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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…