representation – Art Spiel

September 2, 2026August 29, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Pandora’s BoxX Project: Grace Roselli

Grace Roselli’s Pandora’s BoxX Project began as something personal: a way to reconnect with a world of artists she’d drifted from while raising two daughters, much of it as a single mother. She started by photographing the few women artists she still knew; each led her to another, and the project grew by conversation and recommendation rather than plan. Nearly 360 portraits later — of artists alongside curators, writers, historians, educators, and museum directors — it had become a record of a community whose influence has rarely been seen whole. Roselli photographs each sitter in their own home or studio, in available light. She then lets them choose the final image, because the portrait isn’t finished until both of them recognize the person in it. Roselli discusses the project’s origins, her way of working, and what nearly 360 encounters revealed.

July 22, 2026July 21, 2026, by Natasha Chuk

Melora Kuhn’s Power of Erasure and Material Revision

History has always depended on materials. Marble, oil paint, bronze, woodcuts, engravings, museum vitrines, and photographic reproductions preserve the past as well as determine how events, ideas, and narratives are represented. Over time, images become durable, gaining a certain kind of truth value because they acquire material permanence and spread through copies. Mythological heroines, biblical women, allegorical figures, and historical subjects return across centuries through the persistence of artistic media, carrying with them the assumptions, hierarchies, and ideologies embedded in their forms. Melora Kuhn‘s solo exhibition, The Legacy of Disembodiment, on view at Private Public Gallery, starts with the recognition that if representation has helped naturalize and proliferate the narratives these images and forms carry, then materials themselves can be a site of political intervention.

January 8, 2024December 24, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Portraiture, Archives, and Representation: Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle

On the left: Jonathan Ojekunle. *Shining Light*, 2022. Oil, acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Courtesy NARS Foundation. Photographed by Young Yu Don.

Oftentimes, in thinking about the representation of the human form in art, people can get very attached to the ‘abstraction’ versus ‘figuration’ binary. These respective styles frequently get coded as opposites, and certain kinds of politics are ascribed to each. For example, ‘figuration’ is coded as a kind of politics of representation, whereas ‘abstraction’ is a politics of refusal or resistance to legibility. However, the work of Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle, all on view in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, functions beyond this binary in fresh ways. We interviewed the artists about portraiture and its relationship with archives and representation.

July 11, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Eric Wolf: When There is a Solid Fog on the Lake

Background pattern

Description automatically generated — Eric Wolf, Mooselookmeguntic Lake, 2016, ink on paper 22” x 30”. Courtesy of Pamela Salisbury Gallery

Eric Wolf’s landscape paintings are made with ink on paper and reference nature—water, sky, trees. In their sharp light and dark shapes they resemble woodcut, linoleum prints or even highly contrasted black and white photographs, but the more you look at them, the immediacy of the painted ink comes through—from the artist’s direct observation of nature, through his mind, to his hand—in a magical transformation ink flowing on paper fibers becomes river and white floating shapes become clouds.

April 1, 2021April 12, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Mira Dayal: In that Empire at Spencer Brownstone Gallery

In Dialogue with Mira Dayal

*Mira Dayal, installation view (wall text), “…In That Empire…” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist.*

In her inaugural solo exhibition with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal has rubbed by hand the entire gallery floor in graphite, resulting in a map of the space’s topography – all lines and no borders. Drawing on Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, the show explores notions of scale, control, ethics, materiality, and simulation. The show runs through April 4th, 2021.