NYC Art Shows- Edward Holland at Hollis Taggart

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 242024
 

“The Water-Bearer (Version 20)”,2024, Acrylic, charcoal, colored pencil, graphite, ink and marker on canvas with collage

“The Water-Bearer (Version 20)”,2024 (detail)

“The Fish (Version 20)”, 2023, Acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, ink, permanent marker and oil-based permanent marker on canvas with collage

“The Fish (Version 20)”, 2023, (detail)

Tomorrow (5/25/24) is the last day to see Edward Holland’s mixed media zodiac paintings, At the Bottom of the Celestial Sea, at Hollis Taggart. The layers of color and the collaged items combine to form fascinating portraits of the astrological signs, while also hinting at larger themes.

From the press release-

Edward Holland’s zodiac painting series, which he started creating in 2014, are inspired by the many dimensions of zodiac signs from the astronomical to the astrological and the mythological. Holland incorporates the linear geometry of a zodiacal constellation in each painting, using this as a kind of framework onto which he collages printed papers ranging from notes from his neighbors and poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti to maps and doodles created by his two daughters. Holland then builds on this foundation with graphite and paint, at times scribbling out the words on the printed papers, and at others layering expressive brushwork – usually incorporating the color associated with the given zodiac – in what resemble fragments of Abstract Expressionist paintings. The resulting works are almost like abstracted portraits of each zodiac, inviting the viewer into a game of excavating their many layers of meaning.

To take one example, The Archer (Version 18), 2024, is scaffolded by the constellation of Sagittarius rendered in purple and anchored by moments of bold yellow, which is complementary of the color attributed to the zodiac. Partially hidden beneath layers of paint are instructions for how to bandage a wounded leg as well as anatomical drawings of legs, nodding to Sagittarius’ association with lower limbs. Peeking through at the center of the canvas is the signature moustache of Frank Zappa, the legendary musician and composer born under the sign of Sagittarius. Each painting contains dozens of such zodiacal associations – some more obscure than others, with certain material so painted over that it is no longer visible to the viewer. While it may seem that Holland would search for such reference material intentionally, he only ever uses materials he finds on the street or which is shared with him by friends and family. This adds a sense of wonder to the works, as the material has come to the artist through serendipity.

For more on the artist and this series, Artnet recently visited him in his studio to discuss his work and process.

 

NYC Art Shows- Susan Lichtman at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 232024
 

steven harvey fine art projects is currently showing several of Susan Lichtman‘s paintings for the exhibition Autofiction. Through her use of light and color, her domestic scenes become enchanting.

From the gallery-

Autofiction is a genre of literature that combines autobiography and invention. Lichtman paints scenes of her household and family, however her works serve a novelistic function instead of a documentary one, creating what she thinks of as fictions, which attempt “mystery and specificity at the same time.” Working from memory to depict her own home “somehow allows for a more resolved image.” These scenes are the emotional result of prolonged meditation; portraits of continuity and change over time rather than immediate snapshots. Lichtman’s practice is situated within a long history of painting domestic interiors, her recognizable motifs of household objects and figures invoke a sense of ease and familiarity. It is her distinct perspective – that of an insider as well as observer – and her autofictive blend of observed truth and imagination that gives the work its singularity.

Working in the intimist traditions of Vuillard and Bonnard, Lichtman is a subtle and skillful colorist, creating complex harmonies on a large scale. She states, “to me, close-valued color is magical. It’s a way for the paint to imply the fiction of light and air. A palette of close values also gives the picture a kind of envelope into which everything is placed.”

This exhibition closes 5/24/24.

NYC Art Shows- Rob Davis at Broadway Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 232024
 

Rob Davis’s paintings for The Golden, his solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery, challenge the viewer to look beyond these quiet moments to what lies beneath the surface.

