Alex Katz’s three works in Surviving Sandy are painted images of bodies of water. During the show they occupied the large back wall of the first floor, the installation itself therefore an invitation to compare the paintings to each other and consider their roles in a group. Beyond the immediate, obvious similarity that there’s water…

Let’s pretend Alexander Ross’s large paintings of Green Giant green-bean blobby biomorphic forms contain portraits of magnified specimens of metastasizing mutant cellular structures scraped from the skin of one of Alexis Rockman’s futuristic fauna from his Hudson tryptich (Tropical Migrants, 2011), which accompanied Ross’s work in the Sandy exhibition. While gloriously abstract and humorous, Ross’s…

I have always seen the background, or the space behind whatever I’m painting in the foreground, as a piece of history. 1 -Alexis Rockman It is well known that as an urban New York City kid Alexis Rockman followed his anthropologist mother through the halls of the famed Museum of Natural History where his gaze…

Allan Graham and Gloria Graham created Add-Verse in collaboration with 25 poets, many close friends of the couple, between 2003 and 2005. Comprising visual and audio material, great care was taken in paying homage to the many well-known people they worked with. A two-hour video loop filmed by Allan Graham documents approximately three to five…

For nearly 30 years, the husband and wife photographic duo Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have investigated the cultural collisions that arise from our vast appetites for both the dislocated and the decontextualized. In their artist statement, they have described their work as documenting the “transportation of place,” a theory readily demonstrated in bodies of…

From a semi-transparent sail-like amalgamation, a central bamboo mast rises almost seven feet, pulling its wire skin to a peak as it ascends toward the ceiling. Its upward reach carefully countered by the object’s mass and the implied movement of the four red, rubber wheels that form its base—this behemoth is built to move. Between…

We hold our monuments to impossible standards. They are to be classical yet contemporary: elegant and consumable. They are to be mythologizing and didactic, telling an inclusive, rousing story. And undoubtedly, they must be grandiose yet meditative, inspiring feelings of both sublime patriotism and inner illumination. There is something of this impossibility in Barney Kulok’s…

The storm had subsided only recently. The gaping holes in those skeletal furnishings, coated with a sheen of silver as if still soaked with moisture from the floodwater, are tell-tale signs of recent damage. It was only yesterday that someone was sitting in that chair, talking to a friend who was snuggled in the nook…

With her psychologically resonant sculptures, Beth Campbell brought an uncanny domesticity to the Surviving Sandy exhibition. Her mutated dining table and bathroom sink evoke home life and the embodied effects of trauma on everyday existence. With works that range from elaborate hand written flow charts of potential—and very personal—life events, to videos and sculptural installations that replicate…

Geodesic folds reverberating outwards and back, a math explosion onto a white which holds the meaning of crisp. It is the production of subjectivity, dripping infinitesimal color, speckles accumulating to a small, critical mass. Amorphic, ovular dark holes, tone-full, both finished and in progress, shown upright for your inquisitive viewing nature pleasure. Here are inimitable…

That Bob Witz’s 2011 piece, called Apollon-Musagète (or “Apollo, conducteur of the Muses”), is a reference to Igor Stravinsky’s 1928 ballet is made clear by the fact that the two pieces share a name. Based on an episode from Greek mythology in which three muses—Terpsichore (the muse of dance), Calliope (poetry), and Polyhymnia (mime)—visit Apollo,…

Born from mounds of matter piled, dripped, and gently sculpted by Bosco Sodi, then left to its own devices to crack, shift, and solidify over time, Untitled evokes both past and future, while arresting one’s attention in the present. Dark rivulets, mountains, and gorges form labyrinths of a scorched post-human earth, or perhaps a distant…

It’s a strange piece, this circle of color with its missing center. Hollowed out, the rim of tinted clay seems to have been robbed of its energy as it passively hangs on the wall. The ripped-out piece of crumpled clay lying on the floor, on the other hand, seems to continue effervescing heat from within…

