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Elise Ferguson. Pebble. Pigmented plaster on MDF panel, 2018. Photo courtesy of Able Baker.
“Wisdom was the feeling for what is high, great, broad, sharp, even, heavy, bright, light, colorful . . . Wisdom was the feeling for an essentially shared reality, for the mystical, for the indeterminate indeterminable, for the greatest determinacy of all . . . but art is reality, and the reality we share must assert itself beyond all particularity.” Hans Arp, Introduction to a Catalogue
Prototype for the Kodak DCS 100, floppy discs, and Kodak film
The exhibit at Pioneer Works is called “A History of Digital Photography” and features some of the first images taken with Kodak’s earliest digital camera. The show includes that camera, its maquette, and the ever sharper, smaller cameras Lucien Samaha worked with over the years, plus ephemera. But at its heart, this show is less about technology than an artist’s journey, and is deeper and far more human than its title suggests.
In Dialogue with gallerist Silas Von Morisse on the Whale Flukes Paintings and beyond
Installation view, Juliette Dumas, Whale Fluke (Night) at The Neue House New York
Silas von Morisse founded a reputable gallery in Bushwick in 2014. Then, in 2018, due to notable shifts in the art world for small venues like hers, she decided to drastically change her model: from exhibiting in a physical venue, to featuring art as a mostly online presence paired with events which enable viewing in person. Silas von Morisse shares with Art Spiel her changed mode of operation, while highlighting the current show featuring Whale Flukes paintings by the French artist Juliette Dumas.
Throughout her multi-faceted installations, the German-born Canadian based artist Iris Häussler has been slipping in and out of multiple characters. Her invented underdog protagonists live through diverse historical periods and traverse vast geographies. Häussler’s rigorous installations transform any categorization. They are placed between life and art, coalescing multi-disciplinary collaborations including performance, literature, and richly layered visual vocabularies such as drawing, installation and sculpture. The visitor is invited to experience an individual’s life within a specific context of place and history, to decipher the clues from the artifacts and materials throughout installations that reflect on fiction, history and the meaning of a creative identity.
In Dialogue with Peter Gynd on Jody MacDonald’s upcoming solo exhibition he curated at Radiator
Jody MacDonald, Conjoined Twins, 2019, mixed media, 26 x 26 x 24 in.
Peter Gynd is an artist, curator and gallerist whose recent curatorial project is currently on view at Radiator, a solo show featuring new works by the Canadian born and NYC based Jody MacDonald. MacDonald’s sculptural dioramas explore a set of characters on the fringe by merging fact, fiction, and art history. In this Art Spiel interview Peter Gynd elaborates on the genesis of the exhibition.
Installation view of NEW THICK. Image courtesy of The Royal
Katie Hector is an artist, curator, and writer whose work is currently featured in New Thick at The Royal @ RSOAA . a group exhibition she has also co-curated with Barry Hazard at this dynamic venue for curatorial projects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In this Art Spiel interview, Katie Hector elaborates on New Thick, her current show, and the premise behind the RSOAA venue.
Message in a Bottle, installation view at Ground Floor Gallery, 2019, photo courtesy of Jordan Rathkopf
In Message in a Bottle, the current solo installation show at Ground Floor Gallery in Park Slope, the Gowanus based artist Karen Mainenti transforms the gallery into what at first glance looks like an upscale beauty boutique. Mainenti uses this platform to explore the mechanisms at work in the packaging and marketing of beauty products over time, drawing on her own complex relationship to the products themselves. Much of Mainenti’s work examines the subtle but powerful societal expectations of women that show up in ordinary objects. The delicately cast porcelain replicas of her own cosmetics highlight the way objects can be gendered, even when reduced to their elemental forms. Often using humor as a sly way to invite the viewer in, her drawings of creams, lotions and serums using marketing language from real products highlight the inherent contradiction in the ways we read these messages as absurd, yet suspend that disbelief at the cash register when we buy them. Having visited the show when it opened, I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Karen about how this exhibition came together and how the various series within it have developed over time.
Karen Margolis’s intricate wall pieces and sculptures featured in her current solo show In the Precipice at Foley resemble topographic mindscapes or cosmic maps. The sum of her dense cell-like circular shapes in some works create a sense of condensing inward, and in others exploding outward. Close up it is like taking a journey through a complex network of neurons, galaxies or emotional states of mind. It is enjoyable to identify recognizable fragments such as remnants of old maps with readable places, trace the multiple burnt holes and biomorphic shapes created with a soldering iron, focus on the hypnotizing miniscule dots of paint on circular clusters painted with watercolor or gouache, and then follow a complex net of crisscrossing dark linear threads which create an engaging tension with the curvy forms.
Riad Miah, Untitled Spaces,, 2019, acrylic on Dura-lar and oil on canvas over panel, 49 1/4″ x 90 1/2″, photo courtesy of the artist
Riad Miah‘s vivid abstract paintings and bold installations reflect his deep ongoing preoccupation with representation of materiality, time, and light. Riad Miah shares with Art Spiel some thoughts on his own trajectory as a painter. He describes how his painting process has evolved, and elaborates on some projects, including his upcoming exhibition “Magical Spaces, Familiar Places” at Kean College Gallery.
Michael A. Robinson, The Origin of Ideas, 2013, found lamps, tripods, and electrical cords, 6 x 6 x 9 ft,, Image: courtesy of SL Gallery
Trekking down 38th Street in the heart of the garment district on a Thursday evening in October, I made my way to SL Gallery where Michael A. Robinson’s solo exhibition, The Object as Evidence, was on view. As I pushed open the large steel door to the gallery I found myself immediately subsumed within a group of onlookers similarly clad in all-black. The artist’s talk had already begun and attention was fixed upon Robinson, a tall slender man with sandy-blonde hair standing beside a projector that cast images of artwork onto the wall behind him. Arms extended and eyes twinkling, Robinson elucidated upon the evolution of his work.