From the press release-

These modestly scaled oil on linen works take depopulated 1970s and 80s domestic interiors and culturally-charged objects as their subject.  While initially apprehended as a mode of photorealism, prolonged viewing reveals a gauzier, mediated affect that hints at a more considered approach. Painting from photographs (with an intermediary study in watercolor) Davis evokes a peculiar vestige of the source image rather than a mere virtuosic reproduction. In doing so, he homes in on the slippery complexities of individual and shared memory.

The beckoning interior of a pick-up truck, a shark-skinned Cadillac Eldorado (that gives the show its title), a wall-mounted telephone on faux-wood paneling, and a backyard tire swing all conjure a certain vintage of American middle-class signifiers, but with a suggestive twist. These images harbor an extraordinary potential energy that something is about to happen—and gets at an unsettling underbelly of the era and nullifies nostalgia. The tire swing, for example, traces an arc between innocent play and the specter of something more malignant, acknowledging a diffuse dust of unease that has settled on everything.

Elsewhere, Davis engages some curious strategies around reproduction. With Quilt 1-3 and Window 1 and 2 (all works 2024) the artist repeats views of a suburban bedroom in multiple iterations identical in size and only subtly varied in appearance. This has the peculiar effect of calling to mind both the ready reproducibility of the source image and the tremendous effort undertaken to render it by hand. Seriality generally favors the immediacy of the photograph, but for Davis all reminiscence is muscle memory and these paintings carry the imprint of his labor as a potent lever for narrative and remembrance.

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

Ohio Art Shows- Frank Stella at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

Pictured above is Frank Stella’s 1986 work, La vecchia dell’orto, on view at Columbus Museum of Art, part of New Encounters: Reframing the Contemporary Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art– a reinstallation of the museum’s contemporary galleries.

About the work from the museum-

In the 1960s Frank Stella began creating paintings with a composition of lines that closely followed the shape of the canvas. These works often resisted any sense of depth, but in the following decade, Stella would go on to create exuberant works like this, composed of brightly painted cones and other shapes that extend beyond the surface of the rectangle behind it.

The title of this work, like others in his Cones and Pillars series, is taken from an Italian folktale in which a mother’s only daughter is kept by a witch as payment for a cabbage she stole from the witch’s garden.

Stella’s practice was always evolving. In his most recent large painted sculptures, currently on view at Deitch in NYC, you can see how he expanded on the concepts he was working with here.

NYC Art Shows- Frank Stella at Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

There’s only a few days left to see Frank Stella’s recent sculptures at Deitch’s New York location. The large colorful works look drastically different depending on the angle with which they are viewed.

Stella sadly passed away at the beginning of this month. Although it is sad that we won’t be able to see what he would have come up with next, these sculptures help demonstrate how inventive he remained throughout his career.

From the gallery’s website-

Double wide flatbed trucks navigated the bridges into Manhattan to transport five monumental works by Frank Stella to Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery.

They are among the most ambitious and most radical works being made by any artist today. They extend Stella’s forms even further into three dimensions. The works are not painted sculptures or relief paintings. They completely fuse painting and sculpture in a way that has never been achieved before. The sculptures have never been shown in New York City.

Frank Stella said that one of the objectives of his recent artistic approach has been to “build a painting rather than painting a painting.” The new work is a realization of this ambition. Stella combines traditional artists’ techniques with high technology to create his new work. His monumental sculptures begin with computer models that are transformed into a series of small sculptural maquettes through 3-D printing. The artist refines these models in the studio and then sends them to fabricators in the Netherlands and Belgium where they are engineered and constructed using technology derived from shipbuilding. The sections are then shipped to Stella’s studio in the Hudson Valley where they are refined and painted with automotive paint.

The exhibition features works from two series, Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick from 2014, and Atlantic Salmon Rivers from 2021-23. The Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick sculptures are created with high density foam covered in fiberglass. The Grand Cascapedia, inspired by the Canadian river known for salmon fishing, is made from aluminum. As in all of Stella’s work, the forms embody their materials. The materials inspire the forms.