In a review of Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Empire in 2009, Maxwell Heller wrote that the exhibition had tackled issues such as “cultural poverty, urban sterility, and the dawn of the post-American era” with the usual stamp of burlesque-ness one has come to expect from most BHQF works. Looking at Pizzatopia in the Come Together:…

It feels as though magic is afoot in Cameron Gainer’s Luna del Mar (2012) or at least a heavy reliance on cinematic trickery such as careful lighting and extensive post-production. We see a single screen awash in blue and black, constantly in motion. At one moment a figure twists, turns, and writhes in a body…

Sheila Pepe is known for her woven and crocheted installations and web-like constructions. Carrie Moyer, for her acrylic paintings with organic shapes and spindly offshoots that end in distorted figurative references that recall Dada and Surrealism. The two artists are partners and sometimes collaborators and both are esteemed educators. For Surviving Sandy their works were…

The sculptures of Chris Larson speak of destruction at a pitch that refuses all euphemisms. They are barren and fragile; vacuous vitrines of preserved remnants of violence. Like cages on stilts, each sculpture holds a bed of plaster that chips and cracks within its frame—manmade scorched earth. Tiny matchsticks are broken and carefully stacked; small…

While the titles of Chris Martin’s “Red, Yellow, Green” #1 and #2 seem to be an acknowledgement of—or maybe homage to—Mark Rothko’s famous masterpieces, the paintings themselves resemble a combination of outsider art and Abstract Expressionism. Born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., Martin has also lived for long periods in the Catskills and has been…

After years of painting in his trademark style, for which he first gained recognition in the late ’60s, Chuck Close, who is now age 74, has begun to remove what seems to be most essential to his work: his grids, his algorithmic process of painting, and his own hand. His tapestries, two of which were…

At first, from a distance, they appear to be maps. They come more into focus. Large patches of grass and weeds surround the grey concrete rectangles at the center of each image. There is exposed piping for plumbing or heat. Two images that only a moment ago were observed in the way one glances at…

In NV Regional (2013), a video by filmmaker Colin Snapp, a seemingly endless procession of people plod up and down a steep, switchback trail in what appears to be an otherwise desolate location. As we watch, an incessant hum in the background becomes evermore distinct; it is the score to this journey. In reality, the…

Accumulation can be a really powerful force. Think about the early universe: it was all indiscriminate proto-matter, not even particles. Then, as things cooled they started to clump together, and after just a few billion years we get all the diversity of planets, star systems, life, nebulae, and so on that can be seen from…

Cy Morgan: The work in Surviving Sandy feels as though it’s on a couple of different tracks all at once—some things are going in one direction; others are going in another. The work is generally concerned with gravity and the way objects project and resist forces. They also follow different valences that can oppose one…

Daniel Turner’s studio in Brooklyn lies alongside the Newtown creek, one of the nation’s most polluted bodies of water, and a new U.S. Superfund site when Turner moved there in 2010. He had been working mostly outdoors, in rural Virginia, before returning to New York for a studio residency downtown. As a reaction to the…

Darren Jones exhibited four works hung side-by-side. Although they were made between 2012 and 2013 and are each composed of individual intentions, because of their proximity and significance they were, contextually speaking, separate, but acting as a collective and almost singular work. Hanging on the far left was Duct: a piece of brown paper with…

In David Humphrey’s painting Cleaning Up, a tough-girl protagonist leans back as she smokes a neon-tipped cigarette and watches a flirtatious interaction between a nearby tree’s hollows and the eyes on her shirt. The tree ogles, and the shirt—or the young woman’s chest—stares back with cheerful, saucy reciprocity. The girl knows what’s up, unperturbed and…

For Surviving Sandy, the young and ambitious artist Dean Levin presented I Can See Right Through You, his first mixed media installation to date. Known for his monochromatic and grid paintings, the artist has switched gears, so to speak, and made use of readymade objects seemingly in conversation with each other: two transparent television sets…

Deborah Kass likes to have fun but with a vengeance. Or as Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum, describes her, “Deb is an expert at putting a smile on her viewers’ faces, but she packs a wallop behind those smiles.” Known for her feminist vaudevillian appropriations of the great white male Pop and…

