Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week our artists examine culture, colonialism and appropriation.

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1. Nancy Shaver and collaborators’ immersive exhibition Dress the Form at Derek Eller Gallery
2. “Edgar Flores (Saner) uses everyday life as the stage to introduce his magic beings full of energy and mischief, always concealing their identity, resisting the conservative mind. Those creatures represent the ideals and aspirations of people straggling for survival. This exhibit celebrates the spirit of our community, our culture, our love for life and the power to resist the taming of our ancient spirit.” at Museo de las Americas
3. Jorge R. Gutierrez’s Border Bang is a passionate love letter to the Tijuana and US border, documenting the bootleg artifacts sold to locals and tourists alike. Reappropriating the bombardment of pop culture images is the border’s reaction to global issues and events, telling viewers and consumers not to glorify these situations but rather to acknowledge them through their subversive presentation at Gregorio Escalante
4. Featuring a mix of visual influences of the Pacific Rim, Askew One’s latest works reflects on how colonialism has shaped New Zealand throughout the years, and tells a unique story through powerful portraits of the people, and the faces of this diverse community at Inner State Gallery
5. Disguise: Masks and Global African Art connects the work of twenty-five contemporary artists with historical African masquerade, using play and provocation to invite viewers to think critically about their world and their place within it. By putting on a mask and becoming someone else, artists reveal hidden realities about society, including those of power, class, and gender, to suggest possibilities for the future at Brooklyn Museum
6. Dylan Languell shrank hundreds of chip bags, giving new life as the “bodies” of the kachina dolls. Kachinas have a history dating to the mid 19th century or earlier. Around 1850, Hopi Indians carved wooden figures to make dolls that were used to instruct young women about deified ancestral spirits and their influence over the natural environment. During the early part of the 20th Century, kachinas became a commodification of Native American culture and were incorporated into Western artistic practices. Great Value, brings to mind new products, low prices, and issues of mass consumption at Bailey Gallery

July 20, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks are full of quirk and wonderment.

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1. M.A. Peers’ new exhibition is a summation of the two idiosyncratic areas she has explored throughout her career — dog portraiture and painterly abstraction at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
2. In Ulrich Wulff’s most recent paintings, we are presented with a figure that has made reoccurring appearances in nearly all of his paintings for over a decade. This character, with it’s bulging, antenna-like eyes, embodies for Wulff a mutable, calligraphic, or even cartoonish attempt at self representation. Though it can be identified as a central actor in a narrative tableaux of sorts, it’s primary function is to orient the artist in the endless field of possibility that opens up any time a new painting is begun at TIF SIGFRIDS
3. David Shaw’s sculptural work mines the domestic and cosmic, nature and science, craft and fine art. Organic materials brushes against the machine made and the distinction between the two breaks down. It is in this state of entropy that Shaw finds release, if not radiance at Bailey Gallery
4. For WONDER nine leading contemporary artists created site-specific installations inspired by the Renwick. Together, these installations will turn the building into a larger-than-life work of art at Renwick Gallery
5. In Informal Arrangements, Michael Wolf juxtaposes an abstracted view of Hong Kong’s seemingly endless industrial facades with an intimate perspective from within its hidden network of back alleys, in a series of photographic typologies and vernacular sculptures.at Flowers Gallery
6. Leon Benn’s paintings are inhabited by participants, either person or animal, engaging in pleasurable activities within hallucinatory environments at Roberts & Tilton

November 24, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks challenge boundaries and ask questions.

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1. Bruce Dorfman’s stunning colorful abstract assemblages that ignore conventional spatial boundaries at June Kelly Gallery
2. Combining dense sculptural installation with video montages, Dineo Seshee Bopape’s artwork engages with powerful socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation.at Southbank Centre
3. Michael Berryhill’s latest show’s “Shrine Time” investigates both the physical space and spiritual aura of a shrine. For him, the object itself (the painting or drawing), and the act of stopping and looking, supplies the ultimate meaning at Bailey Gallery
4. Ingress/Egress lightly balances its journey in a space created of compressed experiences, a meditative dialogue of depth and transcendence. In its most basic form, the ownership of the works lie in the oneness of everyone who’s asked the eternal ‘why’ of the universe and made beautiful the uncertainty of the answers at Paradigm Arts
5. Dave Kinsey’s works in The Modern Condition are imbued with semi-abstracted figures and objects that become metaphors or symbols that ambiguously reference contemporary issues such as overpopulation, money, power, climate change, consumerism and the everyday dynamics of contemporary life at FFDG
6. Try again. Fail again. Fail better examines four artists’ explorations of ceramics and the inherent nature of its process, contributing authentic voices to the conversation surrounding clay at Cherry and Martin

September 1, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

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