Martha Bone and Janice Caswell: Two Solo Shows at Garrison Art Center

A painting of a snake

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Martha Bone, Mapping the Invisible #3, 2020, acrylic, aluminum enamel, charcoal, joint compound, pastel on pieced paper, 63 x 88 in., photo courtesy of the artist.

Two artists currently showing at Garrison Art Center use scale, structure, and geometry to examine and reinterpret their respective environments. Martha Bone’s large-scale paintings and assemblages express a sweeping view of the cosmos, bringing the macrocosm within our reach, while Janice Caswell’s small-scale sculptures find the infinite within the microcosm, showing us the vast potential in all forms. Both Bone and Caswell photograph their natural and man-made landscapes, later referring to these images when creating their works. And both artists construct their forms as improvisations inspired by their observations, although neither artist is interested in a literal interpretation of nature. But this is where the similarities end, their distinctive styles diverging toward an expansive contemplation of form and space and an intimate exploration of the fabricated structures that inhabit our lives.

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Jonathan Torres: Painting Anxiety and Beauty

In Dialogue
Sube y Baja 2021 Mixed media 47” x 39.25”

Jonathan Torres is a Puerto Rican artist born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010 and was recently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO. In his paintings and sculptures a sense of otherworldliness and living in the diaspora recur. For over 15 years, Torres’ practice has grown from exploring different emotional and mental stages that have affected the way people interact with each other throughout various stages of life—crisis and anxiety with a bent of dark humor that have been crucial to the development of Torres’ imagery.

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Gabriel Chaile: Longing For Nature

A group of people walking on a path near a large pot

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Gabriel Chaile, El viento sopla donde quiere (The Wind Blows Where It Wishes), 2023. Adobe and mixed metal. 303 (L) x 173 (H) x 109 (W) in. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the High Line.

Nestled in the constructed landscape of the High Line, Argentine artist Gabriel Chaile’s colossal sculpture, El viento sopla donde quiere (2023), embodies a nostalgic, transhistorical exploration of humanity’s place within and through nature. 

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A Garden Grows in the Meatpacking District

photo story
A group of objects made out of wood

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Specimens.- 2018. 287 pieces of wood with powdered graphite, 42” x 35” x 6” approx

Sculptor Loren Eiferman has brought a veritable garden of strange to Ivy Brown Gallery this summer. Her meticulously fabricated wood sculptures create a fantastical garden of forms that are both biomorphic and often anthropomorphic at the same time.

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Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10 – Sarah Pettitt and Shannon Harkins

Dance
From left to right: Shannon Harkins, Jaya Collins, and Rosalia Saver in Measures Other Than Duration, set design by Sarah Pettitt, photo by Julie Lemberger

The impetus for this series of conversations between a visual artist and a choreographer comes directly from my recent collaborative work with a choreographer as part of Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10. In this unique project a choreographer is paired with a visual artist to create together over two months a dance performance that integrates the two disciplines into a cohesive vision. Here is the conversation between artist Sarah Pettitt and choreographer Shannon Harkins.

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Dianna Frid: pre-knowing / un-knowing and Lucas Simões: Luscofusco at PATRON in Chicago

Lucas Simões, Dormentes n.2, galvanized steel, nylon ties, rope and pulley, 94 ½” x 67” x 8”, 2023 (left), and Dianna Frid, Weave, canvas, paper, embroidery floss, silk, aluminum, fabric, paint, 78” x 60”, 2015 (right). Photos: Barbarita Polster.

In two side-by-side solo exhibitions by artists Lucas Simões and Dianna Frid, both currently on view at PATRON gallery, the artists appear to pursue possibilities of meaning via symbolic pluralism; however, each artist could stand to learn from the approach of the other. In Luscofusco, Lucas Simões employs the metaphoric notion of twilight, positioned as the moment when light “shifts from presence to absence,” to examine persistent symbols recurrent throughout architectural history and their subsequent phenomenological shifts within unstable temporal contexts. In pre-knowing / un-knowing, Dianna Frid abandons linguistic text in its nominal sense, instead returning in her embroidered canvases to repeating patterns that form a material foundation for legibility – the marks made by the plunging and reemerging of the needle echo the repeating geometric shapes and fragments of Roman characters, allowing pattern itself to suspend the direct relationship between symbol and text. For both artists however, adherence to a dualistic approach to symbol and material, whether limited to form in the work of Simões or “text” in that of Frid, forms an impediment, preventing either from approaching the multiplicitous possibility they seek.

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Time as Space: Alaina Enslen in The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Artist Profile
A person using a drill to drill a picture

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Alaina Enslen in her studio in Cornwall-on-Hudson. Image Credit: Matt Moment

Around six in the morning, Alaina Enslen scales the steps of her Hudson Valley home to the attic where she works. Skylights invite brightness into the whitewashed studio. A hotplate rests upon a wax-spattered tabletop; she turns it on, waiting until it reaches about 170°F. After five minutes, the surface is finally hot enough to melt pigmented beeswax, an integral ingredient in her paintings. She collages in an 11-inch by 14-inch sketchbook, teasing out new ideas with pieces of fabric and leftover monotypes. “I set no expectations for the work,” the artist insists. “It’s all about experiment and play.”

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Remnants of the Past As Omens of the Future at Turley Gallery

Martine Kaczynski, Threshold, Installation, Turley Gallery

Why is home so important? Is it like religion, where we have faith that once we turn the key in the door and step over the threshold, we are safe from all those events that we believe cannot happen to us, orhappen in the place we call home? We now live in a world where the mundane, the environment we know as home is threatened. Common places are invisible because they are part of the warp and weft of our everyday existence. Our personal landmarks such as the library, the elementary school, and the ugly grocery store we quickly stop in, are no longer safe spaces. Self help and self care are great strategies for maintaining equilibrium, but may not extract the roots of our anxiety. Art obviously cannot solve these issues, but sometimes an artist who combines intellect, skill, and personal experience can act as the parakeet in the mine shaft.

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial Names 48 Artists and Art Spiel as Media Partner for their 2nd Edition

Sanié Bokhari. It’s 11.49 pm here, 2022. 3 x 4 ft. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.

The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, titled “Contact Zone”, will showcase the work of 48 artists at seven locations across New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. The curatorial trio adopted the biennial’s theme from a term coined in 1991 by linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt, which she used to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations.” Katherine Adams, co-curator and an affiliate of EMPAC, explains in a statement how this concept guided their curatorial research: “It allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home.”

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Daniel Giordano’s Post-Apocalyptic Chimeras at MASS MoCA 

Artist Profile
A picture containing wall, indoor, floor, art

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Daniel Giordano: Love from Vicki Island

Nonconformity comes as second nature to Daniel Giordano. Wearing an imaginative interpretation of a beekeeper’s outfit, complete with gloves, toe socks, and trekking sandals, he exudes unfailing politeness, erudition, and gravitas. Yet, behind a sly, sardonic smile, Giordano’s true prankster nature reveals itself. The Newburgh-based artist is a volcanic force in the contemporary art world; a genuine, generous, borderline-ascetic vegan, who carries his own homemade food and filtered water wherever he goes. Giordano’s first solo museum show, Love from Vicki Island, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) perfectly captures his heterodox approach to art creation.

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