Gallery Watch: Nosegay Tornado by Ambera Wellmann at Company

Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Nosegay Tornado by Ambera Wellmann

Company Gallery, 88 Eldridge St.

One of the many tokens of pleasure during the pandemic I have come to find is stumbling across an incredible art show by accident while on my way to another. I suffer from option paralysis, a serious-sounding faux disorder that makes it difficult for me to commit to choosing only one gallery to go to at a time. 

Even as COVID-19 continues to impose itself, there is still so much new artwork to see and for that, I am bountifully grateful. I urge you to go out and explore for yourself too. There is nothing quite like seeing artwork in the flesh. 

Regardless of prior planning or research, the sensation of walking into a gallery you’ve not even heard the name of before is something exciting in and of itself. When a body of work appears so forceful in its serendipity, you can’t help but wonder if the paintings were in fact waiting for you to appear this whole time. Who cares how you got there, the point exists in your arrival. 

Company Gallery was by far the best pit stop of my whole week.

Ambera Wellmann presents her first solo show, Nosegay Tornado in this hidden gallery on Eldridge Street. Walking down a dauntingly long hallway to arrive at the show (on your right), Company is surprisingly welcoming and warm for a large white space. This feeling was most likely caused by a combination of witnessing more and more people visiting shows (some seemingly had the same gallery route as me), mixed with the maturity of Wellmann’s use of paint. 

The paintings throughout the space represent the last six months of Wellmann’s studio time. Using inspiration from the romantically distorted and anamorphic bodies of William Blake’s apocalyptic work, these paintings are vibrant and undeniably sexy. There’s narrative, lust and confusion in the room, brought to life through oil paint and soft pastels. 

Nosegay Tornado presents paintings that embody alternative and perhaps conflicting narratives. Whether it be the choice to construct internal (oil on linen canvas) and external (painted frame) structures (The Unicorn Captivity) or in creating a scene where a sinister figure voyeuristically watches two lovers reach ecstasy (Nox Tendencies), her canvases home a level of uncertainty within them.

Wellmann’s vibrant colors bleed into animals and ornaments, blurring forms with shapes and patterns. Figures softly turn into abstractions and the combustion of needs and desires portrayed in these paintings emit a kind of sexy, kind of serious but definitely catastrophic steam that demands the viewer’s attention. The work dramatically (and dreamily) deals with ideas of fluidity in sexuality and gender, the psyche, and queerness. 

Nosegay Tornado extrapolates the potentiality of who we are as animalistic creatures and romanticizes the idea of what human desire looks or feels like beyond any and all of its confinement. 

Nosegay Tornado is on show at Company Gallery until Jan. 9.

 

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: edenchrome for all at ASHES/ASHES

 Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

edenchrome for all 

Michael Assiff, Valerie Keane, Lacey Lennon, Luke Libera Moore, 

Evelyn Pustka, Andrew Ross, Darryl Westly and Damon Zucconi. 

ASHES/ASHES, 56 Eldridge St.

ASHES/ASHES presents a group show that grapples with the ineptitude of the internet’s search engines, algorithms and the navigation of 2020’s digital rhetoric. A wilderness of hashtags, symbols, phrases, redirection notices, surveillance, data, disguises, conspiracies, no results or too many results.

The sculptures, videos and paintings in edenchrome for all have surrendered to the information age, admitting there is no going backwards. 

Eight artists have produced works for this show that plays with ideas of certitude in an age where literally anything is searchable. Our accessibility to questioning and answering has unfortunately become abusive. With advanced abilities like never before, the idea of truth and fact are not mutually exclusive, but more malleable instead.

With the 2020 election arguably presenting as the most dividing campaign in Western history, conspiracies about the far-left and far-right over saturate our cell phones, presenting ideologies so far-fetched and comically irrational that they seem to stick. 

The experience of walking into the gallery itself was eccentric and blinding. Coming from an early sun-down November day and flinging yourself into the severity of the brightest of white walls totally sets the tone immediately. 

ASHES/ASHES steals your attention, almost precisely like a screen. Suddenly in a brand new world, whether you like it or not you won’t be able to look away. 

Artistic agency and digital anonymity were visual propositions externalized through the combination of analog and digital techniques. The hand squeezed mark-making by Michael Assiff, to the fine, unconventional cuts around the edges of Black Friday Sale, 2:43 PM: November 29th, 2019; Poughkeepsie, NY, 2020 blur the reality of what it means to be a mark maker in the contemporary space. 

Laser-cut sculptures can start as scribbles, and 3D objects are re-rendered out of funky and/or trashy graphics from an old-school computer game. Paintings can be digital drawings with thousands of filters applied and almost anything we see hanging in a gallery is professionally deceptive. 

Machine making is limitless within an artistic capacity, as is its power to manipulate our digital community. Machine takeover ... well, that’s now up to us. 

If you are interested in less conventional techniques in painting, sculpture, multimedia and video art, then this is the show to see before the year is out. Easily the most notable show of the year for me, ASHES/ASHES has transformed their gallery into a garden of confusing, confronting and calculated objects — some that would take hours of surveying to appreciate every nuance. 

