Jim Condron and Ilse Sørensen Murdock – Toss at Platform Project Space

Art Spiel Photo Story

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Installation view, Jim Condron (front), Ilse Sorensen Murdock (back)

At first glance, Jim Condron’s whimsical sculptures and Sørensen Murdock’s landscape paintings are an unexpected match for a two-person exhibition. Yet, in Toss, the current show at Platform Project Space, artist and curator Elizabeth Hazan made it into an engaging duet. The show runs the gamut from landscape paintings on canvas to paintings and sculptures made of scavenged materials, but regardless of the used media, both artists prioritize color, texture, and composition.

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Revisiting HOLOSCENES During the Global Pandemic

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On May 13, 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center in the United Arab Emirates hosted a streaming event consisting of a four-and-a-half-hour filmed version of HOLOSCENES, a durational performance installation that was originally presented there live in November of 2016. The event also included a conversation with Lars Jan, artist, writer and project director, as well as members of his team. HOLOSCENES is comprised of performers going about common, every-day tasks while the aquarium in which they are confined fills and empties with water. Although conceived as a commentary on “states of drowning” – rising seas, melting glaciers, intensifying storms, floods, and their impact on daily life – the project takes on additional meaning as we struggle with our own physical and psychological confinements during the great global quarantine.

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Maggie Nowinski -Drawing (un)limited

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Maggie Nowinski, Be Spilled, My Heart, 2021 detail installation view with artist for scale, wHoles are acrylic and India ink on canvas, double sided, installation approximately 20’x30’x10’

About a decade ago, Maggie Nowinski shifted her focus from site specific project-based installation to her studio as the primary site of her work. She made this shift after realizing that her connection to the work had become too fragmented. She needed her studio work to become more accessible and her creativity more meditative. Since drawing has always been at the core of her work, focusing on drawing with limited materials and themes, enabled her to process a lot of the ideas she had been working through in her large-scale installations. “I was craving a way to immediately access creativity, to be in a place where if I had an hour I could walk into my studio and pick up where I’d left off on a drawing,” she says.

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Tamara Kostianovsky – Between Wounds and Folds at Smack Mellon

Featured Artist

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The artist at Smack Mellon, photo courtesy of Rachel Vera Steinberg 

Between Wounds and Folds, Tamara Kostianovsky’s solo exhibition at Smack Mellon, features sculptures which link issues of gender-based violence, personal memory, and ecological destruction through consumption into a complex and speculative ecosystem. Her dimensional forms, both soft and brutal, combine discarded fabric with industrial materials, often drawing their shape from mutilated fauna and flora in various states of decay, including tree stumps, cow carcasses, and birds of prey.

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The Art of Transforming Polluted Water into Clean Water, Energy, and Sound

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Gilberto Esparza at work on Nomadic Plants

Mexican visual artist Gilberto Esparza works with technology, including electronics, robotics, and biotechnology, to develop innovative solutions to the detrimental impact that humans have had on the natural world, particularly on water. His overall goal is to rethink and redo the current relationship between human society and the environment by establishing collaborations between the two. 

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Luisa Caldwell Infinite Butterfly at FiveMyles

In Dialogue with artist Luisa Caldwell


Luisa Caldwell installing Curtain Call at the University of Iowa 2019, photo: Justin Torner

Brooklyn based artist Luisa Caldwell began to exhibit her candy wrapper work in 2002. She collects candy wrappers, from her daily walk on the city sidewalks or gets them from friends who send them to her from all over the world. Caldwell says she likes cleaning up the earth one wrapper at a time. Her current show at FIveMyles runs from September 18th through October 17th.

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What Is Your ‘Tipping Point’ for Collective Action?

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Scream (detail), 150 x 158 cm, mixed media drawing, 2020

I recently read the article “As the Climate Crisis Grows, a Movement Gathers to Make ‘Ecocide’ an International Crime Against Humanity” from Inside Climate News. The authors state that “international lawyers, environmentalists, and a growing number of world leaders say that ‘ecocide’ – widespread destruction of the environment – would serve as a ‘moral red line’ for the planet.” French President Emmanuel Macron and Pope Francis add that ecocide is an offense that poses a similar threat to humanity as genocide. And Pope Francis describes ecocide as “the massive contamination of air, land and water” or “any action capable of producing an ecological disaster.” The Pope has proposed making ecocide a sin for Catholics, endorsing a campaign by environmental activists and legal scholars to make it the fifth crime before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

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An(other) Interview with Artist Katie Holten

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In this issue I have for you my second interview with artist Katie Holten. We first spoke back in 2019, when she created the NYC Tree Alphabet to draw greater attention to the threats that New York-area trees face. Now she’s created an alphabet for the trees of Ireland, her home country. In our interview below we discuss what inspired her latest alphabet, how she’s developed an accompanying tool for use in schools, and what to expect from Learning to be Better Lovers, her forthcoming exhibition about learning to love all creatures on the planet.

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Marya Kazoun: Trans-mutational Materiality#


Steady Breath, 2003, installation/ performance, bamboo, wool, fabric, thread, 320 cm x 300 cm x 228 cm , photo credit: Margerida Correia

Each of Marya Kazoun’s sculptures, performances, and installations evolves into its own open-ended narrative, deriving from the artist’s personal journey—childhood memories and cultural background. Throughout her versatile body of work, Marya Kazoun plays with the concepts of time and space by blurring their boundaries, excavating a wide array of imagery from the realms of the collective and the subconscious to form rich and poetic installations evoking parallel universes. The eclectic materials she is using in her work—fabric, bamboo, Murano glass, plastic, paper, and whatever inspires her—assume new life and new meaning within her idiosyncratic, imaginative, and elaborate visual vocabulary.

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