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.