Stella’s work of the 1980s were characterized by its extension of two-dimensional painting into his version of baroque space. These new works extend beyond baroque space into outer space. The forms seem to float in anti-gravity. They ascend, transcending their weight. They do not have front or a back, existing in the round.

Frank Stella has expanded the art discourse for more that six decades. His new work continues to advance art into a place where it has never been before.

If you are able to see the work in person at the gallery, make sure to take the steps to the top where you will find a diorama containing the sculptural models (pictured below).

NYC Art Shows- Diedrick Brackens at Jack Shainman Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fiber Arts, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 212024
 

“blood compass” 2023, Cotton and acrylic yarn

“summer somewhere (for Danez)”, 2020, Woven cotton and acrylic yarn

“how to approach a foal”, Cotton and acrylic yarn, 2024

“american wedding”, 2019, Cotton and acrylic yarn

Diedrick Brackens’ weavings for blood compass, currently at Jack Shainman’s two New York City locations, have a mystical language all their own. In the gallery’s newest space, inside the landmark Clock Tower Building, his creations look particularly majestic.

From the gallery-

In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place —visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night—hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.”

His figures are accompanied by an ecosystem of symbols and shapes that have recurred over the course of his practice. The animals, natural elements, and man-made objects, accrue significance every time they are cast in this ever-evolving mythology. The characters in this series are placed in dialogue with lightning bolts, waning suns, and sourceless orbs of light—open-ended devices of orientation. In these distilled arrangements, footholds for straightforward interpretation dissolve—inviting viewers to parse the compositions and uncover meaning.

Brackens’ semiotic language emerges from lived experience, but also through revisiting books, poems, and legends. In blood compass, some of these references—alluded to in his titles— include the novel Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler, the poem “How you might approach a foal” by Wendy Videlock, and the Bible’s parable of the prodigal son. These stories, though dramatically diverse in genre and subject, speak to Brackens’ inclination to loop, lose, and locate one’s self in that which is known, but also to shape-shift, forming new meaning from that which is “familiar.” He approaches these symbols—weighted with memory, context, and history—with fresh eyes or, as Videlock’s poem concludes, ”like you / are new to the world.”

The show closes downtown on 5/24, but continues through 6/1/24 at the Chelsea location where the selections below are from.

“if you have ghosts”, 2024, Cotton and acrylic yarn

 

“towards the greenest place on earth”, 2023, Cotton and acrylic yarn

“favorable conditions”, 2023, cotton and acrylic yarn

Brooklyn Art Shows- Ann Schaumburger, Roberta Dorsett, and Denisse Griselda Reyes at A.I.R. Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
May 192024
 

Ann Schaumburger, “Silver Moon in Darkened Sky House”, 2023, Flashe on wood

Ann Schaumburger

Ann Schaumburger

The three exhibitions currently on view at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn all focus on homes in unique ways. In the first gallery, Ann Schaumburger’s paintings of houses for New Work continue her exploration of color.

From the gallery-

For over fifty years, Schaumburger has used the house as a basic structure—a scaffold—for exploring how colors interact with one another. Schaumburger builds her houses with blocks of four pigments, using stencil brushes and tape to fill each house with modular forms. Influenced by the theories of Josef Albers, Schaumburger’s approach to color is meticulous yet playful. Different colors dazzle and dance when placed in proximity, creating a sense of surprise.

The paintings in this new body of work depart from Schaumburger’s earlier explorations in one key detail: the houses are now mounted on wheels. This choice was inspired by Schaumburger’s reading of the biography of Henry David Thoreau, whose family had attached wheels to their domicile, allowing them to transport the house across different sites in Concord, Massachusetts. “The idea of taking a solid house, attached to the ground, and letting it roll away,” Schaumburger says, “seems both comical and deeply suggestive of our times.”

