ADJUSTED for Inflation at Kunstraum

Featured Project with curator Ashley Ouderkirk

ADJUSTED for Inflation, Part 1 installation image. (Artworks visible by Sandra Zanetti, Taisha Brehaut, Bartho Staalman, and Amir Hariri.) Photo by Jenna London.

ADJUSTED for Inflation, the group show curated by curator-in-residence Ashley Ouderkirk at Kunstraum LLC features eighteen works by fourteen members and artists in residence—Annette Back, Taisha Brehaut, Laura Clark, Aleksy Cisowski, Giacomo Colosi, Amir Hariri, Catherine Lewis, Rita Nannini, Olga Rabetskaya, Bartho Staalman, Sato Sugamoto, Dimana Zaharieva, Cassandra Zampini, and Sandra Zanetti. The title, ADJUSTED for Inflation, is based on the economic term referring to the “real” value of money, after considering how much the price of an average good or service has increased. The curator says that the exhibition, like the economic concept, aims to reveal how our emotions determine the “real” value of any situation—the more complex the hardship, the greater the emotional cost and more distorted the adjustment. It runs through September 10th, 2022.

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Deanna Sirlin: Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo

Featured Artist

Deanna Sirlin, Borders of Light and Water, 2022, C-print transparency on glass, 199.5 x 493 inches, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy

In Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo in Venice, American artist Deanna Sirlin utilizes the architecture and translucency of the large-scale windows overlooking the Grand Canal, to create a luminous and ever-changing patches of bold color. The beauty of this installation allures you in and prompts you to gaze out at the flickering water of the iconic canal below, raising awareness to what is at stake with rising water and changing climate. This installation is part of the Venice 2022 Art Biennial organized by the non-profit organization European Cultural Center, running from April 23, 2022 through November 27th, 2022.

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Motel in the Catskills

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The rural Catskill mountain village of Fleischmanns an unlikely a place to find a world-class contemporary art installation.

In the nineteenth century, the village was a flourishing, prosperous Catskill vacation spot for the New York well-to-do, resplendent with Victorian mansions and lodging houses, attracting both Jewish and non-Jewish summer residents. By the mid-twentieth century, the town had languished, and many properties had fallen into disrepair. Over time, Fleischmanns became a summer retreat for a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish community who juxtapose oddly with deer hunters, RV owners, motorcycle enthusiasts, and other locals. “Eclectic” is an understatement. If Fleischmanns were on a deli menu it would be an Everything Bagel.

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Animal Well Being at the Swimming Hole Foundation Residency

In conversation with the artists

The barn studio with artists (left to right) Rick Klauber, Sky Pape, Nancy Davidson, Lyn Godley, Rebecca Welz, and David Provan, 7/23/2022. Photo courtesy of John White.

The Swimming Hole Foundation offers residencies to groups of artists, designers and educators who are exploring environmental and social justice through collaborative work. In Animal Well Being artists Nancy Davidson, Lyn Godley, Rick Klauber, Sky Pape, David Provan, and Rebecca Welz referenced the theme of birds in their collaborative project. The project was open to the public Saturday, July 23rd, 2022.

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Elizabeth Meggs: Found & Lost at Sweet Lorraine Gallery

Featured Artist

Installation view, photo courtesy of Lucas Zhao

Elizabeth Meggs’ work in Found & Lost includes prints, posters, fabric design, and clocks. The exhibit explores the discoveries and losses many have experienced in the world in recent years, from profound themes such as hope, time, or love, to mundane items such as umbrellas. Through this exhibition and opening event Elizabeth Meggs expresses a gratitude for life, and a catalyst for connecting with friends and building community through August, after recovering from being hit by a car and sustaining a head injury in late April of 2022.

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Decolonizing Ecological Encounters at The Gallatin Galleries

Featured Project with Co-Curators Anastasia Amrhein and Patricia Eunji Kim

Gallery view with works by Tessa Grundon, David Nasca, Joiri Minaya, Himali Singh Soin and Alexis Rider, and micha cárdenas.

Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters at the Gallatin Galleries in New York City explores complex questions around impermanence, belonging, transformation, and erasure as they relate to human and non-human lives and the earth itself. The exhibition showcases the work of several contemporary artists, of various backgrounds, who utilize a broad range of media. It includes work by Farah Al Qasimi, Beatriz Cortez, micha cárdenas, Tessa Grundon, Joiri Minaya, Ada M. Patterson, Himali Singh Soin, and Alexis Rider, among others. The show runs from July 22 to August 17, 2022. Co curators Anastasia Amrhein and Patricia Eunji Kim shed some light on this group show.

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Heidi Norton – The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill

Featured Artist

Heidi Norton and Eileen Jeng Lynch, curator.

Heidi Norton’s site-specific installation at Wave Hill examines the intricate links between humans and the natural world. Inspired by Wave Hill’s grounds and the Sun Porch’s architecture. Activated by sunlight, Norton’s installation is made of sculptures and large, vibrant photographic scrolls draping from the ceiling and undulating through the space. Norton says that the configuration of scrolls encompasses landscapes of present and past, incorporating recent photos that the artist took of the gardens, as well as archival images. Norton’s work draws on her rural upbringing by New Age homesteaders. She upcycles discarded plant clippings from Wave Hill’s gardens, repurposes compost and deconstructs past work, incorporating it into new pieces—speaking to sustainability, contemplating how memories are embedded in materials and landscapes, as well as how a sense of place is recorded through time and changes in the land. Heidi Norton with her site specific installation, The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill, July 16th – August 28th, 2022. Meet the Artist recording can be found here

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My Upstate Art Weekend Adventure

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Vanessa German,  Black on Black, 2021, Handmade folk art cloth Black woman pin cushion, glory, wood, love, astroturf, Black seed beads, confusion, Black rhinestone trim, Black bead trim, (they traded your grandmother for a handful of beads), vintage hand purse, rage, old doll parts, ptsd, the fallout from white supremacist delusion, cork, Black pigment, sorrow, vintage mirror, self loathing, cotton, a miracle, twine, tears, yarn, heartbreak, love. 26 x 18 x 9 1/2 in

Last weekend was the third annual Upstate Art Weekend, a wildly ambitious and fun three-day art fair that winds its way from Westchester to Catskill NY. Founded by impresario Helen Toomer in 2020, Upstate Art Weekend celebrates and promotes visual arts throughout the Hudson Valley. One hundred and forty venues participated this year, and there was everything from art in a big-box truck in Kerhonkson to the gallery/studio campus of Foreland in Catskill.  The intense heat of last week made this year’s event a challenge, but totally worth the sweat. Here is a brief travelogue of my schlep around the Hudson Valley: 

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Hew Locke: The Procession at the Tate Britain

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Each year The Tate Britain commissions a large-scale art installation for the iconic Duveen Galleries at the museum. This is a vast space, an art-filled hall, more than a typical gallery that winds its way down the center of the museum on the first floor. This year they tapped the Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose visual musings on migration, history, national identity and ritual are well known in the British art world. Locke has long worked these themes, but never on such a scale. It is a wildly ambitious vision that embraces his interests and presents a fully developed Universe.

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Alicia Piller – Weathering Climates

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Alicia Piller in her Inglewood studio.

LA based artist Alicia Piller creates multi layered sculptures and installations in which material, media, form, and color metamorphose into alluring environments filled with cultural, political, and biographic references—latex balloons, sycamore seeds, silkscreen images fuse into a cosmos with visually complex and open ended layers of meaning.

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