Gallery Watch: Dissecting Cyborgian Swamp Thang at Super Dutchess

Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Dissecting Cyborgian Swamp Thang

Super Dutchess, 53 Orchard St.

Super Dutchess gallery is the type of space that makes me miss my small city back home where artwork is hung respectfully, curated purposefully and in existence with the intent of discourse. This, of course, exists in New York City — it is just that much harder to come by. Small shows in artist-run spaces usually pack a big punch and this one was no different. 

The gallery’s current display delivers a succinct response to a moment in art history, a shift in dialect and questions on what it means to be operating in our often inoperable, ever-shifting and sometimes torturously vague conditions. 

Andrew Woolbright unpacks the very idea of thingness in Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang, curating artifactual relationships that speak to the notions of organs, organisms, organizing and organizational methods. 

The word organ, pre-Francis Bacon was essentially granted to anything, with no clear qualifying distinction. A flower that lived was an organ, much like a hammer was literary ephemera or a dead bird. They were all organs. Organ in today’s language most usually implicates the human body or more directly a heart, lung or liver that is operational or, in effect, alive. But if you applied this historic linguistic to 2021’s ubiquitous matter (think digital spaces, algorithmic patterns, AI, AR, laser technology, robotics and technological intervention) these all become organs themselves. 

So what are THOSE if this is the case, what are WE as bodies and how would artwork begin to extrapolate, accommodate or question thingness?

The work in this show is optically challenging and deceptive, colliding the more referential with the abstract, the melted and porous with the solid and polished. The hybrid nature of the work is perplexing, confusing but satisfying once the show’s ideology presents itself. 

Without knowing what the show is about, it is still extremely seductive, much to do with (in my opinion) Cherubim, a plaster and steelwork protruding from the spaces far wall created by Justin Cloud. 

There is also Randy Wray’s work, which situates the center of the space with his paper-mâché, sewn canvas, quartz crystals, wire, acrylic, oil, resin and mica sculpture. I responded to Chapter and Verse viscerally, perhaps because I walked around it and understood that the work was living in its own right. It had human-like fangs made from viciously planted crystals, fleshy tones and an organic shapeliness. It also looked extremely heavy, which I will never be certain of, offering a new dimension to the show’s hanging treatment and conceptual play.

It wasn’t long into my visit that I asked Andrew about his choice to not include any video inside of the space. I was made aware in his response that Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang had a digital element and life online through Emmett Mettier’s captivating and looping Bodily Collapse. The work is more grotesque than the physical works in the gallery and situates and informs the other artist’s works.

Through the use of case silicone and pigment and iridescent plastic film, Mettier has offered the show color as a formal experience, something in which the physical show is stripped of. The video work includes sound and light which syncopates with your heartbeat. 

When I was watching Bodily Collapse, it made me freak out about my own stomach and desperately wonder why it was in such abrupt and massive distress. It took me a second to realize, with huge amounts of relief, that it was Mettier’s audio element and not my own body. Scary, uncomfortable, extremely realistic while also sheeny, hue-y and delicious. The work is available to watch here.

Other artists in the show include Alexander Ross with Sketchbk98 Overlap Squish, a digital collage and ink-jet print, and Naomi Nakazato with her screen-printed, polyurethane and plexiglass works A Soft Spot for Rupture and Spoil. 

Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang will be showing at Super Dutchess gallery, 53 Orchard St. between Grand and Hester, until Feb. 18. 

A kind thank you to Andrew Woolbright for curating an inspiring show and for allowing me an extremely informative visit. 

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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: First Draft at Ki Smith Gallery

Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

First Draft, Caslon Bevington, Sei Smith and Dylan Reitz

 Ki Smith Gallery, 197 E. Fourth St.

After walking past one of the first iterations of First Draft, I was intrigued to know more about Ki Smith Gallery and its seemingly unique approach to the contemporary art space, curatorial programming and general history. 

