Contemporary Art and Culture
When my mother was very old, I wanted to tell her what it was like to be in the art world. I said, “It is a little like joining the carnival.” While not affording her much comfort, I tried to convey the disorderly balancing act of the ridiculous and the transcendent, the illusory and the real, the sincere and the piratical. I wanted to suggest a midway of precarious lives, thrill rides, and a dubious game of chance.
Continue reading “Phantom Attractions at Astor Weeks”
Where Air Turns to Fog at Below Grand, curated by Ray Hwang, gathers Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng in a sometimes cheeky, but overall multivalent and sincere, investigation of visual perception and the machinery of capital-F/capital-A Fine Art presentation. With his characteristic casual abandon, Hwang exploits the gallery’s awkward architecture to its full potential, letting Bennett install an upside-down trompe-l’œil “group show” in the street-facing walk-in window display while reserving the closet-sized back room for a collection of Gregor and Ng’s paintings.
Continue reading “The Treasure Below Grand”
Anna Gregor often remarks, half in jest, that she wishes she were a poet. Poems, to her, come closest to immateriality; they exist in the mind and can be accessed anytime. In contrast, a painting is a unique object that must be seen in person, confined by paint, the artist’s technique, and the viewer’s presence. Gregor, a painter in New York City currently pursuing her MFA at Hunter, examines the divide between body and mind, material and immaterial, in her art. She sees a painting as having a dual nature: a physical object of paint sharing space with the viewer and an immaterial idea formed in the viewer’s mind. This mirrors the human condition, where body and mind coexist. Gregor says she often feels trapped by her physical form and its social labels—gender, age, race, and ability. Yet, she recognizes that her body is essential for her consciousness. For Gregor, making a painting is a confrontation with matter, a commitment to the material world while striving to go beyond its limits. Viewing a painting involves a similar struggle to find meaning in the artist’s creation. “ Without the physical painting, there is no idea. But without the idea, the painting is just inert matter,” she says. This intricate relationship is central to her solo show, Double Space, at D. D. D. D.
Continue reading “Anna Gregor: Double Space at D. D. D. D.”
Peggy Cyphers’ exhibition at The Front Room Gallery in Hudson, titled Passages, integrates disparate painting traditions into abstract landscapes. The technique—fluid brush strokes combined with sand and paint pour—draws from Chinese landscape art, Native American traditions, and Postwar Abstraction. These paintings suggest the natural world’s fragility, mystery, and grandeur, recalling the upward gaze from the base of a canyon.
Continue reading “Peggy Cyphers: Passages at The Front Room “
Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief at Sugarlift is an immersive installation about the artist’s experience as a foster parent. At the center, a large sculpture titled 29, references 29 points of contact that the artist has had with different foster children. The lines of saffron and gold leaf across abstracted canvases, and a site-specific wall drawing allure visitors to enter Lahav’s world.
Continue reading “Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief”
These works are a way of repairing, an offering and a form of prayer
They are a way of making sense of my life my loves and beliefs
They are about questioning and the acceptance of not knowing
They reflect my inner and outer life
They teach me and I follow
I cut up of old paintings,
the macro has become micro
and past and present have merged
The familial and collective transitioning of the world
Piecing together a loved one’s psyche
Think of them as a cat. I cannot know their mind
I can offer saucers of milk
The work is complete when it has transcended the materials and a new presence is born
They are alive and ever changing
-BL, 2021
Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.
Continue reading “Cheryl Agulnick Hoc: MVA Open Studios”In dialogue with Anne Peabody
A few weeks before the Corona pandemic assumed an overpowering presence in our daily lives throughout the whole country, Art Spiel has scheduled an interview with Anne Peabody on her upcoming solo exhibition at Moremen Gallery in Louiseville Kentucky, where she was born and raised. In that interview the artist discussed her unique technique and the thought process behind her landscapes that are filled with a subtle spirit of longing, memory and loss. Anne Peabody’s images are fine tuned to our Zeitgeist, the ghost of our time. She will participate in the Virtual Dumbo Open Studios 2020, that was scheduled for this weekend, June 4-7 and postponed in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives matter (TBD).
Continue reading “Anne Peabody: Sunspike”During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Claudia Chaseling lives in Berlin and Canberra and received a Masters from Udk, Berlin and a Ph.D. from ANU, Canberra. Claudia is known for “Spatial Painting”, site-mutative biomorphic murals that optically distort the familiar geometry of the space, whilst carrying socio-political content. In 2013 she published the graphic novel Murphy the mutant that became an anchor for her work to follow. Her work has been featured at over sixty exhibitions internationally, including X-Border Biennial, Finland, LAB11 Biennial, Sweden, and the Lorne Biennial, Australia. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Art Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, Serbia; Wollongong Art Gallery, and Yuill Crowley Gallery, Australia; Kunstverein Duisburg and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; and AiB, NYC. “Vfzkt Berlin” published her monograph in 2016. Grants include DAAD, Karl-Hofer Award, Samstag Scholarship, OZCO and artsACT. Residencies include Art Omi and ISCP, NYC.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Claudia Chaseling”
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.
Continue reading “Karen Mainenti: Message in a Bottle at Ground Floor”