Diana Cooper didn’t know what to include in the Surviving Sandy show when she was invited. She was busy, in the midst of several other shows, and skeptical, even nervous to revisit such a sensitive area. For Cooper was greatly affected by Hurricane Sandy. She lost countless works, years of early efforts (done in college…

Someone should give Don Voisine a medal for sticking so rigorously to one format for so long! As a fellow painter I stand in awe of those like Voisine who continually manage to mine the same restrictions, and invariably come up with something new. Voisine’s current working method, which goes back a decade, if not…

The bright clean colors of the monochrome panels shine out from their worldly supports. In Lot 080711 (the radiant future) (2011), the support—an industrial cement mixer with a thick board that carries an orange painting—extends vertically out of the open top, while in Lot 020412 (port) 2012, a more-than-half-ton cement block with a board similar…

The Triptych is a cosmology. In spite of its name and the fact that it consists of three conjoined sections, each created by applying cut-outs and painted images onto both sides of 58 successive layers of thick glass pressed together, its basic structure is defined by its recto and verso, the latter of which depicts…

After 25 years of painting, EJ Hauser says she still feels like “a sculptor who paints” and sometimes even envisions her paintings as depictions of imagined sculptures. The large works on papered canvas exhibited for Surviving Sandy readily deal with the flat marks of drawing and direct handwriting yet these explicitly two-dimensional components are structured and…

Ellen Phelan’s Field Through Trees, is built up and wiped away—built up again, and blurred. Purple, yellow, blue, the darkness of the tree trunks closest to us shows the strokes of paint as paint, and gives itself away even as it describes that which we are to look through. Past the trees there is a…

There is a tragic element, as despite all the attempts at engendering an image that matches a mental picture, the woman underneath the clothes and behind the skin remains a mystery to us and to herself. The perfect projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only does so for the duration of the…

As the son of artist Rob Ryman and art critic Lucy Lippard, Ethan Ryman (New York, 1964) was exposed to visual art at a young age. However, like his father—who originally moved to New York to become a jazz saxophonist, only to become a painter instead—he first had a successful career in music as a…

The installation of renowned English artist Francis Cape’s piece Waterline (2006) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, featured seventeen framed photographs hung above a wainscot of ochre-painted paneling. The photographs were taken in New Orleans on November 6th, 2005, two months after Hurricane Katrina, in the towns of Gentilly and St. Roch in central New Orleans. Cape…

In the first iteration of G.T. Pellizzi’s dynamic installation, The Red and the Black (2013), the artist exposed the often-invisible inner workings of the art world. The art world can be separated into three general spheres of influence: 1) the artist’s labor, without which art works themselves couldn’t come to fruition, 2) the art market, which…

In the late ’80s, I was part of a group of loosely affiliated abstract painters spanning Brooklyn and Manhattan. For these guys, and they were all guys, Gary Stephan had cult status. In particular, John Otte had a reverence for Gary’s paintings born of a short stint as his studio assistant. His roommate Erick Johnson…

There’s something rather poetic in the way James Hyde paints bands of color over a digital print (Down for Up, 2011), almost as if he were exposing the landscape as an illusion while at the same time validating the corporeality of rainbows. Similar bands can be found zigzagging through a terrain of wood and paper…

Whenever I look at James Siena’s work, I am reminded of a very funny review of a Siena drawing show at Gorney, Bravin + Lee by Jerry Saltz in The Village Voice back in 2003. In his typical self-deprecating manner, Saltz describes his attempts to reproduce Siena’s drawings in his own home after coming to…

Elves? Sprites? Muscular fairies? Outcast female deities from a far off land? Naked and vulnerable with breasts exposed, they tumble through space like whirligigs set loose on a stormy day. One lies on the ground, back arched, beckoning to the various limbs that are sticking out of green bushes or maybe those are mutant fruits…

Where it stands, the way it stands, the posture, the posture leaning, don’t stand, don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me. Which way over, under and through the bridge on my way, in my way. What is the capacity, how much can I fit in here? How much can I push down into…

