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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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,…