Contemporary Art and Culture
At first sight, Pat Lay’s vertical scrolls sit comfortably within the soaring Gothic-style Lemmerman Gallery at New Jersey City University. Their mosaic or tapestry-like forms, in glowing red, blue, and gold, echo the tall grided window panes and the elaborate ceiling. Yet once it becomes clear that these scrolls are entirely digital, the contrast generates a sense of fertile dualities.
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In her solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery Gabriela Vainsencher exhibits wall hanging porcelain reliefs, referencing the nuts and bolts of motherhood entangled in layers of epic mythological context—Medusa reveals a worried woman with a frying pan and a baby’s pacifier as weapons at hand. The show runs through April 8th, 2023.
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Power. Power, not bravado, not ego, but the power of intelligence, skill, fortitude, and vision is what Mary Ann Unger possessed and that is what is on exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art (referred to as WCMA). Throughout her life she defied limitations frequently imposed overtly and subconsciously on women. Attending Mt Holyoke College in the mid-60s, she studied biochemistry when few women were found in science departments, then transferred to studio art taking up welding, casting and carving. This was not the typical route for women during the mid-to late 60s. She traveled on her own to North Africa and this journey greatly influenced her work. Returning to New York she completed an MFA at Columbia and launched her career as a post minimalist sculptor, finding herself in the minority amongst a sea of men.
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Staring at Kathy Butterly’s ceramic sculptures, I am overwhelmed by an urge to reach out and touch them. The marriage of color and form is perfectly wrought, shapes and colors inextricable yet sharply distinct. I want to trace my finger along that delicate whisper thin band of orange in Between Things, and feel the little bumps along the rim of Luminious Flow. I want to feel the change between matte and gloss surfaces and the weight of the sculpture in my hand.
Continue reading “KATHY BUTTERLY AT JAMES COHAN GALLERY – COLOR IN FORMING”
In the several years preceding the pandemic, Jen Dwyer completed her MFA in Ceramics at the University of Notre Dame, exhibited at Miami Context in 2019 as well as in back-to-back iterations of Spring/Break, and saw her work profiled by Forbes and Architectural Digest. Then, when the rapidly increasing toll of the coronavirus caused the collective art world to press pause on what promised to be yet another whirlwind year, she took the slower pace of life as an opportunity to embrace deeper introspection in her studio practice. This newfound creative intuition wove its way into the production of her most recent collection of sculptures and paintings, which the artist recently debuted at Wassaic Project in New York.
Continue reading “Rituals & Reflections with Ceramic Artist and Painter Jen Dwyer”