Schaumburger has described her color choices as an attempt to “solve an aesthetic problem.” Yet the work is not entirely abstract. Titles like Forest House Under Summer Sky and Moonscape Moving House gesture toward the fact that certain color relationships become evocative of different seasons, places, and times of day. All of the paintings in the exhibition feature a crescent or small globe in the upper left or right quadrant. Sometimes, this globe is rendered in metallic gold or bronze, recalling the sun. Other times, it is a lunar silver. The round shape of the globe mirrors the house’s circular wheels. Just as the earth rotates around the sun, the wheels rotate around their own axles, allowing the house to move.

The wheeled house becomes a spirited metaphor for Schaumburger’s practice. Dynamic rather than stationary, it embodies the liveliness and energy of Schaumburger’s color choices, as well as the open-ended nature of her process.

Roberta Dorsett’s photos for Sleepwalking explore isolation and uneasiness in her family’s suburban home.

Roberta Dorsett, “Sleepwalking”

Roberta Dorsett, “Sleepwalking”

Roberta Dorsett, “Sleepwalking”

From the gallery-

Dorsett’s Sleepwalking is a series of photographs examining isolation in the suburbs and how a sense of danger often accompanies seemingly idyllic environments. The work depicts three women, Dorsett’s aunt, her cousin, and Dorsett herself, occupying the shared space of a suburban home in Connecticut. Tension arises from the camera’s interaction with the women. The camera acts as an intrusive person, an interloper, and a voyeur as it captures the women in moments of discomfort and vulnerability.

In Dorsett’s previous work, she took on the role of family historian, photographing moments of in-betweenness that result in candid and uncontrived images. Her obsession with taking photographs of her family is driven by their lack of extant family albums or other visual documentation. Because of the family’s socioeconomic status, photography was considered a luxury and only done for special occasions. Moreover, Dorsett’s mother had to leave behind her family’s photographic history when she immigrated from Jamaica to the United States.

Dorsett initially intended Sleepwalking to be a straightforward documentation of her aunt and cousin’s experience as first-time Black homeowners. But she found herself drawn into the project’s narrative and began photographing her family in a more constructed and story-driven way, drawing inspiration from slasher and horror films. Dorsett captures the visceral thrills of these types of films by continuing to utilize her family to explore the concepts of voyeurism and anxiety. The single-family home, once a symbol of milestone achievement, now becomes a surreal site of both safety and terror. As she stood behind and in front of the camera, registering the uneasiness and distress of these three women inside their home, Dorsett dreamed up a distorted reality and asked herself, “Am I awake or sleepwalking?”

Finally, Denisse Griselda Reyes multimedia installation for Did you have a hard time finding me?  explores home and identity using a combination of original artwork and family archives.

Denisse Griselda Reyes, “Did you have a hard time finding me?“

Denisse Griselda Reyes

From the gallery-

Featuring short films and familial ephemera alongside a new body of paintings, this exhibition humorously meditates on questions of self-formation, reparative representation, and archival preservation, inviting us to dwell in the absurdity these ambitions unintentionally generate. This is Reyes’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Presenting what Reyes has called a “maximalist constellation of memory,” the exhibition juxtaposes materials from their family archives with paintings and multimedia projections within an installation space that recalls, yet does not perfectly reproduce, the domestic interiors of Reyes’s family. Anchoring this exhibition is a short film that ties together two threads. First, the border crossings of Reyes’s grandmother Anita that were necessitated by the peril of the Salvadoran Civil War, and this history’s impact on Reyes’s mother. Second, the queer dating life of Reyes’s indignant and savvy alter-ego, Griselda. Part-narrator, part-drag-persona, part-survival-strategy, Griselda offers Reyes a means to dictate the terms of their own representation against the expectations that constrict queer Latinx artists in the United States. Still, Griselda is also beholden to identitarian demands. Reyes allows their avatar to straddle the line of spectacle, flirting with failure, acknowledging that self-formation might be an impossible endeavor. By juxtaposing Griselda’s exploits with the narrative of their grandmother, Reyes interrogates whether familial, social, and historical processes have the final word on what generates a self.

