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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Performance Anxiety at Allegheny College Art Galleries

In Dialogue with Paula Burleigh


Installation view, Performance Anxiety, on view at the Allegheny Art Galleries, 2021. Featuring works by Eric D. Charlton, Taha Heydari, Wednesday Kim. Image courtesy of the Allegheny Art Galleries.

The three person show Performance Anxiety at the Allegheny Art Galleries in PA features videos, paintings, and sculptures by Eric D. Charlton, Taha Heydari, and Wednesday Kim, who all respond in their work to the intense digital terrains most of us inhabit, exploring how the intrapersonal and interpersonal elements interplay— how self-image is being manifested and how does it affect communication with others in an ever-shifting social media landscape? Paula Burleigh, the curator of the show and the gallery director, elaborates on the premise of the exhibition, the artists’ artwork, and her curatorial process.

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Amy Butowicz: Boudoir Theatre at Peninsula Art Space

In Dialogue with Eric Fallen, Founder and Executive Director

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Duet, 2020 76.5”h x 84”w x 53”d Canvas, acrylic paint, wood, furniture parts, wheels, and hinges

Amy Butowicz solo show Boudoir Theatre at Peninsula Art Space features a collection of domestically scaled sculptures staged as a group of characters which are readily associated with notions of sensuality, ornamentation, and haute couture. Bulging cushion-like forms, meticulously hand-stitched over wooden structures, display intricate patterns and rich material suggestive of bedding, vanities, corsets and human anatomy. Bold and tender simultaneously, these anthropomorphic forms defy the disdain and fear that are frequently imposed upon feminine artforms, spaces, and bodies. Eric Fallen, founder and executive director of the Red Hook based Peninsula Art Space elaborates on Amy Butowicz’s exhibition and on his art venue.

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With the Grain at New York Artists Equity

In Dialogue with Patricia Fabricant


Patricia Fabricant, with her work “Dream”

The group show With the Grain, curated by artist and curator Patricia Fabricant at the New York Artists Equity, features artists who work directly with wood grain. Patricia Fabricant, who is also a participating artist, shares some of her thoughts on the exhibition. With the Grainopens today, Thursday, Nov 5th from 6-8PM and runs through Sat, Nov 28th, 2020.

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Confronting History through Herstory

ecofeminism(s) at Thomas Erben Gallery

Installation view of ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska, left to right: Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, and Jessica Segall. Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June/July 2020 (photos: Andreas Vesterlund).

The exhibition ecofeminism(s), on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from June 19th to July 24th, will reopen Tuesday, September 8th through Saturday, September 26th, 2020. Curator Monika Fabijanska brings together works of sixteen artists in graceful, yet dense and thoughtful way as a museum show would. Albeit in the gallery consistently staging pivotal and sophisticated exhibitions,including among many others shows of Senga Nengudi, Dona Nelson, Painting Forward and Looped and Layered – Contemporary Art from Tehran.

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Annesta Le at Yi Gallery

Art Spiel in Dialogue with Cecilia Zhang Jalboukh, founder of Yi Gallery in Bushwick

Installation view of Annesta Le solo exhibition “Inner Space” at Yi Gallery Project Room in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2020. Photo by Yi Gallery.

The Bushwick based Yi Gallery evolved out of Cecilia Zhang Jalboukh’s experience and vision. At its current form it shares space with The Border at 56 Bogart. Yi Gallery’s founder elaborates on Annesta Le’s current solo exhibition, shares with Art Spiel the genesis of Yi Gallery, as well as her vision for the space.

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“Now You’re Looking” – Akshita Gandhi at Pulse

Anna Mikaela Ekstrand in dialogue with Mumbai-based artist Akshita Gandhi

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Akshita Gandhi, Angel, 2019, Lightbox, 48_ x 32.5_Photograph courtesy D’Arte Mart(eKo-System Inc)

Miami Art Week is bigger than any other global fair as it attracts a wide range of audiences. Centered around Art Basel Miami, Miami Art Week is the catch-all term for the seven day art world bonanza in December packed densely with art fairs, public art, interventions, activations, pop-ups, parties – basically all forms of art shows – often sponsored by companies who capitalize on the opportunity to reach art world professionals, art lovers, celebrities, and trend-setters. You might already know this, great. What you might not have considered is what it feels like to be an artist within this bustling eco/nomy/logy.

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Olive Ayhens: Unique Improbabilities

Olive Ayhens, Camelid In the City, oil on linen, 51″x39″ 2019

Olive Ayhens paints unexpected landscapes in which roaming animals, lush fauna and zooming cars frequently co-inhabit familiar urban environments. In her world you may encounter by a vivid East river shore a Prehistoric animal, utterly oblivious to a dazzling Gotham vista on the horizon. Olive Ayhens talks with Art Spiel about her process, ideas, and “Urbanities and Ur-Beasts” , her upcoming show at Bookstein Projects opening October 30th .

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Ground Histories at PS122

Installation view of the East room: (right) david Goodman, (mid) Will Crowin, (left) Heidi Lau, photo credit Tommy Mintz

The grouping of mostly floor-bound sculptures in “Ground Histories”, the current group show curated by Will Corwin at PS122 Gallery, not only pulls our attention to the ground, but also makes us aware of what is underneath its surface – archaeological artifacts, graves, excavated memories. In the east room a triangular layout consisting of Will Corwin’s altar-like sculpture, Heidi Lau’s arched-shape ceramic sculpture sprawling, and David Goodman’s forte-like structure, create a sense of both tension and connectivity. Made of plaster and sand, painted with terra cotta and white tempera hues, and tied with rough ropes, Corwin’s “Jaw” is a rectangular free-standing sculpture that draws literally upon teeth and invokes the idea of the archaic – an architectural ruin from an unidentified culture, or an archaeological artifact with an enigmatic ritual significance. The tooth, a pivotal element in both forensics and bioarcheology, can be read in Corwin’s sculptures as a loaded metaphor for what it means to be human.

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Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum at CUE Art Foundation

Laurie Kang

The group show “Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum” at CUE Art Foundation raises questions on the meaning of visual formulae in contemporary art without falling into the trap of formulaic. The genesis of this three-person sculpture group show started with an open call in which the curators Mira Dayal and Simon Wu asked savvy art viewers to suggest “formulas,” that is, combinations of materials and tropes used, or perhaps overused in art today. Out of the 67 formulas submitted, the curators selected the ones they both found intriguing and invited Nikita Gale, Amanda Turner Pohan, and Laurie Kang to come up with responses to formulas that invoked the hard and soft, technological and biological, individual and institutional. Gale’s body-like textures, Pohan’s sleek kinetic sculptures, and Kang’s architectural steel structure, all merge industrial off the shelf materials with invisible elements such as sound, vibration, and sensitivity to light. Like the relationship of body and mind, their fragmented materials assume meaning through the hidden forces that seem to operate them.

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