On Henry Street, Tianyi Sun Works with Simulacra and Cuteness

Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit. “Bakery Story,” installed as part of FROM_LISTENERS, 2023. 30 x 18 x 32 inches, Laser cut and engraved acrylic, aluminium, LCD screen, webcam.

“I love it. I am all for kitschy stuff,” Tianyi Sun says, laughing, as she notices the iridescent glitter liquid phone case. In her practice, Sun engages with the cute and zany using these categories as an entry point to embody how we approach technology in our everyday lives—her work takes the form of installations and responsive environments activated by a reading or performance. With much of her work being modular, the audience moving through the space is as important as the work itself—“bridging the digital and the analog,” she explains. “I want to expose the aesthetics, the beauty, the politics without lessening the visceral response.” A central question of her work is: What happens with the human experience as we navigate technology?

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Jeanne Verdoux’s Female Vaisselle at Sculpture Space

previewing exhibition
A white and orange plastic mannequin

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Ballerina, Ceramics & glaze, 17x12x9.25”, 2023

Brooklyn artist Jeanne Verdoux’s latest exhibition, Female Vaisselle, at the Sculpture Space NYC from February 2 to March 2, 2024, marks her first solo show in New York City. Verdoux captures the essence of the female form through a blend of ceramics, drawings, monoprints, and video art. The title itself is a linguistic play, merging the French word “vaisselle” (meaning tableware) with the English “vessel,” reflecting the dual themes of domesticity and the female body as a container of multifarious experiences.

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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.

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Ceramics+ Drawing Into Sculpture at LIC

photo story
A colorful paper ball with barbed wire

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Sok Song,- SoNoBe: Legermain Barbed and Coiled. Clay, paper, plastic, 16”x16”x16”.2023, Me, Mom, and the War on Identity. Acrylic, screen print, collage on paper, 36”x28” 2023 ( on wall)

The Long Island City Artists, an art non-profit known as LIC-A, is currently presenting a bold exhibition that brings together artists who work simultaneously in two media not always thought of as compatible. Curator Matt Nolen has gathered a fascinating group of artists from the NYC metropolitan area who work in both clay and drawing–one influencing and bouncing off the other. The synthesis is a fascinating and genre-bending exhibition.

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Portraiture, Archives, and Representation: Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle

On the left: Jonathan Ojekunle. Shining Light, 2022. Oil, acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Courtesy NARS Foundation. Photographed by Young Yu Don.

Oftentimes, in thinking about the representation of the human form in art, people can get very attached to the ‘abstraction’ versus ‘figuration’ binary. These respective styles frequently get coded as opposites, and certain kinds of politics are ascribed to each. For example, ‘figuration’ is coded as a kind of politics of representation, whereas ‘abstraction’ is a politics of refusal or resistance to legibility. However, the work of Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle, all on view in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, functions beyond this binary in fresh ways. We interviewed the artists about portraiture and its relationship with archives and representation.

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A Story of Immigration, Heritage, and Identity: Invisible Bodies on View at Pennsylvania State University

Installation view, Invisible Bodies, at Penn State University (HUB-Robeson Galleries), 2023. Images courtesy of The Border Gallery and HUB-Robeson Galleries

Installation view, Invisible Bodies, at Penn State University (HUB-Robeson Galleries), 2023. Image courtesy of The Border Gallery and HUB-Robeson Galleries.

As one approaches “Art Alley,” part of the Hub-Robeson Galleries at Pennsylvania State University, it is the vibrant green walls that first draw one’s attention. Painted green for the “support for an open immigration system, allowing immigrants to contribute to the nation’s labor force, Invisible Bodies: An Exploration of Migrant Labor Through an Artistic Lens, curated by The Border Gallery and Emireth Herrera Valdes, brings together fifteen artists from diverse backgrounds to contemplate labor, immigration, and identity in the United States.

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Images and Art: In and Out of Politics with Carlos Franco and Keren Anavy

Keren Anavy. Archipelago, 2023. Ink and colored pencils on mylar, plexiglass, shells, concrete bricks, and plywood. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.

As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023, artists Carlos Franco (b. Puerto Rico) and Keren Anavy (b. Israel) both showed their work in the group exhibition Enmeshed: Dreams of Water at NARS Foundation. Franco’s work often deploys appropriated images and linguistic symbols. He seems to be exploring the contextual complexities behind how signification takes shape and how signification continues to evolve as a context-dependent subject. Anavy’s site-specific work has been connected to the multifaceted paradigm of “ecological order,” according to the book Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts. Her fabricated environments consider the “liminal geographic spaces between political art and escapism.”

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At the Limits: Elena Dahn at Revolver

Dahn Performance

Thin, translucent layers of shaped and stretched natural latex are mounted onto walls or wooden boards to extend the limits of painting—these are Elena Dahn’s New Bodies, on view at the Buenos Aires-based artist’s first New York exhibition. Hosted by Revolver, a contemporary art venue launched in 2008 by Giancarlo Scaglia in Lima and subsequently in Buenos Aires and on the Lower East Side, the exhibition is an invitation to rethink the relationship between body and painting, performance and mark-making, space and surface.

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Rachel Frank: Ritual and Rehabilitation

Hot Air
A collage of hands holding a clay dog

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Rewilding Franconia Sculpture Park, Participatory Performance as part of 4Ground: Midwest Land Art Biennial, Franconia Sculpture Park, 2022. Photographer: Rachel Frank

Rachel Frank is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice includes sculpture, video, and performance. Her art explores our shifting perspectives towards natural history, climate change, and relationships with non-human species. She grew up near Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, the birthplace of American paleontology, where large mammoth and other megafauna fossils were found, altering Western views on extinction and evolution. She works as a staff wildlife care manager at The Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Manhattan.

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Amy Talluto Describes an Elisabeth Condon Painting – Dusk, 2023

A blue and brown abstract painting

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Elisabeth Condon, Dusk, 2023, acrylic and mediums on linen, 30 x 21 inches

Amy Talluto’s reflections on a painting by Elisabeth Condon were initially presented in an interview with the artist in podcast episode 59 for Pep Talks for Artists. Elisabeth Condon is a frequent guest on the show, contributing to the series Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting. In conjunction with Condon’s solo exhibition and participation in the Untitled fair, both with Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami,[LINK: https://emersondorsch.com/] Amy interviewed Elisabeth and described Condon’s Dusk, 2023, acrylic and mediums on linen, 30 x 21 inches, a painting included in her show. Dusk will be on view at the gallery from December 3, 2023, through February 3, 2024, in the exhibition Tempus Fugit.

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