Danny Ferrell’s Thirty in Palm Springs, 2020 from the group exhibition, Sound & Color at Miles McEnery Gallery in 2020.
Aug 042023
Aug 042023
The work above is from Regina Durante Jestrow’s current exhibition Free Form Connections at Dunedin Fine Art Center.
The artist’s statement about the exhibition-
This exhibition includes my organically shaped geometric art quilts from various series from 2020-23. I utilize improvisation, repeat patterns and shifts in scale while incorporating colors, textures, and structures representative of the diversity of the people and the natural surroundings of my current home in South Florida.
I use diversely toned second-hand, gifted, or saved fabrics and dyes from locally sourced plants and rust. Textiles are also manipulated with burning and staining with inks and acrylic paint. Other materials, such as neoprene, sequins, and faux leather, reference Miami’s pop culture.
Along with my constant interest in American Folk-Art Quilts, geometric-abstract artists from the mid to late twentieth century are my influencers, including Gees Bend quilters, Elizabeth Murray, Helen Frankenthaler, Anni Albers, and Gego. These artistic voices have driven me to create quilts of scale with strong personal symbolism and narrative.
This exhibition is on view until 8/13/23.
Aug 042023
The sculptures above are from Kat Howard’s current exhibition Controlled Telling, at Dunedin Fine Art Center.
From the gallery about the work-
Kat Howard’s work interrogates the complicated process of healing from trauma. The sculptures in ‘Controlled Telling’ examines the burden and pressure to conceal the truth.
Existing as various restricted forms of cotton, bound braids, transparent quilts, compressed scraps of muslin, mound of raw material, or hand-twined waxed rope, the writhing abstracted bodily forms overwhelm and invade the viewer’s personal space, emulate the feeling of tension, imploring the viewer to navigate physically and emotionally around them.
Howard creates visual art that uses abstraction, the innate language of texture, and the repulsion/attraction of touch to interrogate her identity as a survivor of abuse and sexual violence. The material and texture of the object is integral to her practice, and its connection to the body. Evidence of the hand and the physical marks of the body are always present in her work. What happens to the body when it is forced to become a vessel for trauma? In what ways do we physically carry pain? How is the self altered afterwards?
Howard’s pieces either have a physicality to them that feels almost human, or they are twisted abstractions from the domestic landscape. Repetition and labor are vital aspects to the work. Through the labor, the anxiety tethered to a desire for freedom is palpable. The viewer can sense the thousands of hours, and the fevered precision which act as an echo of the madness in the mind that comes to claim the body. What does freedom look like? The answer is in taking up space. The answer is in speaking up. The answer is in the attempt.
This exhibition is on view until 8/13/23.
Aug 042023
There are so many wonderful, detailed art works in Hannah O’Hare Bennett’s current exhibition Recede, on view at Dunedin Fine Art Center. They are all worthy of a closer look.
Below is the artist’s statement about the work-
“From the moment we are born until we die, we are almost constantly in contact with cloth as we move through our lives. Without thinking about it, we are familiar with its varied qualities–the simplicity of white cotton, the luxury of silk velvet, the flexibility of knitting, the structure of weaving. We can see the impact of time in a piece of fabric: how it wrinkles, stains, takes repairs, unravels. Handmade paper is a kind of non-woven cloth and is in fact often made of recycled cotton or linen. It can be dyed, stitched, wrinkled, torn, and repaired much in the same way as fabric.
My work explores the expressive possibilities of these materials, which I use to deal with my fascination with time altered urban and rural landscapes. A piece of land in the Oregon outback, the brick wall of buildings in Madison, a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood, etc. are all impacted by the passing of time, actions of human beings, weather. These occurrences can be incremental or sudden, and the change they bring almost imperceptible or very radical, each change layering on top of what came before. I use that observation to inspire my work. Fabric surfaces are worked over with layers and layers of pigments, embellished with embroidery, dunked into dye, cut and torn. Paper pulp is poured, dipped, mixed with sawdust, painted, crumpled and smoothed out again. In this small human way, I am channeling the world into the objects I create.”
