#drawing – Page 15

November 18, 2019September 10, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Iris Häussler – Invented Biographies

Throughout her multi-faceted installations, the German-born Canadian based artist Iris Häussler has been slipping in and out of multiple characters. Her invented underdog protagonists live through diverse historical periods and traverse vast geographies. Häussler’s rigorous installations transform any categorization. They are placed between life and art, coalescing multi-disciplinary collaborations including performance, literature, and richly layered visual vocabularies such as drawing, installation and sculpture. The visitor is invited to experience an individual’s life within a specific context of place and history, to decipher the clues from the artifacts and materials throughout installations that reflect on fiction, history and the meaning of a creative identity.

November 7, 2019November 15, 2020, by Heather Topcik

Karen Mainenti: Message in a Bottle at Ground Floor

Message in a Bottle, installation view at Ground Floor Gallery, 2019, photo courtesy of Jordan Rathkopf

In Message in a Bottle, the current solo installation show at Ground Floor Gallery in Park Slope, the Gowanus based artist Karen Mainenti transforms the gallery into what at first glance looks like an upscale beauty boutique. Mainenti uses this platform to explore the mechanisms at work in the packaging and marketing of beauty products over time, drawing on her own complex relationship to the products themselves. Much of Mainenti’s work examines the subtle but powerful societal expectations of women that show up in ordinary objects. The delicately cast porcelain replicas of her own cosmetics highlight the way objects can be gendered, even when reduced to their elemental forms. Often using humor as a sly way to invite the viewer in, her drawings of creams, lotions and serums using marketing language from real products highlight the inherent contradiction in the ways we read these messages as absurd, yet suspend that disbelief at the cash register when we buy them. Having visited the show when it opened, I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Karen about how this exhibition came together and how the various series within it have developed over time.

October 19, 2019October 19, 2019, by Katie Hector

Americana Archetypes Frolic Centerstage in Rebecca Morgan’s Solo Show Town and Country at Asya Geisberg Gallery

Image courtesy of Rebecca Morgan and Asya Geisberg Gallery. Photography by Etienne Frossard.

Rebecca Morgan’s solo exhibition “Town and Country“ at Asya Geisberg offers viewers a subversive and unflinching look into aesthetics of Americana. Panty raiding hillbillies, buxom bonnet sporting milkmaids, and characters engaged in Appalachian revelry scrupulously rendered in paint, graphite, and brass galavant throughout the exhibition. Morgan’s cringeworthy figuration walks the line between portraiture and allegory and highlights the pitfalls of romanticization. Inspired by the sucker-punch illustrations of R Crumb, Morgan’s depictions of rural life speak to notions of voyeurism, power dynamics, and the ubiquity of toxic masculinity within contemporary American culture. The works included in “Town and Country” strike a balance between hilarity and horror and provide a fantastical portal into the American psyche. I had the opportunity to chat with Morgan about her fourth solo show with the gallery and reflect upon her personal fascination with the subjects she portrays.

August 26, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Patricia Spergel – On the Verge of Recognition

Patricia Spergel, Sita Ram, 2018, oil on canvas, 18” x 24”, photo courtesy of Tim Grajek

Patricia Spergel‘s vibrant oil paintings interrelate gesture, color, and form, to create imaginative spaces that are on the verge of being recognized – both playful and incisive, lightweight and massive. Patricia Spergel shares with Art Spiel her approach to color, how printmaking informs her painting, and her painting process.

August 6, 2019August 7, 2019, by Etty Yaniv

Brian Wood Drawings: Visions of Hyperawareness

Brian Wood, Plank, 2017, Graphite on paper, 11 x 14 in., photo courtesy of the artist

Brian Wood’s drawings are literally visionary. They derive from what the artist describes as a “trance-like” state, where the ego is consumed by the image, as the inner mind and hand become vital conduits for arising images. This inner process results in drawings that invoke nuanced mental states, fragmented memories, and perhaps most important, a glimpse at the unknown. Holland Cotter wrote in his NY Times review of Brian Wood’s 2014 solo show Enceinte that the artist creates “a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process.” In a cynical age with ubiquitously ironic art, this unabashed approach to the spiritual elements in the process of art making is quite refreshing.

