mixed media – Page 30

September 20, 2023September 14, 2023, by Art Spiel

PE Pinkman: Two Solo Shows at Watchung Arts Center

Featured Project

A collage of a couple of images of a person

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — *(l) Mona Brody, Getting Answers, 60” x 48”, 2023, and (r) Anne Trauben, a section of the installation, Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky, 2023*

PE Pinkman, the chief visual arts curator and executive director of the Watchung Arts Center in New Jersey, notes that two exhibitions — Mona Brody: Portals, Apparitions, and Other Voices and Anne Trauben: Step Up on a Stool to Reach the Sky — emerged from separate discussions with each artist. For over 45 years, the nonprofit Watchung Arts Center has been a prominent stage, showcasing works from regional artists in New Jersey and New York. Their central mission is to provide visual artists with a platform for engagement, promoting arts education while offering unique exhibition opportunities. At a first glance, both Mona Brody’s paintings and Anne Trauben’s installations appear straightforward. However, Pinkman emphasizes that they reveal deeper layers upon closer inspection. He observes a fascinating contrast: while Brody’s art unveils forms from the shadows, Trauben emphasizes light and shape within a darkened setting.

September 18, 2023August 18, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10 – Alejandra Seeber and Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon

Dance

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 Alejandra Seeber and choreographer Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon.

September 7, 2023September 6, 2023, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Myth Maker: Laleh Khorramian at SEPTEMBER Gallery

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Alon Koppol

Finally! What a joy to meander through a show that is not just a formulaic scaffolding rendered to execute a marketing plan rather than make art. Walking into the building that houses September Gallery’s new space in Kinderhook, NY, The first thing you see is not a wall or architectural ornamentation but a monumental scroll that immediately hints you might be here for a while. This colossal collage introduces Myth Maker, the second exhibition at September Gallery by Laleh Khorramian.

September 6, 2023September 4, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Art of Getting It Together

Jesse Benson, *Packaging*, 2003/2023. Ephemera from all projects completed in grad school, vacuum-formed plastic, plexiglass, silkscreen on board. Installation dimensions variable, individual dimensions 21 x 28.8 x 3 in. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy As-Is LA.

In Organizer, Jesse Benson’s first solo gallery show since 2017, the Los Angeles artist unpacks the “dialectic of order and chaos” by introducing heterogeneity to organizing systems.

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023, by Meg Hitchcock

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

A painting of a snake

Description automatically generated — 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.

August 14, 2023August 7, 2023, by Art Spiel

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.

August 8, 2023August 8, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

Gabriel Chaile: Longing For Nature

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

Description automatically generated — 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.

July 25, 2023July 25, 2023, by Melissa Stern

A Garden Grows in the Meatpacking District

photo story

A group of objects made out of wood

Description automatically generated — 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.

July 24, 2023July 15, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

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

July 19, 2023July 4, 2023, by Barbarita Polster

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.