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Americana Archetypes Frolic Centerstage in Rebecca Morgan’s Solo Show Town and Country at Asya Geisberg Gallery

Image courtesy of Rebecca Morgan and Asya Geisberg Gallery. Photography by Etienne Frossard.

Rebecca Morgan’s solo exhibition “Town and Country at Asya Geisberg offers viewers a subversive and unflinching look into aesthetics of Americana. Panty raiding hillbillies, buxom bonnet sporting milkmaids, and characters engaged in Appalachian revelry scrupulously rendered in paint, graphite, and brass galavant throughout the exhibition. Morgan’s cringeworthy figuration walks the line between portraiture and allegory and highlights the pitfalls of romanticization. Inspired by the sucker-punch illustrations of R Crumb, Morgan’s depictions of rural life speak to notions of voyeurism, power dynamics, and the ubiquity of toxic masculinity within contemporary American culture. The works included in “Town and Country” strike a balance between hilarity and horror and provide a fantastical portal into the American psyche. I had the opportunity to chat with Morgan about her fourth solo show with the gallery and reflect upon her personal fascination with the subjects she portrays.

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Artist Without Borders: Catching Up With Jackie Neale

“Crossing Over: Immigration Stories – Anonymous” by Jackie Neale

Immigration is a hot issue. It has determined national elections and divided communities around the world. Artists have weighed in on it, often with projects lacking input from the immigrants themselves.

Jackie Neale is a fine art photographer, author, instructor, and former Imaging Producer of Online Features at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her project “Crossing Over: Immigration Stories,” she pairs large-scale cyanotype portraits of immigrants with audio of them telling their own stories. In May it will be on exhibit in Palazzo Mora at the Venice Biennale.

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Nota Bene with @postuccio [v]


The Painting Center, Present Company, Talking Pictures, NURTUREart, Slag, SOHO20, M. David & Co., Fresh Window, Studio 10

The Painting Center

I’ve been looking at and occasionally commenting on the virtues and various points of particular interest in Alannah Farrell’s lusciously pictorial, sometimes lushly lusty paintings for a number of years now, and one thing I’ve enjoyed noting is that there seems often to be something stealthily, furtively, sometimes perhaps a bit serpentinely surreptitious about many of her works. 

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Patricia Fabricant – Weaving a Fluctuating Self

After November 2016 Patricia Fabricant‘s paintings shifted  from dense and layered abstractions to self portraits depicting fluctuating expressions and altogether underscoring post election malaise. Fabricant developed an intriguing mechanism of observation and layering. Her gaze is meant to be neutral, just a stare into the mirror but throughout the weaving process,  chance yields  unintended emotions –  knowing, anxious, sad.  The artist describes in this interview for Art Spiel her process, ideas, and on going projects.

Patricia Fabricant, Emotions: Angry, Love, Confused, Sad, Shocked, Anxiety, 2016. Each gouache on paper, 16 x 12 inches, photo courtesy of the artist

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David Samuel Stern’s Portraits: The Mechanics of Longing

For photographer David Samuel Stern’s photography typically serves as a departure point for crafting tangible objects. In his Woven Portraits series for instance, Stern physically assembles pieces of his photographic portraits into new forms, aiming to fuse the notion of photographic representation with its own material nature, making a new essence. The imagery in this series may bring to mind Cubists’ and Futurists’ paintings, or David Hockney’s Polaroids, but in Stern’s  hybrid artworks, the imagery derives from a photographer’s imagination and can be distinctly traced to our digital age – the manual  counterpoints the virtual. Here Stern shares with Art Spiel some of his ideas, process, and projects.

Aaron; 2015; Photographic prints on archival translucent vellum, physically cut and woven together; 40 x 31 x ¼ in, 101.5 x 78.75 x 1.25 cm; Courtesy David Samuel Stern

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