What strikes first about this space is its small fish/big pond boldness — you can see certain works before you walk in and in most cases see all works at once when you are inside. The interior to me is experimental, testing and quite obviously full of potential. 

I had the pleasure of being taken around the work of install_1, the first of three parts in First Draft by its curator Sei Smith (pictured in the middle above, and brother of Ki Smith). Speaking to the works of art and about the show as an art form in and of itself, Sei’s confidence and strong sense of adaptability between both artist and curator presented me with a wealth of knowledge and, naturally, a long list of questions.

I didn’t want to leave, but since when has a gallery show been something dying for certainty or resolution? I had accessed more information about how each artist and curator worked with materials, while maintaining my curiosity around why Sei had curated his share of the show the way he had. 

What did he want his audience to take away from hanging Bevington’s referentially digital painting next to Reitz’s recycled paper sculpture? Why were pieces hung at jarringly different heights? What time of the day could you watch certain works change in color? What would the show look like next if all of the same work would be in the same room? How does it feel for a viewer to engage with the artworks in such an intimate setting? 

“The synchronicity lies not in the aesthetics of the art objects, but in the artists’ treatment of material as subject to create subversive “paintings” that embody the inescapable harmony of minimalism.”  (Read the press release here.)

Harmonizing Ki Smith Gallery until Valentine’s Day, three young artists who were supposed to show at Art Toronto found themselves in conversation about how their practices ebb and flow, fit with and depart from each other’s. 

After being hit with a pandemic and needing to exhaust different resources, Caslon, Dylan and Sei dug into finding meaning in solitary art making for the benefit of collaborative showcasing.

This show is fantastic in the sense that all three artists who hold reputable qualifications had the decency to deliberately exclude theoretical and institutionalized guidelines from their curatorial processes. Instead, they have relied on the work itself, their tastes, instincts, and respect for their fellow artists. This show is real and makes the work so much more raw. East Village… can we have more of this please? 

The artists and revolving group of curators include Bevington, who works with resin, concrete, acetate and polyurethane. Her work bridges between hypothetical and physical through the use of paint, pixels, words and fabric. My favorite of hers was the acrylic on panel Photograph of Orange Rose, 2020.

Another stand out work for me was Rills, 2020. Made from handmade paper by Reitz who has a background in stock animation film. He is currently studying Integrated Digital Media and has seamlessly married an organic analogue material with a mechanically digital format. 

Both his animation and in-real-life works are memorable purely because you’ve probably never seen something recycled both physically and digitally quite like this. Extremely impressive. 

And of course, the curator of the first installation of First Draft, Smith studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has shown his work both locally and internationally. I personally felt an instant draw to Sei’s work because of its reflective surfaces, fluorescent, iridescent and transient in their formal finish. 

His work in First Draft grapples with the substantiality and appearance of wet paint, dry paint, adhered surfaces and deliberate mistakes in the process of layering various materials. His work changes each time you walk into the space, creating differing sensations for each viewer. Made from acrylic and iridescent film on panel, his best work for me was Half Iridescent_Paint Subjects, 2020.

You can find all work from First Draft and many other works from Caslon Bevington, Sei Smith and Dylan Reitz on the Ki Smith Gallery website.

First Draft will be travelling through two more iterations, curated by Reitz (install No. 2 ending on Sunday) and Bevington (install No. 3 from Feb. 3-14) at Ki Smith Gallery, 197 E. Fourth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B. 

And a special thanks to Sei Smith for showing me around the space.

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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: Paige Beeber’s Farbe at Freight and Volume Gallery

Text and photos by Clare Gemima  

Paige Beeber’s Farbe

Freight + Volume Gallery, 97 Allen St.

Freight + Volume Gallery is a space I regularly walk past, but it wasn’t until seeing Paige Beeber’s large scale paintings that I had wanted to ring their doorbell for a tour. 

