Contemporary Art and Culture
An occult presence pervades the sylvan scenery of Comet Eater, a solo show from Terra Keck. In these nightswept graphite drawings, trees shimmer and sway. Leaves levitate and glow. Stars or fireflies illuminate ornate paths. Among other sources, Keck hybridizes the ghostly impressions of Anna Atkins’s botanical cyanotypes and the mystic geometry of Hilma af Klint’s paintings.
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Across the city, artists are focused on the meaning of visible labor and extracting the potential in the most innocent of found materials. Through unconventional mediums and reclaiming disregarded items like paper or rubber bands, artists are able to tap into universal experiences that inject value and sacredness into everyday objects. At PEEP Projects, Maria Ah Hyun constructs layered paper vessels to serve as ritual objects and gateways into cultural landscapes. Gabrielle Constantine transforms Blah Blah Gallery into a romantic archive of working class textures and sensibilities that honor the excesses of labor. Museum of Art and Wood presents the 2025 cohort for their Windgate Arts Residency program, inviting experimentation and individual perspectives in wood in A Plank in a Shipwreck.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in August 2025”
I often think about the first scientist who looked into a microscope and saw the dividing of cells, the jiggle of bacteria, and the movement of microorganisms. They must have marveled at the invisible worlds that were revealed. Similar to uncovering fossils of long-extinct species, we are humbled when we discover that we are only a tiny part of a much larger story. These monumental confrontations move us emotionally as much as they do intellectually, evoking within us a sense of awe and wonder. Close Encounters at Box Spring Gallery and Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses at the Institute of Contemporary Art both ask us to consider our position within the cosmos, drawing attention to the fragility of our existence and the complicated ecosystems in which we live. Turning inward, allow yourself to be nourished by Ann Wehrwein’s Tender Ground at Pentimenti, where she renders quiet moments of everyday life with layers of color and care.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in February 2025”
A 1949 US Federal law set the stage for crisis-level upheaval. Cities across the country used the money it provided to launch “urban renewal” projects that often only added misery to the communities they professed to be helping. In San Francisco, a largely Black neighborhood in Western Addition was targeted on the premise that the vibrant ‘Harlem of the West’ was blighted. This misconception has gone unchallenged until now, thanks to the photographic documentation Ernest Burden III exposed in his late father’s immense photograph archive.
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Punto in Aria, Patricia Miranda’s solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center, features monumental textile- based sculpture and installations in the gallery space, as well as a site-specific lace installation on the venerable tree outside. In addition to Miranda’s artworks, the show includes items from the artist’s collection, such as panels and glass gilded with vintage and inherited gold leaf depicting lace patterns. Miranda’s work involves a rigorous research into historic material practices in context of women’s labor, ritual, and the environment. The show runs through November 7th, 2021.
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Amy Talluto’s paintings and collages depict landscapes, ranging from representational wood-scapes to more abstracted forms reassembling a hybrid of landscape and still life. Darren Jones wrote in Artforum that Amy Talluto’s series of oil paintings from 2017 produce “symphonic arrangements of green, ranging from deepest phthalo to honeyed laurel. Dashes of pink, crimson, and yellow also crop up, to shimmering effect. The technical proficiency of her sumptuous compositions, based on forests around the artist’s Catskills home, parlays them into sites of ethereality.” (Darren Jones, Artforum). Recently, during the pandemic, the artist started exploring collage, resulting in bold cutouts, and consequently paintings, where the previously hinted pinks, yellows and crimsons become central alongside the blues and greens. Amy Talluto participates in The Upstate Art Weekend show at the rambling old manufacturing building in High Falls, NY. This art event was initiated by Todd Kelly, Alex Gingrow and Shanti Grumbine, who have studios in that building and have invited over 30 artists to show their work there from Aug 27-29, 11am-6pm.
Continue reading “Amy Talluto: Moments of Light in the Forest”In Dialogue with Natalie Westbrook
The Pittsburgh based painter Natalie Westbrook’s solo show at Freight + Volume in Tribeca features her recent body of bold and highly energetic paintings ranging from monochromes to vivid colors. Jeffrey Grunthaner writes in his essay for the show that Westbrook’s works “confront the limits of what painting makes possible.” The show runs from May 21st to June 26th, 2021.
Continue reading “Natalie Westbrook: Surface Tension at Freight + Volume”
Bonny Leibowitz makes site responsive sculptural installations with painterly sensibility – they hover in the air, spill on the floor, or sprawl on the walls. Her love of Baroque compositions, Abstract Expressionist gestures is underscored throughout her work. Bonny Leibowitz had a long-standing interest in the illusory nature of experience and the supposition of stability. In Terra Unfirma, her most recent body of work, she tackles what it means to deconstruct expectations and perceptions by using a variety of materials which play off one another – natural appearing manufactured, manufactured appearing natural – constructing environments which may feel ephemeral, eternal, fleeting, solid, light or looming at the same time. The artist refers to this quote: “Everything worth knowing is cloaked in paradox because everything substantial defies being revealed in its totality” – Mark Nepo
In Axis Mundi, his current painting exhibition at Elizabeth Harris, Ron Milewicz shows a body of work that reveals his continuous fascination with the mystery of trees. While focusing his gaze on a specific woodland landscape ,the Hudson Valley woodlands, Ron Milewicz is opening a portal not only to the universal meaning of trees, but also to the overall vulnerability and wonder of life on this planet. Ron Milewicz shares with Art Spiel some reflections on his approach to painting and on what draws him to his consistent thematic exploration.
Continue reading “Ron Milewicz – Axis Mundi at Elizabeth Harris”