In Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s solo exhibition, I Want to Know, I Need to Know, at Eli Klein Gallery, the work Are You Still Strong Enough? (2025) emerges as the visual center of the show’s underlying tension. A My Little Pony toy hangs vertically, the surface covered in bronze patina, while the incision along its abdomen is carefully stitched closed. What was once a lighthearted and slightly absurd object becomes, through this treatment, both fragile and solemn. Its form evokes a body after surgery, yet also resembles a preserved specimen. However, the meticulous stitching does not suggest that the wound has truly healed. Instead, the seam runs along the body, leaving the incision exposed and gradually becoming part of the sculpture’s structure. The suturing does not erase the rupture; it keeps the rupture visible. The wound is no longer simply a trace of intervention, but the structural element through which the work sustains its tension.
Would you have believed the sun revolved around the Earth? Possibly, since that was the ironclad determination of the bureaucracies in the 16th century. Slavery legally existed in the United States for centuries before there was even the slightest abolitionist movement. Which brings to mind, why do we adhere to beliefs today simply because they are propagated by governments and institutions?
Alice Pixley Young’s Still Life takes shape in semi-darkness at A.I.R. Gallery as an immersive meditation on ecological time, stratified and shadowed by industrial residue. Installed as a multisensory environment of video projection, sound, industrial scaffolding, and glass bell jars, the installation places viewers in a space where remediation and damage coexist. Suspended from tall black scaffolding, the glass containers move like dimly illuminated pendulums, casting shadows across the walls and establishing the installation’s temporal pulse from the outset.
The work’s rootedness in place is central. Young’s studio is located on an Ordovician fossil bed near a nuclear Superfund site in the Rust Belt. Her exhibition in Brooklyn hints at another Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal, linking two contaminated landscapes across geography. The central video shows horizontal strata in constant motion. Below the upper dusky blue sky, you can travel slowly through narrow moving bands — grasses and wildflowers filmed at the Fernald site in southwest Ohio — creating a lateral sense of passing through a remediated landscape. Alongside it, a thinner strip shows water seen from a bridge, evoking an industrial waterway shaped by contamination and cleanup. The cross sections are clean-cut and suggestive, tinged with a bluish monochrome.
Exhibition view, Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
Birds enter through sound and sight. The birds’ calls, recorded by the artist, continuously shift and reorganize, gradually overtaken by industrial noise. They suggest a tough migration. The suspended glass bell jars are engraved with imagery of Eastern Meadowlarks (one of the bird speciesin population decline). The glass pieces swing slowly like pendulums of grandfather clocks, casting moving bird shadows across the projection, encapsulating past, present, and future. These dome-shaped transparent jars are recognizable as decorative containers used to showcase collected specimens, typically placed on a safe shelf. In Young’s installation, they lose their ground, engraved on, and swing side to side hypnotically. Here, these fragile containers of life also signal warnings, becoming what she calls “active image-makers.” I can imagine those glass jars holding the souls of vanished birds. The birds’ blurred wings flicker as their cries reverberate through the space, at times piercing, at times distant.
Alice Pixley Young, Detail, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
The birds’ imagery appears in motion, blurred and only partially formed, more hinted at than fully seen. The birds seem to move as if traveling between sites, from Young’s Rust Belt landscape toward Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, some vanishing along the way. The black scaffolding structure stands before the screen, geometric, imposing, and bare. It interrupts the projected space, holding the blurred flight behind it in tension with containment. Objects, shadows, and projected imagery fold into one another. The present physical space bleeds into its layered past, reaching toward an unknown future. The disappearing birds, the scientific monitoring of contaminated landscapes, and the broader theme of environmental time link seamlessly. Or as the artist says, the projection reads like a “cross-section connecting atmosphere, land and contaminated infrastructure.”
