domestic themes – Art Spiel

October 14, 2024December 7, 2024, by A.E. Chapman

A Leg to Stand On—Melissa Stern at DIMIN

*Melissa Stern: A Leg to Stand On*, installation view

In Melissa Stern: A Leg to Stand On, the domestic meets the fantastic in the aptly named The Living Room, the front room exhibition space at DIMIN complete with a cozy two-seater sofa. Featuring her drawings and sculptures, Stern’s trademark humor and sense of play persists while the underlying thread of darkness that pervades her oeuvre feels especially heightened in this presentation. Deeply shaken by a fall during a winter walk in 2021, the artist’s works in the exhibition explore the precarious and fragile construction of the human body. Cobbling together disparate elements such as vintage shoes, wooden branches, scrap pieces of bannister railings, a doll’s lost arm, linoleum, wallpaper, resin, clay, paint cans, bolts, and screws, Stern balances absurdity with familiarity.

October 26, 2020September 17, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Nancy Elsamanoudi in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Nancy Elsamanoudi

Artist at home with paintings during lockdown, May 2020

Nancy Elsamanoudi says she was drawn to painting because of its fluid relationship to time from the viewer’s and the painter’s perspectives alike. The viewer gets a visceral sense of the painter’s vision in the past, and the painter experiences the fluidity of time throughout the process of painting. Elsamanoudi further specifies: “when you paint, you can, so to speak, go back and forth through time, adding layers-submerging the past or revealing the past by scraping or stripping away previous layers.”

October 19, 2020September 22, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Sharon Madanes in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Sharon Madanes

Selfie in studio

Sharon Madanes grew up in Chicago in a family of physicians and was exposed to both art and medicine from a young age – her first job was helping to package sterilized surgical equipment. She also spent weekends at the Art Institute of Chicago taking art classes and wandering through the collection. She has always found the strange forms and aesthetics of medical settings fascinating: “as a painter and physician, I’m currently making work about this very juxtaposition, exploring different elements of hospital and medical culture through paint,” she says. Sharon Madanes is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.

October 5, 2020September 22, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Aisha Tandiwe Bell in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Aisha Tandiwe Bell

Aisha Tandiwe Bell is interested in the many manifestations of the traps of race, sex, and class. She makes drawings, paintings, ceramic sculptures, installations, and performance work that examine the metaphors and the allegory that this trap manifests. In her newest work Aisha Tandiwe Bell’s is looking at how one might negotiate traps, utilizing shape shifting, and code-switching as well as looking at identifying markers that both separate and unify. She says, “I am a Black African American Jamaican Woman Artist Wife and Mother. These are all categories that I consistently juggle and negotiate in a white male dominated space.” Aisha Tandiwe Bell is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.

September 29, 2020September 22, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Melissa Stern in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Melissa Stern

:M.Stern for Etty.jpg — **NYC Studio, with the sculpture WIG SHOP**

Melissa Stern is an artist, working in mixed materials and across genres. She is interested in ideas that are simultaneously funny and dark- that is, “work that might make you smile or laugh, but with a wee bit of discomfort,” as she puts it. Much of her work of recent years focuses on home and childhood and the ways in which our childhoods and our memories haunt our lives. She works in clay, found objects, wood, metal collage and various drawing materials. Her goal is that the materials she uses are at the service of the ideas. On a different note she says, “I am an only child, raised by older parents who were first generation Americans. My mother desperately wanted to be ‘American’. My father was very connected to his European heritage. This push and pull; between belonging and being an outsider has profoundly influenced my life as an artist.” Melissa Stern is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.

September 15, 2020September 17, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Ashley Norwood Cooper in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Ashley Norwood Cooper

”How to Draw Your Shoe”, oil on panel, 36” x 30”, 2020.

Ashley Norwood Cooper is an artist and a mother, raising three teenagers in a small town in upstate NY. Her paintings have always dealt with family and home and how the personal connects us to the global and political. She is interested in the schizophrenic role of the artist-mother-wife-teacher and in how to redefine the heroic from a woman’s perspective. Ashley Norwood Cooper is participating in Domestic Brutes and she will present her work in a virtual studio visit hosted by Pelham Art Center on Thursday, October 15th, 5-6pm.

September 10, 2020August 8, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Manju Shandler in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Manju Shandler

Manju Shandler working on Persistent Mothers in her studio in Brooklyn, NY 2020. Photo Stephen Estrin.

Manju Shandler creates symbolic art that speaks to current events. Building upon established storylines from myth, religion, and history, her mixed media artworks create richly layered narratives that reflect on our dense and complicated times. Shandler believes people are natural storytellers that make sense of the world through by mining both personal experience and collective memories that have been passed down. Her work dips into this well. Training as a theatre designer helps her to envision installations and her background as a puppet builder informs how she approaches building objects. Identifying as a mother seeps into everything she does.