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March 23, 2022March 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Melissa Stern: Chat & Chew at Garvey Simon: Previewing

In her solo exhibition Chat & Chew at DFN Projects, multi-disciplinary artist Melissa Stern features drawings, assemblages, and sculptures which probe into the surface of social decorum not only with a biting wit but also with a tender gaze. Her outlandish characters invoke in the viewer an unsettling tension between elusive simplicity of forms and deep psychological complexities. Couples stare or reach out to one another, mouthless faces seem to whisper—whether rendered with graphite, pastel, and colored pencils, or molded with clay, these figures form an array of characters we may interpret as archetypes in dreams or comic strips. They remind me of duos in a Becket play or characters in Saul Steinberg’s absurd universe—with Stern’s very own take. Stern’s protagonists express distinct attitudes and appear to have lots to say. Underneath the verbiage, you can sense a vulnerable core that is silent, on the verge of coming up to the surface.

September 26, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Kate Dodd: MVA Open Studios

Adjusting “Sky Cache” on the Jersey City waterfront

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.

June 23, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Melissa Stern: Stronger than Dirt: A twenty year Retrospective

Art Spiel Photo Story

Stronger than Dirt: Melissa Stern at the Lockwood Gallery, installation shot

Walking into The Lockwood Gallery in Kingston NY one is instantly transported into another Universe. One populated by people and things who clearly are living in a world parallel to ours, but profoundly different. Smiling figures stand tall, grinning at the world, while all the time missing a limb or two. Or having their feet nailed to the ground. Images from vintage magazines merge seamlessly with Melissa Stern’s drawings. Her world is populated with folks who exhibit a stubborn resilience in the face of cosmic obstacles. Hence the exhibition’s title – Stronger Than Dirt.

June 3, 2021June 3, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Alyssa Fanning: A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space

In Dialogue with Alyssa Fanning

A person sitting on a couch holding a board

Description automatically generated with low confidence — *Alyssa Fanning in her studio in northern NJ, 2020. Photo courtesy of Emma Fanning.*

A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, features Alyssa Fanning’s elaborate and richly layered graphite and colored pencil drawings on paper, focusing on the duality of strength and fragility of the natural world. The work includes drawings from two related series, created through a process of combining projection, stencil and improvisation. The pieces range in size from 2.75 by 4.75 inches to 16 by 20 inches and within these intimate boundaries, Alyssa Fanning creates intricate worlds which invite you to plunge in. The exhibition opens June 5^th with an opening reception June 4th, and runs through July 3^rd, 2021.

May 24, 2021December 6, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Clive Knights: Fragmentary Intimations of Shared Meaning

Clive Knights in his studio, Portland, Oregon, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist

Clive Knights practices architecture and art, in particular mixed media and monotype printmaking. He holds professional architectural design undergraduate and graduate degrees from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, and a Master of Philosophy in Architectural History and Theory from Cambridge University. Clive has taught architecture since 1984 and was a full-time lecturer at Sheffield University for six years before moving to Portland State University in 1995 where he currently resides as a professor and director of the PSU School of Architecture. His primary areas of interest include the cultural meanings of architectural representation understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the revelatory capacity of metaphor in poetic work; and speculations in architectural design studio pedagogy. Publications include many journal articles and book chapters on the theory, history and pedagogy of architecture.

April 1, 2021April 12, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Mira Dayal: In that Empire at Spencer Brownstone Gallery

In Dialogue with Mira Dayal

*Mira Dayal, installation view (wall text), “…In That Empire…” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist.*

In her inaugural solo exhibition with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal has rubbed by hand the entire gallery floor in graphite, resulting in a map of the space’s topography – all lines and no borders. Drawing on Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, the show explores notions of scale, control, ethics, materiality, and simulation. The show runs through April 4th, 2021.

March 29, 2021April 12, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary

In Dialogue with Holly Wong

A picture containing person, laying

Description automatically generated — Holly Wong working on “Phoenix.” Graphite on drafting film with sewing. 132 x 132 in. Photo courtesy of Al Wong

Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:

“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”

March 2, 2021March 2, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Babs Reingold: Palette of Materials

Macintosh HD:Users:babsreingold:Documents:• Babs_Art:Art_Resume:Art_Profile:Art_Babs_photosOfBabs:Babs_images_jpegs:Babs_HairNest_1_15_16_0385sm.jpg — From left to right: Babs Reingold in the studio with Hair Nest ’01, Hair Nest ’16, Hair Nest ’15, photo courtesy of the artist

In her multi layered installations Babs Reingold‘s brings together drawing, sculpture, found objects, and at times video, to create potent environments alluding to the body, the environment, and the passage of time. Equipped with a fine tuned sensibility to materiality and an imaginative approach to spatiality, Babs Reingold’s installations inhabit spaces as an alternate force of nature and take a life of their own.

November 2, 2020October 19, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Katrina Bello – Non Human Expressivity

*In the studio in Newark, NJ, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist.*

New Jersey and Manilla based artist Katrina Bello draws on memories of her childhood experiences in the Philippines. Ranging from small to large scales. her drawings depict geological layers as vast fields of textures and colors – alluring us to sense the awe in vastness while also inviting us to get close and sense the fragility and tenderness in each detail.

September 1, 2020August 8, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Fay Ku in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Fay Ku

May 2020. The artist lives and shares a studio with her partner, who is a musician. She is usually on the other side of her worktable, or else he wouldn’t have been able to sneak this photo of her.

For Taiwanese born artist, Fay Ku, the single, most formative event in life was immigrating to the United States. Ku says that if she had stayed in Taiwan, she would never have become an artist so she would have been a completely different person. It still surprises her how much this one event which she was too young to remember (though of course remembering all its aftershocks), shapes her work, often without her being consciously aware of the themes and issues at the time of making the work. Fay Ku shares some insights on her body of work in Domestic Brutes, the all women group show at the Pelham Art Center which engages the visitor with diverse approaches of what feminism means in American society today.