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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…