The artist and her work, photo courtesy of Christine Collado
Fei Li’s large-scale paintings in her solo show at First Street Gallery are layered with paint, collaged fragments of dollar bills, magazine cutouts and jetsam of daily life. These visual cues are immersed in vivid yellows, blues, and greens, altogether representing the chaos of our moment. Drawing on a wide array of sources—Chinese calligraphy, pop culture, science fiction, myth, and current events—Li invites us to engage with her own anarchic universe.
Kahori Kamiya,, performance Still at Amos Eno Gallery 10/29/2021
Multi-disciplinary artist Kahori Kamiya uses in her sculptures a wide range of materials and techniques to explore oppositions like suffering and healing, beauty and grotesque. Her current sculptures focus on motherhood, especially on breastfeeding.
On May 13, 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center in the United Arab Emirates hosted a streaming event consisting of a four-and-a-half-hour filmed version of HOLOSCENES, a durational performance installation that was originally presented there live in November of 2016. The event also included a conversation with Lars Jan, artist, writer and project director, as well as members of his team. HOLOSCENES is comprised of performers going about common, every-day tasks while the aquarium in which they are confined fills and empties with water. Although conceived as a commentary on “states of drowning” – rising seas, melting glaciers, intensifying storms, floods, and their impact on daily life – the project takes on additional meaning as we struggle with our own physical and psychological confinements during the great global quarantine.
Maggie Nowinski,Be Spilled, My Heart,2021 detail installation view with artist for scale, wHoles are acrylic and India ink on canvas, double sided, installation approximately 20’x30’x10’
About a decade ago, Maggie Nowinski shifted her focus from site specific project-based installation to her studio as the primary site of her work. She made this shift after realizing that her connection to the work had become too fragmented. She needed her studio work to become more accessible and her creativity more meditative. Since drawing has always been at the core of her work, focusing on drawing with limited materials and themes, enabled her to process a lot of the ideas she had been working through in her large-scale installations. “I was craving a way to immediately access creativity, to be in a place where if I had an hour I could walk into my studio and pick up where I’d left off on a drawing,” she says.
Steady Breath, 2003, installation/ performance, bamboo, wool, fabric, thread, 320 cm x 300 cm x 228 cm , photo credit: Margerida Correia
Each of Marya Kazoun’s sculptures, performances, and installations evolves into its own open-ended narrative, deriving from the artist’s personal journey—childhood memories and cultural background. Throughout her versatile body of work, Marya Kazoun plays with the concepts of time and space by blurring their boundaries, excavating a wide array of imagery from the realms of the collective and the subconscious to form rich and poetic installations evoking parallel universes. The eclectic materials she is using in her work—fabric, bamboo, Murano glass, plastic, paper, and whatever inspires her—assume new life and new meaning within her idiosyncratic, imaginative, and elaborate visual vocabulary.
Louisa Pancoast will perform her movement-based art installation Pinch Back at Main Window in DUMBO September 10th at 7:30pm. This will be the final performance on view at this non-profit public art space in Dumbo. The performance was commissioned by Main Window as a companion piece for Evan Paul English’s Inexterior.
Premier of Exploration Of The Everchanging, April 2019 at The New School
The theater workExploration Of The Everchanging is an experimental interactive theater piece exploring the relationship and dynamic between audience and performer. Clara Wiest created it in 2018 and has directed it in four iterations performed in NY and Denver Fringe two years in a row. Their fourth iteration took place at FiveMyles Gallery in Crown Heights, where it has been adjusted to the gallery space and visitors. Clara Wiest says this work was created out of their love for collaborative processes and their mission to bring humanity back into the rehearsal room and on stage.
In her first solo exhibition at SPANTZO Gallery, Judy Giera, explores the nuances of girlhood and the expectations of the feminine through painting, video, and performance. Giera’s bright colors and synthetic materials reference Barbie and her Dream House as well as the patriarchal conceits of the action painters of the 1950s. Judy Giera and SPANTZO founder and director, Nathaniel Garcia, share their reflections on the exhibition.
Secrets between (Wo)Men & Nature, single channel video, 2021
Chalet Comellas-Baker uses video, sound, installation, and print to interrogate memory, environment, and place. The Nashville-based artist is inspired by her Spanish, Cuban and American roots and often references Latin American diasporic histories through her personal lens of assimilation. As the co-owner of Unrequited Leisure, she brings a new dynamic of screen-based artwork with critical and topical investigations into Nashville’s growing art scene.
Logan Gabrielle Schulman + Benjamin Behrend in Conversation
Gallery View of Exhibition A Golem Sleeps and Wakes in the Mourning, 2021
A Golem Sleeps and Wakes in the Mourning, featuring works by Philadelphia based artist Logan Gabrielle Schulman and writer Benjamin Behrend,is a collaborative interactive exhibit of images, objects, and video from the theatre of grief, on view at the Old City Jewish Arts Center in Philadelphia, PA through July 2nd. Benjamin Behrend, a writer and performer, says he has recently been straddling the worlds of comedy, performance art, and also various explorations of faith, especially these past few years. Logan Gabrielle Schulman (they/them) is a queer interdisciplinary artist, with a background in theatrical performance, directing, playwriting, and designing, while also developing over the last few years a foundation in the visual arts. They say their work “primarily investigates modern crises of faith and collapse,” which they started investigating initially by drawing on their theatrical design experience through installation work, and gradually later on, in smaller scale work as well. Schulman’s work also draws upon their experience as a Jewish educator teaching about the Jewish diaspora and Holocaust history.
