This week’s artists experiment with materials + medium to explore and express their message.

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1. Crystal Wagner’s work in Biotica combines 2D and 3D forms while investigating alternative uses of materials through hybrid approaches to printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Her work consists of smaller shadowbox-like sculptures and large scale paper installation that fill the gallery space at 108 Contemporary
2. Jane Rosen’s new exhibition of stone, glass, and bronze works, Cash-Morandi, is a play of presences—a balance between nature and culture, or what Rosen calls “landscape time and domestic time.” In her works, birds of prey and vessels formed of opaque glass perch on hewn stone piers, their surfaces and edges as worn as beach glass at Sears-Peyton Gallery
3. While utilizing the plethora of techniques and materials, Ruth Hardinger and Kara Rooney choose to express their ideas through the exploration of three dimensional, or sculptural idioms, with drawing, photography, digital collage or stone wool being an integral part of the work. There is an open ended dialogue of technologies and materials enacted, of past and present experience; there are traces of the multiple processes and substances used to create individual pieces at Five Myles
4. These new Ingres-inspired paintings are an evolution of Taner Ceylan’s Unfinished Painting series, which also examine historical Orientalist portraits through a contemporary, Eastern lens. The portraits involved an in-depth study of Ingres’ technique and process, as well as a detailed, in-person analysis of the original painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York at Paul Kasmin Gallery
5. Jared Madere primarily creates installation-based works featuring disparate materials such as salt, flowers, foodstuffs, and plastic tarps that are assembled and aggregated in a manner that insists on their material connections to society, economics, industry, and human emotion. For Madere, the meanings and associations of objects are never stripped away— floral arrangements can point to longing or sadness and a burnt coat is imbued with isolation and dejection at Whitney Museum of American Art
6. Kim Simonsson uses traditional techniques to create sensitive and surreal painted ceramic sculptures. His sculptures combine innocent animal and child forms with a twist of violence and suspense to create a monumental physical presence at Jason Jacques Inc.