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Armita Raafat: Traces and Silences at High Noon

Featured Artist
Untitled, 2023, resin, Styrofoam, paper mache, subway tiles, mirror, fabric, mesh, acrylic, and Sumi ink 58” x 41” x 7”, photo courtesy Max Yawney

In Traces and Silences, exhibited at High Noon Gallery in New York, Armita Raafat showcases multimedia sculptures and handmade paper works. By blending elements like the historic Muqarnas from Islamic architecture with subway tiles from her current base in New York, Raafat offers a juxtaposition that liberates and challenges traditional associations of these materials. Here, the artist elaborates on the insights behind this body of work.

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Daniel Giordano’s Post-Apocalyptic Chimeras at MASS MoCA 

Artist Profile
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Daniel Giordano: Love from Vicki Island

Nonconformity comes as second nature to Daniel Giordano. Wearing an imaginative interpretation of a beekeeper’s outfit, complete with gloves, toe socks, and trekking sandals, he exudes unfailing politeness, erudition, and gravitas. Yet, behind a sly, sardonic smile, Giordano’s true prankster nature reveals itself. The Newburgh-based artist is a volcanic force in the contemporary art world; a genuine, generous, borderline-ascetic vegan, who carries his own homemade food and filtered water wherever he goes. Giordano’s first solo museum show, Love from Vicki Island, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) perfectly captures his heterodox approach to art creation.

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Heidi Norton – The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill

Featured Artist

Heidi Norton and Eileen Jeng Lynch, curator.

Heidi Norton’s site-specific installation at Wave Hill examines the intricate links between humans and the natural world. Inspired by Wave Hill’s grounds and the Sun Porch’s architecture. Activated by sunlight, Norton’s installation is made of sculptures and large, vibrant photographic scrolls draping from the ceiling and undulating through the space. Norton says that the configuration of scrolls encompasses landscapes of present and past, incorporating recent photos that the artist took of the gardens, as well as archival images. Norton’s work draws on her rural upbringing by New Age homesteaders. She upcycles discarded plant clippings from Wave Hill’s gardens, repurposes compost and deconstructs past work, incorporating it into new pieces—speaking to sustainability, contemplating how memories are embedded in materials and landscapes, as well as how a sense of place is recorded through time and changes in the land. Heidi Norton with her site specific installation, The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill, July 16th – August 28th, 2022. Meet the Artist recording can be found here

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Showings in Four Dimensions

Showings in Four Dimensions (installation view L-R), Darius Yektai, Waiting For Death Or Slavery: After Delacroix, 2022, Elise Ansel, Celestial Lounge Chair, 2021, Darius Yektai, Untitled Falling Flowers, 2021 & Kyle Hittmeier Natural Le Coultre, 2022. Photo: AB NY Gallery

As soon as the formula codified that a contemporary artist could reach a new level of institutional engagement once they proclaimed their inspiration from generations of art historical masterpieces, the flood gates opened to practitioners solely deploying references to the canon to project their careers farther and faster. With encyclopedic museums refreshing their image by aligning themselves with the success of the contemporary art world’s darlings, by connecting their creative process to roots foregrounded in the rich mire of historical artworks, new publications and programming surfaced. Notably The Artist Project at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was launched in 2015, and most recently even the gilded age indulgence of The Frick Collection created their exhibition series Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at their temporary home on Madison Avenue.

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Chellis Baird – Redefining Sculpture

Featured Artist

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Portrait of Chellis Baird in her studio. Photo courtesy of the artist

Chellis Baird’s work bridges the fine line between painting, sculpture and textile work, which is no easy feat. Baird’s sculptures require that extra layer of attention in order to really take in all the details: bright colors interwoven with gold accents, as well as the hint of foreign materials bulging from underneath. Her current exhibition, The Touch of Red, explores the significance of the color red in Baird’s practice. The color red is Baird’s favorite color, and holds much significance to her. The color conjures a wide range of symbols, feelings and history, including the contrasting emotions of love and pain, as well as symbols such as good luck, war and seduction. For this exhibition, Baird developed a shade of red with local suppliers in New York and Georgia and also developed her first metal and rosin works titled Serpentine and Flirt with the assistance of a foundry in Long Island City. The exhibition is up through April 8th at the National Arts Club.

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Entanglement at BravinLee Programs

In Conversation


Entanglement (Paintings by Cecile Chong, Sculpture by Jack Henry, courtesy BravinLee Programs

Entanglement is a new exhibition of works by Jac Lahav, Cecile Chong, Jack Henry, and Erik Olson. The work ranges from the psychological to the sentimental with many references to the natural world. Much of the work is dissimilar, like a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing leopard print and a leafy necklace which stands in contrast to atmospheric encaustic paintings referencing Chinese landscape. Together these pieces take us deep into a post-pandemic psyche. The binding theme is plants, using nature as a metaphor for an internal growth many of us have experienced during the past two years. Entanglement opened on Thursday March 3rd and is up at BravinLee Programs in Chelsea New York until April 9th. We sat down with gallerist Karin Bravin and two of the artists to talk about the show.

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Armita Raafat: Reflective Tactility


Site specific installation, 2016, The Horse & Pony Fine Arts, Berlin

Armita Raafat is a New York based artist, born in Chicago and raised in Iran. Her sculptures, installations, and wall reliefs draw upon traditional Iranian architecture, specifically the Muqarnas Domes, the vaulting element in Islamic architecture. She is exploring their form and symbolism through her personal lens by using contemporary materials, transplanting them into new cultural, historical, and geographical contexts to assume a new meaning.

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The Location of Serenity at D R O N E

In Dialogue with Gryphon Rue

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The Location of Serenity (installation image, 2021). Photo: Jimi Billingsley

The inaugural group exhibition at D R O N E, a non-profit arts space in Tribeca, brings together four New York-based artists – Elsa Rensaa, Viktor Timofeev, Yasue Maetake and Eddie Natal – who explore recent memory from loss and death to spiritual regrowth. Gryphon Rue, a New York-based artist, composer, and curator, organized the exhibition and sheds some light on its premise. The show closes June 29th, or July 10th, 2021, depending on imminent leasing of the space.

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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 21st 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.

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Artists on Coping: Daniel John Gadd

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

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Daniel John Gadd, Assembling an Octopus, 2019,111 x 100 x 12 in. – oil, wood, copper, rope, mirrored glass, steel, epoxy resin and marble on wooden supports

Daniel John Gadd is an artist living and working in New Jersey. His work blurs the boundaries of painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, and “high” and “low” art. His work is fragile, violent, aggressive, and sensitive all at once, reflecting (literally, with his use of mirrors in much of his work), and sharing our complexity with an acceptance of all of what we are, and in the end, what makes us human. His most recent exhibition Animal was on display at M. David & Co. last fall.

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