Featured Project: with curator Maria De Los Angeles
Ryan Bonilla. Hope, 2004. Encapsulated Digital C Print, 20 in x 30 in.
The group show, A message from the Underground at Mana Contemporary Jersey City, curated by artist and curator Maria De Los Angeles, featuring 18 artists from Mana Contemporary whose work explores current political climate, love, and sense of place. The exhibition runs through 1/15/2022, 3rd floor, Mana Contemporary in Jersey City
The Front room Gallery hosts an online tour of “Aqua/Terra”, the beautiful and evocative solo exhibition of sculpture, installation, photograms, layered egg tempera and encaustic drawings by New York Artist, Beth Dary. The artworks in “Aqua/Terra” explore the power of water throughout natural forms and forces of nature, as a force to shape the land, sustain life, and destroy it. Beth Dary’s work also responds to the effect of human activity on land and water – bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide captured in Arctic ice, the rising tides due to the climate crisis, and fractal patterns formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.
Message in a Bottle, installation view at Ground Floor Gallery, 2019, photo courtesy of Jordan Rathkopf
In Message in a Bottle, the current solo installation show at Ground Floor Gallery in Park Slope, the Gowanus based artist Karen Mainenti transforms the gallery into what at first glance looks like an upscale beauty boutique. Mainenti uses this platform to explore the mechanisms at work in the packaging and marketing of beauty products over time, drawing on her own complex relationship to the products themselves. Much of Mainenti’s work examines the subtle but powerful societal expectations of women that show up in ordinary objects. The delicately cast porcelain replicas of her own cosmetics highlight the way objects can be gendered, even when reduced to their elemental forms. Often using humor as a sly way to invite the viewer in, her drawings of creams, lotions and serums using marketing language from real products highlight the inherent contradiction in the ways we read these messages as absurd, yet suspend that disbelief at the cash register when we buy them. Having visited the show when it opened, I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Karen about how this exhibition came together and how the various series within it have developed over time.
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.
Altoon Sultan, Convergence, 2018, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 9 1/2 x 12 in. Photo courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art.
Altoon Sultan‘s egg tempera paintings depict close ups of agricultural equipment with incisive color and architectural forms. Her paintings consistently reveal inner tensions: the shapes are abstracted and literal, the colors are vivid and subtle, the space is shallow and dimensional. The artist shares with Art Spiel some of her rich experience as a painter, her work process, and her on-going projects.
Katarina Wong, Murmuration, Detail of wax casts of fingerprints
Katarina Wong is an artist and curator whose interests range from cross-cultural pollination to Buddhist perception of interdependence, expressed through a myriad of media such as sculptural ceramics and works on paper. She shares with Art Spiel her background, ideas,and process.
Beth Dary, Elements of Ambivalence, 2006, fabric, pins, encaustic, 10’x17’x4″, photo courtesy of the artist
Beth Dary‘s sculptures, installations and drawings have in common deep layers of meaning, imaginative combinations of materials, and subtle delicacy in form and color. Her insatiable curiosity in exploring diverse materials and processes results in a wide array of formal expressions, ranging from ceramics to photography; fabric to glass. She shares with Art Spiel some insight into her work throughout the years, her process explorations, and her upcoming projects.
