meditation – Art Spiel

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November 30, 2024December 9, 2024, by Anna Shukeylo

Silence Breaking: Gail Winbury at Kean University

Silence Breaking is a hidden gem of a show featuring abstract paintings by Gail Winbury at the Carl and Helen Burger Gallery on Kean University’s idyllic, park-like campus in Union, NJ. A New Jersey native, Gail Winbury’s oil paintings depict interpretations of various poems and personal stories that manifest into abstractions with colliding shapes and colors. Her use of gestural abstraction and expressionist lines reflect her interest in the elicitation of psychological responses via painting. Most of the work in the gallery is in large square format, dominated by celadon or mint blue green – a color frequently ranked among the calmest colors. The Field of Green series, which is most of the show, is a departure for the artist, whose previous series had much more aggressive lines and brighter shapes, which more comfortably rested into a traditional rectangular surface dimension. The compositional choices in this body of work are deliberate and minimal, reflecting a more meditative feel full of cooler tones and calmer transitions.

January 22, 2024December 6, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Swoon – Hushed and Big Voices

In Dialogue

All images courtesy of Tod Seelie. — Swoon, Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, photo courtesy of Tod Seelie

Brooklyn-based artist Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is celebrated internationally as one of the first female street artists in a male-dominated field. For over two decades, Swoon has explored human experiences through public art, museum exhibitions, and film. Her latest projects look at the ties between trauma and addiction, inspired by her own life in a family affected by opioid addiction. She works closely with communities, using art to show empathy and help people heal. Over the last ten years, Swoon has led important projects in places like Braddock and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, New Orleans in Louisiana, Venice, and Komye in Haiti, tackling everything from natural disasters to the opioid crisis.

October 15, 2023October 15, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Dreams and Rituals: Mia Enell, Chiarina Chen, and Jamie Martinez

When does rational agency relinquish its control over the human psyche? In poetic dreams? During nightmares? Or during meditative rituals? In their work, Mia Enell, Chiarina Chen, and Jamie Martinez explore how meaning is derived from out-of-the-ordinary experiences.

Enell, whose work will be exhibited in Excavated Selves: Becoming Magic Bodies, approaches image-making “with humor and a surrealist bent.” Bodies transformed into vibrant geometries as “a proxy for survival” seem simultaneously physical and non-physical in her work. Chen, an independent curator whose workshop Heal Me Through Your Nightmare will take place on October 22nd, grounds her practice on exploring posthumanism and proposes a collective reconsideration of relationships—with oneself, others, and society. Participating in the group show Enmeshed: Dreams of Water, Colombian-U.S. artist Martinez taps into his creative process through intuitive inquiries that are spiritual and ritualistic. He speaks about the encounter with transcendental artistic guidance by opening up to what’s beyond one’s faculties.

As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial: Contact Zone, the three creatives come together with Xuezhu Jenny Wang, TIAB’s writer-in-residence, to discuss the intangible and the inexplicable: dreams, rituals, bodies, and metaphysical relations.

August 1, 2023July 26, 2023, by Art Spiel

Inner Landscapes | Paesaggi Interiori at MuSA Museum

featured exhibition

A room with large screens

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Inner Landscapes | Paesaggi Interiori, a video installation by Angelica Bergamini and curated by Alessandro Romanini and Maurizio Marco Tozzi, marks the beginning of a new season of multimedia work at the MuSA museum in Pietrasanta, a city in northern Tuscany, Italy. This installation artfully weaves together a rich tapestry of visual and auditory elements.

July 5, 2023June 14, 2023, by Art Spiel

Gathering with Asianish

In Conversation

**Asianish potluck gathering (photo credit: Sara Jimenez, September 22, 2022)**

Co-curators Cecile Chong and Sophia Ma are delighted to present “Gathering,” an exhibition that showcases the connections between forty-five Asianish artists and their artwork. Asianish, an informal collective of AAPI artists and art professionals, was established in March 2018 to foster a safe and inclusive environment for a diverse community of Asian identities. Through conversations, artistic expression, and shared meals, the group explores themes such as code-switching in art contexts and the longing for a sense of belonging in their adopted homeland. The exhibition will be held at Tiger Strikes Asteroid–New York (TSA-NY) in Bushwick from June 24 to July 30, 2023, and at FiveMyles in Crown Heights from July 8 to August 13, 2023.

July 1, 2023October 6, 2024, by Art Spiel

Deanna Sirlin: Wavetable

Artist Profile

Deanna Sirlin, Wavetable, installation view at 211 East 43^rd Street, NYC, NY

Deanna Sirlin’s Wavetable, on view in the lobby of 211 East 43rd Street, New York, includes seven recent paintings, all 7 feet by 5 feet, arranged in a line that turns a corner. Produced between 2020 and 2023, at the height of the pandemic, the paintings in Wavetable offer an eye-popping meditation on connections. As the world went into lockdown and our interactions and connections with others were circumscribed, Sirlin explored interaction and connection through these paintings.

May 10, 2023October 6, 2024, by Maggie Pavao

Ahavani Mullen: Across Centuries and the Earth

Artist Profile

Installation view, Ahavani Mullen: Across Centuries and the Earth, 2023. Dennos Museum Center, Traverse City, MI. Photo by the artist

In Ahavani Mullen’s studio, humble materials of pigment, metal, limestone, and resin transform into spiritual relics. She enters into the act of creation in silence from which paintings, sculptures, and installations evolve and become artifacts of human consciousness. In connecting the seen to the unseen, her objects hold memories of time, space, and sound, referencing the very turning of the earth with its movements and vibrations.

March 10, 2022March 10, 2022, by Maggie Pavao

Not knowing is most intimate at Amos Eno

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, Installation view of *Somewhere Around There,* 2022. Photo courtesy of Maggie Pavao

It is perhaps in this state of “not knowing” that we first encounter the works in artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda’s current solo exhibition Somewhere Around There, on view at the Amos Eno gallery. The exhibition, which presents works from the artist’s KuroKuroShiro series (‘black-black-white’ in Japanese), features dynamic shapes in shaded monochrome that seem to alternately emerge and recede from view. Faced with this shifting visual field, the viewer gradually develops a kind of intimacy with these unknown forms, opening up new possibilities for interpretation and engagement.

July 24, 2021November 2, 2022, by Carter Ratcliff

Jeanette Fintz at Carrie Haddad Gallery

In Dialogue with Jeanette Fintz

As an abstract artist, Jeanette Fintz has long been interested in the contrast of hard-edged planar geometry (circles, squares, hexagons) existing within an atmospheric field where shapes can float or hold the plane, in a space that appears expansive, transient and increasingly released from the canvas’s edge.Of her newest body of work currently on view through August 1^st at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY, she explains “these paintings are about giving structure to something intangible, ephemeral, in-flux or conversely, revealing the dissolving of structure that has been.” The following is the artist in conversation with writer and art critic, Carter Ratcliff, to discuss her influences and process.

June 7, 2021July 22, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Nicole Kutz: When the conditions all fall in place

Nicole Kutz in the studio, 2020, Photo courtesy of Nicole Kutz

The Nashville based artist and curator, Nicole Kutz, meditates in her paintings on life’s transience through handmade pigments and dyes. She frequently draws on the Japanese Wabi-sabi aesthetics, as well as the artforms of shibori and kintsugi, to create ethereal abstracted worlds, where you can find beauty in imperfections.