The standout pieces for me were spangle maker by Valerie Keane, a laser-cut sculpture hanging from the ceiling, Party in the USA, a video work that re-imagines Miley's famous anthem by Evelyn Putska and WEEDS (WDFY04 Vidia Purple / WDMN02 Pink Bow Beauty) a painting on cotton by Michael Assiff. 

edenchrome for all is showing at ASHES/ASHES until Dec. 19.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: NYNY2020 by Melissa Brown at Derek Eller Gallery

 Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

NYNY2020 by Melissa Brown 

Derek Eller Gallery, 300 Broome St.

Melissa Brown's work is an equally refreshing and dystopian take on the year of severe global chaos.

The upheaval of all normalcy has forced us to take a step back — can we even remember how we lived before the pandemic wiped out our rituals and routines? What has COVID-19 made us bereft of or even worse, adapt to? 

NYNY2020 highlights the beauty in the banal and takes viewers into atmospheres that seem so out of reach in 2020. 

Zoom, New York’s subway system and famous art museums are subjects shown glorified throughout Derek Eller Gallery’s latest show. It was the first space I had visited that had more than two people in it. All wearing masks of course, but the irony of the work's commentary rang true during my physical encounter at the gallery. 

How do we safely look at art anymore? Especially when these seemingly cheerful paintings take a while to figure out. 

Brown’s distortional collages are created with layers of oil paint, stencil, airbrush and screen printed digital photography that undulate with reflective mark makings and contrasting textures. Brown’s use of light is also unique as it ranges from natural to digital, illustrating how ubiquitous the glare of a screen has become for us as our world turns increasingly virtual. 

NYNY2020 is somewhat of an optical illusion in that it turns ordinary objects into surreal terrains. The intimacy of portraying commuting, being in an office or heading to a virtual work meeting displays the new set of demands our society faces, particularly in what was once the world’s epicenter.

Another interesting feature of the work is that it occasionally involves a human hand, suggesting that this work is in fact about us. Our consumption, our surveillance, our addiction to our cellular devices. The world is still in our hands during this pandemic, but the way in which we see and control it will be altered tremendously ... and forever. 

This show is so uncomfortably relevant that it is almost scary to think how else 2020 in New York City will be depicted in the future. Melissa Brown’s work forces you to slow down, to stop and think about this year and to understand our home with an entirely different appreciation.

NYNY2020 by Melissa Brown is showing at Derek Eller Gallery until Dec. 19

 

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: Cotton Mouth by Tschabalala Self

 Text and photos by Clare Gemima

Cotton Mouth by Tschabalala Self

Eva Presenhuber, 39 Great Jones St.

Cotton Mouth presents as a formal critique on projected viewings (or constructions) of Black bodies in America. This show is physically and figuratively in your face, hitting the nail on the head with what needs to be addressed socially and artistically right now. 

The demand of this politically charged work is potent with its use of scale and installation method especially. Cotton Mouth is striking, hard-hitting and an exciting insight into the trajectory of young artist Tschabalala Self (1990, Harlem). This is her first solo show at the gallery. 

As you walk into the beautiful space that is Eva Presenhuber on the historically rich Great Jones, you will quickly find yourself surrounded by mixed-media paintings made out of materials such as fabric, thread, charmeuse, silk, velvet, paper, pigment, acrylic and canvas that completely dominate the space.

Cotton Mouth also features sculptures, drawings and an audio work spread across the two gallery floors.
The title of the show and Self’s making process simultaneously speak to slavery, and the mutually exclusive relationship that cotton has with the African-American experience. 

The act of these characters stitched and painted into the canvas by hand carry an emotional and personal significance to Self, while also speaking to the historical devastations of Black slave labor in America. Each constructed character holds power over their self-presentation and external perception unapologetically, an act of power that Black people in America are denied daily.

The work is so hard not to touch based on the array of different fabrics used and sewn together. What was hard for me to believe is that through stitching and constructing, Self has made characters that undeniably hold their own presence and somehow even look different in age and personified life experience. 

Self has impeccably built each and everyone of these characters from scratch whether it be Lil Mama 2 with her plaid and tulle fringed pants or the two lovers in Sprewell that kiss in front of an incredible photo transferred TV. One of the characters even wears the artist’s actual jeans. 

Self’s practice marries her interests in the psychological and emotional effects of projected fantasy with her sustained articulation of Black life and embodiment. Seeing every hand stitch in Self’s work shows the viewer how painstaking and timely it is to create. The labor in each stitch holds affection, memory and protection according to the artist, and I feel as though the painted hands directly applied to the gallery’s walls touch on this too. 

Cotton Mouth by Tschabalala Self is showing at Eva Presenhuber until Dec. 19 

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: Total Running Time by Jibade-Khalil Huffman at Magenta Plains

Text and photos by Clare Gemima

Total Running Time by Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Magenta Plains, 94 Allen St.

