretation and engagement.

March 7, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Terrarium at Ice Cream Social

Featured Project with Curator and artist Jenn Cacciola, and Artist/Owner of Ice Cream Social Matthew Shively

Installation view, photo courtesy of Ice Cream Social.

The inaugural group exhibition, Terrarium, at Ice Cream Social features painting, photography, sculpture, fiber and site-specific installations by 26 artists. Terrarium examines growth of different forms, inside and outside of containment, managed and wild, protected and exposed, as well as growth that sometimes requires destruction or thorny discoveries. The show runs from March 5th through May 6th, 2022.

February 28, 2022December 23, 2021, by Susan Hoffman Fishman

The Last Ones Standing

A picture containing floor, indoor, furniture

Description automatically generated — *Sea-Change* Installation at MARS gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2017. Photo by Matthew Stanton

Many artists have begun making work related to the climate crisis in recent years. But Australian visual artist Penelope Davis decided to address the subject eight years ago. Originally trained as a photographer with a portfolio including mainly camera-less photographs, she turned to sculpture and the looming environmental disaster after observing her first jellyfish blooms along the Melbourne coastline. Although alarmed by what appeared to be an unnatural and terrifying phenomenon, she was also attracted aesthetically to the jellyfish’s semi-transparency and how they reflected light.