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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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’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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…