I had initially thought these were oversized textiles. Crazy in composition and almost panicked in their abstraction, as I drew closer to Beeber’s mixed-media canvases, a clear and painterly dialogue seeped through her strategically applied pallet of wet media, paint and found objects instead.

Ink splotted, cross-hatched and heavily patterned, what I enjoyed most about this show was how reminiscent of a studio scene these works exuded. It was almost as if all the paintings had kicked up a fuss about being transported to the gallery. It is immediately clear from their proud experimentalism that every work has a life of its own. Farbe (German for color ) felt like it was incredibly fun to put together and is an evocative showcasing of Beeber’s vibrancy and growing talent.

Beeber’s works operate as frames of time, snapshots of external and internal circumstances articulated and crafted by the artist. She has investigated ideas like order and chaos, which can be seen on her canvases through controlled, more orderly mark-making amongst the more frenzied and fluid gestures. The draw to these works is found within their multitudinous layers. Countless mark-making techniques that have managed to survive within the constraints of a canvas —how she has not run out of room I do not quite understand. 

What Beeber’s work does successfully is a call for contemplation from her viewer, as there is simply too much to comprehend from one glance. 

The scale of these works aid in this as well. As each work in the gallery towers over you, they demand some kind of attention and calculation — are they puzzles? A game of snakes and ladders? Painted knitting swatches? It is definitely not a case of what you see is what you get. 

Aside from the brilliant choice in showcasing Beeber’s paintings, I learned that Freight and Volume publish beautifully designed catalogs for each of their exhibitions. For a gallery that is dedicated to providing opportunities for emerging visual artists, an incredibly unique resource such as this — so kindly extended to their artists — is rare enough to be highlighted. 

Paige Beeber’s Farbe at Freight + Volume Gallery will be on view until Feb. 21.

 

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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: Moko Moko Doki Doki and Double Happiness at the Hole

Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Moko Moko Doki Doki and Double Happiness 

at the Hole, 312 Bowery

The Hole, as I have previously relayed, takes the idea of transformation passionately and excels in this. Yes, this highlights the gallery's talented team, but more important, it provides a climactic show for both artist/s and gallery go-ers. 

Whether you enjoy the experience or not, there's no way that you'll be able to forget The Hole's first two shows of 2021. A cacophony of color, form and touch (that thing we've all forgotten about), Misaki Kawai presents Moko Moko Doki Doki filling the main floors in the space, while Double Happiness occupies the back room with luscious wetness and optical illusion from Caroline Larson and Roxanne Jackson. 

Moko Moko Doki Doki sets the tone all the way from the opposite side of Bowery — you can start to spot large mounds of purples and yellows and furry sculptures that will make you skip all the way to the front door. Moko Moko or  "fluffy"  colliding with Doki Doki or "excited heartbeat" literally describes the work perfectly. 

You're immediately made aware that you can pet the sculptures and feel as though you've traveled back in time to kindergarten, where words aren't really necessary anymore, but smiles, giggles, touching and enlivening your immature senses is of utmost importance. 

The sensations in my body and face as soon as I saw the array of fluffy and excited heartbeats were something unique to me — it has been a while since I've been physically affected by artwork. I was grateful to blush and laugh around these sculptures, stroke one and fight the urge not to cuddle the hell out of them all. I was suddenly 6 years old.

Kawai is an internationally renowned artist, most famous for her all-ages, immersive work that is bold and playful. A talented painter and illustrator, her new text-based works lace the walls of the show, presenting an interesting iteration of her G-rated sculptures while staying classically true to her repetitive use of emoji-esque motifs. This is her fourth solo show at The Hole since 2013. 

The darkish vibrance of Moko Moko Doki Doki's walls made the whole gallery look like miniature maze toys or building blocks. It kept you there, simply because it felt like there was so much to see and do, to play with and to pet. 

But in a lime green distance, there was a space I admittedly made a beeline for. Double Happiness took me to a level of speechlessness. Honestly, please do yourself a favor and visit this show. The name for me does not do it justice. I know it sounds corny, but seeing Caroline Larsen and Roxanne Jackson's work really tripled, quadrupled and I will go as far as to say it quintupled my happiness. 

