Tag: environmental art

Posted on , by Joan Sullivan

In the Beginning There Was Only Water

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In the Beginning There Was Only Water: Panels 19-22, each panel 30″ x 15″, acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper, 2021

While some of us taught ourselves to bake sourdough bread or to mend socks during the pandemic, the American painter and arts writer Susan Hoffman Fishman plunged herself into her studio and emerged, a year later, with a revised creation story. The result: a magnificent, nearly 50-foot (15 meters) opus entitled In The Beginning There Was Only Water. Currently on exhibit at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut through December 19, 2021, In The Beginning There Was Only Water reframes the biblical creation myth – in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – into a new, non-human-centric story.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Theresa Hackett: Flipping the plane

Image from 1977 courtesy of the Artist

The PA based painter Theresa Hackett has been reflecting on landscape and environmental issues throughout her extensive body of work, Her paintings combine elements of drawing as well as different materials such as earth material and plastic. Altogether the process of coalescing all these elements is readily visible on the surface —the marks, bold shapes, vivid colors, texture— create landscapes resonating with vitality but also with an urgent sense of loss.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU

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Amanda Thackray with A Tangle; A Swarm; A Precondition of the Plastisphere, 2021

In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.

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Posted on , by Art Spiel

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

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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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Posted on , by Susan Hoffman Fishman

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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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

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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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Tamara Kostianovsky – Between Wounds and Folds at Smack Mellon

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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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Posted on , by Susan Hoffman Fishman

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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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

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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