Karla Black civilizes the drives in her pastel-colored Gilded Age-style show at Rodder

Karla Black presents her first show in New York City since 2016, and inaugurates Rodder’s expanded Upper East Side gallery space.

Karla Black is a canonized Scottish artist known for working with basic art materials like plaster, paper, and chalk, alongside beauty products like bath bombs, rouge, Vaseline, and lipstick, all in shy pastel colors to create womb-like, abstracted dreamscapes. At Rodder, she creates a site-specific installation, painting Rococo silhouettes in light hues on mirrors as well as constructing monumentally delicate, scented sculptures that glide through the space, chiming in on somatic echoes of the building’s historical narrative, and celebrating feminine beautification rituals.

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Liz Collins in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Liz Collins in her studio. Photo by Joe Kramm.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Liz Collins whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

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Polly Shindler: Place on Material


The artist in her studio at The Wassaic Project, 2020, photo by Luis Mejicanos

In her paintings CT based painter Polly Shindler takes a close look at lived-in spaces – interiors with furniture of different periods, textiles with colorful patterns, flooring with different textures. Here spaces are typically void of people and at the same time breath with a sense of human occupancy.

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Objects from the End of Western Civilisation at Norte Maar

Kevin Curran, Objects from the End of Western Civilisation
Kevin Curran, Objects from the End of Western Civilisation

All Photos courtesy of the artist and Norte Maar Cypress Hills Gallery

In his exhibition at Norte Maar Cypress Hills gallery, Kevin Curran uses interior design elements as a departure point for an installation – combining  wallpaper, rugs, vases, framed works on paper,  wall-mounted and free standing sculptures. His surfaces merge opulent materials like crystals and gold leaf, with rough-hewn casual aesthetic. This exhibition includes drawings that refer to Afghan war rugs as well as political tensions in the US. The symmetry of rug design paired with natural and man made forces of destruction highlights the fine line between an orderly society and chaos. The imagery brings together a little boy’s enthusiasm for rockets, trucks and guns with the perspective of an adult’s anxiety driven by real world events.  Continue reading “Objects from the End of Western Civilisation at Norte Maar”