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Yvette Molina: Big Bang Votive at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

In Dialogue with Yvette Molina


Yvette Molina in residence at the VACNJ before shutdown. Photo credit: Ettienne Frossard.

Big Bang Votive, Yvette Molina’s collaborative storytelling art installation has evolved over fifteen weeks, utilizing the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey through January 18th, 2021. Yvette Molina creates an immersive audio-visual experience — accompanied by a 30-minute surround sound composition played on a loop, her installation includes three hundred paintings of starry skies, some with votive symbols of delight or love taken from stories gathered from the public, a work-table with the artist’s materials, and an on-going “story catcher” project involving public participation.

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Gal Nissim – Sci-Art Encounters


Gal Nissim & Leslie Ruckman, SurveillAnts at Science Gallery Detroit, 2018, live ants, acrylic, sand, wood, electronics. 41.5 X 29 X 29 Inch. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Mark Sullivan.

Gal Nissim creates collaborative experiential multi media installations which stimulate the visitor to track and decode the behaviors of animals through audio-visual patterns, ranging from a colony of living ants in a gallery space to wild life in Central Park. Nissim shares with Art Spiel her fascination with the link between science and art, some insight into her elaborate collaborative process, and on her projects. Our interview process had been taking place before the pandemic and the artist was given an opportunity to bring her responses fairly up to date.

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Artists on Coping: Ronit Levin Delgado

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


Ronit Levin Delgado by Written in Water (detail), site-specific installation at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, NY.

Ronit Levin Delgado is an Israeli–born, New York–based multidisciplinary visual artist and a Fulbright Scholar. Her work explores conditions and experiences of instinctual human interactions through the use of the body, rituals, and the intimacy of a kiss. In performances, videos, paintings and sculptural objects, she calls into question the personal narratives of vulnerability and desire. In immersive installations she invites the viewers to engage and share a private intimate moment in a collective environment experience. The artist’s personal rituals fuse the fragments of cultural traditions, rituals and beliefs into performative actions and objects.

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Magdalena Dukiewicz at Stand4 – In Every Dream Home a Heartache

In every dream home a heartache, installation view. Photo courtesy of the Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

A former medical office located in the heart of Bayridge Brooklyn, hosts Magdalena Dukiewicz solo exhibition “In Every Dream Home a Heartache“, a visual, physical and poetical exercise in which the artist revisits particular objects and memories from her childhood in Poland to explore an idea of “home” that has been inoculated in her mind from an early age. For Dukiewicz, the thought of a home brings a cumulus of anxieties related to social expectations, which calls into question the preconceived ideas of how things are supposed to be in life: motherhood, marriage, work, living in a place other than your birthplace, fulfilling certain obligations.

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Milcah Bassel – Poetic Documents

Milcah Bassel, governing vessels, 2019, artist book (variant edition of 5), closed: 4 x 3 ½ x 3”, open: 34 ¼” x 26 ½”

Milcah Bassel is an avid art learner whose curiosity leads to cross disciplines and techniques such as sculpture, performance, and bookmaking. She probes deep into her subjects and investigates her forms with rigor, but also with a playful approach. That playfulness is revealed throughout her diverse body of work, giving us a distinct flavor of her thought process and sensibility.

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Natsuki Takauji: Sensuous Abstractions

Natsuki Takauji, String, stainless steel, aluminum, hydraulic oil, pigment, steel base, H72″ W40″ D40″, at WHA, Williamsburg, photo by Etty Yaniv

Natsuki Takauji sculptures create a stimulating tension between the monumental and the minute, the calm and the stirring. They are grounded yet flow, at times literally with fluids, and range from intimate indoors sculptures to large scale outdoors interactive structures. The Japanese born artist who draws upon Japanese culture and Buddhist philosophy share with Art Spiel some of the origins to her imaginative work, her process, and her projects.

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Nota Bene with @postuccio [iii]

Five Myles, Slag Gallery, Fresh Window, SOHO20, Studio 10, SARDINE,Sikkema Jenkins

Five Myles

Barbara Campisi at Five Myles, photo courtesy of Paul D’Agostino

No matter how banal it might seem to say that Barbara Campisi‘s “Sound of Light” — the artist’s massive and joyfully interactive, labyrinthine installation at Crown Heights gallery Five Myles — is lit, it’s still a fully legit thing to say: it’s both lit and LIT. Lit up in both senses was also Campisi’s packed opening, during which visitors were invited to ‘draw’ their own light doodles all throughout the translucent-panel maze of sorts while listening to live music, encountering meandering dancers, and constantly running into strangers who didn’t feel like moving — not out of confusion, but because they were just fine and dandy right where they were, playing around with LEDs like all adults should do more, as every single kid in attendance that night would’ve surely agreed.

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A Genuine Urge to Behold: ‘Meltdown’ by Kurt Steger

Opening night at ArtHelix, with partial view of Meltdown by Kurt Steger; photo courtesy of Vincent Romaniello

Suspended murky waterdrops on the verge of dripping from an icicle onto a sheet of paper prove to be almost hypnotic in Kurt Steger’s interactive project at ArtHelix. Utilizing elegant wooden contraptions made of a rotating large-scale low wooden table, a transportable tall crane-like sculpture, and a few low benches, Steger’s participatory performance evokes a genuine urge to behold the genesis of a fresh mark, from the first drip to the final circular tracing. The resulting drip drawings hang on the walls, mostly depicting  circular forms that range from dark sepias to vibrant yellows and rusty oranges. Continue reading “A Genuine Urge to Behold: ‘Meltdown’ by Kurt Steger”