August 3, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Kate Teale: Landscapes of Void

Kate Teale, Going Dark 15x12x8” paintings, on graphite wall drawing 120″ x 164″, Grand Rapids MI, 2018, photo courtesy David Henderson

No matter what subject matter Kate Teale’s drawings, installations and photographs depict – a house, a sleeping couple, bed sheets, a Tsunami – her images always lead us into an urgent psychological landscape, prompting us to pause and reflect on what we are looking at. Precise like poems and complex like dreams, her subtle and highly focused artworks take diverse forms ranging from works on paper to tromp l’oeil murals. Kate Teale shares with Art Spiel some concepts behind her work, process, and thoughts about her evolution as an artist.

May 28, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Tansy Xiao – The Echo of Journeying

Domestic Language, multimedia installation, 2017

Tansy Xiao is a curator, artist, writer, translator, and an overtly out of the box thinker. She shares with Art Spiel some insights on her upcoming curatorial project at Radiator, her art-making, as well as translation and writing processes.

AS: Tell me a bit about yourself and what brought you to art – writing, translation, curation and making.

Tansy Xiao: I wasn’t properly schooled, neither did I consider myself an artist when I was travelling around and painting abstract murals in exchange for food and accommodation. Now you might call it an unprompted residency. During my long trips and brief sojourns, I would write book length letters to my friends, with a mutual understanding that they were not obligated to reply. I joined and formed communities, then left them, until I have relatively settled in New York, a city with such transience that the fear of being trapped in a constricted niche no longer haunts me. That’s when I began my practice as a curator and translator. If I were to describe my status quo now, I’d quote D. H. Lawrence’s last paragraph in Rainbow:

April 24, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Rachael Wren – Shimmers and Hums

Rachael Wren, Defenders, 2017, oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches. Photo by Bill Orcutt

Rachael Wren’s delicate paintings pulsate with repetitive brush strokes that both allure you to look closely at the elaborate geometric surfaces and at the same time pull you into mysterious psychological interiors or perhaps cosmic fields. Her grid structure serves as an anchor for the paint /space- anchoring facilitates a greater freedom of movement and flow within. The artist shares with Art Spiel her ideas on color, painting, and studio process.

February 26, 2019February 26, 2019, by Etty Yaniv

HyperAccumulators at Pelham Art Center

All photos courtesy of Alexandra Brock

Artist Talk: “HyperAccumulators”

Sat March 2nd from 2-4PM at Pelham Art Center

Hyperaccumulators are plants capable of growing in soils with very high concentrations of metals and are known for extracting contaminants; thus, helping the ecosystem. This duality of destruction and restoration underscores “HyperAccumulators” – the current vibrant group show at Pelham Art Center. In their upcoming artist talk, curators Alexandra Brock and Elizabeth Saperstein will lead the panel on how contemporary artists interpret connectivity between nature, toxicity, and possible regeneration. And not merely in nature. As curator Alexandra Brock says, “we have become ‘HyperAccumulators’ dealing with the everyday environmental and political climate we are living in. The artists are taking in all this- and helping us return to a better state.”

January 8, 2019January 31, 2019, by Etty Yaniv

Beth Dary – Near the Water’s Edge

Beth Dary, Elements of Ambivalence, 2006, fabric, pins, encaustic, 10’x17’x4″, photo courtesy of the artist

Beth Dary‘s sculptures, installations and drawings have in common deep layers of meaning, imaginative combinations of materials, and subtle delicacy in form and color. Her insatiable curiosity in exploring diverse materials and processes results in a wide array of formal expressions, ranging from ceramics to photography; fabric to glass. She shares with Art Spiel some insight into her work throughout the years, her process explorations, and her upcoming projects.