Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists examine the intersections of our spirit and our minds.

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1. Coalescence brings together the psychedelic styles of New York-based collage artist Sebastian Wahl and Grass Valley/San Francisco landscape painter Justin Lovato. Curated by collector Brian Chambers, this exhibition of multi-dimensional urban mandalas and op-art natural settings evolves the contemporary visionary genre established by artists Mario Martinez, Damon Soule, Oliver Vernon, and David Choong Lee at Luna Rienne
2. Fernando Reyes show, DANCE – DREAM – DRAMA, is very much about body language, or the conscious and unconscious ways in which our bodies communicate, often with much richer honesty than verbal language allows at Mercury Twenty
3. FIGURATION INSIDE/OUT examines portraiture through the depiction of the body, mind, and spirit. The paintings by the four accomplished artists in this exhibition were selected for their engaging personal expression, and styles. Their genre, unalike and varied, runs from realism, abstraction, narration, symbolism, patterning, and adornment at Nancy Margolis Gallery
4. For this show ,Oliver Jeffers has combined classical landscape and seascape painting with technical measurements. Through this juxtaposition, the artist presents the viewer with two modes of representation, one artistic and one scientific. Rather than increase our understanding, this combination makes things less clear by providing superfluous distraction whilst highlighting the boundaries of perceived knowledge. Thus, Jeffers points to two underlying obstacles of human cognition, the tendency to overthink and the inability to fully comprehend at Lazarides Rathbone
5. Jason Jagel’s CRAP SHOOT acknowledges the inherent gamble –the experimental nature– of making art, an arena where literally anything can happen at FFDG
6. Ryan McGinley’s Fall photos find art historical precedent and inspiration in the likes of Frederic Church and the Hudson River painters – Romantic landscapists working in the same region in which McGinley took these photos. Delicately avoiding the trappings of clichéd fall foliage photography, McGinley employs the coloristic lushness of Northeastern autumn as a setting for his models that is at once ecstatic and moribund: these bodies, frozen by the mechanism of photography, are placed in a landscape that is dazzling for the very reason that it is transitional, caught between periods of verdancy and barrenness. McGinley carefully constructs a world orchestrated by a dichotomous imagination: the public and the private, humanity and nature and even life and death exist in these pictures as a correlative nexus at Team Gallery, Inc.

 

November 17, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday Gallery Picks




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Myth and ephemerality play a large part in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. A group show with a throughly playful vibe at Andrea Schwartz Gallery
2. Saner’s works are heavily influenced by traditional Mexican customs and folklore. ForPrimitivo, the artist created lively portraits of characters wearing Nahuale masks reminiscent of those found on the streets of Mexico and according to legend, have the power to transform human beings into animals at Jonathan Levine Gallery
3.Integrating memory, literature, art history, and contemporary culture, Heidi Howard deftly paints portraits with loose, lively, gestural brush strokes, full of color, pattern, line, and a figuration, abstract to defined, reminiscent of old masters such as Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, Botticelli at Nancy Margolis Gallery
4.On the theme of the artist as mythologist, in her series ‘I remember Paradise’, Lakwena Maciver uses the relationship between myth and adornment to explore the possibility that myths – expressed through films, paintings, songs, advertisements – carry ‘echoes’ of paradise, pointing to a past and a future glory which we only see glimpses of in the present at Papillion Art
5. The Making of Personal Theory: Mysticism and Metaphysics in the Work of Sara Kathryn Arledge, Charles Irvin, and Jim Shaw is a three-person exhibition that takes notions of “the mystical” as an entry point to consider daily encounters that are marked with eccentricity, the surreal, and a dream-like passage of time at Armory Center for the Arts
6. Yellena James’ ethereal ecosystems at LeQuiVivre

January 27, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Taker a closer look at time and movement through these six exhibitions…

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1. Susan Siegel inserts a cast of animal-human hybrids into her intimate, delicate paintings inspired by 18th Century masters at Sloan Fine Art
2. Fresh Paint encompasses a wealth of dynamic and vibrant stylistic approaches to Contemporary painting, each one presenting a distinct, very personal and entirely organic approach to the practice at Lazarides Rathbone
3. Jackie Meier’s “Razzmatazz” explodes with color at Nancy Margolis Gallery
4. Cassandra Smith is fascinated by the dichotomy between organic and geometric shapes, the contrast between natural and synthetic at Sky High Gallery
5. With her new series of energetic works on paper, Simone Shubuck considers our relationship with the past and acknowledges that oftentimes what we think of as “new” are really old ideas re-imagined, recycled or “knocked off.” at Taylor Cordoba
6. The striking female forms in Simon Birch‘s Hooligan bear the imprint of an invisible force, as though someone hurled them through space and punched them into the frame at Ben Brown Fine Arts

April 23, 2013 | By: Shayna Kulik

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