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Here and Hereafter – Lydia Viscardi at Five Points Gallery


Lydia Viscardi, Maybe Hereafter, detail, photo courtesy Jeanne Tremel

Lydia Viscardi’s scintillating multimedia tarpaulins festoon the airy, post-retail environs of Five Points Gallery in Torrington CT. This quaint looking old mill town straight out of middle America may seem an unlikely destination for contemporary visual art, but Viscardi’s new work is worth a trip to the hinterlands. Ostensibly Viscardi’s imagery encompasses the weighty notion of life after death, but I was inspired by their joie de vivre.

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Artists on Coping: Niki Lederer

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Goldenrod, 2019, Found re-purposed plastic bottles, machine screws, hex nuts, wire, rebar armature, concrete base. Artist with sculpture currently on view at Wolfs Lane Park as part of Pelham Art Center’s Public Art Program.

Niki Lederer is a sculptor working with found materials including discarded umbrellas and post-consumer plastic. Born in London, Ontario and raised in Vancouver, she received her BFA from the University of Victoria and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Group exhibitions include Portal: Governors Island, 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks, Central Park and the Outdoor Sculpture Biennial Adelphi University, Garden City, NY. Solo exhibitions include Washington Square Windows, NYU and Preset Tense, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Niki recently collaborated with XAOC Contemporary Ballet for Norte Maar’s CounterPointe8. Currently her re-purposed plastic bottle sculpture is featured at the Pelham Art Center and Wolfs Lane Park and her discarded-umbrella based work will be included in the Wassaic Project 2020 Summer Exhibition. Niki lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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Artists on Coping: Jaanika Peerna

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Jaanika Peerna at her pandemic era studio

Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist and educator living and working in New York since 1998. Her work encompasses drawing, installation, and performance, often dealing with the theme of transitions in light, air, water and other natural phenomena. For her performances she is often involves the audience in participatory reflection on the current climate meltdown. Her art practice stems from the corporeal experience of our existence and reaches towards enhanced awareness of the fragility, interconnectedness and wonder of all life. 

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Artists on Coping: Cecile Chong

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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At EFA Studios. Photo: Gaby Deimeke

Cecile Chong is an Ecuadorian-born, New York-based multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture and installation in which she layers material, identities, histories and languages. Her work addresses ideas of culture interaction and interpretation, as well as the commonalities humans share both in our relationship to nature and to each other. Inspired by materials as signifiers, Chong is interested in how we acquire and share culture, and how world cultures now overlap and interact in ways previously inconceivable. With uncertainty looming in everything from our economies to our weather patterns, she’s concerned with the fragility of our civilization despite the universality of its cultural underpinnings.

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Artists on Coping: Katherine Jackson

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Small Oils (Little Oil 79,80,81), glass, lightbox, 2019-20

Katherine Jackson has been bringing glass and light together for many years, often deriving them from drawing. Recently, in a series called Little Oil, (alluding to Big Oil), and/or Small Oils, as in oil painting, she has cast solid glass versions of vintage oil cans and set them on lightboxes. Recent shows include Park Place Gallery, 1 Gap Gallery, Odetta (Chelsea), and Odetta Harlem. She will participate in the sculpture show of the Venice Architectural Biennale (August 29, 2020 – February 16, 2021); Kunstraum LLC.

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Artists on Coping: Galen Cheney

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Perceiver, installed at University of Dallas, March 2020 (Photo credit: Sven Kahns)

Galen Cheney has been working as an abstract painter for three decades. During that time she has consistently sought to make work that challenges her as an artist and vulnerable human, taking risks and pushing into new personal territory. Her work has been shown and collected throughout the U.S. and in Europe and China. She has a show installed at the University of Dallas that is closed to the public, due to the virus.

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Artists on Coping: Liz Sweibel

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping

Untitled, 2020, thread and vellum, 8×8 in

Liz Sweibel’s work is an exploration of liminal spaces, points of contact, and unseen forces:  wind, history, values, math, gravity, emotion, memory. Her drawings, sculpture, and installations are spare and abstract, using specific yet ordinary materials and gestures. She often salvages materials, sources, and forms from her older work and uses them to make sense and establish identity in the present. Her studio process is low-tech, immediate, and improvisational.

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Artists on Coping: Melanie Vote

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Melanie Vote, In Studio, photo credit: Jessica Glick

Though Melanie Vote has lived in NYC for over 20 years, she grew up on a functional farm in Iowa. Her work straddles these two worlds, investigating the complexities of the human-land relationship, the cyclical nature of all life, and the impossibility of permanence. In temperate months she works remotely, painting outside. She is a visual scavenger collecting passages, then returns to the studio to reconstruct layers of a place, weaving them together into open-ended narratives. Her most recent body of work, The Washhouse, Nothing Ever Happened Here, at Equity gallery is on view virtually, via Artsy.

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Artists on Coping: Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Constellation, 2017-2018. Installed at Seward Park Library, Lower East Side, NY.

Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong is a New York-based artist and trained architect working at the boundary of art, architecture and social practice. Cheryl investigates the transformation of shared space over time through sculpture, installation, performance and site-specific architectural interventions. Cheryl received her B.A. in Art and Italian at the University of California at Berkeley, studied sculpture at Brera Academy and earned her Master of Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP. Cheryl’s work has been commissioned by NYC Parks and DC Percent for Art and she has exhibited at Triangle Arts Association, NYFA, Istanbul Design Biennial, Taliesin West, Venice Biennale, Berkeley Art Museum, Museo della Permanente.

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Artists on Coping: Wendy Letven

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Wendy Letven, Flowtopia II, 2020. Site-specific installation, Urban Outfitters Headquarters ©Wendy Letven, courtesy Urban Outfitters

Wendy Letven interprets natural form and pattern through a reductive creative process in sculpture, installation and painting. She received a B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, an M.F.A. from Hunter College and is a MacDowell Colony Fellow. She’s created installations for Urban Outfitter Headquarters (Philadelphia, 2020), Portal: Governors Island (New York, 2019), Art on Paper Fair (New York, 2019), Flatiron Prow Artspace (New York, 2018), and The Sheila R. Johnson Gallery at the New School (New York, 2018) among others. Wendy currently has a solo show at Fou Gallery in Brooklyn, entitled, Lines Falling Together in Time.

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