As projected forms lengthen and shift, they spill beyond the screen and into the room, animating the gallery with a haunting beauty that is eerie, grim, but not yet fatalistic. Still Life does not settle into elegy. It resists the stillness implied by its title. It operates as a poetic wake-up call.
Exhibition view, Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
Alice Pixley Young: Still Lifeat AIR, 155 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY 11201.On view throughMarch 15, 2026. Wed–Sun, 12–6 pm
About the Writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018, she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. @etty.yaniv
Lance Rautzhan standing in front of Cabin Contemporary. Photo courtesy of Cabin Contemporary
Established in June 2022, Cabin Contemporary culls local, urban, and international artists for solo and group exhibitions, hosting contemporary art concepts and dialogue in a rural context, from April through October. Multidisciplinary artist and educator Lance Rautzhan curates exhibits of installation, new media, painting, and outsider art in an outbuilding on his family farm near the Appalachian Trail, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, and Pennsylvania State Game Lands.
The West Chelsea Artists Open Studios presents its 16th annual artists open studios tour on Saturday & Sunday, May 10th and 11th, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. The event offers a look inside the art studios at the iconic building at 526 West 26th Street. Art Spiel conducted brief interviews with three artists who will participate in the event.
Eileen Neff, a multidisciplinary artist with a background in literature and painting, has been creating “photo-based images and installations” since 1981. She recounts her understanding of poetry long before grasping painting. Her academic path led her from being an English major at Temple University, where she immersed herself in painting studios, to the Philadelphia College of Art (the recently closed University of the Arts). While teaching at a private secondary school, a tuition-free photography class captured her unexpectedly. “I began photographing pieces of my paintings and, before long, had convinced a couple of students to build a black and white darkroom in my apartment,” she recalls. This transition directed her focus to natural elements and interiors, subjects she still rigorously explores. Though she no longer paints, Neff states, “I still think more like a painter than a photographer; my photographs are still very driven by how a poem means.” Neff currently exhibits her work in In Some Light Reading, a group show at the Mitchell Art Museum featuring work by five artists and poetic texts by four writers addressing the life-making qualities of light. The show runs through July 7th.
Out of the Vessel, Choreography and Dance : JoVonna Parks. Visual Art and Video Projection: Jeanne Verdoux. Photo: Jeanne Verdoux
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 Jeanne Verdoux and choreographer / dancer JoVonna Parks.
Gail Winbury’s multidisciplinary art exhibition The Girl Who Drew Memories at the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum on the campus of the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, Vermont, addresses the intersection of art and psychology, specifically “vulnerability and creativity”. Winbury proposed to include poetry as a component of the exhibition and curator Alison Crites brought together Winbury’s paintings and collages, with poetry by living poets. The exhibition altogether raises the question “how do we tell the stories of our early childhood when at times there may be no words, or we dare not utter the words aloud?”
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Susan Mastrangelo
Susan Mastrangelo was born and raised in New York City and Washington D.C. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the New York Studio School, and received her MFA from Boston University under the tutelage of Philip Guston. Based in New York since graduate school, she has shown nationally and internationally, and is a recipient of a Rockwell Grant as well as two grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a guest at Civitella Raneri, and a resident at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Triangle Workshop (as a student of Anthony Caro), and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. For 27 years she taught and chaired the Art Department at the Buckley School in New York City, and now works as a full time multidisciplinary artist at the Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Ronit Levin Delgado by Written in Water (detail), site-specific installation at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, NY.
Ronit Levin Delgado is an Israeli–born, New York–based multidisciplinary visual artist and a Fulbright Scholar. Her work explores conditions and experiences of instinctual human interactions through the use of the body, rituals, and the intimacy of a kiss. In performances, videos, paintings and sculptural objects, she calls into question the personal narratives of vulnerability and desire. In immersive installations she invites the viewers to engage and share a private intimate moment in a collective environment experience. The artist’s personal rituals fuse the fragments of cultural traditions, rituals and beliefs into performative actions and objects.
