It saved me once too often,You’d never know how often.I’ve pictured you in coffins:My baby in a coffin.But I love it when you blink your eyes. — Distortions, by Clinic Contributed by Zach Seeger / How do we know we’re still alive? Reverse Marie Kondo: the accumulation of our stuff; at least this was how … read more… “Essex Flowers: Waiting to be activated”
Author: Editor
On a Cartoon Graveyard
Contributed by Julian Kreimer/ At 3:10 pm on a blustery Thursday afternoon, the falling sun refracted off the 3rd floor windows of PS 42, the Benjamin Altman Elementary School, named for the department store magnate, a first-generation son of Bavarian Jews who rose from running a small Lower East Side dry-goods store to opening one of … read more… “On a Cartoon Graveyard”
Steve Hicks: Sparring shape and line
Contributed by Carol Diamond / Steve Hicks’s oil and acrylic canvases exude confidence and exuberance, like a teenager sporting a new outfit and venturing out to face the world. I’ve got this, the paintings seem to say. Hicks’s shapes and lines, his layers and hues, impart a robust, jaunty sense of speed and physicality. For all … read more… “Steve Hicks: Sparring shape and line”
Art and Film: 2019 Top Ten
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It’s been a fine year for movies, their demise due to streaming having been greatly exaggerated notwithstanding awkward episodes like the theatrical release of Netflix-backed The Irishman. Here is my inexorably subjective and eminently debatable list of the Top Ten dramatic films of 2019. The Irishman. Still the king of the … read more… “Art and Film: 2019 Top Ten”
Richard Tuttle sees the light
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Richard Tuttle, who has lived in New Mexico since the late 1980s, recently got an expansive new studio on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Exchanging mesa views for a perch on the ocean, at the very edge of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown, places him physically … read more… “Richard Tuttle sees the light”
Allison Schulnik’s glamour magic and illusion
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Moths are weird and macabre. Allison Schulnik, in her animated short MOTH in “Suffering From Realness” at Mass MoCA, fully captures their gothic elegance. The moths rhythmically fan eyespots and morph into something new and magical every few seconds, conjuring a resonant line from Mary Oliver’s poem, Sleeping in the Forest: “By morning I had vanished at … read more… “Allison Schulnik’s glamour magic and illusion”
David Diao’s challenge to formalism
Contributed by Adam Simon / The space between 0 and 1 is infinite. I thought of this in relation to David Diao’s exhibition, “Studios and Sales,” currently at Postmasters. The show is an inspired pairing of two works, Studios, Updated and Sales. Sales is an arrangement of twenty-five smallish paintings from 1992 that documents Diao’s painting sales between 1968 … read more… “David Diao’s challenge to formalism”
Two Coats of Paint Resident Artists: Peter Dudek and Monika Sosnowski
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Peter Dudek and Monika Sosnowski, as Two Coats of Paint artists-in-residence, will present an exhibition of their work on Thursday, December 5, 6-9 pm, during DUMBO First Thursday. Primarily a sculptor, Dudek, born in 1952 in Adams, Massachusetts, has always been interested in Modern Architecture, particularly the early works of Corbusier, … read more… “Two Coats of Paint Resident Artists: Peter Dudek and Monika Sosnowski”
JJ Manford’s domestic stages for acid daydreams
Contributed by Liz Ainslie / Each of JJ Manford’s vividly realized paintings in the Project Room at Derek Eller draws us into a tightly confined interior space – notionally, an apartment – in which a kinetic, centrally-placed meta-image vibrates. The paintings serve as containers for fantastical projections of the mind, such as a dinosaur painting, … read more… “JJ Manford’s domestic stages for acid daydreams”
Art and Film: Merchants of nostalgia
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If bad times increase the demand for nostalgia, the current bull market is going to persist for at least another year. But Donald Trump, the ultimate stimulus for that demand, is himself a product of a certain toxic brand of nostalgia – one for a time of white male domination, … read more… “Art and Film: Merchants of nostalgia”