This special two-person exhibition showcases new bodies of oil painting and ceramic sculpture. The two artists engage in ideas like doubling, mirroring, pattern, reinventing/invigorating craft and pushing the limits of historical/ traditional techniques.

Across the room, vases are positioned on mirror-topped plinths that host oil marks in their reflection. The sexy interventional designs of Jackson's vases proliferate as you navigate within Larson's multiplying paintings that surround the exhibition. There is color, design, form, meshing and merging absolutely everywhere. It's as nauseating to walk around the space as it is to stand still in this environment. You totally forget about the literal gestures here — flowers and vases. 

How these artists have conceived Double Happiness is doubly acerbic and commendable. The way Larson's delicious-looking paintings warp and skew and mess you up while you’re walking around delicate vases, so ready to smash (accidentally) proposes an optical challenge definitely worth trying out. 

Moko Moko Doki Doki and Double Happiness will both be showing until Valentine’s day at The Hole.

 

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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: Home Alone Group Show at ATM Gallery

 Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Home Alone Group Show

ATM Gallery, 54 Henry St.

Going rogue and off-map seeking out ATM Gallery, I was highly appreciative of taking a friend's advice on visiting. The exhibit was a fresh send off to the weirdest and saddest year possible, lining the walls with young artist's work that mixed painterly, graphic and illustrative practices under one young roof. 

Having only opened this past September, ATM Gallery is a space that oozes vivacity as soon as you walk in; from the artwork, the attitude and the engagement from its founders. Not only is a congratulations in order, but also a watchful eye needs to be kept on this space. 

The excitement in the face of the gallerists as they spoke about their curation process, exhibiting artists and general views on artistic sustainability blew my mind — it was clearly way beyond a passion project for William and Madeline who I spoke to on my visit to HOME ALONE. 

It was also extremely encouraging knowing that there were spaces run by passionate and proactive people, focused in their pursuit to showcase young artists popping up on the Lower East Side. The exhibition highlights work from 15 artists living in different places locally and globally, celebrating the gallery's community of respected artists and friends who were dedicated in their support throughout such an unprecedented (but also arguably incredible) year for art-making and makers alike. 

Be warned, it is a hard show to want to leave. This is perhaps because of the shared and dire experiences depicted by these artists that most viewers can relate to right now, but, I assure you it also offers much-needed ease. The work's materials, visual connections and formative expressions in HOME ALONE are as diversified as the experiences that each artist had while preparing for the show during the onslaught of COVID-19. 

Together, Anna Park, Mike Lee, Eliot Greenwald, Roby Dwi Antono, Koichi Sato, Mark Ryan Chariker, Caleb Hahne, Michael Kagan, Alexis Ralaivao, Luisiana Mera, Thomas Radin, Matt Leines, Sun Woo, Ji Woo Kim and Juilo Anaya Cabanding share documentations of their time living globally, separately, isolated and alone.

HOME ALONE will be running until Jan. 17 at ATM Gallery, 54 Henry St.

 

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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: Mrs. Evan Williams by Jamian Juliano-Vilan at JTT Gallery

 Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Mrs. Evan Williams by Jamian Juliano-Vilan

JTT Gallery, 191 Chrystie St.

The New Jersey raised and hilariously edgy painter Jamian Juliano-Villani showcases 11 paintings in Mrs. Evan Williams, her third solo show at JTT Gallery. 

After getting to know Jamian through her online presence and impressive list of press, her paintings speak for themselves and indulge in her wacky sense of humor, unpredictable juxtapositions and to me establish her presence in the New York art scene — her career has only just begun. 

Seeing how she works, laying down surfaces with paint, then projecting onto the canvas to compose her pieces and then repainting again and so on and so forth builds a crass narrative that’s psychologically challenging and morbidly personal. 

