hybrid forms – Art Spiel

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

October 14, 2024December 7, 2024, by A.E. Chapman

A Leg to Stand On—Melissa Stern at DIMIN

*Melissa Stern: A Leg to Stand On*, installation view

In Melissa Stern: A Leg to Stand On, the domestic meets the fantastic in the aptly named The Living Room, the front room exhibition space at DIMIN complete with a cozy two-seater sofa. Featuring her drawings and sculptures, Stern’s trademark humor and sense of play persists while the underlying thread of darkness that pervades her oeuvre feels especially heightened in this presentation. Deeply shaken by a fall during a winter walk in 2021, the artist’s works in the exhibition explore the precarious and fragile construction of the human body. Cobbling together disparate elements such as vintage shoes, wooden branches, scrap pieces of bannister railings, a doll’s lost arm, linoleum, wallpaper, resin, clay, paint cans, bolts, and screws, Stern balances absurdity with familiarity.

March 18, 2019March 19, 2019, by Etty Yaniv

Pat Lay: Mapping New Interiors

Pat Lay, installation view in studio, photo courtesy of the artist

Pat Lay‘s Digital work conjures ancient iconography, or maps organized in what appears to be a binary logic. Throughout her abstracted digital and more figurative sculptural work she consistently reflects on the role of technology in our life, merging cultural cues with a seemingly mathematical order. For Art Spiel the artist elaborates on her interest in technology, what brought her to art, and her 42 year experience as an art educator at Montclair State University – both as a teacher and as the founding director of the MFA in Studio Art.