Alignments at Flinn Gallery in CT is a three-person exhibition featuring abstract work by Meghan Brady, Ben Godward, and Erika Ranee, curated by Tracy McKenna. The work triangulates around shapes and strata. It runs through January 26th, 2022.
Featured Project: with curator Maria De Los Angeles
Ryan Bonilla. Hope, 2004. Encapsulated Digital C Print, 20 in x 30 in.
The group show, A message from the Underground at Mana Contemporary Jersey City, curated by artist and curator Maria De Los Angeles, featuring 18 artists from Mana Contemporary whose work explores current political climate, love, and sense of place. The exhibition runs through 1/15/2022, 3rd floor, Mana Contemporary in Jersey City
InBlack Moves First, NYC-based artist Kim Dacres brings together eight new sculptures where all chess-like pieces depict solely black female figures, based on characters from the artist’s own life – mother, grandmother, sisters, aunts. The show is on view through January 2, 2022 at GAVLAK Palm Beach.
Featured Project: TIAB 2023 with Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Katherine Adams, Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, and Meghana Karnik
From left: Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Katherine Adams, and Meghana Karnik. Photographed by Yann Chashanovski.
The Immigrant Artist Biennial is the first and only biennial to celebrate and amplify the diverse voices of immigrant artists and its second edition will take place in 2023 hosted by institutional partners. A venue for artist-curators, the biennial’s founding artistic director Katya Grokhovsky, who curated the first edition, has appointed artists Bianca Abdi-Boragi and Meghana Karnik alongside curators Katherine Adams and Anna Mikaela Ekstrand to form the core curatorial team. Further pushing the boundaries for curation, the team has chosen to collaboratively curate the biennial and have begun a year of communal research and studio visits aiming to announce their concept in 2022.
From line drawings and cutouts to wall reliefs and sculptures, lines shift forms throughout the group exhibition Drawing a Line at Five Myles. Curator Klaudia Ofwona Draber says she was inspired by the gallery founder Hanne Tierney’s vision to organize a drawing exhibition. Ofwona Draber’s interest in social justice and post-colonialism guided her choice of artists as well as the theme of the exhibition – drawing a line as an action of drawing boundaries, whether to protect personal boundaries in the quietude of one’s own home, or at the heart of a political conflict. “By drawing a line, we protect ourselves, our families and our communities from the violence and inequalities that are happening around us,” says Ofwona Draber.
“Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land”, installation of exhibition, courtesy The Moody Center for the Arts and albertz benda gallery. Photo by Nash Baker
Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.
In Rebecca Welz’s recent sculpture series, the sculptor reflects on the global phenomena of people who have been displaced from their homes due to a wide range of hardships—political, economic, climate change. The steel structures in her Displacement series represents a quest for safety and belonging. This body of work is featured at the June Kelly Gallery through January 4th, 2022.
New York based artist Juan Hinojosa collects found objects from everywhere he passes by. A toy snake, a wooden bird, a Good Luck charm, fragments from advertisements and billboards—find their way into his intricate compositions, creating altogether layered sculptural assemblages and intricate two dimensional collages. In both dimensional and flat formats, Hinojosa’s vocabulary is grounded in Pop aesthetics with a tint of Surrealism. Through super vivid colors and elaborate graphic shapes he depicts imaginary worlds where extravagant shrines and hybrid flowery creatures become a convincing presence. When you get closer, you can most likely trace where they came from.
Baris Gokturk, working on All Saints at The Boiler@ ELM Foundation
Baris Gokturk’s installations are intricate, layered, and admirably ambitious in both meaning and form. The Turkish born New York based artist asks the big questions – what is his role as an artist, individual, immigrant within the larger context of a world in crisis? In All Saints he exhibited at the Boiler space at the ELM foundation he combined imagery of dance and fire into a monumental installation.
In Jon Bunge’s exhibition, Presence, at the Bonsack Gallery of John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri, 23 sculptures, moving and turning in invisible air currents, appear to float inches above a hardwood floor. Made from the branches of trees, they evoke both a sense of mystery and a clear expression of the universe’s forces. Eight more works are included in a display case outside of the installation.