She makes these works while getting through a pack and a half of smokes a day, another attribute to the painter that bleeds into her work. I know it sounds weird, but this artist looks and sounds like the paintings in her show — that might just be my take. 

While discussing her modes of making and navigating her studio, she describes herself as a vessel. In one of her more graphic works, Replace Phosphates Without Compromising Functionality, a Relief ; I believe her diagnosis is visualized. This work is the first large scale piece you will see in the main room of the gallery and is recommended to soak in on an empty stomach. 

The work depicts a slender female object crawling out of the most magnificently painted pink toilet in a pastel themed bathroom. You can put 2 and 2 together from my photography, but the stare from the subject is absolutely mesmerizing and, of course, off-putting. 

The painting has turned a private moment into a torturously grotesque, almost animated and caricatured hell-ride. It was by far my favorite work in the show and one of the few pieces that included a sculptural element, leaving a foldable step-stool in front of the canvas, presumably for the relief to be relieved of its nasty journey.

This show includes works that are intervened with, as described above, smaller paintings, non-conventionally framed works and a whole back wall of the gallery wallpapered as an office/board meeting scene. This show is mostly flat but plays with other tools to include sound, light and the internet through QR codes, suggesting that the artist is branching out with her materials and sculptural play.

Another work, Origin of the World, highlights the artist’s nod to the revolutionary Courbet work from the 1800s. Highlighting the problematic nature of the work, the painter throws shade by creating her own hodge-podge of nonsensical, penis-bearing creatures. 

Jamian Julaino-Villani again places uncomfortably confronting subject matter directly in the eye line of the viewer (I am 5’4 for reference), which the gallery has described as sophomoric in nature. I, however, feel as though it is weirdly sophisticated, especially with its gorgeously decorative border and terribly calculated composition layout. Another winner for me. 

This show will get you excited about contemporary painting that is graphic, bold and not shy about being absolutely vile to look at. For a giggle and gag and everything in between, Mrs. Evan Williams will be on show at JTT Gallery until Jan. 23.

 

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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: In the Woods by Sally Saul at Rachel Uffner Gallery

Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

In the Woods by Sally Saul

Rachel Uffner Gallery, 170 Suffolk St.

In the Woods showcases a packed room and a half of new ceramic sculptures created with a sense of humor, anxiety and down-to-earthness from Sally Saul in her second solo show at Rachel Uffner Gallery. 

The array of sculptures within the space play and interact with our senses of familiarity and comfort while also introducing us to a "new normal." A new struggle, a new challenge, a new moment and a new movement. This show forces us to understand that one way to deal with this shitshow of a pandemic is well, to embrace it. (While wearing a mask, please).

During the last several months of living amidst the coronavirus and its subsequent social sorrows, Saul (married to the incredible Peter Saul) reflects on this confusing but unavoidable new world through her detailed expressions and use of finer details as a ceramicist. The work to me almost felt like a personal chronicling of the artists' time in lockdown, a documentation of pandemic experiences and a tribute to the American lives lost. 

Sally Saul consistently incorporates the everyday into her sculptural practice, and this time is no different. At In the Woods, we get to surround ourselves with her forest of birds, flowers and the natural world too, which we can understand as her refuge over the course of this work being created. 

Taking time to find enjoyment in the smaller pleasures, Saul's sculpture garden at Rachel Uffner Gallery remains light-hearted but is also question-provoking owing to its sophisticated documentative style. 

Will artists who are alive in 2020 continue to make reference to the pandemic we currently occupy? Will self-portraits include protective gear as political or apolitical symbolism? What sort of art history are we forming or moving away from? 

But forgetting about all of the more serious stuff, the works bulky form and playful undertones are also cause for a much deserved and maybe overdue giggle. This show has all of the right ingredients in it to make you forget about the weight of the world ... just for a moment. 

In the Woods is showing at Rachel Uffner Gallery until Jan. 30.

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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