protest art – Art Spiel

October 5, 2024October 7, 2024, by Santiago Zabala

kennardphillipps Greatest Emergency

This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The fourth article in this series highlights the work of kennardphillipps.

April 6, 2023April 6, 2023, by Art Spiel

William Norton – Styx & Stones- at The Boiler – ELM Foundation

Photo Story

A picture containing building, graffiti

Description automatically generated — “Cop,CodPiece, and Tigger”, “Lurking Cop”, “Cutting the Head Off the Thug”, “in the rain i feel myself swallowed, savored, teased by your tongue”

William Norton’s large-scale paintings at The Boiler – ELM Foundation evoke imagery of oppression and protest through gestural graphic marks and bold color on recycled vinyl advertisements as canvas. “We are always being sold something in this age of hyper-ventilating propaganda. And there is just enough of the advertising image left over to titillate the viewers’ eyeballs,” Norton says.

January 26, 2022January 25, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Doomscrolling at Petzel

In Conversation with Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston

Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston, “May 27” (2021), multi-color woodblock print on paper. 57.5 x 42.25 inches (courtesy the artists and Petzel, New York)

The woodblock prints by the artists Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston at Petzel refer to recent harsh events that occurred in the United States and the way we perceive them through iconic media imagery. The prints specifically address 18 moments that took place between May 24^th, 2020 to January 6^th, 2021—marked by the COVID pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the ensuing protests, and the insurrection at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is on view at the gallery Upper East Side location through February 12, 2022.

November 22, 2021November 23, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Baris Gokturk: Danse Macabre in Public Spaces: Painting Euphoria and Madness in Times of Crisis

Baris Gokturk, working on All Saints at The Boiler@ ELM Foundation

Baris Gokturk’s installations are intricate, layered, and admirably ambitious in both meaning and form. The Turkish born New York based artist asks the big questions – what is his role as an artist, individual, immigrant within the larger context of a world in crisis? In All Saints he exhibited at the Boiler space at the ELM foundation he combined imagery of dance and fire into a monumental installation.

December 21, 2020December 21, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Joyce Yamada: Contemplating the Human Species

Joyce Yamada, *Portrait, 2019*, photo courtesy of Nila Onda

Painter Joyce Yamada grew up on the west coast. She spent her childhood vacations in the beautiful national parks of the US and Canada where pristine forests and the Pacific coast were imprinted in her visual memory. She recalls that although as a teenager she realized that art is her task in life, struggling to survive by minimum wage work led her to medical school which she completed and then subsequently became a diagnostic radiologist. This science background has fed her mind and artwork ever since. Yamada says she is a painter because she conceptualizes in images rather than in words — “when puzzled, my mind juxtaposes or fuses unexpected images, often leading to new work,” she says. For instance, an early series, Body, Earth, came to her in art school — while looking at the hills across the bay from San Francisco she saw the low rounded hills as the reclining body of a woman. The juxtaposed imagery meant to her that we are intimately and indivisibly part of earth and of nature, that what we do to the earth we do to ourselves. She has subsequently seen this idea expressed in indigenous cultures, and it became central in her work.

November 5, 2020October 28, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

All the Way to Hell

In Dialogue with Eliza Evans

Last year, after artist Eliza Evans learned she had inherited the equivalent of three acres of mineral rights in Oklahoma, she started receiving offers from agents for fossil fuel companies to buy or lease these rights. After researching the law, Eliza Evans learned that she could not refuse and that the property could be fracked without her consent if the neighboring property owners agreed. Eliza Evans says that since like most artist she does not like being told what to do, she took a deep dive on mineral rights and property law to see if she could create some options. This resulted in the conceptual art activism of All the Way to Hell.

All the Way to Hell is giving away fractions of this property to as many people as possible. Nearly 300 people are participating so far, and signups will remain open until mid-December. This aggressive fragmentation of the property drives up the driller’s acquisition costs and will impede their interest. All the Way to Hell is a platform for a new form of protest, the foundation for a 100-year sit-in. Although each fractional mineral property is minuscule from a practical and legal perspective, the space it occupies is vast. All the Way to Hell may be the largest land art project ever.

October 26, 2020September 17, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Nancy Elsamanoudi in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Nancy Elsamanoudi

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.”

June 27, 2020June 27, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Dasha Bazanova

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

What To Where When, September 2019, burnt wood installation in progress,
@Gridspace gallery

Dasha Bazanova was born in Arkhangelsk, Russia right before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a child she spent most of her time at her grandparents’ farm in a small village called Kulikovo. In 2004 she moved to Moscow where she got her Master’s Degree in 2011 at the Moscow State University of International Relations. In 2012 she moved to New York. She earned an MFA at Long Island University in 2014, and in the intervening years she has shown extensively all across the United States.Her artwork is inspired by her childhood memories and Russian folklore, but with an ironic 21^st Century twist. She lives and works in Bushwick, NY. Her work is currently featured in The Making of… at Art Port Kingston, which has just reopened again for visits during weekends.

June 15, 2020June 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Jessica Segall

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Reverse alchemy in Conga (Màxima), 2019, Photograph. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Jessica Segall is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is exhibited internationally including recent/ current shows at The Fries Museum and The National Museum of Jewish American History and upcoming at Thomas Erben Gallery, The Coreana Museum of Art and The Center for Art Research. Jessica received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, The Harpo Foundation and Art Matters and attended residencies at The Van Eyck Academie, The MacDowell Colony and Skowhegan. Her work has been included in Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. Jessica will have a work in a show on ecofeminism in June 19th at Thomas Erben Gallery and she will also participate in the Virtual 2020 Dumbo Open Studio that was postponed (TBA) due to solidarity with the movement of Black Lives Matter.

July 11, 2018November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Visual Arts Center of New Jersey – Global Angst

“Containment”, partial Installation view at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, (right wall: Erin Diebboll, center front: Linda Ganjian, left: david Packer), photo by Etienne Frossard

The group of international artists throughout the two exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey – “Containment” and “Oh what a world! What a world!” are altogether reflecting on social, political, and cultural changes in recent history. “Oh what a world! What a world!”, located in the Main Gallery, addresses a wide array of issues related to immigration, gender equality, civil rights, policing, protest, and the state of our Democracy. “Containment”, at the Eisenberg and Strolling Gallery, addresses specifically hot trade issues – how the use of shipping containers affects our ability to trade and ship goods globally, coming to the forefront with Trump’s attempts to remove the country from existing trade deals. Both shows were curated by Mary Birmingham. The following preview on the two shows is largely based on text provided by the NJ Visual Arts Center.

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