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Artists on Coping: Morgan Jesse Lappin

Morgan Lappin photographed by Hannah Bryan, 2012

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Morgan Jesse Lappin b. 1979 is a visual artist, entertainer, musician and image-maker Lappin first started creating collage art in 2007 for a clothing company creating original designs. In 2008, Lappin moved to Brooklyn and began working with paper to create contemporary collages. His art, like his mind, is a combination of comedy and chaos with elements of music, vintage horror and sci-fi. Lappin’s work ranges from seven-foot- long cartoon metropolises, to fictional album covers, to take-out Greek diner coffee cups embedded with tiny paper worlds. He uses nostalgic material from his childhood from the 80s, such as VHS Tape boxes, video game cartridges, and any other 80’s household items that could cause you to experience flashbacks. Having a background in collecting and curating, he set out to assemble some of his favorite collage artists from NYC, and so in 2013 the Brooklyn Collage Collective was born. The BCC has now exhibited all over the world and has a strong global presence amongst collage makers and collectors alike.

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Artists on Coping: Renee Robbins

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Renee Robins in her studio

Renee Robbins is a Chicago-based visual artist who layers biomorphic forms to create detailed otherworldly environments. She has been awarded public art commissions with Chicago Public Art Group, Wabash Arts Corridor, and Illinois’ Art-In-Architecture program. She has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, IL; Lois Lambert Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL; Firecat Projects, Chicago, IL; and the Alden B Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, MI. Her work has been featured in the Chicago Gallery News, PBS WTTW, and Ahtcast. Robbins has been working in Chicago for over a decade.

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Artists on Coping: JoAnne McFarland

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

JMcF_Selfie_With_Swiss_Chard_3584.jpg

Selfie With Swiss Chard, 2020

JoAnne McFarland is an artist, poet, curator, and independent publisher. She is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus that exhibits work exploring the intersection of visual art and literature. She is the former Exhibitions Director of A.I.R. Gallery in DUMBO. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally for over 30 years, and is the author of ten poetry books, chapbooks, and libretti. Her most recent curatorial project, co-curated with Sasha Chavchavadze, is SALLY, a multi-venue, muti-year exhibition that showcases lost histories of women artists and philosophers, and contemporary artists whose work exemplifies passionate inquiry.

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Nota Bene with @postuccio [iv]

Knockdown Center, Orgy Park, CLEARING

Knockdown Center

Wonderfully striking in bright luminosities, diagonal analogousness, situational room-to-room parallels, transporting suggestiveness and subtly warmed circumstantial frigidities are the two installations ‘contained,’ in a way, by “A Continuous Stream of Occurrence,” an exhibition that opened a few weeks ago at Maspeth gem The Knockdown Center . 

At top is Luba Drozd‘s room. It both looks and sounds like a veritable spatial knot of brilliantly site-specific polyphonia involving significant degrees of multidisciplinarity, multimateriality and strata within circumstantial strata of shadow-play. It’s a tough but fun knot to look at and into, and listen closely to, to begin to untie just how it works with totality and relative simplicity, though not in ways simplistic in the least. 

Rather than necessarily site-specific or sonic, the active state of William Lamsom‘s installation in the adjacent gallery is like that of a shimmering, gradually phase-changing antechamber to Drozd’s comparative cavern; they scan instantly as visually coherent in many satisfying and still individualizable ways. Entering Lamsom’s room alone is like stumbling into an abandoned research lab in a yearless future. Seeing the rooms in tandem is like being dropped in some nicely mysterious nook on Krypton and having no idea why.

Great installations, great show. Curated by a duo going by the ‘name’ XP (@xaviacarin & @parkcmyers). 

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