Tamara Kostianovsky – Between Wounds and Folds at Smack Mellon

Featured Artist

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The artist at Smack Mellon, photo courtesy of Rachel Vera Steinberg 

Between Wounds and Folds, Tamara Kostianovsky’s solo exhibition at Smack Mellon, features sculptures which link issues of gender-based violence, personal memory, and ecological destruction through consumption into a complex and speculative ecosystem. Her dimensional forms, both soft and brutal, combine discarded fabric with industrial materials, often drawing their shape from mutilated fauna and flora in various states of decay, including tree stumps, cow carcasses, and birds of prey.

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Overflowing Skies: Stephanie Eche at High Line Nine

Art Spiel Photo Story

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Agua/Cielo, 2021 Cotton, wool, indigo, wire and steel. Photo by Brian Schutza courtesy of the artist.

“…I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places in time.”

– Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

The undulating asymmetry of Stephanie Eche’s weavings in her solo exhibition Handmade Landscapes: Ocean Meets Sky that ran through July 26th, 2021 at High Line Nine, leaves space for you to interpret. The first work that your eyes encounter, Agua/Cielo, mirrors staring out at an ocean horizon that becomes the air above, a direct embodiment of the show’s title. The loosely woven piece speaks to the cyclical nature of water; its evaporation and transformation into rain that returns it to earth. 

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Tina Struthers: Life in Fiber


Tina Marais Struthers, studio in Montreal, 2020, Photo courtesy of Josiane Farand

Tina Marais Struthers’ work develops from a rigorous, personal, and highly technical consideration of fiber as an evocative medium deftly addressing subjective experience, memories of place, and processes of change and growth. Struthers says she is fascinated by how fabric reflects and absorbs light, how it can entice us to touch, and feel comfort, or discomfort, by visual directing textures—”In this world during the pandemic, this need to touch, to feel textural comfort I think has really been amplified. I often challenge the notion of textile as being soft, in manipulating it to appear as metal sculptural forms.”

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Form or Function at ArtPort Kingston

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Exhibition view

The group exhibition Form or Function at ArtPort Kingston features works of various media, exploring the relationship of objects in between contemporary art, design and craft with an attempt to blur the lines and create dialogue. The exhibition overall prompts a question – “Looking at everyday images, objects, tools and materials, we have very diverse emotional bonds with them. An artist creates a dialogue with their materials, providing intentions. Is it an object’s form, their history, or the story we create that attracts us?”

The show is curated by Laurie De Chiara, featuring works by Chuck von Schmidt, Karen Jaimes, Staveley Kuzmanov, Traci Johnson, Barbara Marks, Ellie Murphy, Courtney Puckett, Jim Osman, Rachel Urkowitz and Gabriele Hamill, Inna Babaeva, Clemens Kois, Sophi Kravitz, Christina Kruse, Jeanne Atkin, Kathleen Vance, Erika DeVries, and Rodger Stevens. The show runs through June 6th.

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Tomo Mori: Fibrous Points of Origin


Filling the gap, 2020. 24″x30″. Acrylic, painted canvas fabric on masonite board.

Tomo Mori is a Japanese-born and New York City-based fiber artist who has been focusing on two main bodies of work: wall based collage series and sculptural
installations . In both she is working with used materials like old clothes and linens, fabrics she keeps reusing and transforming into new forms. During this 2021 Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Tomo Mori shares what brought her to art making, what role her cultural background plays in her work, and what are some of her recurrent themes and processes.

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Melissa Joseph: Née at REGULAR•NORMAL

In Dialogue with Melissa Joseph

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Intergenerational, 42 x 131 in, needle felted wool and sari silk on inkjet print on Indian duppioni silk, 2020-2021

Née, Melissa Joseph’s first solo show in New York, features 27 wall based works and 5 sculptures, utilizing mostly wool felt and textiles assembled through a highly intuitive process. The show runs at REGULAR•NORMAL through May 2, 2021.

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Katya Grokhovsky: FANTASYLAND at Smack Mellon

In Dialogue with Katya Grokhovsky

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Katya Grokhovsky, Fantasyland, 2021. Images courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photos: Etienne Frossard


Katya Grokhovsky ‘s site-specific installation FANTASYLAND at Smack Mellon explores the rise and fall of a fantastical empire and its uncertain future. Giant plush toys, inflatable beach balls, deconstructed and re-assembled mannequins, an unfinished carousel structure, recycled parachute canopies, wallpaper, a glowing neon sign, and performance videos, altogether underscore American society’s surplus of objects, and unbridled desire for material possessions, ironically, the capitalist symbol of freedom. The artist scrutinizes the American Dream through an immigrant lens, exposing a desirable yet unattainable mirage. Katya Grokhovsky’s work is currently on view in the solo exhibition FANTASYLAND at Smack Mellon, through May 2nd, 2021.

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Jessica Lagunas: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center


The artist and “Por siempre joven” (Forever Young) Series. Installation at the Bronx Museum’s The Block Gallery, 2019. Photo courtesy Argenis Apolinario/The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Jessica Lagunas is Interested in working with unconventional materials—makeup, hair, perfume, organic materials—through video-performance, installation, drawing, prints, artist books, embroidery, and recently, weaving. She is a New York City-based Latinx artist, whose group exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio’s The (S) Files Biennial, The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and Laxart, among others.

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Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary

In Dialogue with Holly Wong

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Holly Wong working on “Phoenix.” Graphite on drafting film with sewing. 132 x 132 in. Photo courtesy of Al Wong

Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:

“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”

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Joy Curtis: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center


The artist holding a “green study”. Photo courtesy of the artist

Joy Curtis was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, and grew up in rural Indiana and Iowa. In college, she studied painting while making objects outside the medium. Later, Curtis earned her MFA at Ohio University where she studied sculpture. In 2002, she moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and has been living and working there since that time. Curtis has been represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend since 2010, and has had 5 solo shows with them. She has been included in other recent exhibitions at the Pelham Art Center, Ceysson and Bénétière, the Aldrich Museum (CT), and T.S.A (Brooklyn). Curtis is the recipient of fellowships from Socrates Sculpture Park and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, ArtCritical, and Saatchi Online, and she has been featured on Gorky’s Granddaughter and James Kalm’s Rough Cut video blogs. Currently Curtis is working on a large, outdoor sculpture made of fabric that will be included in a summer show.

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