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Beatrice Scaccia: My Hope Chest at Katonah Museum of Art

In Dialogue with Beatrice Scaccia


Beatrice Scaccia at the KMA, in the spot Gallery with the install of My Hope Chest. Courtesy of Ellen Rachlin. The animation was realized also thank to the Queens Arts Fund Grant.

Beatrice Scaccia’s solo show at The Katonah Museum of Art includes a stop-motion animation and site-specific wall drawings, altogether exploring the links and tensions between tradition and modernity. This body of work by the Italian born and NYC based multi-disciplinary artist has developed based on a furniture item with layered connotations – Hope chests were (and are) used by young women to collect items in anticipation of married life. The show runs through June 27, 2021

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Artists on Coping: Cecile Chong

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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At EFA Studios. Photo: Gaby Deimeke

Cecile Chong is an Ecuadorian-born, New York-based multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture and installation in which she layers material, identities, histories and languages. Her work addresses ideas of culture interaction and interpretation, as well as the commonalities humans share both in our relationship to nature and to each other. Inspired by materials as signifiers, Chong is interested in how we acquire and share culture, and how world cultures now overlap and interact in ways previously inconceivable. With uncertainty looming in everything from our economies to our weather patterns, she’s concerned with the fragility of our civilization despite the universality of its cultural underpinnings.

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Artists on Coping: Michal Gavish

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Michal Gavish, Hidden Features; acrylic on fabric and paper; 86”X60”; 2019; courtesy of the artist.

Using microscopic imagery and collaborative laboratory data, Michal Gavish focuses on DNA and proteins. Her process begins by adopting old traditions of nature drawings that she modifies by constantly searching for new materials. Her installations examine the delicate balance that is essential for bio-structures and their vitality. Gavish is a multimedia artist working on paper, fabric, plastic and video. With her background as research scientist she concentrates on the intersection of art and science. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally. She writes art reviews regularly and is a contributor to SciArt Magazine.

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Artists on Coping: Gianluca Bianchino

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Gianluca Bianchino in front of Lightmap #7, courtesy of the artist

Gianluca Bianchino is a multimedia artist and curator living and working in Northern New Jersey. Inspired by physics and architecture, his work is focused on immersive installations and interactive sculptures that often engage with optics and technology expressing lyrical qualities that stem from a background in painting and an interest in astronomy. Originally from Italy, he attended an Architectural magnet school before relocating to the US where he received a BFA from New Jersey City University, and an MFA from Montclair State University. Bianchino is currently an adjunct professor at MSU, WPU, and BMCC.

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Artists on Coping: Keren Anavy

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Keren Anavy by Written in Water (detail), site-specific installation at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, NY, jacket design by Ori Anavy. Courtesy of the artist, photo: Nomi H Rave.

Keren Anavy is a multimedia artist working in drawing, painting, installation and performance. Her process and research-based practice scrutinize the relationship between nature, culture and site. Seeing landscape as a metaphor for political and personal narratives, her interest is how nature can function as a cultural agent in different societies. Anavy has written art reviews in Basis magazine (Hebrew), the New York artistic Director at Radio28, located in Mexico City, and currently a mentor at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), IAP. She is working on a site-specific installation planned for display at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico, and was selected Artist in Residence at Guild Hall of East Hampton, New York, and at Marble House Project, Vermont. During the Coronavirus pandemic Anavy was invited by ZAZ10TS to share personal messages on the ZAZ Corner Times Square billboards at 41St & 7Av, every night starting May 8 and for the next two weeks from 7PM-8PM. 

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Artists on Coping: Jada Fabrizio

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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“All things big and small”

As a Multimedia Artist, Jada Fabrizio’s practice incorporates aspects of various disciplines, taking the form of set building, sculpture, photography and, when available, installation. Jada is interested making images and that communicate complex feelings and psychological dilemmas. The use of sculptural creatures makes difficult ideas somewhat friendlier or more approachable. She endows the animal-based figures with personalities or traits that could be considered more “human” Because the stories she is telling all have something to do with humanity and the connections we all share.

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Laura Karetzky: The Action of Looking

Laura Karetzky, Embedded Brexit, 2019, oil on wood, 14” x 11”, photo: James Wade

Selfies in domestic interiors, mobile phones, and computer screens are ubiquitous throughout Laura Karetzky‘s paintings. Her fragmented figures inhabit familiar interior spaces such as a bedroom or a work space, resonating altogether the uncanny in our daily experiences in this digital age, where the boundaries between space, time, self and other become increasingly blurred and at times even disorienting. In
this interview with Art Spiel Laura Karetzky reflects on her figurative painting roots, her process, and her upcoming projects.

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Ribbons Become Space at SL

Elizabeth Riley, Structure from Light, collaged sculptures, inkjet-printed video stills on paper

At the end of “Dragons of Iceland,” a video the NYC based multi-media artist Elizabeth Riley made throughout her SIM residency in Reykjavik, the dragon protagonist is determined to escape the societal constraints and limitations placed on women when the artist was growing up. The dragon flies into a gushing waterfall which for Riley symbolized finality. But later-on, after she returned from the residency, Riley has both deconstructed and reconstructed this video into a sculptural installation, and throughout the process of art making, the dragon’s route shifted from a fall into the abyss to a portal into a different artform. Elizabeth Riley’s solo show, “Ribbons Become Space,” at SL invites us to experience an exuberant journey. The journey starts as you enter the front gallery space with a 2011 video installation “Dragons of Iceland,” continues throughout the back gallery space with two related large-scale wall works made recently for the SL Gallery, then loops back as you exit, leading us back to the video installation with a new perspective.

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Perfected Scene at John Doe

Jeff Liao, Coney Island from Steeplechase Pier, pigmented print, 2011, image courtesy of LYK Art Projects

Curated by LYK Art Projects,”Perfected Scene” the upcoming show at John Doe Gallery features work by Jeff Liao, Jaye Rhee and Jason River, whose photographic works share a sense of manipulated stage-like worlds.  Jeff Liao creates  cityscapes with Utopian undercurrents, Jaye Rhee questions authenticity  in making art, and Jason River creates enigmatic spaces with bare bodies and everyday objects. Continue reading “Perfected Scene at John Doe”