In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles’s collages hold both a capacious nihilism and a hope to build stories from the void. From this fulcrum, I think of Joan Didion’s classic essay The White Album, and its opening truism: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Voyles’s compositions of found photographs extend to viewers, a branch, a bone, a tool in making sense of the randomness that seems to rule our lives. Cutouts layered into loops capture chaos, but the care in each cut, the curation, and the collision of hyperspecific images betray a belief in an idiosyncratic order. These works are at once figurative mazes of manifold meaning, and objects calculated to short-circuit our thinking and experience pure sensation.
Continue reading “Unreliable Narrators: Rochelle Voyles”Holly Wong: Full Circle at Slate Contemporary Gallery
Previewing Exhibition

“Coming full circle and making whole” is how Holly Wong describes her process of repair—working with memory, reassembling fragments, and layering paint, fabric, and light into new forms. On view at SLATE Contemporary in Oakland from September 5 through October 11, 2025, Full Circle is her second solo exhibition with the gallery. It brings together collaged paintings on shaped aluminum and wood panels, mixed media drawings, wall-based fiber and LED installations, and a heat-molded acrylic assemblage, presenting a mid-career survey of her work.
Continue reading “Holly Wong: Full Circle at Slate Contemporary Gallery”A Garden Grows in the Meatpacking District
photo story

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”Natale Adgnot: What We Are Really Seeing

What does Cognitive Bias and Fallacy Look Like? Natale Adgnot’s Work Tests What We Are Really Seeing. Natale Adgnot’s work explores the power of psychology and the impact that cognitive bias has on our everyday life, routines and choices. Her work incorporates patterns and systems to explore different cognitive biases such as stereotyping and pareidolia (seeing patterns in random information) to reflect on the elusiveness of truth. Best known for wall sculptures made of painted thermoplastic adhered perpendicularly onto birch panels, she challenges the viewer to consider her work from multiple perspectives. Her new series, Bird Brains, continues to delve into her exploration of bias and fallacy. Bird Brains matches entries in the cognitive bias codex with the birds that best exemplify them. From black swan theory to the duck test to the proverbial canary in the coal mine, she taps into this rich language to point out the stunning variety and sheer magnitude of ways we humans misconstrue the world.
Continue reading “Natale Adgnot: What We Are Really Seeing”Joseph Fucigna: DRIP-DROP, TICK-TOCK, HERE + NOW at the Housatonic Museum of Art
Previewing with Joseph Fucigna

DRIP-DROP, TICK-TOCK, HERE + NOW, Housatonic Museum of Art. Photo: Paul Mutino
Joseph Fucigna is a multi-media artist whose work is rooted in process, play and the innate qualities of the materials used. Through experimentation, and innovation, he creates sculptures, paintings and drawings that are known for their power to transform materials, ingenuity and odd but compelling subject matter. His one-person show, DRIP-DROP, TICK-TOCK, HERE + NOW, was originally scheduled to open at the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut in September 2018. Due to water damage from a fire above the space, it was rescheduled for September 2020, and postponed a second time due to COVID. At this time the exhibition opens for the third time on October 28th and runs through December 10th, 2021.
Continue reading “Joseph Fucigna: DRIP-DROP, TICK-TOCK, HERE + NOW at the Housatonic Museum of Art”Donna Conklin King: MVA Open Studios

Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.
Continue reading “Donna Conklin King: MVA Open Studios”This Two: Sun You at Geary
In Dialogue with Sun You

No Title (detail), 2020
This Two, Sun You’s first solo show with Geary, takes place concurrently at Geary’s two locations: Bowery in the Lower East Side and Main street in Millerton, New York. Geary features You’s clay- based work which includes oven-baked polymer clay forms mounted on painted wood panels, sculpted clay forms in cardboard boxes, and a separate body of sculptures made of mixed media — metal wire, razor blades, beads, and artificial flowers “held by magnets and gravity”, as described by Michael McCanne in the press release. The show runs through March 5th, 2021.
Continue reading “This Two: Sun You at Geary”Debbie Hesse: Spatial Paintings

Debbie Hesse, Laboratory for Healing, 2018, Immersive installation at Yale West Campus, Photo Courtesy of Graham Hebel, Artspace
Debbie Hesse, the CT based artist, makes plexiglass sculptural constructions and video installations. Her sculptural installations, or “spatial paintings” are typically made of multiple planar Plexiglas and wood cutout shapes layered to create complex shapes which bring her ideas to life through light and color.
Continue reading “Debbie Hesse: Spatial Paintings”Jacqueline Shatz – Overcoming Gravity

Photo courtesy of Michael Zansky
Jacqueline Shatz‘s ceramic based wall sculptures depict biomorphic forms, mostly referring to animals and humans as a single entity. An abstracted silhouette of an agile swimmer, a whimsical hybrid of horse and baby snake, a queen’s bent head fully covered by flowing hair spilling downward – each evokes a mystery associated with ancient civilizations, archetypes, and mythologies or what the artist describes as “states of being and permeable nature of time.” Jacqueline Shatz shares with Art Spiel some thoughts on her work and work process.
Continue reading “Jacqueline Shatz – Overcoming Gravity”Artists on Coping: Elizabeth Riley
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Factory Fresh, 2019; Video stills inkjet-printed on paper and fabric, repurposed laser-cut metal, 120 x 108 x 24”
Elizabeth Riley’s art addresses questions concerning the complex and changing world we inhabit and our “mixed reality,” living between physical and digital/virtual contexts. This project includes sculptural wall works, installations, and tabletop cityscapes, made from a combination of video, video stills, and diverse materials. A longtime New Yorker, the artist graduated from Barnard College and received an MFA from Hunter College. In 2019 her work was presented in Ribbons Become Space, a solo show at SL Gallery in New York City. This show included the Dragons of Iceland Installation, a 2011 sculpture/installation with multiple live video elements, as well as, two large-scale, site-specific wall sculptures made from video stills. Elizabeth Riley curated and participated in Trill Matrix at The Clemente Center on New York City’s Lower East Side in 2018, a show of seven dynamic women artists.
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