It is easy to be carried away by the undulating lull of the swoops and licks that characterize Joanna Pousette-Dart’s stunning compositions. The flat, imperfect crescents and loosely coiled ribbons that inhabit her stacked canvases convey a command of curvature, a language of movement that swings wide between grandeur and whimsy. Each arc both echoes…

Since the landmark, monumental work 100–Foot–Long Piece (1969), which can be seen as the painter’s compilation of pictorial vocabulary—one that in alphabetical order is always ready to be realized by his generative experiments with materials and techniques—Joe Zucker has been deemed not only a master of grid-based painting, but a fearless explorer of materials of…

Untitled (2013) is a poised illusion: a Beat arrangement in the romantic tradition. Structured according to the artist’s perspective where subjectivity is the narrative center, the physical actualization of its floating bronze beams is freed from reason. Or perhaps it is more like Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne because Shapiro knows that to suspend a moment…

I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case; the verse must be alive and inseparable from its contents —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poetry…

We were already blackened with charcoal that wouldn’t come out even with vigorous scrubbing after the first week of Gwen Strahle’s Drawing Marathon at RISD in 2005. It was a notorious Winter Session elective that locked students from every discipline at the School in the Foundation Studies drawing studios from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m….

People say “once an adult, twice a child” as a pejorative for aging but Jonas Mekas has always possessed a child-like curiosity that has propelled his remarkable approach to filmmaking. Mekas is now 91 but in his nearly seven decades of making films, photos, collages, and performances, the artist never succumbed to the deadening of…

I return to the third floor gallery to stalk the effect of Josiah McElheny’s Walking Mirror 1 and Walking Mirror 2 on the space and the viewers. My hope is to remain unseen, to find a part of the room from which to observe without catching my own reflection in one of the mirrors, but…

There is something on the move. It’s a total grey-out; a haze of billowing fog clears to reveal a shapeless form. The form appears to have two wispy arms, and at the end of each arm there are hands that gesture with charismatic force. The form is active and airy, and it weightlessly hums and…

Katherine Bradford presents a series of large paintings depicting foreshortened views of hulking ocean liners solitarily moored on the open seas. The horizon in Ship on a Rust Sea (2013) is barely articulated. In fact, it is so swathed in atmosphere that the edges of the forms seem to be sinking in from all sides….

Part of the charm of New York City is the alien aspect of much of its setting: still relatively recent in historical terms, this artificial landscape remains a strange scene to behold. Even the trees dotting avenues and small parks are curated, nature now just another tool that we use in our efforts to make…

Kiki Smith has a way with wonder. In her careful yet playful depictions of the natural and the fantastic, she occupies pictorial space with a cast of characters whose relationship to reality is delightfully ambiguous. In keeping with this embrace of the almost possible—as opposed to what is simply familiar—narrative is often left open: momentary…

A few weeks before the Sandy exhibition came to a close we had the first snowfall of 2013. I was working as a curatorial assistant on the show at that time, and at Phong’s request I set out to photograph the sculpture garden amidst the freshly fallen snow. The tumult of New York seemed far…

Lisa Yuskavage’s two Surviving Sandy monoprints with pastel additions treat young, nubile figures in relatively isolated landscapes. A No Man’s Land 2 is the more narratively obscure of the two. In it, a squatting young woman appears to be making a bonfire like the one already lit to the right of the piece. She wears…

Lois Dodd says she’s not an artist, but a painter. There is a knowledge that comes from making things. It cannot be reproduced by history, or philosophy, or criticism. Artists often say their hands are smarter than they are. She is a painters’ painter. Her work is a resolute refusal to conform to social, political,…

New York artist Loren Munk’s paintings depict the art world as a series of maps and thought-bubbles. In an interview with Phong Bui, co-founder of the Brooklyn Rail and curator of Surviving Sandy, Munk cites a job at Utrecht Art Supplies as the opportunity that began his research into the connection between the New York…