Reyes has produced Griselda as a mediating figure—one who negotiates their own identity between femininity and non-binary gender, and who personifies the absurdity of any singular narrative of origin. In its plenitude and play, the exhibition exceeds the ostensible facticity of the familial and historical archive. Featuring new paintings that hazily recreate family photographs, a vitrine full of childhood teeth that parodies genres of museal presentation, screens that toggle between home videos and the simulation of archival footage, and striking blue-green walls that recall the past domestic spaces of Reyes’s family in El Salvador, the exhibition transforms processes of preservation into acts of mythmaking. The exhibition is less a recreation of the artist’s family’s domiciles than a space of critical reflection and ambiguity. Guests are invited to join in this meditation—and may find their own notions of selfhood implicated as a result.

These exhibitions close 5/19/24.

NYC Art Shows- Lucy Puls at Nicelle Beauchene

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 182024
 

“Equulus Duo (Two Horseys)”, 1993, Resin, steel, toy horses

“Noven Beastiolae et Octo Massae (Nine Animals and Eight Blocks)”, 1994/99 Resin, stuffed animals, steel, wood, paint

“Sub-Tristis (Somewhat Sad)”, steel, paper towel roll, resin, bees wax, dead fly, 1989

“Notae Litterarum (Foreign Trade)”, 2003, Book, glue, steel

Lucy Puls’s sculptures for Here Everywhere at Nicelle Beauchene encourage the viewer to think about objects in a new way, while also seeing them in the context of their own history. The thrift store toys in her resin sculptures are reminiscent of specimens in a jar or bugs in amber. A roll of paper towels, coated in resin and bees wax, also has a fly on it as if, like the people preserved at Pompeii, an event caused it to be trapped in this moment.  Casts of ships that no longer sail, and books detailing things no longer important, are made and remade into new forms with new codes to decipher. Consumerism, technology, even language itself (her titles are in Latin and English), evolve and change.  What will remain of the present day as we move into the future? Are there clues in what Puls has made using remnants of the past?

From the press release-

Showcasing selected works from 1989 to 2003, Here Everywhere highlights Puls’ unique and overlooked approach to materials and form, surveying her early experiments in making sculpture with found objects, wax, and resin.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Puls turned to making small, resin-cast sculpture with personal effects, found objects, and outmoded household items. At the time, Puls had been making large-scale fiberglass and corrugated metal sculpture; as a reprieve from this labor-intensive work, she began to experiment with leftover waxes and resins on more intimately sized works using items that were on hand in the studio or discovered during thrift shop runs.

Here Everywhere presents selected artworks made across almost fifteen years, loosely arranged into three categories that broadly describe their materials: Small Things, In Resin, and Of Book.

Comprising Small Things is an example of one of Puls’ very first experiments in wax from 1989, Dicis Causa (For the Sake of Appearances). Puls coated a fur hat in a mixture of wax and resin, tipping the form on its edge and affixing insects to its interior surface. Once a status symbol, here the fur hat transforms from a useable object to relic, recognizable, yet made distant through the artist’s material interventions and presentation on a steel shelf.

Works from In Resin include heavily sanded, amberized sculptures arranged throughout the gallery at varying heights atop artist-made shelves and pedestals. Assembled in this series are objects that made their way into thrift stores en masse throughout the 1990s, including once sought-after goods such as the Macintosh 512K and My Little Pony toys. Puls primarily acquired items that had been marked down at resale stores, thus seeking to understand the ways our consumer tendencies pave the way for trend cycles and widespread obsolescence. Children’s toys, in particular, mark this system for the artist; Res Parvus (Little Things) (1991) and Pueri Arma (Child’s Gun) (1991) reveal assembled compositions of the consumer objects that denote childhood—from the innocence and ubiquity of small, plastic figurines to the targeted marketing of BB guns to young boys.

Made a decade later, Imperfectus (Encyclopedia Britannica) (2002) and Involvo (Websters Twentieth Century, Red) (2002) from the series Of Book were created in a time-intensive process of gluing and layering. Unbinding and re-articulating the ideologic form of the encyclopedia, Puls meticulously transformed thousands of loose pages into solid, illegible objects.

The goal across all three series, Puls says, was to achieve in sculpture that which is done with relative ease in painting and drawing: to reduce “representation” to its simplest means while physically separating the object, or artwork, from real-time reality. This is to suggest the idea of a physical object that is both there and not there, devoid of any use-value yet rife with manifold meanings and associations. Through a “strangely alluring sense of loss,” as Glen Helfand described of the work in 2005, Puls turns Dada and Minimalist principles inside out, asking us to more deeply consider the influence of everyday objects and the way they reflect essential ideas of who we are.

This exhibition closes 5/18/24.

NYC Art Shows- Lina Tharsing and Miho Ichise at Scroll

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 182024
 

Miho Ichise “Backlit Portrait”, 2024, oil on linen

Lina Tharsing, “Late Afternoon”, 2024, “It’s Not All Darkness”,2024, and “High Above”, 2022, oil on canvas

Miho Ichise “Warm, Gentle”, 2024, oil on linen

Lina Tharsing, “Golden Ginko”, 2024, and “Waiting for Us”, 2024, oil on canvas

Miho Ichise “Dancing Lights”, 2024, oil on linen

Lina Tharsing, “One Clear Moment”, 2024, and “Eclipse”, 2023, oil on canvas

Walking into the room of paintings in the Miho Ichise and Lina Tharsing two person exhibition at Scroll, the outside world seems to disappear, replaced with a sense of calm. Although their subject matter is similar, their approaches are different- as detailed in the press release below.

From Scroll’s website-

Photographing scenes of the life around her, Miho Ichise translates these snapshots into drawings before finishing her compositions on canvas. Rather than paint what is directly and physically in front of her, Ichise turns to photography, which she feels gives her a certain freedom to create her world, taking extracts of an image, changing the colors, and adding other elements. Painting is not just a replication of her surroundings, but a sensory and atmospheric translation – an attempt to capture the sight, sound, touch, smell, and feeling around her. Ichise draws inspiration and admiration from the play of light and shadow by Georges de La Tour, the lush and atmospheric scenes of printmaker Hasui Kawase, the refined and minimal compositions of Alex Katz, and the colorful textures of Pierre Bonnard.

The artist states, “I would like my work to be an open door to anyone where they can enter to enjoy a connection to their childhood or small excitement of daily life.” Her intimate paintings crop to subtle and distinct details – an element of a scene – allowing the viewer to imagine the bigger picture beyond the edges of the canvas. Whether depicting family members, friends, or strangers on a street, Ichise always draws from scenes of her life and experience.

Both intimate and visually transfixing, Lina Tharsing’s paintings are rooted in real places while possessing a dreamlike quality. For Tharsing, nature is a vehicle where she finds moments of transcendence in the ordinary fabric of everyday life. Light plays a major role in Tharsing’s compositions – whether filtering through trees or glimmering across water, light serves as a catalyst, and a reminder to stay curious.

Following the loss of her parents, Tharsing’s work has been shaped by grief, a transformative force that has reframed her perception of the world. Tharsing states, “Grief is a paradoxical experience – a profound journey into sadness, yet also a doorway to nearly overwhelming love and connection. Each of these paintings is a gateway, an entrance, a window, to what I refer to as ‘thin places’ – moments that reveal the veil between the seen and unseen. My paintings are an invitation to contemplate the presence of something beyond ourselves, something ineffable yet persistent, felt, and present. I am more aware than ever of our collective grief about our relationship to this planet, our ecological grief, and the grief associated with war and human suffering. I come back to the invitation of grief which asks us to transform ourselves and to open ourselves towards our connectedness.”

This exhibition closes 5/18/24.

NYC Art Shows- Mary Lum and Lynn Saville at Yancey Richardson

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Illustration, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking
May 172024
 

“Island”, 2024. Acrylic on paper

“Daredevil”, 2024, Acrylic and colored pencil on paper, and “L’Observatoire“, 2024, Acrylic on paper

Yancey Richardson is currently showing two exhibitions which focus on architecture and city life. Mary Lum’s paintings and collages for temporary arrangements combine elements of city life found on her walks in New York and Paris. Fragments she discovers along the way combine to form dynamic interpretations of these environments.

