Contemporary Art and Culture
Hrriet Salmon is an artist, gallerist, as well as a podcast host and producer. Her engagement in art is deep and wide—in her own art she makes sculpture, drawing, photo, installation, and weaving; in Heroes, the gallery she co-founded with her partner, Jesse Penridge, they create vibrant visual dialogues between contemporary artists and historical art; in her Craftsmanship podcast she discusses technical skill in the contemporary artworld told through oral history of fabricators.
Continue reading “Harriet Salmon: Tracing Genologies at Heroes”
At 291 Grand Street, a bright red glow radiates from Home Gallery, a storefront window exhibition space in the Lower East Side. The light comes from large, fluorescent neon letters that spell out “Que no Quede Huella,” which are layered over a flat screen TV playing a rotating series of videos. The installation is the latest iteration of multimedia artist Jesus Benavente’s neon video sculptures, displayed in the exhibition Que no Quede Huella (Let There Be No Trace), curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen.
Continue reading “Jesus Benavente: Que no Quede Huella (Let There Be No Trace) at Home Gallery”
Now on view at Equity Gallery in the Lower East Side is a notable group exhibition, cogently titled Making Sense Without Consensus, with works by 14 remarkable artists and 3 astute curators at the helm. The exhibition statement says that these artists explore reality through fragmented connections and geometric materiality, “investigating whether the linearity of time is real or if past and future overlap.”
In further absorbing what this exhibition might represent, I also want to offer an illuminating quote from The Radicant (2009), an essay by celebrated curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. This thought piece provides context for the development of Making Sense Without Consensus:
“In ordinary language, ‘modernizing’ has come to mean reducing cultural and social reality to Western formats. And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own problematics: an alter modernity …”
Continue reading “Making Sense Without Consensus at Equity”
Featured Project: with curators Anna Shukeylo and Yasmeen Abdallah
The group show To Have and to Hold at the Abrazo Interno Gallery at the Clemente brings together work by Maria de Los Angeles, Julia Justo, Jeff Kasper, Michela Martello, Patricia Miranda and Jean Carla Rodea, who explore in their work notions of beauty and soulful trajectories through the potency of heirloom-like objects. Co-curators Yasmeen Abdallah and Anna Shukeylo share their thoughts on their collaborative curatorial experience.
Continue reading “To Have and to Hold at the Clemente”Previewing – with gallery founder and curator Catherine Fosnot
The Opening Fall Season at the Fosnot Art Gallery will showcase Fred Gutzeit’s body of works from 1966-2021. Although he began as a painter of found objects and landscapes, Fred Gutzeit has never been satisfied with capturing the realism we “see“ in nature. He has continually sought a realism through abstraction that would capture the hidden complexity of nature juxtaposed with a human search for structure. Musings about complexity and chaos theories, string theory, mathematics modeling, and current scientific speculation about “multiverses” are employed as he explores consciousness, interaction, identity, and searches for structure. His bold use of color and dimensionality are wonderous and aesthetically pleasing allowing us to travel into the cosmos of his world.
Continue reading “Fred Gutzeit Retrospective at Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery”Judy Giera and Nathaniel Garcia In Conversation
In her first solo exhibition at SPANTZO Gallery, Judy Giera, explores the nuances of girlhood and the expectations of the feminine through painting, video, and performance. Giera’s bright colors and synthetic materials reference Barbie and her Dream House as well as the patriarchal conceits of the action painters of the 1950s. Judy Giera and SPANTZO founder and director, Nathaniel Garcia, share their reflections on the exhibition.
Continue reading “‘Til The Moon Turns Pink at SPANTZO”In Dialogue with Kat Chamberlin
Kat Chamberlin: TRANSACTIONS for BEVERLY’S: Under Construction Sessions includes works in drawing, glass and aluminum created in response to a year in quarantine and loss of work. In exchange for the year’s shifted labor conditions and loss of independence, the artist uses her 5-year-old daughter’s ideas as payback. The show runs through April 20th, 2021.
Continue reading “Kat Chamberlin: TRANSACTIONS” In Dialogue with Sun You
This Two, Sun You’s first solo show with Geary, takes place concurrently at Geary’s two locations: Bowery in the Lower East Side and Main street in Millerton, New York. Geary features You’s clay- based work which includes oven-baked polymer clay forms mounted on painted wood panels, sculpted clay forms in cardboard boxes, and a separate body of sculptures made of mixed media — metal wire, razor blades, beads, and artificial flowers “held by magnets and gravity”, as described by Michael McCanne in the press release. The show runs through March 5th, 2021.
Continue reading “This Two: Sun You at Geary”In Dialogue with Greg Drasler
Greg Drasler came to be a metaphorical figurative painter when he lost everything he owned in a fire in 1978, except for two paintings. At that moment he decided to focus exclusively on painting — he was a painter and painting would be everything he needed. He began to rebuild his pictorial world with scenes from the self-help DIY magazines and for over 40 years has continued to explore and expand his visual vocabulary through several bodies of work. Greg Drasler says he identifies with the subjects of his paintings “as personal questions, metaphors, and allegories often responding to social and cultural topics.” His current solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery includes both works from his lengthiest series, the Hats Paintings, and some from his most recent series, the Road House paintings. Sparked by the effects of social distancing due to the pandemic, the paintings overall assume another layer of meaning.
Continue reading “Greg Drasler: Crowded Places / Open Spaces at Betty Cuningham Gallery”