Lynda Benglis’s work is supremely erotic. Her infamous 1974 advertisements for Paula Cooper are still shocking. I found them in reproduction when I was a teenager and they were one of my first significant revelations about both art and sex. I’ve felt some fear about the possibility that the photographs in my mind might swallow…

Margrit Lewczuk’s bright paintings titled Connie’s Drum and Green & Purple were installed facing her husband Bill Jensen’s intense diptych Passions According to Andrei (Rublev/Tarkovsky). The adjoining wall was hung with a cluster of eleven of Lewczuk’s smaller paintings, drawings and collages interspersed with eight of Jensen’s brush drawings in black ink. Where Jensen’s work…

Last seen on Governor’s Island in 2012, Rust Angel (1995) found a temporary home in the courtyard of Industry City in the fall of 2013. The vermillion red, painted steel structure is almost nine feet tall and over fourteen-and-half feet wide—a relatively small sculpture when compared to di Suvero’s other works. Made from one plate…

The Banker’s Daughter (2009-2010) is a relatively small oil painting (20 x 38”), with five disparate figures and one cat, all curiously placed together in a rustic kitchen. There is little character interaction except from the representation of the artist’s friend Chuck Close, whose exuberant smile of rotted teeth is directed out towards the viewer…

We wouldn’t expect a straight take on the presumed comfort of “home and hearth” from Marlene McCarty. Her monumental diptych, Hearth 2 (China Camp 2009, China Camp 1976) (2010) is no exception. The two drawings (80” x 117” and 80” x 115”) describe the scene of a crime, in stereo. Both show the same low-angle…

The word “geometry” was coined in ancient Greece to describe the measurement (metron) of earth (geo). As such, it dealt with concerns regarding physical space, and the ways in which said space could be defined, illustrated and measured. With time, however, as notions of space began to shift from the physical to the abstract, so…

All things are subject to explanation by constructs that assign or impregnate their subjects with meaning. In order to construct meaning, an order is assigned to the object’s components. Out of this ordering comes the inevitability of a hierarchy. From hierarchy, we are then given a system of relations in which precedent is given to…

Meanwhile I realized that these bourgeois upper-middle-class interiors were the spaces modernity declared war on, and yet this is the space that paintings come from and return to.   -Matvey Levenstein, Interview with Phong Bui Brooklyn Rail, April 2006   A painter of exquisite quiet where interiority seems to emanate from every brush stroke, Matvey…

At the close of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, the exiled poet Andrei finds himself in the ruins of the San Galgano cathedral, confronted with the memory of a home that is forever out of reach. The cathedral’s interior and exterior have become blurred, the roof long since collapsed, the delineation of sacred space rendered in remnants, a residual…

Through a series of inventive and cogent gestures and placements Michael Joo has responded to and shaped the 100-year-old industrial space where Surviving Sandy took place. He incorporates the track lighting installed for the show into his piece Untitled (Impacted). He also lowers the piece an additional five-and-a-half-feet to the same height of the Herkimer…

Before being about anything, Michelle Segre’s Surviving Sandy sculptures are about matter, such as the feel of their materials—from papier-mâché to milk crates—coaxed by plaster, tape, and putty into position. Many of the materials Segre uses are most often colloquially used to bind, adhere, attach, contain. Consequently, the works seem to be all joints: sometimes…

Mike Cloud insists on the content of form and the figures of abstraction. A primary strategy in this aim is literalism. Blood Diamond, Cloud’s painting on the second floor of Surviving Sandy, is about diamonds and looks like one. Much of the paint depicts what look like building blocks, a reference to geometric abstraction as…

It was a great pleasure for me to see Nancy Haynes and Mike Metz, an artist couple with a long tenure of making art in New York, exhibited side by side in Surviving Sandy. To encounter Haynes’s superb paintings is to see a rigorous intellectual practice executed with extreme sensitivity, restraint, and a touch of…

The billboard-sized words “We the People” grow out of and drip from the wall in the outline of calligraphic script. Before comprehending the phrase, those of us who live in the United States or are familiar with its culture have already registered layers of meaning and their signifying objects: wigs and waistcoats, quill pens, yellowed…