The exhibition closes 8/13/23.
Jul 252023
Currently at the University of Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum is Rico Gatson: Visible Time. The exhibition includes a collection of the artist’s paintings and works on paper, video works from 2001-present, and a life size mural of author Zora Neale Hurston.
From the museum’s website about the exhibition-
For more than two decades, Brooklyn-based artist Rico Gatson has been celebrated for his vibrant, colorful, and layered artworks. Inspired by significant moments in African American history, identity politics and spirituality, his oeuvre includes images of protests and longstanding injustices—touching on subjects like the murder of Emmett Till, the Watts Riots, and the formation of the Black Panthers—as well as dynamic abstract geometries that celebrate Pan-Africanist aesthetics and Black cultural and political figures.
About the mural, Zora III, commissioned by the museum (pictured above)-
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo (a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs created by enslaved Africans in the Southern U.S.). The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. Born in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston grew up near Orlando, in Eatonville, Florida, incorporated in 1887 as one of the first self-governing all-black municipalities in the country. Despite her landmark achievements, Hurston died penniless and in obscurity in 1960-her novels and other writings largely unknown, until they were single-handedly rescued by novelist Alice Walker in 1975. Through his wall painting Rico Gatson extends the monumental impact of Hurston’s legacy-and Walker’s- into a visual arena reminiscent of the Mexican Muralists and hand-painted cinema signs.
“Untitled (Seven Panels)”, 2022 acrylic paint on wood, in seven parts
From the museum’s wall plaque about the above paintings-
According to catalog contributor Mark Fredricks, Rico Gatson’s “panel paintings” resemble “a musical framework.” Arranged together along a single wall, the “rhythm” animating their colorful compositions and their “uniformity of structure” suggest, anthropomorphically speaking, musicians in a jazz combo. One of the many ways in which Gatson draws on music as a lasting influence in his art, his seven panels approximate what legendary jazz player Albert Ayler described as “the healing force of the universe,” but in three dimensions.
“Don” 2022, Color pencil and photo-collage on paper
“Sidney” 2022, Color pencil and photo-collage on paper
“Miles #2″ 2022, Color pencil and photo-collage on paper
Below are images are from Four Stations, one of the five moving image works in the exhibition. For this work, Gatson traveled to Money, Mississippi and took handheld footage along the trail of places and events that led to the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
“Four Stations” 2017
On one of the smaller screens is Gun Play, 2001, a film collage that mixes sequences from Foxy Brown and The Good, the Band and the Ugly, combining them together with kaleidoscopic effects.
“Gun Play”, 2001, single-channel video, color, sound
This Thursday 7/27/23, the museum will be showing Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the last of the three films chosen by Gatson to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition will close on Saturday, 7/29.
Jul 212023
“Precarious recline”, 2015, Found lawn chairs, strap, bottle
This sculpture, Precarious recline, is from Bjorn Copeland’s 2015 exhibition Over Easy at Various Small Fires Los Angeles. It was created using discarded furniture found around East Los Angeles.
The exhibition also included a sound sculpture, Scrambled Eggs, Mexican Radio Edit (2015). It was made in collaboration with the artist’s Black Dice band mates Eric Copeland and Aaron Warren, and combined signals from multiple car radios in an unpredictable and erratic disharmony. The resulting composition was synthesized in real-time and constantly changing.
The video below is for White Sugar, from Black Dice’s 2021 album Mod Prog Sic.
Jul 212023
“You’re Fired”, 2015, Concrete, grill, shredded office documents, charcoal
This sculpture by Josh Kline was located in the Various Small Fires Los Angeles courtyard in 2015.
