History has always depended on materials. Marble, oil paint, bronze, woodcuts, engravings, museum vitrines, and photographic reproductions preserve the past as well as determine how events, ideas, and narratives are represented. Over time, images become durable, gaining a certain kind of truth value because they acquire material permanence and spread through copies. Mythological heroines, biblical women, allegorical figures, and historical subjects return across centuries through the persistence of artistic media, carrying with them the assumptions, hierarchies, and ideologies embedded in their forms. Melora Kuhn‘s solo exhibition, The Legacy of Disembodiment, on view at Private Public Gallery, starts with the recognition that if representation has helped naturalize and proliferate the narratives these images and forms carry, then materials themselves can be a site of political intervention.
Continue reading “Melora Kuhn’s Power of Erasure and Material Revision”Farrell Brickhouse Looking Back at Tomorrow at JJ Murphy Gallery

Farrell Brickhouse’s exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery in the Lower East Side marks a significant milestone in Brickhouse’s artistic journey. It is his first solo exhibition at the gallery and his first one-person show in over a decade. The works on display, all created between 2020 and 2024 at his new home and studio in Hudson, NY, provide an insight into the artist’s evolution in painting and picture-making over this period.
Continue reading “Farrell Brickhouse Looking Back at Tomorrow at JJ Murphy Gallery”Mimi Graminski: Between Shadow and Light at Window on Hudson
Featured Project

Mimi Graminski started her work for Between Shadow and Light with small textile sculptures, using remnants from other projects. She pinned these pieces to the wall and experimented with light to produce pronounced shadows. Graminski was invited to create a new installation for her second exhibition at Window On Hudson. She magnified these small textile sculptures, suspending them using monofilament (fishing line), a method she had previously applied with other materials.
Continue reading “Mimi Graminski: Between Shadow and Light at Window on Hudson”David Dew Bruner reinterprets still life in Equipoise at Carrie Haddad Gallery
Artist Profile

David Dew Bruner is no more a thief than the next artist—it’s only that he is candid enough to tell us outright who he has stolen from. In “Equipoise: Stasis and The Power of Suggestion in Still Life,” a group show on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through October 1, Bruner presents a series of drawings, each titled “Morandi Bottle.” More accurately, it is not so much Morandi’s bottles that Bruner has lifted (he’s the first to admit that the works “don’t look anything like Morandi paintings”) but rather the essence of Morandi’s mark-making. “Sometimes, I just love the way other people make marks,” Bruner enthuses. “My endeavor is [to riff off] the gesture of the form, the gesture in the detail, the quality of the line. It may be a subject matter that’s dull as dishwater to me, but the way it’s painted… I’m jealous.”
Continue reading “David Dew Bruner reinterprets still life in Equipoise at Carrie Haddad Gallery”Time as Space: Alaina Enslen in The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery
Artist Profile

Around six in the morning, Alaina Enslen scales the steps of her Hudson Valley home to the attic where she works. Skylights invite brightness into the whitewashed studio. A hotplate rests upon a wax-spattered tabletop; she turns it on, waiting until it reaches about 170°F. After five minutes, the surface is finally hot enough to melt pigmented beeswax, an integral ingredient in her paintings. She collages in an 11-inch by 14-inch sketchbook, teasing out new ideas with pieces of fabric and leftover monotypes. “I set no expectations for the work,” the artist insists. “It’s all about experiment and play.”
Continue reading “Time as Space: Alaina Enslen in The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery”Remnants of the Past As Omens of the Future at Turley Gallery

Why is home so important? Is it like religion, where we have faith that once we turn the key in the door and step over the threshold, we are safe from all those events that we believe cannot happen to us, orhappen in the place we call home? We now live in a world where the mundane, the environment we know as home is threatened. Common places are invisible because they are part of the warp and weft of our everyday existence. Our personal landmarks such as the library, the elementary school, and the ugly grocery store we quickly stop in, are no longer safe spaces. Self help and self care are great strategies for maintaining equilibrium, but may not extract the roots of our anxiety. Art obviously cannot solve these issues, but sometimes an artist who combines intellect, skill, and personal experience can act as the parakeet in the mine shaft.
Continue reading “Remnants of the Past As Omens of the Future at Turley Gallery”David Konigsberg at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Traditional, yet innovative; reflective, yet distant, David Konigsberg’s landscapes and still lifes are rife with double-backs and unexpected turns. A self-proclaimed “solitary wanderer,” Konigsberg gathers imagery and visions from long walks through the Catskills, through surrounding terrain, and through his own backyard. He views all as equally minute and equally monumental, from a peaked horizon to a burst of petals collected from his garden. This confluence of near and distant perspectives creates an almost literary quality; the intimacy of first-person voice jockeying with the scope of an omniscient narrator. David’s paintings resist a certain aboutness, allowing simultaneous narratives to proliferate across the bodies of his canvases, culminating in an emotional sucker punch.
Continue reading “David Konigsberg at Carrie Haddad Gallery”Jeanette Fintz at Carrie Haddad Gallery
In Dialogue with Jeanette Fintz

Installation view
As an abstract artist, Jeanette Fintz has long been interested in the contrast of hard-edged planar geometry (circles, squares, hexagons) existing within an atmospheric field where shapes can float or hold the plane, in a space that appears expansive, transient and increasingly released from the canvas’s edge.Of her newest body of work currently on view through August 1st at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY, she explains “these paintings are about giving structure to something intangible, ephemeral, in-flux or conversely, revealing the dissolving of structure that has been.” The following is the artist in conversation with writer and art critic, Carter Ratcliff, to discuss her influences and process.
Continue reading “Jeanette Fintz at Carrie Haddad Gallery”Artists on Coping: Farrell Brickhouse
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Experimenting with my wife Beverly Peterson’s VR gear
As a mature artist Farrell Brickhouse states: “I have this large vocabulary to draw from, imagery that has woven its way thru my entire career is available and malleable even as new stories continue to emerge.” He has a long Exhibition history in New York and across the U.S. A. including One Person Shows @ Julian Pretto Gallery, Max Protetch Gallery, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery, John Davis Gallery, Fred Giampietro Gallery and elsewhere. His work has been reviewed in the major publications. Farrell has taught at The School of Visual Arts since 1980 and recently retired.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Farrell Brickhouse”Artists on Coping: Julie Torres/LABspace
During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

gouache, acrylic, dried paint, collage on envelope, 2020
Julie Torres is a Hudson NY-based artist and co-director of LABspace gallery, a vibrant cultural hub in Hillsdale NY. She runs it with her partner, artist Ellen Letcher.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Julie Torres/LABspace”