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.
Upon entering this exhibition, I was taken to the wall pieces immediately, especially the use of vibrantly colored embroidery string mimicking paint strokes on the canvas. Art historical references and connections are very prevalent in the works of this exhibit. It was refreshing to see this conversation of the painting canon being brought up in a contemporary light by the use of this novel medium. Amer’s love and interest in the history of painting is apparent, and her works show art historical influences intertwined with intuition and a strong painterly hand that is present despite there being no paint in the show.
An energetic jaunt through the various art fairs over the past week revealed curious findings and trends: Relational aesthetics, atmospheric landscapes, the human psyche, and acts of care are on view in the forms of plants, animals, & organisms. Rendered in splashy colors, text-based media and kitschy coolness, the various moods are quirky and earnestly expressed through painting, sculpture/ceramics, textiles and installations. Here is a roundup of some booths that hit the mark and kept it refreshing.
Immi C. Storrs is obsessed with depth: she manipulates it, refusing to render it as-is. Instead, her adventures in depth-perception range from steeply sloping forests—her favorite subject— to thickly layered glass light-box dioramas, and to truncated and oddly meshed animal forms in bronze. While the animals merge together into multi-legged seemingly mythological beasts, or emerge pseudo-two dimensionally from a bronze cube, it’s less about the creatures themselves—horses, sheep, and oxen, but more of a slow-down lugubrious space in which forms melt together and time becomes unpredictable.
Installation view with Naomi Lev at The Space Between Knowing exhibition at The TL Studio. Photographed by Argenis Apolinario. Left (top to bottom): Shony Rivnay, The Loss of Innocence Squared, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch; Shony Rivnay, Keep Movin’, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch. Right: Shony Rivnay, Initiation of Movement No.1, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 77 inch.
Naomi Lev is a curator, cultural program director, and arts writer based in New York City. She works closely with living artists and calls her approach “Process Curating”—a method that follows a project from its earliest stages through final installation. It’s about long-term exchange and staying present as ideas shift.
Mark Dagley and Lauri Bortz of the Abaton Project Room
Mark Dagley is an artist who has exhibited his paintings and sculptures, which explore the intersection of abstraction and materiality, in New York and Europe since the 1980s. Lauri Bortz is a playwright and author whose farcical tragedies have been performed in theaters in New York, and over the past decade, she has created a series of children’s books. Abaton Project Room, or APR, is a temporary exhibition space conceived by Lauri, located at 11 Broadway, in the historic Bowling Green Office Building in Lower Manhattan. Over a one-year period (August 2024-2025), APR is alternating monthly presentations of Mark Dagley’s work—paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—with thematic group exhibitions as well as selections from Mark and Lauri’s personal collection.
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.
Rose Briccetti’s interdisciplinary and intermedia practice combines deep historical, artistic, and scientific research with artmaking to re-present natural and cultural histories to question systems of power. Her work surrealistically weaves together strange truths, biology, museology, cultural myths, internet culture, and personal experience using humor and vivid visuals.
Jai Hart, Finding Harmony from the Neckline to My Right Heel, 2025, Acrylic on canvas and poly-fill, 72h x 41w in
When I first heard about the pairing of Jai Hart and Kelly Worman in a two-person show at Freight + Volume, I was puzzled. Their formal vocabularies appeared too distinct, too dissonant. But upon entering the exhibition, my skepticism dissolved. Their differences are not discordant—they are dialectical. Both artists, working through abstraction and form, propose modes of seeing and making that are sensitive, inquisitive, and quietly defiant. While their materials and gestures diverge, Hart and Worman converge in a feminist-postmodern sensibility that challenges the hegemonic logics of painting, and, more subtly, the gendered histories that underpin it.
FELLOW IMAGINARIES installation (three pieces), Carole d’Inverno and Susan Rostow, (left) Telling Bones, 21 x 19 x 15, paper, metal, bone, plastic, wood, pigments. Rostow, (middle) North-South, 42 x 71, vinyl emulsions, ink pens, inks on canvas, rod, d’Inverno, (right) Under Cover, 24 x 12 x 12, wood, sisal rope, wire. d’Inverno
Carole d’Inverno and Susan Rostow live a block apart. Over the past year, they passed sculptures between studios, texted images and material references, built paper maquettes, and revised their work without fixed goals. Fellow Imaginaries, now on view at Atlantic Gallery, result from this sustained exchange. The exhibition includes fully collaborative hybrid sculptures made jointly by d’Inverno and Rostow, alongside individual works by each artist: sculptures by Rostow and both sculptures and paintings by d’Inverno. Though distinct in authorship, all the works were developed in close dialogue. They respond to one another in form and material and in how they occupy space. Walking into the show feels like entering a toy store—joyous, playful, a place of invention. The visitor becomes a child again, wondering how things were made and how they might move.