From the press release-
In the warm breeze of Southern California’s endless summer, the 20th Century dream of life in the early evening after work: a large backyard covered in concrete and grass, a hammock or a lawn chair, cold beer, and a blazing grill. Ground meat sizzling above a glowing bed of charcoal soaked in lighter fluid. Underneath the avocado tree. Or the oak tree. Or the whatever tree. Putting the last 8-10 hours of your day out of your mind and enjoying your “free” time. A nuclear family fantasy repeated across hundreds of millions of suburban and semi-suburban homes and half a century of North American lives.
Pattern recognition is the primordial ooze from out of which living consciousness and intelligence crawled into the minds of animals. The ability to recognize repetitive relationships and recurring phenomena. The habits of food, the faces of your loved ones, and the sounds of human language. From automobile factory assembly line and the discount drug store cash register today to the taxi cab’s driver seat and patent lawyer’s office tomorrow: unconscious software is slowly and not-so- slowly aping the abilities of the living mind.
Reading without eyes. Recognizing without consciousness. The outsourcing of understanding. You’re Fired!
The first U.S. museum survey of his work, Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in NYC.
Jul 202023
Built Landscape I, 2015, by Paul Davies, was included in Palm Springs Art Museum’s 2018 group exhibition, Eighty @ Eighty.
From the museum’s wall plaque-
Through a rich process of layering, mirroring, and mimicking, Davies explores the fusion of manmade and cultivated natural elements that comprise our environment. Reflecting a contemporary Southern California sensibility, his paintings are at once a dream of an idealized lifestyle made popular by midcentury modern architecture, and a commentary on how such structures interact with and fragment the world around us. This image references the unique periscope-like structure of architect Albert Frey’s first home in Palm Springs.
Davies’ work can currently be seen as part of Stark White gallery’s exhibition Surface Tension in Queenstown, New Zealand, on view until 8/20/23.
Jul 142023
The 2023 Emerging Artist Exhibition in Creative Pinellas’ gallery space highlights work from the ten Pinellas County artists chosen by the organization for this year’s Emerging Artist Grant.
Above are sculptures by Amy Wolf. She has written several articles for the Creative Pinellas website which give some insight into her work and are worth a read.
According to artist Kimberly Engel, the paintings above “explore vibrant color interaction while inviting viewers to meditate on an illusive horizon line where sky meets water.”
From the Creative Pinellas website-
Kimberly Engel is a contemporary abstract painter who lives and works in Clearwater, Florida. Her distinct gestural style combines a love for color interaction with spontaneous mark making. Engel’s paintings explore levels of transparency, evoking depth and light. She is inspired by the constant presence and changing states of large bodies of water. She has lived on the shore of Lake Erie in Euclid, Ohio prior to moving to the Gulf Coast.
Engel describes her process as an exploration of herself and ultimately the dissolving of herself mirrored in the process of making and deconstructing works. Her gestural marks have been described as both compulsive and somewhat calligraphic. They undulate and disappear under thin veils of color.
Also check out her Instagram.
Denis DeBon created the unique glass works seen above.
His biography from the gallery website-
Dennis DeBon is the creator of EnergyWebs, which are one-of-a-kind works of modern glass art. He is often been compared to artist Jackson Pollock. Like Pollack, Dennis uses simple artistic techniques and has combined reverse painting on glass with spin art and taken both to a whole new level.
Each EnergyWeb is cut from a large sheet of plate glass, then free-style hand-cut into shape, scalloped, polished then spun. Dennis uses a multitude of application techniques and color combinations when creating each piece before firing and hand-signing them.
Every EnergyWeb is a unique, one-of-a-kind work of modern glass art and he is the only artist in the world creating them.
In addition to selling his artwork at fine art festivals across the country, Dennis was commissioned as the artist to create the Richard Dawkins Awards. In addition, his past creations have been presented to James “The Amazing” Randi, Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, and the Zora Neale Hurston and the Koi Society of America award winners.
Dennis was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, where he studied photography and graphic design.
