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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…