Having stumbled across Magenta Plains awaiting the results of the election, my mood was tense and suspended. I was cynical and in urgent need of a distraction, but entering this gallery gave me so much more than that. I was elated by what I saw the second I walked into the almost disguised gallery space on Allen Street (refer to the top photo to avoid missing it entirely).

 
The atmosphere was moody and engrossing. Neons, vocal soundscapes and jolted light flashings from unconventionally hung projectors filled the two-storied gallery space. 

Total Running Time presents a multifaceted insight into the practice of inter-disciplinary artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman, a successful writer and poet working with text and imagery to re-imagine and challenge semiotic hierarchies. His object making involves the re-contextualization of text presented through densely layered video pieces, light work, moving imagery and digital stills. 

The exhibition includes photographic lightboxes and digital photo-collages printed onto transparencies that are manipulated and scrutinized by looped video projections. Layering visuals for Huffman intentionally speaks to conversations and language pertinent to race and visibility. 

Upon looking at a projected transparency work, you’ll find yourself becoming confused about what is printed and what is projected while being completely mesmerized by the piece and its much larger light leak onto the back wall. The prints are saturated with color and cartoon graphics, making for an almost psychedelic and explosive experience. 

Huffman’s work confronts serious subject matter while colliding loose and dated graphics together such as paint-by-number motifs, classic television stills, advertisements from the 1960s and iconography from various American comic books. 

His work embraces contemporary interests such as the degradation of digital media while also saluting recognizable imagery to draw his viewers in. Because of the ephemeral nature of Huffman’s work, I suggest Total Running Time be a show you visit more than once. 

Whether his pieces juxtapose illustrations with video or projections with digital prints, his work looks and feels different with every photographic iteration, video capture and sensory interaction. 

Total Running Time by Jibade-Khalil Huffman is showing at Magenta Plains until Dec. 16. 

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: Crichoues Indignation at the Hole NYC; Vantage Points at GRIMM Gallery

Text by Clare Gemima

Crichoues Indignation by Caitlin Cherry 

The Hole NYC, 312 Bowery: Showing through Nov. 15

The HOLE NYC honestly takes it up a notch with every artist they showcase.

 

Upon visiting this gallery, I was shocked to see that The HOLE had transformed entirely, with crisply painted walls, a huge amount of incredible new works and a fresh take on their whole space.

Transforming the gallery for Cherry after Cubed, their previous group show (14 international artists) that utilized the space in an entirely different means, allows viewers to understand just how important looking at art is right now, how passionate The HOLE is and how on board their team is with highlighting the current climate of technology and social media running rampantly hand-in-hand with civil unrest, the election and dismantling (or establishing) social hierarchy in 2020. 

Cherry's oil on canvas works are engulfing in their larger than life scale, confronting the viewer in a familiar digital landscape with Black Femme figures at the foreground, her gazes highlighting the way social media appropriates this community's body image, sexuality and style without highlighting their skill set or expertise. 

An image-run, surface level and vapid Instagram-esque landscape is expressed through Cherry’s undulating use of fluorescent colors, shapes and installation techniques. The artist’s hyper-sexualised characters are based on dancers, bartenders and Instagram models working at cabarets and as online influencers. 

I would recommend seeing this show for an impressive take on its online origin (a misspelt tweet that Kanye West made) that expands into a gooey, delicious and psychedelic series of abstract paintings. 

Cherry also includes a very large paintings vault, housing several canvases that gallery goers can engage with. The vault speaks to the value of archiving digital works (or lack their of) playing with online’s ubiquitous sugar-coating methods and the over-arching authenticity in the art world today. 

PS. The HOLE also has a show on by Anders Oinonen

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Vantage Points by Letha Wilson, Sonia Almeida, Heidi Norton and Claudia Peña Salinas

GRIMM Gallery, 202 Bowery: Showing through Nov. 14

Although the gallery is dominated by a vast amount of captivating and rich work by a male painter, Tjebbe Beekman (Symbiosis), if you get to the middle of the gallery and turn to your left, you will see a small door leading to a descending staircase that you can go down for a refreshing take on (finally) an all women's show!

The work deals with the natural world, conceptually and physically, as the artists criss-cross and mingle with the use of plants, grass, fibre, wax, metal and paper presented in a range of autonomous sculptures, paintings and installations in their final form.

The work in this show is presented on the ground, wall, floor and even corners of the building, challenging conventional installation techniques that demonstrate how space can be manipulated by both delicate and less delicate forms. Nature versus structure, hard versus soft, digital versus organic, etc.

Wilson, Almeida, Norton and Salinas' work compliments each other as much as it highlights the differences in each piece. The most compelling work for me was Reverse timeline (2019) by Sonia Almeida, made out of printed fabric, screen print, fabric pen, cotton, polyester and wool hung from the ceiling, and The Museum Archive by Heidi Norton made out of five panels of glass, resin, plants, beam splitter glass, photo gels, photographic prints, film and an aluminum stand.

This is GRIMM Gallery’s final show before they move to Tribeca.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com