#newyorkcityart – Art Spiel

October 25, 2021October 4, 2021

Hedwig Brouckaert: Un-Informing

PORTRAIT3 copy.jpg — Hedwig Brouckaert in her Studio in the Beginage in Ghent Belgium, August 2021

New York city based artist Hedwig Brouckaert is currently working on a body of work for two solo shows, one at the Emory & Henry College in Virginia, where she is invited as visiting artist in January 2022, and one for Galerie El in September in Belgium. She has been developing Peel (America), a collage series of magazine images of skin on marble tiles, which she started during the lockdown. She says the tiled walls in public spaces have become like skin surfaces that were feared during the pandemic, as touch has become complicated. She is fascinated by the contrast between the depth and time visible in a marble tile, created by age-old geographical processes, and the temporality of magazine paper. “Even though magazines – and mass media images in general – arrive as pristine, glowing objects in the mail or on the newsstand they are meant to disappear quickly and to become trash, to be replaced by the most recent up-to-date information,” she says.

May 3, 2021May 3, 2021

Nandini Bagla Chirimar: Becoming Who We Are

Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s richly layered drawings, prints, paintings and installations draw on her daily life as a mother, daughter, homemaker and artist living in New York. She grew up in Jaipur, India and came to the USA to complete her undergraduate art education at Cornell University. Here, she found herself working with many of the elements she had encountered in her daily life growing up in India — homes she lived in, her relationships, events, color, block prints, miniature and folk paintings.

January 12, 2021February 26, 2021

Samira Abbassy: Hybrid Iconography

A person sitting in a chair

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — *Studio Portrait, 2016 at EFA Studios*

Samira Abbassy’s paintings and drawings portray mysterious iconic figures, primarily female, who inhabit an ambiguous space. While her pictorial world resonates with archetypal imagery from eastern and western cultures, it equally pulsates with an urgent psychological core, creating an invigorating tension which prompts the viewer to search and discover rich layers for meaning.

January 2, 2021January 4, 2021

More Time Less at Cathouse Proper

In Dialogue with David Dixon

MORE TIME LESS, Cathouse Proper: Zac Hacmon, ‘Capsule #5’ (2020); Nari Ward, ‘Anchoring Escapement (Baule)’ (2017); Elana Herzog ‘Cross Pollination #1’ (2020); photo: Dario Lasagni

For Cathouse Proper’s second ensemble exhibition, More Time Less, curator and gallery director David Dixon brought together five artists — Zac Hacmon, Elana Herzog, Aga Ousseinov, Tim Simonds, and Nari Ward — whose installations, wall-based work, and sculptures reflect our changing perception of ‘normative time.’ David Dixon describes his curatorial process, gives us a closer tour of this ensemble exhibition, and shares some background on his diverse art practices.

December 21, 2020December 21, 2020

Joyce Yamada: Contemplating the Human Species

Joyce Yamada, *Portrait, 2019*, photo courtesy of Nila Onda

Painter Joyce Yamada grew up on the west coast. She spent her childhood vacations in the beautiful national parks of the US and Canada where pristine forests and the Pacific coast were imprinted in her visual memory. She recalls that although as a teenager she realized that art is her task in life, struggling to survive by minimum wage work led her to medical school which she completed and then subsequently became a diagnostic radiologist. This science background has fed her mind and artwork ever since. Yamada says she is a painter because she conceptualizes in images rather than in words — “when puzzled, my mind juxtaposes or fuses unexpected images, often leading to new work,” she says. For instance, an early series, Body, Earth, came to her in art school — while looking at the hills across the bay from San Francisco she saw the low rounded hills as the reclining body of a woman. The juxtaposed imagery meant to her that we are intimately and indivisibly part of earth and of nature, that what we do to the earth we do to ourselves. She has subsequently seen this idea expressed in indigenous cultures, and it became central in her work.

December 8, 2020November 2, 2022

The Immigrant Artist Biennial: Abena Motaboli

Abena Motaboli, The Pieces that hang far up above – in you, in me, in I, in We, in Us, 2019 Plastic Tarp. Dimensions variable approximate 12ft x 12ft x 12ft. Photo courtesy the artist

The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) is a volunteer, female-led, artist-run project. TIAB 2020 launched in March in New York City at Brooklyn Museum, and continued in September through December at EFA Project Space, Greenwood Cemetery, and virtually, presenting 60+ artists. This interview series features 10 participating artists.

Abena Motaboli is a Southern African born educator, visual artist, and writer based in Chicago. She grew up in Lesotho, a landlocked country in Southern Africa, before moving to the U.S where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at Columbia College Chicago and at L’Institut Catholique de Paris in Paris, France. With a strong commitment to social justice work in the South and West sides of Chicago and being an immigrant, her artwork comments on displacement, immigration, the African diaspora, and the loss of the sense of home. In her intricate plastic installations and meditative line-work in her paintings, she uses ephemeral material such as plastic, tea, dirt, and coffee to comment on colonialism, past memories, and the culture of creating.

December 2, 2020November 30, 2020

Edge of Light at Plaxall

Previewing with Jonathan Sims

A picture containing cake, indoor, show, photo

Description automatically generated — Jess Holz, *Borderlands*, 2020. Installation with laser cut Fresnel lenses and video of the artist’s skin being examined under the scanning electron microscope at the HoloCenter exhibition EDGE OF LIGHT

The Edge of Light began with the intent to create a group exhibition of artists who work in light. Jonathan Sims, a light artist himself and the curator of this group show at Plaxall, says that although there are a very large number of artists currently working with light as a medium and a material, but their chances to exhibit, particularly in a group setting, are limited.

May 7, 2018November 15, 2020

Trish Tillman – Souvenirs of a Moment

Trish Tillman, Afterschool Locker, 2017, Hand-printed vinyl, wood, metal, horsehair, resin, 66” x 37” x 6”, photo by Ethan Browning

Trish Tillman flirts with materials. She fuses in her sculptures elements of fashion and interior décor like leather, vinyl, studs, ropes, and chains, to create art objects which are often both humorous and enigmatic. While her sculptures bring to mind old relics, early symbols, or mysterious calligraphic forms, they also embody the allure of faux luxury. Continue reading “Trish Tillman – Souvenirs of a Moment”

April 24, 2018November 15, 2020

Helen O’ Leary: No Place for Certainty

Helen O’Leary, installation view of Home is a foreign country, 2018, photo courtesy of Lesley Heller by Eva O’Leary

Helen O’Leary‘s sculptural paintings are delicate and rough, subtle and raw, literal and metaphoric – they embrace and prick the viewer at the same time. Her current exhibition “Home is a foreign country“ at Leslie Heller indicates not only clear incisiveness and impressive mastery of form, but also a deep generosity- sharing with the viewer her rigorous process of grappling with material: visible jointing, disjointing, bending, folding, knitting. She says that somewhere through the struggle some magic happens. And magic does happen in her artwork. Continue reading ” Helen O’ Leary: No Place for Certainty”