This Two, Sun You’s first solo show with Geary, takes place concurrently at Geary’s two locations: Bowery in the Lower East Side and Main street in Millerton, New York. Geary features You’s clay- based work which includes oven-baked polymer clay forms mounted on painted wood panels, sculpted clay forms in cardboard boxes, and a separate body of sculptures made of mixed media — metal wire, razor blades, beads, and artificial flowers “held by magnets and gravity”, as described by Michael McCanne in the press release. The show runs through March 5th, 2021.
Crowded Places / Open Spaces installation Betty Cuningham Gallery
Greg Drasler came to be a metaphorical figurative painter when he lost everything he owned in a fire in 1978, except for two paintings. At that moment he decided to focus exclusively on painting — he was a painter and painting would be everything he needed. He began to rebuild his pictorial world with scenes from the self-help DIY magazines and for over 40 years has continued to explore and expand his visual vocabulary through several bodies of work. Greg Drasler says he identifies with the subjects of his paintings “as personal questions, metaphors, and allegories often responding to social and cultural topics.” His current solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery includes both works from his lengthiest series, the Hats Paintings, and some from his most recent series, the Road House paintings. Sparked by the effects of social distancing due to the pandemic, the paintings overall assume another layer of meaning.
Sari Nordman, Assembling on Ancient Towers, 2020, video, video still 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.
Sari Nordman, a native of Finland, is a NYC-based interdisciplinary artist working with dance, video and installation. She loves to travel to the isolated parts of the world to reflect on nature, history and female experience, the recurring themes in her works. She continues developing Torni-Tower, an installation work which has received support from the Catwalk Institute and NYU, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, The Amsterdam Collective and Tohmajärvi Residency, for Jamaica Flux: Workspaces and Windows 2021 exhibition and Performance Mix Festival. She worked as a performer with choreographer Dean Moss in 2009-2018, and holds a M.F.A. from NYU/Tisch School of The Arts.
Artist at home with paintings during lockdown, May 2020
Nancy Elsamanoudi says she was drawn to painting because of its fluid relationship to time from the viewer’s and the painter’s perspectives alike. The viewer gets a visceral sense of the painter’s vision in the past, and the painter experiences the fluidity of time throughout the process of painting. Elsamanoudi further specifies: “when you paint, you can, so to speak, go back and forth through time, adding layers-submerging the past or revealing the past by scraping or stripping away previous layers.”
Melissa Stern is an artist, working in mixed materials and across genres. She is interested in ideas that are simultaneously funny and dark- that is, “work that might make you smile or laugh, but with a wee bit of discomfort,” as she puts it. Much of her work of recent years focuses on home and childhood and the ways in which our childhoods and our memories haunt our lives. She works in clay, found objects, wood, metal collage and various drawing materials. Her goal is that the materials she uses are at the service of the ideas. On a different note she says, “I am an only child, raised by older parents who were first generation Americans. My mother desperately wanted to be ‘American’. My father was very connected to his European heritage. This push and pull; between belonging and being an outsider has profoundly influenced my life as an artist.” Melissa Stern is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.
Artist Jac Lahav in dialogue with NAVA Contemporary about working for over a decade painting portraits of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Jac Lahav, Red Hope, from 48 Jews, oil on canvas, 24×24 in, 2017
The recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shocked us all. Artist Jac Lahav has painted portraits of RBG for over a decade. In this interview with NAVA Contemporary he discusses his thoughts on RBG, iconography, and a way forward during these challenging times.
Soon after the Corona pandemic hit NYC, a resourceful and talented group of NY based artists came together to create an informal collective called artists-X-change (aXc) with the aim to alleviate the growing distress that both artists and art organizations have been facing. They were united by a sense of urgency — the severity of the situation coupled with the need to help others in their community.
Noa Charuvi’s paintings convey a distinct sense of place where narratives of the present interrupt those of the past with urgency, sometimes even violence . Yet, her places encapsulate past and present not only as a rupture but also as an ongoing flow of coinciding contradictory forces – ruin and construction, anarchy and order. No matter if the painting depicts an interior of a room or an exterior of a construction site, it frequently portrays a place that is devoid of human figures but charged with the aftermath of human actions. Even if human figures are present, they are typically placed in context of their larger environment, players in a powerful and mysterious systemic forces of history, city, society. Noa Charuvi shares with Art Spiel some insights on her ideas, work, and process.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Performance still from “In America, You are Asked Why Leaves are Green,” February, 2020; from left, artists JinJin Xu, Jiaoyang Li. Photo courtesy of artists
Silkworm Pupas is a new media arts collective consisting of NYC based Chinese poets Jiaoyang Li and JinJin Xu. Our projects strive for intimate ways to envision attainable, inclusive, and bleeding-edge futures through innovative storytelling, documentary poetics practice, sound installation and video-performance art.
Jiaoyang Li is a Chinese poet and visual artist. Her literary work has appeared in LA Reviews of Books-China channel, 3:AM, Spittoon Magazine, Voice and Verse poetry magazine, and others. Her interdisciplinary practices have been supported by the New York Foundation of Art, The Immigrants Artist Biennial and others. She co-founded the interdisciplinary poetry journal 叵CLIP.
JinJin Xu is a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai invested in docu-poetics. Her work has been featured in The High Line Public Arts, The Harun Farocki Institute, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, and anthologized in Nasty Women Poets. Honors include The Poetry Society of America’s George Borgin Prize and fellowships from The Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Flaherty Seminar. She teaches hybrid workshops at NYU where she is a Lillian Vernon Fellow.
Studio 54 Reject Re-Performance by Lisa Levy, Photo Credit: Phil Buehler.
Right before the Coronavirus outbreak prompted a mass-shutdown of New York City’s galleries and museums, multidisciplinary artist, radio show host and (self-proclaimed) psychotherapist Lisa Levy recreated her classic guerrilla art project ‘Studio 54 Reject’. On the opening night of the “Studio 54: Night Magic” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Levy stationed herself outside the institution’s main entrance. Standing behind a small table encircled by red velvet ropes and four stanchion posts, she gestured toward a sign reading “Studio 54 Reject T-Shirt, $20” while imploring passersby to take pride in “reject status” with the purchase of a shirt, newly re-designed in gold glitter and the official logo.