“Hold this,” Nicole Wittenberg says, handing me one end of the measuring tape she is snaking across the room. After some calculation she sets the 8-by-4-foot panel of FOX NEWS I (2014) in front of her open studio doorway and marches me straight back to the other end of the hall: “This is fifty feet;…

Death in the hands of an artist is almost paradoxical: while as a lived experience it is unknown and unwelcome, as the subject of art it can become a site of wonder, imagination, and inquiry. In other words: death can be generative. In the sense that it inspires the desire to make art, death is…

Unlike most barricades, Rachel Beach’s toll-gate-like structure is an invitation, rather than a barrier. Like much of her work, it comes to us as much as a painting as it does a sculpture: a zig-zagging base snakes upward in lusty gamboge, a charcoal beam rises vertically to support a horizontal arm tattooed with black <s…

Juliet Helmke: I visited your works a few times at Surviving Sandy, but it always took me a while to get close enough, I had to wait for a moment that was completely my own. I heard a lot of people discussing where they had been painted, and a fair number of visitors, not seeing…

I volunteered at Red Hook and was overwhelmed by the kindness and community created post-Sandy by the people in New York. There were donations of food, cleaning supplies, power outlets, and free Internet to connect to loved ones. Volunteers lined up waiting to help people clean, take apart, and re-build homes, art studios, and businesses….

By the mid-’90s, Richard Serra had become an art world superstar. He had started to become recognized as the world’s “greatest living sculptor,” a superlative so bold and ridiculous that perhaps Serra was the only artist that could be considered for it in the first place. He has never been a subtle artist; his opinions…

From the built-up masses of paint and sand to the oil seeping into the linen, erasure makes the body spongy and absorbent in Rita Ackermann’s Picnic (2012). One has the sense that with Ackermann the figure is always both itself and becoming something else—multiple painting methods, events, and even zones make their way into a…

In a dimly lit cubicle on the third floor of Industry City’s mammoth warehouse, six masterpieces of modern photography stare out across a room; still, serious, and open, waiting for a viewer to wander in. Of the six, four are portraits, ever so slightly larger than life and very direct—no titles, no names, no context,…

Anyone who has ever been punched squarely in the nose can appreciate those old Tom & Jerry cartoons’ expert rendering of the experience: When struck, Tom’s face would recoil so far that it would disappear into his head. That’s not what it looks like to be punched in the face, but it’s what it feels…

There are two primary features that have consistently preoccupied Robert Storr in his pictorial ambition thus far: first, the attraction to reductive abstraction without a link to any particular school or group; second, the pace of the painting awaiting the painter, or one could say his speed of execution, which is slow, deliberate, and restrained…

Rona Pondick’s world has long been one of astounding perfection crossed with disturbing, yet inviting, mutation. Phantasms of chimerical hybrids, her sculptures, have a presence and personality that make me want to sit on the floor and talk to them, or stroke their gleaming curves and limbs, or twisted plaintive heads as I pass by….

Ronnie Landfield asked, “Who are they to tell me I can’t be expressionistic? Who are they to tell me I can’t use imagery or paint landscapes? I don’t care if it’s ‘old fashioned.’” 1 His recalcitrance exemplifies the defiance of a youth spent in New York in the ’60s. 2 I mean, Landfield has spent…

Shirin Neshat is split within by the barrier without: as an exile from Iran living in the U.S. she is caught between two worlds, simultaneously of both, and also of neither. To be exiled is to be divided not only from a homeland, but also from oneself. Although it is rarely directly addressed in her…

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive…

Works by New York/Alaska-based Sienna Shields, and C. Finley of New York and Rome, are rich with texture and color. Chock-full of compiled items, Shields’s collage paintings and Finley’s mixed media mandala are comprised of layered materials that cohere together to produce whole works. These artworks are neither overwhelming nor disorganized—rather they are visually diverse,…

