Contemporary Art and Culture
Nestled in the constructed landscape of the High Line, Argentine artist Gabriel Chaile’s colossal sculpture, El viento sopla donde quiere (2023), embodies a nostalgic, transhistorical exploration of humanity’s place within and through nature.
Continue reading “Gabriel Chaile: Longing For Nature”
With her public sculptures, Jean Shin makes powerful statements about the climate crisis out of discarded and obsolete materials. She often engages communities in her materials sourcing, mixing social practice into her public sculpture practice to create platforms for discussion. Ingenious and esthetically considered, her works show novel ways to engage with the climate crisis.
Continue reading “Jean Shin the Alchemist: Turning Waste into Art”
At the crossroads of architecture, painting, and sculpture, one encounters the awe-inspiring steel monoliths of Tony Smith (1912–1980). Tony Smith: Wall, New Piece, One-Two-Three showcases the evolution of the artist’s sculptural practice throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Continue reading “Tony Smith: Sacred Geometry at PACE”
Sculptor Loren Eiferman has brought a veritable garden of strange to Ivy Brown Gallery this summer. Her meticulously fabricated wood sculptures create a fantastical garden of forms that are both biomorphic and often anthropomorphic at the same time.
Continue reading “A Garden Grows in the Meatpacking District”
In two side-by-side solo exhibitions by artists Lucas Simões and Dianna Frid, both currently on view at PATRON gallery, the artists appear to pursue possibilities of meaning via symbolic pluralism; however, each artist could stand to learn from the approach of the other. In Luscofusco, Lucas Simões employs the metaphoric notion of twilight, positioned as the moment when light “shifts from presence to absence,” to examine persistent symbols recurrent throughout architectural history and their subsequent phenomenological shifts within unstable temporal contexts. In pre-knowing / un-knowing, Dianna Frid abandons linguistic text in its nominal sense, instead returning in her embroidered canvases to repeating patterns that form a material foundation for legibility – the marks made by the plunging and reemerging of the needle echo the repeating geometric shapes and fragments of Roman characters, allowing pattern itself to suspend the direct relationship between symbol and text. For both artists however, adherence to a dualistic approach to symbol and material, whether limited to form in the work of Simões or “text” in that of Frid, forms an impediment, preventing either from approaching the multiplicitous possibility they seek.
Continue reading “Dianna Frid: pre-knowing / un-knowing and Lucas Simões: Luscofusco at PATRON in Chicago”
Why is home so important? Is it like religion, where we have faith that once we turn the key in the door and step over the threshold, we are safe from all those events that we believe cannot happen to us, orhappen in the place we call home? We now live in a world where the mundane, the environment we know as home is threatened. Common places are invisible because they are part of the warp and weft of our everyday existence. Our personal landmarks such as the library, the elementary school, and the ugly grocery store we quickly stop in, are no longer safe spaces. Self help and self care are great strategies for maintaining equilibrium, but may not extract the roots of our anxiety. Art obviously cannot solve these issues, but sometimes an artist who combines intellect, skill, and personal experience can act as the parakeet in the mine shaft.
Continue reading “Remnants of the Past As Omens of the Future at Turley Gallery”
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.
Continue reading “Daniel Giordano’s Post-Apocalyptic Chimeras at MASS MoCA “DANCE
The impetus for this series of conversations between a visual artist and a choreographer comes directly from my recent collaborative work with a choreographer as part of Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10. In this unique project a choreographer is paired with a visual artist to create together over two months a dance performance that integrates the two disciplines into a cohesive vision. Here is the conversation between co-founder, director, and choreographer: Julia K. Gleich and artist: Tamara Gonzales.
Continue reading “Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10 – Tamara Gonzales and Julia Gleich”
In their first joint exhibition, Every Place is Also Another, Mar Ramón Soriano and Paul Mok engage in a compelling exploration of the relationship between manmade and natural materials within the Yi gallery space. The exhibition celebrates the ordinary, featuring concrete, conduits, plants, clay, and canvas that respond to and resist the force of gravity.
Continue reading “Every Place is Also Another, Mar Ramón Soriano and Paul Mok at Yi”
Last year, I watched a TikTok video where Kiersten Lyons, an actor, was hilariously recounting all her many misfortunes in love and career. Her whole video read like a voyage of self-discovery through rejection, a tale familiar to anyone pursuing a creative life. It was part of a trend on the app that encouraged creators to pair their comeback stories with a gospel song: In the Sanctuary by the Kurt Carr Singers. In the Sanctuary is one of those songs that seems to end, but then a few moments later, starts up again. And this plays out over and over, to almost comic effect, until you don’t know if it will ever end. And it really struck me as an analogy that could be widely applied to all the arts.
Continue reading “Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts”