Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Matthew Stone at The Hole

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 162025
 

“Radiating Kindness (Oil)”, 2023, Oil on linen

“Bold Glamour”, 2023, Digital print on linen

For AI Paintings, Matthew Stone‘s 2023 exhibition at The Hole’s Lower East Side location, he explored new ways of using the latest technology while expanding on techniques used in his previous digital creations.

Details from The Hole about this exhibition-

Two LED screens form the center of this show, displaying an unedited stream of novel AI outputs; a new painting every ten seconds. Corresponding in scale to the surrounding works on linen and functioning like smart canvases, these AI paintings transform endlessly and if you’re alone in the gallery, you will be the only person to ever see that version of the artwork.

Stone’s AI paintings—both the tangible on linen and the fleeting screenic pieces—are created through his training of a custom AI model on top of Stable Diffusion’s open source, deep learning, text-to-image model. By feeding it only his past artworks, Stone has created a self-reflexive new series of AI works that disintegrates the hegemony of the singular static masterpiece and problematizes the idea of ownership, or even what “the artwork” itself entails.

AI has become part of contemporary culture, used to solve real world problems and also create TikTok filters. It’s a tool and like a paintbrush it can be used skillfully or not. At the moment AI is throwing the art world into upheaval as artists explore its potential, galleries contend with its disruption of technique and presentation and collectors and museums feel the dissolution of authorship and ownership.

A second type of work makes its debut here, Radiating Kindness (Oil), a 3D printed, machine-assisted oil painting made in collaboration with ARTMATR labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to make innovative tools and tech. By leveraging AI, robotics, computer vision and painting scripts, their robot has created a traditional oil painting in three dimensions. You can see on the surface how the interplay between analog and digital mark making is eye-boggling.

The show also includes examples of Stone’s “traditional” technique, which is anything but: on the 13-foot wide linen painting, Irradiance, four nude figures dance over piles of strewn AI paintings. The figures in the foreground, reminiscent in choreography of Henri Matisse’s Dance (La Dance), 1910, are bodacious, athletic women, heavy and sexy like a Michelangelo marble while at the same time futuristic, weightless and splendid in impossible glass and metallic brush marks. Here Stone’s circular and sensitive approach is laid bare for the viewer, the references to art history, technology, culture, access and the pursuit for the intangible is almost overwhelming to grasp.

Stone’s approach points to the deeply interwoven nature of our offline and online lives today. He sees artists’ use of new technologies as necessary, with creatives deploying these tools in a manner that’s not motivated by big tech or financial gains, disrupting the algorithm by creating their own and exploring this new frontier without data-driven deliverables. Creating new context and room for human subjectivities and emotion in the shift from analog to digital that arguably has already occurred.

Below, in an interview for The Standard, he discusses using AI for this work further-

When working with AI, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed or do you always feel in control?

I have never felt fully in control while making art and I’ve always been back and forth between wanting to be and understanding the transformative and creative power of just letting go. The most exciting moments in my creative process have often been unexpected mistakes. Those happy mistakes have revealed something that can then be consciously amplified. Using AI creates lots of unexpected outcomes very fast. So as someone who likes accidents in this context of image making, it’s a good way to become accident-prone.

Do you consider AI as just another digital tool? Or does it feel more like a collaboration? In other words, do you sometimes feel AI might develop its own taste, point of view, conscience?

It’s a digital tool and I try to resist the urge to anthropomorphize it. But it’s difficult because it feels like such a paradigm shift and also sometimes like dreaming. I think that culturally speaking, we are moving in a direction that assigns these qualities of perceived sentience to AI even when more mundane actions are at play. It’s not clear to me how we will tell if AI has achieved general intelligence, but I think most people will assume it to be the case long before it actually happens, assuming that it does.

NYC Art Shows- Peter Opheim at The Hole

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 252024
 

Peter Opheim has created a charming, colorful world for Cocoon at The Hole. It’s worth bending down to get a closer look at the little clay creatures that helped form the basis for the characters in his paintings.

From the press release-

After a 25-year career as an abstract painter, Opheim started anew; “since everything we see in the world around us has already been painted”, a family of imaginary creatures and Opheim’s career-defining style was born. His works are an intuitive manifestation of emergence: sculpting the figures first in clay, Opheim removes roadblocks to his imagination. Working intuitively with his hands, the creatures reveal themselves to him and he then paints “from life”.

Not focused on conveying a snapshot of our contemporary world or visual markers of the present day, the sculptural approach to making the subjects of the paintings results in works that exist out of time—the characters are transient yet grounded in subdued color fields, their bodies and borders ambiguous and hazy. In Meadow of My Heart, Holding You and others, multiple figures fill the canvas, an assortment of semi-recognizable parts from a few fuzzy friends fill the canvas, cat-like ears, skinny arms or blobby bodies, with many large eyeballs blinking. In paintings such as Thinking of You a lone figure presents themselves, staring right back at you.

Rather than conveying grandiosity, Opheim instead is in the pursuit of emotional impact. The exhibition includes smaller paintings than ever before, making viewers look closely and the textural brush strokes more prominent. In the large rear gallery, small sculptures are positioned on the floor, barely visible from the other side of the room and dwarfed by 17-foot ceilings. Above the paintings, large woven flowers climb the length of the wall, further figures revealing themselves at the base of the stems: a sense of coziness and protection settles in with clay figures nestled in a small wooden home carved by a fallen tree on his property in Taos, New Mexico.

For this recent body of work there is a shift to a different type of subtlety based on concepts of emergence, interconnectedness, and growth. The title Cocoon is a multifaceted metaphor for these themes, as when a caterpillar spins its body transforming into a chrysalis and cocoon, it is surrendering to transform. This emergence can’t be expedited; patience and independence are crucial, a butterfly must emerge on its own. In the work we see an emergence of form, skillful blurred brush marks of creatures in a softer, hazier palette than when we first showed Opheim in 2018 and an emergence of emotions, a warm joy, the sensation of standing in the sun. These new paintings were difficult to make, notes Opheim, with the figures only starting to reveal themself once the painting was close to completion. Opheim notes the importance of an intuitive organic emergence: “we can have preconceptions on how something is supposed to be, but that’s not how they are made”.

Standing In The Sun, I Feel Your Arms Around Me the title of one of the larger paintings in the show and one of the potential titles for the exhibition, evokes the physical warmth that you feel in these paintings. The hues and figures are inviting yet the asymmetric, spherical bodies have just enough wonkiness to not be classified as overly “cute”. Opheim has shown extensively in Asia where Kawaii culture is widely pervasive and appreciated: New York is known for many things, but cuteness would not be one of them. While foreign, Opheim’s visual language feels refreshing and necessary, inviting curiosity and play through imagery we don’t often see in Western art. Here, Opheim is deliberately moving on from a lot of what we see in galleries at the moment and instead gives us enough room to think on our own, leaving space for our own joy and pleasure.

 

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

NYC Art Shows- Jeremy Shockley at The Hole

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 202023
 

“Double Double”, 2023

“Creep”, 2023

“The Switch”, 2023

“Under The Sea”, 2023

“Under The Sea”, 2023 (detail)

“Hour Glass”, 2023

Currently at The Hole gallery’s Tribeca location are Jeremy Shockley’s imaginative paintings for his exhibition, Well, Look At That.

From the press release-

Across eleven large canvasses, Shockley depicts the intersection of painting as a window into landscape and painting as a cloth stretched over some wood slats.

Shockley, who has a background in art conservation, was helping to restore a Lucio Fontana painting when he decided to incorporate the renowned Spatialist’s slashed-canvas imagery into his own practice. After experimenting with actual cuts he arrived at his signature trompe l’oeil technique, beginning each canvas in big exuberant strokes with four- or five-inch housepainting brushes then progressing to eyelash-thin ones to simulate frayed threads along fake slits in the canvas.

He describes his first large series—painted flaps suggesting two eyes and a smiling mouth—as a response to the renaissance in portraiture that coincided with COVID lockdown. “I put faces on the beautiful landscapes as a way of saying that in the future people may want to go back to looking at them instead of people. We might be all right,” he says, “but perhaps the landscapes won’t be.”

The works in this show push the theme further: the natural world becomes a curtain to be tugged, a veneer to be peeled back, or a series of ever-darkening portals that nonetheless contain a dose of optimism. We are invited to think about alternate dimensions, about the structural materiality of the painted canvas, and about our kitten-like propensity to just “hang in there.”

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

 

NYC Art Shows- “The Midnight Hour” at The Hole NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Feb 212023
 

Nastaran Shahbazi, “In The Cold Nights, We Were Red As Blood”, 2022

Sung Hwa Kim, “When The Evening Song Begins, Everything Turns Into Nothing. From Nothing, You Find Everything.”, 2022

Sung Hwa Kim, “When The Evening Song Begins, Everything Turns Into Nothing. From Nothing, You Find Everything.”, 2022 (detail)

Lindsay Merril, “Come To Me”, 2022

Krzysztof Grzybacz, “Affection”, 2022

Jason Birmingham, “Path of Totality”, 2022

Dan Attoe, “Full Moon Rock Harvest”, 2022

Susan Metrican, “Cast, Cast”, 2022

For The Midnight Hour at The Hole NYC, curating team Scroll (Julien Pomerleau and Rachel Ng), assembled a gorgeous selection of paintings- it was difficult to narrow down which ones to post.

From The Hole’s press release-

The Midnight Hour is about nighttime rendered in landscape, domestic settings, still life, and portraiture. In these paintings, darkness is uniquely dimensional, with celestial blues and blacks composed of—and deepened by—a range of hues. Here you’ll find the coolness of the night sky offset by the warm incandescence of street lights and shop windows, or the silvery light of the moon. Inside glows a candle or a lamp.

The works depict all facets of the night, from nocturnal contemplation and solitude to after-hours festivities, some barely glimpsed in the shadows, some vivid and bustling. Not all the subjects in these paintings appear to partake in the recommended eight hours of sleep. Instead, The Midnight Hour presents happenings mostly outside of the bedroom, from Dan Attoe’s moonlit foragers to Paul-Sebastian Japaz’s late-night cigarette smokers. Whether through interpretations of dreams or by picturing the people we become once the sun sets, the exhibition reveals all that goes unseen during the day.

The lineup of artists welcomes both new talent and familiar names: Olga Abeleva, Dan Attoe, Jason Birmingham, Jose Bonell, Krzysztof Grzybacz, David Hamilton, Anthony Iacono, Paul-Sebastian Japaz, Claudia Keep, Sung Hwa Kim, Jean Lee, Lindsay Merrill, Susan Metrican, Keita Morimoto, Francesco Pirazzi, Cait Porter, Nastaran Shahbazi, Masamitsu Shigeta, Aaron Michael Skolnick, Mai Ta, James Ulmer, and Mikey Yates.

Founded by Julien Pomerleau and Rachel Ng, Scroll is a New York–based curatorial project focused on fostering community and uplifting the works of emerging and overlooked artists. Following first exhibitions in September and November 2022, The Midnight Hour is its largest show to date, bringing together twenty-two artists from around the world.

 

Rosson Crow at The Hole NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Dec 272019
 

Volcanic Eruption At The Junk Yard, 2019

Standoff at the Bedrock Bunny Club, 2019

After The Rapture (Border Town), 2019

Rosson Crow’s paintings for her exhibition Trust Fall at The Hole are bright, chaotic, and very reflective of the times we are living in.

From the press release-

Rosson Crow is in one sense an American History Painter—capitalized—who has made paintings across a range of subjects, foreign and domestic, but always meditating on the American story and her place in it. Since her debut show at Canada Gallery in 2004 while still an undergrad, Crow has established herself as a big, brainy, macho painter who nonetheless maintains a performative seduction with color and content.

This new exhibition features ten immersive panorama paintings that meditate on our 2019 moment in America. In what is her most urgent and timely work to date, she grapples with the erosion of American institutions and even of reality and truth itself. “Chaos autopsies” she calls them, each taking on specific aspects of her thinking—or dreaming—about current issues. KonMari is about the latest trend of disciplinary minimalism but depicts a giant landfill of “fast fashion”; After the Rapture in a Border Town shows a human-free street at the Mexican border; Volcanic Eruption at the Junk Yard is a fierce, fiery pit of melting old cars, while Ocean Front Property in Arizona is pretty self explanatory. No humans are present in any of the works, unless a cardboard cutout or statue; in this trust fall there is no one to catch us.

Using luminous oil paint, spray paint and thrown enamel, Crow builds up the surfaces of her works as she layers their content; bleeding into one another, the paintings feel like a tinted vintage post card, hi-contrast outlines whose colors have melted with time. Using moments of photo transfer for snippets of text, bumper stickers or beer cans, the repeating transfers confer a sense of glitching in the painted image, heightening their theatrical illusionism while questioning their reality; has this image been photoshopped? Has this video been edited? How much can we trust our own eyes?

The paintings are topical but not didactic. Ignorance, absurdity and swirling misinformation make the current political landscape untraversable; to a civilian psyche it makes analysis and action extremely difficult.  The exhaustion that comes from this onslaught must make artmaking even harder; most retreat, make head-in-the-sand works that don’t attempt any sociopolitical issues. Crow has always made works that highlight the staged nature of space, that look at fake or contrived scenes, like the painting above; in this Garden of Eden recreation from a religious-themed creationism park, the plants look like they are from Home Depot not an actual tropical jungle. Looking “behind the curtain” at manipulated reality is a non-partisan issue that speaks to both sides of the cultural divide, as everyone is stuck in this morass together; everyone wants to unravel the myriad ways we are secretly controlled and how power is written into our lived and virtual environment.

This exhibition closes 12.29.19.