May 242023
 

Rachel Ratcliff, “Roll of the Kaleidoscope”, 2021, acrylic on canvas

Richard Logan “Sea Oats”, 2022, photographic transfer on metal with etched glass

Steven Spathelf, “Orange Blossom”, 2022, acrylic on canvas

This past Friday the city of Dunedin, Florida, celebrated the opening of its new City Hall. As part of the celebration, the building and all of its offices were open to the public. It was the first opportunity to see all the wonderful art by Florida artists- selected and commissioned by Elizabeth Brincklow.

Pictured above are works by Rachel Ratcliff (wave painting) and Richard Logan (photography). The third work is by Steven Spathelf whose oranges can be seen adorning buildings and homes all around town.

Scroll through the pages below to see the other works on view.

May 122023
 

Currently at Marc Straus is Marie Watt’s impressive exhibition, Singing Everything.

From the press release-

A member of the Seneca Nation, Watt also has German-Scott ancestry. Her layered and complex influences include Indigenous knowledge and Iroquois proto-feminism, the matriarchal structures of certain Native American nations, the rise of social activism throughout the 20th century, and the anti-war and anti-hate content of the 1960s and 1970s music scene.

Central to the exhibition are three Sewing Circle pieces that were initiated at communal gatherings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022. Watt’s sewing circles are cross generational, multicultural gatherings that she has been organizing for over a decade. Inspired by poet laurate Joy Harjo’s (Mvskoke/Creek) poem Singing Everything, Watt collects words from the participants of her sewing circles with the prompt, “what do you want to sing a song for in this moment?” The submitted words are then embroidered or sewn onto patches of fabric during the sewing circle. For the Whitney Sewing Circle, with over 300 participants, Watt, for the first time, used all the submitted words. Each panel is patterned in a way that stays true to the original hand. She thinks of ones handwriting as an extension of the cadence of one’s voice and in this project, it becomes part of a larger chorus. By composing large-scale wall works from these pieces of fabric, Watt creates collaborative artworks that interweave many individual handwritings, touches, and the stories that were exchanged in a shared space.

When entering the gallery, the visitor is greeted by a sweeping, 24-foot-long neon sign spelling out the words “deer, skywalker, heron, bass, great lake, woodland, beaver, turtle, wolf, lowly, muskrat, rat” in various hues that evoke the sky on the horizon during sunset and sunrise. While the piece represents a new direction in Watt’s work, she views neon as an extension of beadwork. The glass itself is at once thread and bead, and both neon and beads have a relationship to trade. They both envelop light, color, and sound, embodying sunrises and sunsets on the horizon.

Two blanket towers, her signature sculptural works, appear in the show but now with tin bells or jingles added to the reclaimed wool blankets. This choice of added material felt like a natural extension to Watt. She writes: “Blankets are danced and so are jingles, there is something healing about them both. They are objects of comfort” – by way of touch or sound. Jingles acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1910s during the influenza pandemic. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act. In 1883, the United States banned Indigenous ceremonial gatherings. Though the ban was repealed in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, during its century-long prohibition the Jingle Dress Dance was shared with other tribal communities. Today it is a pow-wow dance and continues to be associated with healing. The relevance of this dance extends beyond pandemics.” By including jingles Watt brings the potential of sound into her work, adding to their visual and tactile aspects.

While drawing from long craft traditions such as textile or glass work, Watt is expanding her work by including contemporary stories and both individual and collective experiences. Her primary interest is to think about art as more experiential, rather than only visual, a direction she plans to explore further.

This exhibition closes 5/20/23.

Apr 122023
 

“With a Full Heart”

“Unforbidden Pleasures”

“Unforbidden Pleasures” (detail)

“Wild Nights”

Currently at the Creative Pinellas gallery is Yolanda Sánchez’s Out of Eden, a collection of her paintings and textile work. The gallery is filled bright pleasing colors and this is the perfect exhibition to celebrate the spring season.

On the Creative Pinellas website, Sánchez discusses her work in a detailed essay. Below is a section of that piece.

Whether in painting or textiles, my working instruments are rhythm and color. I am interested in the joyful, playful or even spiritual properties of light. I am reflecting the light and color of where I live, of my immediate environment.

This artistic practice is improvisational and process-oriented, abstract. The relationship of one color to another creates a rhythm and tempo and establishes the composition. Each color suggests the next color, almost like the “call and response” form found in many musical traditions. There is a continuous orchestration, as the colors converse with one another, suggesting a mood or vibe.

I am often not sure where it is going or going to go. It is a surprise at every turn. I shape my perception as I work.

My textile work is informed by the Korean art form known as Bojagi. Humble in its origins, nameless women made these traditional textiles as often extravagant visual pieces using mundane, leftover fabric from wrapping, storing and transporting goods. Over time, the nobility introduced finer, more delicate cloth.

In its traditional form, design characteristics include stitching and seams to create linear elements, especially with translucent fabrics. These features differentiate and distinguish Bojagi from patchwork textiles found in other cultural traditions. Nevertheless, Bojagi shares what feminist art historians identify as centuries-old histories of turning scraps of fabric into beautiful objects and ultimately shifting perspectives from private to public.

I pay homage to these unknown women, authenticating their domestic work – and I affirm their values of inclusion, pleasure, love, the familial, the decorative, the colorful and joyful, the spiritual and the everyday.

My Bojagi-inspired textile work – painting with thread and fabric – honors the Korean tradition. Still, while relying on the conventions and basic structure, these pieces extend and interpret the Bojagi into a more contemporary form. I offer a new direction by varying medium and size and utilizing color compositions and stitching techniques less anchored to established methods.

Material, color, texture and transparency are crucial elements in this work, as is the geometry inherent in the design. While geometry, in this case, emerges from a particular culture, the form does not demand a specific culture-dependent response. Its only function is beauty. It is about the sensual delight derived from looking – the viewer can ascribe or chose meaning, if at all.

As an order, rhythm and pattern are generated within the geometry, creating beauty through harmony and stability, color dominates as a suggestive poetic force, concurrently evoking a connection to my immediate tropical environment. It sets as my intention arousing a sense of place, a feeling, and the atmosphere of an abstract garden, or even a walk through a field of flowers.

It is the color but also the sensuousness of nature that I endeavor to suggest in both my paintings and textiles.

This exhibition closes 4/16/23.