He now lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida and when he isn’t creating art, you might find him writing screenplays or in the boxing ring . . . working as a professional boxing referee.
For more of the artists in the exhibition, head to the pages below.
Jul 032023
There are currently two exhibitions in New York celebrating Richard Avedon’s photography. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Richard Avedon: Murals. Pictured above are two of the large murals included. The first is of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory and the other is of members of the Mission Council in Saigon.
From The Met’s website about the show-
In 1969, Richard Avedon was at a crossroads. After a five-year hiatus, the photographer started making portraits again, this time with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Instead of dancing around his subjects from behind a viewfinder, as he had in his lively fashion pictures, he could now stand beside a stationary camera and meet them head-on. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting their outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, Richard Avedon: MURALS will bring together three of these monumental works, some as wide as 35 feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.
The murals are society portraits. In them, Avedon assembles giants of the late twentieth century—members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, architects of the Vietnam war, and demonstrators against that war—who together shaped an extraordinarily turbulent era of American life. Presented in one gallery, their enormous portraits will stage an unlikely conversation among historically opposed camps, as well as contemporary viewers. The formal innovations of Avedon’s high style—of starkly lit bodies in an unsparing white surround—are best realized in these works, where subjects jostle and crowd the frame, and bright voids between them crackle with tension. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he so transformed the conventions of the genre.
About Andy Warhol and members of The Factory–
Avedon fantasized about throwing an annual fete for New York society and watching the group evolve over time. This mural is his downtown take on such a party, featuring a new “smart set” of sexual revolutionaries. They were affiliated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, the studio and gathering place for a coterie of avant-garde filmmakers, artists, and socialites. Avedon summoned them to his own studio, where they met over a series of weeks. Working in his most directorial mode, he arranged his subjects—including transgender actress Candy Darling and adult film star Joe Dallesandro—in a lateral frieze across adjoining frames, the fracture and repetition of their bodies in space suggesting the filmic passage of time.
The culmination of much trial and error, the mural’s composition took time to perfect, as evidenced by session outtakes displayed nearby. Avedon later praised the professionalism of his cast but joked, “You couldn’t keep the clothes on anybody in those years. . . . Before you could say ‘hello,’ they were nude and ready to ride.” If this unabashed undress tests gallery decorum, it is a provocation grounded in art history: in the central panel Avedon presents a male version of the “three graces,” riffing on a gendered tradition in allegorical painting with an ironic, Warholian wink.
About The Mission Council, Saigon, South Vietnam–
Avedon knew he would have mere minutes to photograph the U.S. generals, ambassadors, and policy experts who ran the war in Vietnam—not the weeks he spent refining his first mural. Planning in advance, he requested the heights of the men known collectively as the Mission Council and mapped out their positions, with careful attention to rank and influence. He rigged a makeshift studio at the embassy in Saigon, and recalled that once assembled, they “lined up like high school boys. They all wanted to be in the picture.” This is true of all but Ted Shackley, the camera-averse CIA station chief known to colleagues as the Blond Ghost, who begged out of the sitting for “a meeting,” leaving a void in the rightmost panel.
As blunt and procedural as a police lineup, the mural recalls Avedon’s first photography gig as a teenager in the Merchant Marine, where he made mugshot-style portraits of new recruits. Here, scrutinizing the faces of the war’s top brass, Avedon invokes their unseen operatives and victims. When the work was later published, one critic deemed it “a terrifying picture of business as usual.”
This exhibition closes 10/1/23.
For a more comprehensive look at Avedon’s career, Gagosian’s Chelsea location is showing Avedon 100, “a collection of Avedon photographs was selected by more than 150 people—including prominent artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives—who elaborate on the impact of the photographer’s work today.”
The gallery’s website has a video of the installation that is well worth checking out, especially if you can’t see the exhibition in person.
This exhibition will close on Friday, 7/7/23.