From the press release-

Lum mines aspects of daily life, vistas of architecture, design, and advertising that could easily go unnoticed. These familiar and often mundane sights are transformed into something more: juxtapositions and layers of random elements, which show both spontaneity and control, perhaps revealing a glimpse into the soul of a city.

The exhibition title temporary arrangements refers to Lum’s journeys though the streets of New York and Paris, observing the fragments of a crumbling façade of a building, a vendor’s pushcart, or a poster for a vernissage, which may have a short shelf life in the urban environment. Lum takes photographs on the streets looking at geometric forms, planes of color, and text. She pulls off bits of advertising posters that are peeling from their bases and collects printed materials – all of which are collaged in her sketchbooks, becoming the basis for her paintings. These elements provide inspiration for Lum, who creates a collision of perspectives and forms that boldly announce the delights of quiet discoveries.

Susan Cross, Senior Curator, Mass MoCA, wrote that Lum’s work “suggests the speed of daily life and the fragmented way in which we encounter language in the world. Language speeds up and slows down, much in the way that when we are walking or riding a bike in the city our pace is determined by what we notice around us. Words come together and fall apart, with each individual viewer making meaning.”

Influenced by Cubism and Russian Constructivism, Lum is also interested in the concept of psychogeography, as practiced by members of the Situationist International movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Referring to the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behavior of the individual, one may see Lum’s interdisciplinary practice as a physical manifestation of this phenomenon. Lum also finds inspiration in artist and activist Corita Kent’s graphic style and fractured text as well as artist Ray Yoshida’s use of comics, which tell stories with isolated fragments.

Mary Lum wrote, “A couple of years ago I saw a William Kentridge exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. One of the things that kept jumping out at me from that show was the phrase: ’FIND THE LESS GOOD IDEA.’ That painted phrase was repeated several times in various parts of the exhibition, and each time I saw it I got a little jolt of recognition. I’m not sure exactly what Kentridge meant by that phrase (it’s related to his Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg), but to me it meant everything about the way I work. I took the reference to mean finding the things that are in the margins, those things that are on the periphery, those things that are between the lines, that you see out of the corner of your eye. Not through a concerted effort, but by paying attention, looking around, looking the other way. And often, later, you are not sure that you’ve seen these things at all.”

For Lynn Saville’s exhibition Elevated, she has captured NYC at its most peaceful time, twilight.

From the press release-

Twilight in the city, after the sun disappears below the horizon and the hustle and bustle has dissipated, is where Lynn Saville finds refuge and inspiration. For decades, she has documented these fleeting, dream-like moments suspended in time within the urban landscape.

Elevated showcases Saville’s mastery of the city’s natural light. Much like Edward Hopper, who painted the solitude of New York City through its buildings and rooftops, Saville’s photographs transform architectural elements and structures into dramatic geometric forms and patterns through light and shadows. Saville describes the importance of capturing images at twilight, “During this transitional time, the change from daylight to moonlight and artificial light seems to awaken the city’s own dreams, apart from the business and errands of its inhabitants. For me, these dreams are expressed in basic shapes and patterns, as if the infrastructure were communing with its own geometry while distracting details are hidden in shadow. The shifting light brings out forms that may disappear in the darkness of night or remain invisible during the more chaotic visual world of daylight.”

As the exhibition title implies, photographs featured in the show were taken from the elevated platforms of New York City’s mass transit system or from the street looking upward at structures on rooftops. These photographs explore perspectives on the language of the built environment and our perception of the cityscape. For example, Elevated subway platforms offer an expanse of skyline structures such as rooftops, water towers, and upper sections of nearby buildings, which along with the coming and goings of trains become the focal point.

Both of these exhibitions close 5/18/24.

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