My grandmother with a bird, 2021, silk, cotton, salt, ink, wood, 80 x 70 inches, image courtesy the artist.
Linda Sok uses in her fiber-based sculptures elaborate dyeing techniques practiced throughout Asia and imagery of her family she receives through social media to convey narratives of migration and cross-cultural pollination. Linda Sok is a second-generation descendant of survivors of the Khmer Rouge Regime, a genocidal period in Cambodia’s history that forced her family to flee Cambodia. By accessing fragments of Cambodia’s traumatic past, she attempts to recontextualize lost traditions and culture to allow living descendants to process the history through a contemporary lens.
In Demons and Fields, Shay Arick’s solo show in Tel Aviv Artists’ Studios Gallery, most sculptures are made of dried Ficus leaves he collected near his home. The vertical constructions are like linear drawings of delicate figures—they sway gently with the air or rotate in place through an automated mechanism. Each has its rhythm and character, evoking wonder and awareness of life’s fragility. Arranged along an extended white platform reminiscent of a road, these characters appear as if caught in a paused procession—some still move but remain anchored as part of a collective entity, an undefined network, or an intricate matrix. It is a nuanced and powerful metaphor for life’s transience in a complex reality. It is the second exhibition by Shay Arick since his return from New York City to Israel a year and a half prior. The show, curated by Eitan Bognim, opened on October 6th but was closed the next day on October 7th, due to the devastating Hamas attack on southern Israel and the subsequent ongoing war. The conversation with Shay Arick focuses on his art and his process.
In Dialogue with Linnéa Gad, Magdalena Dukiewicz, and Anna Ting Möller
Linnéa Gad. Detail from Shoal II. Photographed by David Schulze. Courtesy of The Immigrant Artist Biennial.
Instead of transcribing a previously established set of ideologies through scholastic mediums, Linnéa Gad, Magdalena Dukiewicz, and Anna Ting Möller engage with materials that “breathe”—materials whose lives and afterlives warrant separate biographies.
Presented within the context of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, Swedish artist Gad creates sculptures with limestone, oysters, lapis lazuli, and other materials profoundly connected to the Earth’s carbon cycle. On Governors Island, her sculptures, Shoals I-II, evoke humanity’s resonance with and reliance upon nature. Polish-born artist Dukiewicz juxtaposes industrial components with provocative, organic materials such as hair and blood. In the group show, Enmeshed, Dreams of Water, at NARS Foundation, Dukiewicz’s Object #6 (2023) contains decay, regeneration, and fluidity elements into beautifully translucent and sculptural artwork. Chinese-born Swedish artist Möller, whose work will be presented in Parasites and Vessels at Accent Sisters, unpacks the convoluted social history of kinship via kombucha cultures. The oysters, hair, and kombucha are not subjected to manipulating the artists’ hands; instead, the materials are collaborators in these projects, bringing their subjectivities, histories, and sociological implications into the creative process.
Together with TIAB’s co-curator, Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, the artists speak about their work about technology, materiality, and ecosystems.
Donna Zarbin-Byrne, Like Water from a Rock. Here Once Was Ocean, still image from augmented reality animation. Photo courtesy, Donna Zarbin-Byrne
In her installation-based exhibition, Like Water from a Rock, at Arts Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, Donna Zarbin-Byrne responds to the landscapes of the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas and the West Maui mountains, connecting material sites with an internal process. Western art traditions often portray the landscape as an idealized place to conquer and expand. Zarbin-Byrne frames the landscape as a place to experience the sensate.
On view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through November 26
Artist Profile
The Artist in his Studio, Great Barrington, MA. Image Credit: Matt Moment
When Dai Ban first traveled from his native Japan to the United States, he was struck by the nonchalant vibrance of American street art. The year was 1985, and although the golden age of graffiti had come and gone, its ethos had indelibly permeated the fine art world. Imagery that had been considered lowbrow just ten years prior became astronomically salable, so long as it decorated a canvas and not a subway car. Ban was bemused by the transformative power of gallery spaces. “Anything you show at the gallery looks like some kind of art,” he observed.
Reproducing as an Im/migrant: Young Joo Lee, Maria Kulikovska, and Coralina Rodriguez Meyer
Young Joo Lee. Disgraceful Blue, 2016. Digital Animation. 10:24 min. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.
During a talk at NYU, feminist post-Marxist scholar and author Silvia Federici said: “The image of the worker is not the image of the person at the assembly line; it’s the immigrant.” With this statement, she is referring to vulnerable migrants whose movements are fueled by the climate crisis, corporate control of natural resources, and economics. With her social practice project Mama Spa Botanica, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer attempts to recreate the bond between nature and the female body to enhance healthcare for black and brown pregnant women, empowering them to advocate for themselves and their communities within an inadequate maternal healthcare system. In her book, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, to explain the link between migrants and reproduction, Federici cites “the war on human reproduction” which encapsulates the separation of people from land, soil, sea, and independent means of reproduction acted out by corporate interests. This is a separation that Rodriguez Meyer both highlights and resists in her work.
This article was initially published in Portfolio Magazine in Hebrew on October 17th, 2023. It was translated into English by Sharon Yam Sananes and Ariane Goldberg Davidson and edited by Art Spiel. This publication in Art Spiel is in collaboration with Portfolio Magazine.
The Kutz family had always found hope and solidarity in their ability to create. It was their way of managing and flourishing as a family and as individuals. Aviv, Livnat, Rotem, Yonatan, and Iftach Kutz were murdered in their home. Aviv’s sister, Talya Kutz Shamir—artist and art therapist—talks about the family on her Instagram account, using their art as a jumping-off point for conversation.
Moving Image: Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu, Alexander Si, and Masha Vlasova
Masha Vlasova. Waterlands, 2022. Experimental film,15 min. 4K. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.
Surrealists invigorated the film genre in the 1920s and 30s, especially the Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—who at the time were living in Paris—with their non-linear narrative film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Surrealist elements reign in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone’s exhibition Excavated Selves, Magic Bodies at Alchemy Gallery—where surreal elements allow bodies to thrive, often in hostility. A garment used in the video work Mourning Ritual created by artist duo AYDO (Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu) on the border between North and South Korea is included in the show. It uses spirituality, ancestry, and surreal landscape to engage with the separation of families and loss of connection. In Parasites and Vessels at Accent Sisters, Alexander Si employs video matter of fact to document his process of crafting a Birkin bag. Masha Vlasova’s poetic work Waterlands investigates surface and texture in the landscape in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water at NARS Foundation.
Virginia-based artist Emily Culver’s background is as multifaceted as her artwork. With a father who is a carpenter and contractor and a mother who transitioned from being a midwife to a nursing professor, she was raised in a world that merged craft and body. This upbringing influenced her own creative direction. Adept at procedural tasks, she nonetheless felt a pull towards a less constrained form of expression. College introduced her to painting, but she soon sought more than just surfaces, finding herself intrigued by the interplay of gravity, physics, and mechanics.
A Stage Within a Stage-mixed media on eight fitted panels. 5 x 27 feet. 2022-2023
There’s a riot going on. That’s what I thought as I stood in front of Ye Qin Zhu’s large-scale installation piece at Dimin in Tribeca. The gallery space painted a matte black that seems to absorb all the light in the room, is dominated by one wall-mounted assemblage that is 27 feet long and five feet tall. There is a bench placed in front so that the viewer can take a few minutes to absorb the full volume of information and energy radiating from this piece.