Certain lines from Wallace Stevens’s great elegy for George Santayana, To an Old Philosopher in Rome, capture for me a quality in these paintings by Stanley Whitney: “On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street / become the figures of heaven.” In his poem Stevens envisions Santayana dying in a Roman hospital, in…

Light        dark be             be gets           gets light          dark   —Robert Lax, Light, 1984   Stephen Antonakos worked endlessly with neon, collage, sculpture, and drawing to explore the gaps between perceiving and knowing, space and the ways to delineate…

The end of days begins serenely, peacefully. Our rush through history has reached stasis; our glittering creations glibly sparkle, frozen in a time that stretches forever in every direction. Ronald McDonald smiles horribly, welcoming us to an eerie silence. Shangri-la serves Happy Meals. Water begins to seep into this hellacious paradise, slowly at first, steadily…

Suzanne Joelson’s assemblage of paintings titled Rhymes with Orange is a kind of visual meditation on the color orange. But just as “nothing rhymes with orange,” the paintings that comprise it live in conversation with one another, a kind of slant-rhyme that bounces meaning and formal devices from one panel to the next, throwing them…

Tamara Gonzales is like a shaman, a female spiritual leader in North Brooklyn. With the most economic means, her ecstatic paintings effuse with kaleidoscopic patterns of color and light. She employs antique lace as a template through which she creates polychromatic washes of spray paint. Lace isn’t girly in Gonzales’s images. Multiple patterns and styles…

A Lissajous figure, framed within its invisible rectangular confinement, hovers on the top left corner of a canvas. Painted against an indigo-blue background in bleeding tints of white, the figure—a two-dimensional representation of parametric equations used to describe harmonic motion in mathematics—meets its shadow at its bottom right. It shifts further right to merge with…

If there was ever a moment of solitude behind the scenes of Surviving Sandy, it was early each morning in the sixth floor gallery. There, on the east side of the building, Tom Doyle’s Togher and Clonard, stood majestic and elegant like twin bows of a ship. Streaks of late morning light, cut into rectangles…

For painter Tom Nozkowski and sculptor Joyce Robins, abstract artists whose work is rooted in the tangible, the world is a complex spider web of interconnections. Both have a predilection for melding the grid with wilder, more primal qualities that put austerity on defense. As Nozkowski once said of his work, “If a painting would…

The paintings Dark Side of the Moon, Side 1 (Speak to Me) and Dark Side of the Moon, Side 2 (Eclipse), (both made in 2013) are part of a series by Tomas Vu titled Flatlands. Large and highly detailed, they feature a mixture of abstract and representational forms variously rendered through the use of acrylic…

Yellow white green clock (2012) is an abstract stained glass clock face with Roman numerals. It hangs from a wire so that the “X” is where “XII” should be, meaning 12 is actually at 2 o’clock. Placed against a window with a view of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the clock face transforms the gallery space into…

It’s difficult to imagine what the exhibition would have been like without the late inclusion of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Ocean Voices. It arrived one afternoon in a crate, like an animal. And when it was installed, the lumpen wooden sculpture became animate. The patchworked body of the form is made of shims and segments of…

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! —William Wordsworth, The world is too much with us   No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her…

Language comes rockishly alive in New York’s streets. In Chinatown, where Wendy White lives, language for the hanzi-illiterate is phenomenally present. White doesn’t derive the words that adorn her canvases from the Chinese signage that, to Latinate-accustomed eyes, look so multitudinous and vibrant. But one does become more aware of text when seeing the profusion…

There is bluster here. There is a wind blowing, and a fire rising prickly and rolling. There are waves. There is a multitude that shifts and solidifies and rolls out again. So may pieces in movement, block the light and reflect it back, if moving through the air. But they’re not real bullets. They’re resin….

Will Yackulic’s Enigma Variations takes its name and theme from a work of music by Edward Elgar written in 1898-1899. Elgar’s composition of twelve variations on a theme is composed to suggest the personality of a friend, personifying some quirk of character through the texture of music. Similarly, Yackulic’s 24 ceramic vessels—each approximately five inches…