sculpture – Page 18

October 25, 2023October 26, 2023, by Anat Or Magal

The Kite Runner from Kfar Aza

מצילומי הלילה של אביב קוץ — Night Photographs, Aviv Kutz

This article was initially published in Portfolio Magazine in Hebrew on October 17^th, 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.

October 24, 2023October 23, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Moving Image: Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu, Alexander Si, and Masha Vlasova

A sun shining through the trees

Description automatically generated — 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.

October 16, 2023September 28, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Emily Culver: The Idea of a Thing

In Dialogue

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.

October 8, 2023December 7, 2024, by Melissa Stern

A Stage Within a Stage- Ye Qin Zhu at Dimin

A person walking past a large art piece

Description automatically generated — 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.

October 4, 2023October 6, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Interior Worlds of Sculpture and Performance: Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith

Nyugen Smith and Marvin Fabien, *After the Fracture* 2019. Performance at Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Photography Pascal Bernier.

Creating work that both resists and grapples with their immigrant experiences, Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith offer distinctive approaches to sculpture. Their perspectives on their immigrant experiences show some overlap but also many differences. As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Kim’s work in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water explores how new morphologies of identity emerge across time, place, and patterns of self-reflection, while Smith and De Lara’s work that will be on view in Excavated Selves, Becoming Magic Bodies begs the viewer to interrogate place through storytelling. Together with the artists, co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand discusses the politics of art and how the artists approach personal histories and historical and political events before the exhibit.

September 25, 2023September 3, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Peter Eudenbach: From Cricket Songs to Solar Panels

In Dialogue

A framed picture of a person sitting in a chair

Description automatically generated

Virginia-based artist Peter Eudenbach says that while he has always been interested in making things, his pathway to studio art was through the humanities. The history of art and ideas became part of his language even before he found his voice as an artist. His belief that studio practice has the most potential to make sense of human experience was a significant driver in his choice to pursue an art career.

September 6, 2023September 4, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Art of Getting It Together

Jesse Benson, *Packaging*, 2003/2023. Ephemera from all projects completed in grad school, vacuum-formed plastic, plexiglass, silkscreen on board. Installation dimensions variable, individual dimensions 21 x 28.8 x 3 in. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy As-Is LA.

In Organizer, Jesse Benson’s first solo gallery show since 2017, the Los Angeles artist unpacks the “dialectic of order and chaos” by introducing heterogeneity to organizing systems.

September 4, 2023August 29, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

A Meditation on Artists’ Residencies, a Dune Shack and the Twilight Zone

Ray Wells dune shack with well pump in the bottom left foreground, Provincetown/Truro 2016, photo courtesy of the writer

Sometimes I find myself scrolling Instagram on a dark day in February or March, just wondering what it would be like to make art in a lighthouse…or in Robert Rauschenberg’s old fishing shack…or in a Florida swamp…or in a small RV in a Utah ghost town…or on an island in Italy. Artists’ residencies are a nice thing to dream about when you feel stuck or in a rut and when life is wearing you down with mundane pressures. Sure, there are the big ones like MacDowell and Yaddo, but those are uber-competitive and hard to get into. There are so many other off-the-beaten-path secret outposts that will happily allow a creative person to try on their lifestyle for a bit. As an artist, it’s so helpful to get out of dodge now and then and hit the road for new sights and sounds.

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023, by Meg Hitchcock

Martha Bone and Janice Caswell: Two Solo Shows at Garrison Art Center

A painting of a snake

Description automatically generated — Martha Bone, Mapping the Invisible #3, 2020, acrylic, aluminum enamel, charcoal, joint compound, pastel on pieced paper, 63 x 88 in., photo courtesy of the artist.

Two artists currently showing at Garrison Art Center use scale, structure, and geometry to examine and reinterpret their respective environments. Martha Bone’s large-scale paintings and assemblages express a sweeping view of the cosmos, bringing the macrocosm within our reach, while Janice Caswell’s small-scale sculptures find the infinite within the microcosm, showing us the vast potential in all forms. Both Bone and Caswell photograph their natural and man-made landscapes, later referring to these images when creating their works. And both artists construct their forms as improvisations inspired by their observations, although neither artist is interested in a literal interpretation of nature. But this is where the similarities end, their distinctive styles diverging toward an expansive contemplation of form and space and an intimate exploration of the fabricated structures that inhabit our lives.

August 14, 2023August 7, 2023, by Art Spiel

Jonathan Torres: Painting Anxiety and Beauty

In Dialogue

Sube y Baja 2021 Mixed media 47” x 39.25”

Jonathan Torres is a Puerto Rican artist born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010 and was recently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO. In his paintings and sculptures a sense of otherworldliness and living in the diaspora recur. For over 15 years, Torres’ practice has grown from exploring different emotional and mental stages that have affected the way people interact with each other throughout various stages of life—crisis and anxiety with a bent of dark humor that have been crucial to the development of Torres’ imagery.